Campfire Stories is a series by Mike BurnFire and Zach Hazard. A spinoff of their let's play series, it has the hosts... well, sitting around an in-game campfire and telling random stories from their lives. A complete playlist of them (including some podcasts without tropable material) can be found here
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The page also includes tropes present in stories from compilation videos, which can also be found on the above playlist.
Campfire Stories provide an example of:
- Always a Bigger Fish: Master Sergeant Bob, who insisted on being called a First Sergeant despite only temporarily filling the role of a First Sergeant, had this happen to him twice.
- The first time, while chewing out a soldier from another company for having the audacity to pass out during a parade due to extreme heat, then for calling him a Master Sergeant (despite that being his correct rank and title, him wearing the insignia of a Master Sergeant, and the soldier being from a different company and therefore having no idea Bob was an acting First Sergeantnote . This resulted in the Battalion Sergeant Major coming up to him and chewing him out, making it clear he was not a First Sergeant and did not have the right to make people call him one, threatening to have him charged with Impersonating an NCO if he didn't stop.
- The second time, the unit was loading onto helicopters and he was micromanaging the loading, only for Crew Chief of the helicopter he was on to tell him he couldn't put something in a specific spot. Bob tried to argue, even trying to pull rank (and again acting as if First Sergeant was his actual rank), but it went nowhere because, even if you outrank them, a Crew Chief's word is law on-board their helicopter. Bob ended up having to wait for the next flight of helicopters because he annoyed the Crew Chief so much that he kicked Bob off his helicopter, and told the other Crew Chiefs on that flight not to let him on their helicopters.
- "Anger Is Healthy" Aesop: Played for laughs. When telling a story about one of many bad experiences in Fort Polk, Zach tells the story of how he was sent to Anger Management for insulting a Chief Warrant Officer. For context, Zach decided to order cabinets for his workplace because the lack of organization was making his job more difficult than it already was. However, once the parts were ordered, Zach brought them down by hand because no vehicles were available or suitable, which was a 1-hour walk. Additionally, a forklift wasn't available so he had to be helped by 20 people and was forced to disassemble and reassemble the cabinets to get them inside his office. However, the Chief Warrant Officer wanted them instead, for humvee parts. Despite being told they wouldn't fit, the chief arranged for Zach to be put in anger management and took the cabinets for himself once Zach was away. However, Zach found this a comparatively light punishment for yelling at a superior officer and found himself among other people who empathized with him. According to him, anger management felt more like a support group for Fort Polk's incompetence and the exercises he had to do were so relaxing for him that he could fall asleep to them. According to a comment made by Zach
, the anger management classes also helped him become eligible for disability claims. - Armed Farces: A recurring theme, with Zach (and Mike, to a lesser extent) having plenty of stories about the incompetence of their respective branches. If Zach is taken at his word, the entirety of Fort Polk was barely held together by the few competent leaders. To this day, Zach is dumbfounded and infuriated by how badly disorganized the military was during his service and jokes that working at Fort Polk was more traumatizing than the war itself.The description of Beret/Inspections: The military being stupid? SHOCK!
- Artifact Title: M1 Garand and CZ Scorpion, despite both being labelled as a Campfire Story, don't take place around a campfire, or any fire, but in a British pub.
- As You Know: Frequently during stories about their time in the Army/Marines, either Zach or Mike will include details about the military that civilian viewers need to understand the story, details that the other person knows but will pretend they don't.
- Being Good Sucks: Zach was once reprimanded by his superiors for "tampering" with a pack howitzer. Zach's reason for interacting with it? Somebody else had left live ammunition next to it and Zach replaced the ammunition with dummy rounds so nobody would be able to fire it.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In M1 Garand, Zach discusses the Civilian Marksmanship Program
and compares the reasoning behind it to post-WW2 school lunches
(both programs were started after WW2 and targeted towards the youth). Mike then jokingly suggests giving the youth firearms alongside the food. - Bring My Brown Pants:
- Zach described his reaction to being mortared while in a portapotty as literally getting the shit scared out of him.
