If you didn’t see it yourself, today’s five paragraph mission plan delivered by 2nd Lt. Smith was an absolute doozy. Here are ten of the most outrageous comments, annotated by SAW gunner PFC Ryan Joseph.
1. “Hey men, how’s everyone doing?” It has been well documented that Smith gives 0.0 fucks about anyone in this platoon.
2. “We’ve got a good mission to accomplish today.” Clearly Smith is already well versed in the officer skill of blindly saying yes to anything that comes down the pike, but come on, we all know this mission is garbage.
3. “We have reliable intelligence that the enemy is in a weakened state as the fighting season draws to a close.” Oh, really? Does ‘a weakened state’ simply mean that the local men might not pick up their weapons for the next few months, but then again they might? If so then, yes, weakened, we agree.
4. “Most dangerous course of action is that the enemy masses a fire team-plus and synchronizes small arms fire with the detonation of an improvised explosive device, which we will overcome with fire superiority.” Wrong. We would have accepted “enemy masses hundreds of fighters, synchronizes small arms, heavy machine gun and indirect fire to isolate and capture or kill one of our elements” or “Afghan ‘partner’ guns us all down before we leave the wire.”
5. “Order of movement will be second squad followed by third, then first.” Fuck, why is second always first? I mean, we know that the first squad leader has the navigational capability of, well, you, but come on!
6. “We’ll have a quick shura with the local elders.” There is no such thing as a quick shura. There is a shura where you politely talk about nothing for five hours and then they lie to you about what you need to know. There is also the abbreviated four hour version where they think you’re rude for cutting small talk short before asking them where the fuck the bad guys are.
7. “Gather intelligence on enemy disposition.” See above. We will gather lies and / or meaningless phrases from the men who would be fighting us themselves were they able-bodied.
8. “Our Afghan partners will clear all buildings prior to our entering the village.” There’s a recipe for success!
9. “We’ll need to make sure we initiate our movement back to base while we still have daylight.” WHY???
10. “Has anyone seen NODs? Things are green when you look through them.” OMG I can’t.
