I remember being a kid, and sometimes being bored. I also remember learning at an early age never to admit that to your parents (or other authority figures) but that’s another story. When we first got to Iraq, some people complained about being bored since we were pretty much confined to the base doing guard duty and other menial chores. Anyone who’s read the strip from the start knows how that point of view eventually got up-ended.

While in the long run, we ended up going back and forth between “outside the wire” and “inside the wire” missions, being “bored” in Camp Victory was still tinged with the idea that at any time something could happen; and of course chilling at Camp Victory had a certain level of frustration to it. But since coming back, once you internalize that there’s no chance for imminent danger, the prospect of “being bored” has actually become something of a welcome feeling from time to time.