- Inverted in the anecdote from one of the Military Stories compilations: Zach needed to pee into a cup for a military drug test, simply couldn't, and the sergeant's (baseball bat) threat of "Private, if you don't pee right now I'm going to cave your skull in and fuck you to death!" made it even harder for him to pee.
- Burn Baby Burn: On the day when he left the military, Zach burned his black beret - which, on top of being a pain in the neck to prepare and wear on its own, symbolized everything that frustrated him about the army.
- Chew-Out Fake-Out: Zach recalled a time where his sergeants played a 'game' with a rubber stress ball shaped like a grenade. Soldiers who heard a sergeant yell 'frag out' were expected to fall on the fake grenade if they were nearest to it. Except that one time, when Zach was nearest to the door when a sergeant threw the fake grenade, he simply kicked it back outside... prompting a sergeant to yell "WHO DID THAT." Zach confessed and was told to get into the sergeant's office, where he expected to be punished with a presumably absurdly large number of push-ups while being yelled at. Instead, the sergeant immediately went back into a normal tone of voice and acknowledged that, in a combat situation, Zach's choice was technically the most correct choice, but the purpose of the grenade drill was mostly to encourage compliance with prior instructions and being willing to take one for the team. Zach was let off with little more than a warning, though the sergeant said that he was going to yell Zach out of his office in order to keep up the charade of being a Drill Sergeant Nasty.
- Clingy Aquatic Life: In Leech, Zach describes an incident where he went swimming in a lake near Fort Polk and ended up with a titular worm on his testicle - an experience he described as more terrifying than being mortared.
- Color-Coded Speech: Like in the let's play series, Zach's subtitles are white with a blue outline, and Mike's are white with a red outline.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype:
- Zach's stories often deconstruct the Manchild and Psychopathic Manchild. Zach joined the military to work with firearms and live out a childhood dream. However, his colleagues and superiors regularly proved to have the mental capacity and maturity of teenagers. They were operating all sorts of firearms and other deadly equipment and they treated them like Nerf guns. The superiors bullied soldiers and were insanely petty and spiteful. One soldier got in trouble with the FBI because he pointed a laser-guided missile launcher at an airplane as a joke, "Baloney Bob" had absolutely no personal hygiene, Zach was told by his drill sergeant to teach other soldiers how to use a washer and dryer, also once had to spend days searching for a gun that another soldier had petulantly thrown out of a window during a convoy, soldiers driving military vehicles without seatbelts, and the time where Zach was nearly bitten by a cottonmouth snake during a search for a Raven drone that his superior had used carelessly and crashed. Although a manchild might in theory be fun to be around or to hear stories about, the reality is that this would be a terrifying and stress-inducing experience considering these people have access to firearms and lack the discipline and patience to use them responsibly and respect the laws of basic gun safety. The worst part of it all is that people have died from the collective incompetence and idiocy of the military that was supposed to protect them and Zach's stories show how the soldiers’ stupidity doesn’t just make them incompetent; it makes them dangerous.Sometimes military incompetence can be funny! Most of the time it's horrifying.
- Zach also deconstructs the Only Sane Man and The Reliable One. As a Small Arms Repairman, Zach was responsible for fixing the firearms at Fort Polk. Still, some of the guns he was in charge of repairing would not be classed as "small arms" as he had to fix a 155mm howitzer and M242 chaingun, making him realize that he was the only one trained to fix any type of gun in the entire fort. Not only that, he had to fight tooth and nail to get a second opinion because the German doctors and medics seriously considered putting him through chemotherapy as the first option and then considered removing his lymph nodes from his leg as a second option to help him with a medical issue that affected him every 2-6 monthsnote . As he recollects his more infuriating stories about the petulant and immature soldiers, his tone of voice can only be described as bitter and resentful for working with idiots who should have known better. He once argued with Acting First Sergeant Bob over how a bullet can only be fired in a straight line, rather than curve in the air like Bob believed. Zach's stories ultimately show what it's really like being the only sane person in a world of insanity - it's deeply infuriating and would leave you massively disillusioned and disenfranchised. Especially since the Veterans Affairs office adamantly refuses to compensate him for all the crap the military put him through, claiming some of the injuries he got in service were received before enlisting.
