robotnik2004: (Default)
robotnik2004 ([personal profile] robotnik2004) wrote2005-12-20 01:25 pm
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Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Chris Bray is a PhD student in history at UCLA and a sergeant in the U.S. Army currently stationed in Kuwait. He blogs at both Cliopatria and Histori-blogography about history and also about the weird limbo of his tour of duty. All of Chris' posts are worth reading, but this is the story that I currently can't get out of my head:

Training for war, I spent an afternoon in an army classroom listening to presentations on improvised explosive devices and the insurgents who plant them. Droning through one of the inevitable PowerPoint presentations, a sergeant first class read directly from the slide in front of us: The insurgency, he read, will probably die down after we capture Saddam Hussein. Except that the class was taught this October, a couple of years after that former dictator had been dragged out of his spider hole. The sergeant stopped for the briefest moment, mumbled that the slides were a little out of date, and went right on reading.

Here's the rest of that post if you're interested. Here's hoping Chris' war remains uneventful and banal.

[identity profile] robotnik.livejournal.com 2005-12-21 05:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I know there's lots more stupidity (that whole freaking war comes to mind, but that's just me...). I guess I was just struck by the precious banality of that moment, having zero experience with war but plenty experience with droning mindless PowerPoint presentations.