Just back from entertaining the troops in the Middle East, and morale is high despite the heat and the imminent danger all around them. In Tina Turner’s song “One of the Living” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, she says, “In the desert sun every step that you take can be your final one.” And it’s no wonder: the desert is full of dangerous things just waiting for a bunch of comedians to lean up against.

A fat tail scorpion, a creepy sand spider and the dreaded camel spider. These are the world’s most horrifying bottles of tequila ever.

And not all of the dangerous things are man made. I came across specimens of some of the desert’s own natural horrors. By the way, the outlandish stories you hear about poisonous camel spiders the size of house cats are pure fiction. “They aren’t poisonous,” an Air Force doctor reassured me. “But they do have a numbing bite which allows them to eat chunks from your leg without you knowing.” Oh, thanks, I feel much better.

They took this away from me pretty quickly. Because a guy who leaves a pocket pulled out has no business playing with a real M60 machine gun, I guess.

The M60 is a fully-automatic machine gun that usually takes a team of three to operate. There’s even a version made for civilian use, because fuck deer, that’s why.

Me, with Sarah Tiana, about to get flipped over and over in the MRAP crash simulator. I’m totally ready to catch a ride with Lindsay Lohan now.

Lots of simulated danger in the desert, as well. I got to fire a bunch of weapons at a simulated firing range, complete with air-powered real-life recoil. And then got to climb into a crash rollover simulator, which prepares troops for the disorienting escape from an overturned vehicle.

The comics with Captain Perez and the “Dirty Third” at a Patriot Missile launcher. Did you know that the Patriot Missile works by secretly videotaping the practice sessions of opposing missiles? Fact.

And as if there isn’t enough dangerous stuff in the desert, the bad guys are prepared to send more dangerous stuff over in the form of ballistic missiles. Our guys came up with an answer to that: the Patriot Missile. When the bad guys shoot a missile at us, we shoot a missile at their missile. But it’s only a matter of time before the enemy comes up with an anti-anti-missile-missile. I can only hope that we are already hard at work on the anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile.

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