- Zach's stories often deconstruct the Manchild and Psychopathic Manchild. Zach joined the military to work with firearms and live out a childhood dream. However, his colleagues and superiors regularly proved to have the mental capacity and maturity of teenagers. They were operating all sorts of firearms and other deadly equipment and they treated them like Nerf guns. The superiors bullied soldiers and were insanely petty and spiteful. One soldier got in trouble with the FBI because he pointed a laser-guided missile launcher at an airplane as a joke, "Baloney Bob" had absolutely no personal hygiene, Zach was told by his drill sergeant to teach other soldiers how to use a washer and dryer, also once had to spend days searching for a gun that another soldier had petulantly thrown out of a window during a convoy, soldiers driving military vehicles without seatbelts, and the time where Zach was nearly bitten by a cottonmouth snake during a search for a Raven drone that his superior had used carelessly and crashed. Although a manchild might in theory be fun to be around or to hear stories about, the reality is that this would be a terrifying and stress-inducing experience considering these people have access to firearms and lack the discipline and patience to use them responsibly and respect the laws of basic gun safety. The worst part of it all is that people have died from the collective incompetence and idiocy of the military that was supposed to protect them and Zach's stories show how the soldiers’ stupidity doesn’t just make them incompetent; it makes them dangerous.
- Dirty Coward: One of the most infuriating and disturbing stories Zach tells is where a captain and a gunner abandoned a teenage soldier. In the story, they were all riding in a Bradley as part of a convoy and the Bradley ended up being struck by three IEDs. Despite knowing how dangerous it was, the captain and gunner told the young soldier to drive the Bradley, since they didn't want to risk themselves. Suddenly, the vehicle was hit by a fourth IED. Rather than risk their necks to check if the soldier was alive or fetch his dog tags to confirm his death, they both just decided to abandon him. Fortunately, the soldier survived but was severely concussed. According to some stories, the captain went as far as to falsify reports to not only confirm the young man's death but to clarify that his body could not be recovered. In a rare moment of seriousness, Zach furiously points out they had broken the Soldier's creed: "Never leave a fallen comrade" and he is disgusted by the blatant cowardice on display.
- Drill Sergeant Nasty:
- The single scariest thing to ever happen in his life was a drill sergeant, according to Zach, even worse than the time he was nearly blown up by a mortar shell while trapped in a Port-A-Potty. He served during the era when the Army had mandatory drug screens on all service members returning from leave. Unfortunately, Zach has a shy bladder, and his inability to urinate on command resulted in several increasingly angry drill sergeants, culminating in one sergeant taking a baseball bat and smashing things around the room, culminating in the immortal threat:"Private, if you don't pee right now, I'm going to cave your skull in and then I'm going to fuck you to death!"
- Mike relates an amusing inversion, the Drill Sergeant Kindly, a man with an easygoing demeanor who promised to help recruits who might experience personal issues (dumped by the girlfriend, death in the family, etc.). Said drill sergeant still inserts the line "don't you dare fucking step outta line or I will rip your head off, but I love you" in the middle of his speech to new recruits, and caps his introduction by reminding them that he is the nice sergeant... and there's still three other drill instructors of the traditional nasty type who are going to be handling the actual training.
- The single scariest thing to ever happen in his life was a drill sergeant, according to Zach, even worse than the time he was nearly blown up by a mortar shell while trapped in a Port-A-Potty. He served during the era when the Army had mandatory drug screens on all service members returning from leave. Unfortunately, Zach has a shy bladder, and his inability to urinate on command resulted in several increasingly angry drill sergeants, culminating in one sergeant taking a baseball bat and smashing things around the room, culminating in the immortal threat:
- Enraged by Idiocy: Played for drama. Zach was legitimately horrified and enraged by the rampant incompetency of Fort Polk and his base in Iraq.
- In one example, there was a base Sergeant Major with a habit of micromanaging. The Sergeant Major needlessly sat outside the base in a Humvee to ensure the soldiers had their seatbelts on when they left to go into enemy territory. This resulted in the death of his gunner because local insurgents quickly figured out that the same Humvee was staying in the same spot every day and inevitably attacked it. Worse still, the Sergeant Major wasn't even in charge of the convoy and was interfering with their job.
