When you think about it, there’s a lot of information the Army collects on us that could be boiled down to a character stats sheet. You could, in fact, make a pretty convincing stat sheet as if for a Role-Playing Game (RPG) character if you wanted to.

Character sheets, after all, are just statistics that have been rolled up with a set of dice and recorded. You typically account for strength, dexterity, intelligence and wisdom (or streetwise), appearance and so on. Training and experience with certain weapons are categorized.

And if there’s one thing the military loves, it is training metrics. Everything that we do has to be assigned some sort of value and placed within a certain “point spread” type series of training brackets. It measures readiness, which impacts deployability and budget in some cases.

The higher up you go in the chain-of-command, your readiness and training metrics can have a deeper and deeper impact on an officer’s future career prospects, so there is a lot of incentive to “keep the numbers up”.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re all just characters in someone’s great role-playing game, and our fates are decided by random dice rolls. It sure feels like it sometimes. And for the record, someone’s been rolling a lot of 1’s lately.