Characters

  • 1SG Douglas Dawg

Locations

  • Road Worksite, Iraq

I tell you what, a lot of Combat Engineers work in the construction industry. I myself have not had that experience; the closest thing I ever had to that was the couple of weeks I spent doing the road and culvert work with my Reserve unit in Panama. So I needed to look up some “construction humor” on the internet, specifically, road construction humor. No matter what type of job is out there, there’s some kind of humor that has evolved around it.

Anyhow, I found stuff about orange barrels and road construction taking forever (touched on that one on Monday) but of course there’s always the one about “a bunch of guys standing around leaning on their shovels”. So what happens when you forget the shovels? You just got to lean on each other for awhile, I guess.

The other equipment portrayed here are the head of the pick (we call it a ‘maddox’) and the handle that goes through it, as well as the grey wire-frame things: these are called “gabion boxes” and they are collapsible, wire-frame boxes that are typically used to pack full of rocks, then stack together. They are used to shore up areas where erosion might put earthworks at risk. I used a lot of gabion boxes during the culvert mission.

Oh, and the MT-LB armored transporter in the background is an old Soviet-era design that the Iraqi Engineers are using; I figured I’d park one in the background for a bit of flavor. I was planning to put Hakim or one of his troops with them but dealing with the crashed website issues kind of put me behind on time and I didn’t have time to complete everything I had initially wanted.

Enjoy, and see you next Monday!

Characters

  • 1SG Douglas Dawg

Locations

  • Road Worksite, Iraq

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