- A Base Commander used a large blimp to spy on the soldiers inside the base so they wouldn't drive over the 5mph speed limit, rather than use the "multi-million dollar digital infrared camera" to look outside the base for enemy insurgents so they don't bomb the base or launch any surprise attacks. Zach is surprised that nobody thought they should move the blimp away from the base, otherwise insurgents would notice it and bomb them.
- Everyone Has Standards: If Hell exists, it would be inspired by and take lessons from Fort Polk. However, for all its incompetence and collective idiocy, they did not try to justify or bury the actions of the gunner and captain who abandoned a soldier in Iraq during Zach's Bradley story. They crucified the pair for their cowardice and ensured they were punished to the fullest extent of the law.
- Exact Words: Zach frequently employed this during his time in the military, at one point showing up to a weapon inspection with an (empty) RPG-7 because he was never told that he had to bring his M16. Another notable example being using an officer's exact words to justify putting an M203 grenade launcher onto his M16, as he was asked to simply affix six launchers to any six M16s of his choice.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: When discussing what contraband he brought home from Iraq, Zach mentions several items, then realizes that mentioning any more might be a violation of international law, and immediately begins backpedaling.
- Failed a Spot Check: In Zach Doesn't Like the TSA, Zach recaps an anecdote where a TSA agent noticed a bottle of water bigger than the 3 oz. permitted and had him throw it away, while failing to notice an AK bayonet at the bottom of the bag that Zach forgot to take out.
- Faux-To Guide: Zach's instructions for shaping a beret open thusly:Remove beret from plastic bag. Cry for hours, because you know that you have to put this dead rat on your head.
- Flat "What": Zach's reaction to Mike mentioning what happens when a Marine runs out of toilet paper.Mike: Um, there wasn't enough toilet paper so what they used was... fiberglass cloth.Explanation
Zach: What. - Freeze-Frame Bonus: In The Hentai Incident, Zach's impression of a printer spitting out pages of hentai is accompanied by pages of foot fetish comics going past the screen quickly.
- Goatee of Intellect: Zach's avatar in Fallout: New Vegas has a disconnected goatee, and Zack's drawn avatar has a goatee and mustache combo. Zack's role in the military was Small Arms Repairman, meaning he was in charge of inspecting, maintaining, and repairing weapons at Fort Polk. Zach is also fond of learning about things and is willing to show his gun knowledge at any opportunity.
- Gone Horribly Right: In one anecdote, Zach recaps how he tried to build a gunpowder cannon in Iraq, using ball bearings and gunpowder from damaged ammo. After a few underwhelming iterations of it, he managed to build something loud enough to temporarily damage his hearing and fast enough to make a hole in his motorpool's roof.
- Hard Truth Aesop: "The mistreatment and objectification of veterans is genuinely appalling and more needs to be done to compensate and support them." Zach and Mike have spoken about the corruption at the Veterans Affairs office and how the organization adamantly refuses to take any accountability for the duo's respective health issues and falsified documents by claiming Zach had his health issues before enlisting, such as anxiety and depression that were worsened by his service. The VA refuses to hear the full story, just tossing Mike and Zach back into civilian life and making no effort to support them afterward. The VA has a dental plan but they refused to give it to Zach because they didn't class him as fully disabled, despite being registered as disabled for his other health issues. Zach has wedged vertebrae from carrying heavy equipment from his service and despite being told he was eligible for disability claims, the VA told him it had no relevance to his service and it was an age-related issue.Zach: It's really disturbing to me how poorly the US treats its service members once they are out of the military. "Oh you gave 8 years of your life to the US military? Great, here's a fucking coupon."
Mike: Disposable heroes?
Zach: Yeah. I don't like it. - Highly Conspicuous Uniform:
- In Mortared/UCP Camo
, Zach discusses the Universal Camo Pattern and the various reasons why it's a Real Life example of this, ranking it as the worst uniform ever issued - even worse than the British issuing bright red jackets, since those at least were supposed to stand out.It blends in with nothing! "UCP" is the camo pattern, which stands for "Universal Camo Pattern", because it universally doesn't blend in with JACK. FUCKING. SHIT. ... Most militaries are just going to Multicam now, cause Multicam just seems to work with pretty much everything. Unlike UCP, which, the three colors of UCP are: Freshly-poured concrete. Sand. A color that doesn't exist in nature. That's it. - Humvees / APCs has Zach discuss the initial equipment problems the US had in Iraq, and he names issuing woodland camo to the troops (also seen in e.g. the TV adaptation of Generation Kill) as one of the examples.
- In Mortared/UCP Camo
- I Call It "Vera": Zach mentioned that back in the military when others were naming their weapons after their wives or girlfriends, he named his rifle Piper, because it sounded cool. Mike jokes that he named his rifle after its serial number.Mike: Good old 0309823!
- I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham: In Amnesty Box / Good Steak, Zach describes how he used to hate steak, because his dad "cooked" it by grilling it way past well-done and considered condiments a personal insult to his cooking. He describes trying out a proper restaurant-cooked steak as the best thing he had ever eaten.
- Insane Troll Logic: Zach describes how the US Army considers Bushmaster chainguns mounted on Bradley IFVs and howitzers to be small arms, evidently because he was the only person in the entire fort rated to fix any firearms. Though they don't consider miniguns to be small arms: those are aircraft weapons systems, even if they are mounted on something other than an aircraft (though some special forces members asked if he could fix one. He tried, but couldn't).
- Jaded Professional: Zach loved the idea of serving in the military and has an intense and highly focused interest in firearms. However, serving in Fort Polk and Iraq after the September 11 attacks wrung out all of his passion for the army and left a deep-rooted resentment for the people he served under.
- Jumping on a Grenade: Zach recounts in one of the stories that in basic training, the drill instructor threw a dummy grenade into the barracks right near him, who was trained and expected to jump on it. He simply punts it outside the nearest door and closes it. Said officer privately praises his quick thinking and reflexes but publicly chews him out because that wasn't the point of the exercise.
- Kick the Dog: According to Zach, the chief who arranged for Zach to be put into Anger Management took his cabinets anyway and used them for target practice out of spite.
- Left for Dead: Bradley is a story of a rookie driver ending up left alone in a Bradley in the middle of Iraq. The gunner and commander moved to a different vehicle in the convoy after hitting one too many IEDs, and didn't bother to check on the driver after it hit another IED, knocking out both the driver and the comms. The rookie survived with a concussion, but was unaware of his situation, and the vehicle was spotted going up and down the road by some gate guards. The story is one of the few times Zach sounds genuinely enraged at the parties involved, even for his usual acerbic demeanor; given the sheer amount of command incompetence which allowed this incident play out, it's hard to blame him.
- Lethally Stupid: In one of Zach's stories, a base sergeant major felt obligated to check that the soldiers had their seatbelts on. This resulted in the death of his gunner because local insurgents quickly figured out that the same Humvee was staying in the same spot every day and inevitably attacked it. Judging by Zach's tone of voice during the whole thing, he's mad at both the Sergeant Major and the soldiers. A gunner died because nobody thought to put their seatbelts on during the convoy and because a Sergeant Major chose to interfere with a convoy that he wasn't in charge of.
- Mundane Object Amazement: In Losing My Religion, Mike compares his excited reaction to the contents of a biology textbook in college (after attending Christian schools and only learning creationism) to a five-year-old finding out about dinosaurs.Mike: How did you know [which two chromosomes in a human body fused together]?
Book: Inactive telomeres.
Mike: OH MY GOD! - Named After Somebody Famous: In The Battle of Lake Erie Zach mentions that the "Hazard" part of nick comes from Oliver Hazard Perry
. - No, Except Yes: After stealing, and then returning, a bunch of contraband from an Amnesty Box, Zach admits that he didn't get to keep anything... except a bunch of M16 magazines... and a flashbang grenade.
- No Longer with Us: The Bradley story opens with Zach being woken up to clear a Bradley APC. When he asked about what happened to its crew, the response he gets is "they're gone". It turned out they weren't dead, but the situation was messy enough without that.
- Noodle Incident: Mike recaps a story where one of his bunkmates, without prompting, asked him if he has ever seen a man's balls stuck in a vice. When Mike replies that no, he has not, the bunkmate replied with "yeah... don't ever join a gang".
- Not So Above It All: At one point during his deployment in Iraq, Zach swiped a bunch of stuff from the Amnesty Box (where soldier can dispose of contraband, such as pornography and grenades, without getting reprimanded). On his way back, he was stopped by his squad leader, who immediately ordered him to return everything he'd taken...after the squad leader took a porno magazine.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: According to Zach, most of the high-ranked soldiers had no issue pulling rank over him or reprimanding him for not following the procedure, even if Zach had a good reason for doing so.
- Zach decided to order cabinets for his workplace because the lack of organization was making his job more difficult than it already was. However, once the parts were ordered, Zach brought them down by hand because no vehicles were available or suitable, which was a 1-hour walk. Additionally, a forklift wasn't available so he had to be helped by 20 people and was forced to disassemble and reassemble the cabinets to get them inside his office. However, a higher-ranked soldier wanted them instead, for humvee parts. Despite being told they wouldn't fit, the chief arranged for Zach to be put in anger management and took the cabinets for himself once Zach was away. According to Zach on his Twitch channel, the cabinets were instead used as target practice because the officer never needed them in the first place.
- Zach was once reprimanded for interacting with a pack howitzer, despite only doing so because somebody had left live rounds with it and Zach was replacing them with dummy rounds as a safety precaution.
- Place Worse Than Death: According to Zach, Fort Polknote in Louisiana is by far the worst U.S. Army base in existence (even counting the ones near combat zones), and that no one who ever ends up there re-enlists. In his words, "I don't have PTSD from being in Iraq, I have PTSD from being stationed at Ft. Polk and its shittiness!".
- Pun: The episode about Mike's experience as an installer and maintainer of central vacuuming systems is called "Jobs That Suck".
- Punishment Detail: Several of Mike and Zach's military stories talk about the horrible punishments they were either forced to do or saw others suffer through.
- In one episode of Campfire Stories, Zach describes how, during boot camp, a fellow recruit wore his running shoes instead of his boots, so the drill sergeant made him run everywhere they went.
- In the same episode, Zach describes how one recruit got into so much trouble that they were made to go outside in the pouring rain and mop the water up for hours.
- Read the Freaking Manual: In Raven Drone, the officer in charge of Zach's unit didn't do this for said drone, and also put a soldier who didn't attend the training class on how to use it in charge of it (despite the soldier outright telling the officer this). This results in them putting the radio-controlled drone on the same frequency as their radios (which the instructions stressed was something you should never do), meaning that whenever someone used their radio, it interferred with the drone's controls and made it turn in a random direction. They also didn't set a home point on its GPSnote , meaning that, when the out of control drone eventually flew out of range (with help from a strong tailwind), it just kept flying until it ran out of battery and crashed in some unknown location. Cue the training exercise they were on their way to being cancelled, the unit spending weeks searching the Louisiana swamps for it, Zach nearly getting bitten by a cottonmouth
because their sergeant ordered them to search the bottom of a creek (and didn't realise the drone, which was mostly made of styrofoam, would float), and it all being pointless because the drone actually landed in someone's tree in a nearby town, and when the guy finally noticed it, he did the right thing and called the number listed on the side of the drone to tell the Army he had found it. - Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Most of Zach and Mike's superiors discussed during the stories don't apply, but Zach described one straight example: after Zach kicked away a training "grenade", instead of jumping on it as expected/ordered, the superior calmly explained in private that while that wasn't the point of the exercise, Zach's solution was perfectly valid. Zach was loudly dressed down in public, but the superior explicitly told him it's to keep up appearances.
- The "gloves" anecdote in Bradley/Gloves has a small enough example that Mike nevertheless finds notable enough to remark on: when everyone cut off fingers in their gloves to imitate Zach cutting off the trigger finger in his glove, the brass didn't dress Zach down because he did it for a legitimate safety reason, and he had actually brought the issue up with them and asked before doing it. The "safety reason" being that firing the belt-fed machine gun he was issued while wearing the gloves could end up with the trigger being stuck in firing position, meaning the gun would shoot by itself.
- Shout-Out:
- Anger Management has Zach commenting on a different company assisting him more than his own with a shout-out to Telltale's The Walking Dead games.* Clementine will remember this.
- First Sergeant / Damaged Firearms opens with a short anecdote about Zach knowing about two friends, Sgt. Lieutenant and Lt. Sergeant, which Mike compares to the names of characters from Sheep in the Big City.
- Anger Management has Zach commenting on a different company assisting him more than his own with a shout-out to Telltale's The Walking Dead games.
- Skewed Priorities: Mike and Zach occasionally discuss how higher-ups in the Army and Marine Corps often... mismanaged their time and resources. Whether it was C.O.'s prioritizing their mechanics and techs having squeaky-clean boots all the time over doing actual work, or using a multi-million dollar infrared camera blimp to enforce on-base speed limits rather than spotting enemy activity in Iraq.
- Small Name, Big Ego: The titular First Sergeant from First Sergeant / Damaged Firearms - Zach describes him repeatedly mouthing off to people above his rank and/or outside his jurisdiction and getting dressed down when people above him notice. Note that he was not actually a First Sergeant, but a lower ranked Master Sergeant filling the position of a First Sergeant, but still insisted on being referred to as such and acted as if that was his rank (to the point that the Battalion Sergeant Major eventually threatened to have him charged with Impersonating an NCO when he started dressing down someone who, being from another company and having no way of knowing he was filling in as a First Sergeant, referred to him as Master Sergeant, which was the rank on his uniform).
- 'Stache of Duty: Zach always tells stories of his experiences at Fort Polk while working in Small Arms Repair. Zach has a mustache and goatee, and his stories emphasize his frustrating, stressful, and rage-inducing experiences.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: When Zach is recapping an incident with one of his roommates leaving a plastic cup with a hole in the bottom in the bathroom, Mike guesses its purpose on the first try:Mike: Maybe he likes to fill it up with water and then unplug the hole and let the water pour over him. Like a shower!Zach: How did you know that's what he was doing with it?Mike: Wait, what? What?!
- Unishment:
- How Zach describes being sent to Anger Management after mouthing off to a supervisor - it was a comparatively light punishment for telling a superior officer to fuck off, and he found himself among other people that empathized with him.
- In Meds / Raven Drone Zach describes a recurring scenario where the position of an armorer is given to someone as a punishment, to get them out of the way. He then points out that it gives them the ability to mess with everyone's equipment or just sell it illegally.
- Unusual Euphemism: In the story about Zach passing out during "mandatory fun day", Mike asks him if he got "the silver bullet", which is military slang for a rectal thermometer.
- Vetinari Job Security: When talking about how telling his direct superior to go fuck himself got him the Unishment of being sent to Anger Management, Zach notes that, in hindsight, this probably happened because he was the only small-arms repairman for the entire base. Zach figures that he probably could have gotten away with anything short of murder since, if they discharged him, they wouldn't have anyone left on base who could fix guns.Mike: And that was the first time you had job security!
- The Watson: Carrying over from the Let's Plays, Mike usually plays this role to Zach, asking follow-up questions and keeping the conversation going.
- Waxing Lyrical: The episode talking about their disillusionment with organized religion is called "Losing My Religion". The description quotes the titular song:That's me in the corner. That's me in the spotlight.
- You Are the New Trend: The "gloves" anecdote in Bradley/Gloves describes a minor case of this. Zach noticed the trigger finger of his glove would get stuck between the trigger and the trigger guard of his machine gun, causing it to continue firing even with the trigger released, brought this up with the brass and got permission to cut that finger off of the offending glove. Other people saw that, declared it looks cool, and cut off all fingers off their gloves. The brass complained:Others, as paraphrased by Zach: Yeah, but I saw Specialist Zach do it, so that means I can do it, too!Brass, ditto: Specialist Zach had a legitimate safety concern, you guys are just frickin' idiots!
