DoR: Sir, are you familiar with the article "Our GI's Earn Enough?"

FC: Yes, I am familiar with that piece of shit article. So what?

DoR: Well...we at The Drive-On Rag wanted to ask you some questions pertaining to its content, would that be alright?

FC: I didn't write the fucking thing. What the fuck do YOU guys want to know? I don't read your fucking paper that often anyway. I just OWN the damn thing!

DoR: Sir, I realize we are taking time from your busy schedule but-

FC: (interrupting) Listen, bitch: Just because some civilian puke turns public support against the soldier's pay, doesn't mean that I have to grant every single interview that I get called for. Did you know I had to turn down SPIN magazine and Penthouse, just to talk to you? I hope you print that too. The only reason I am sitting here talking to you for more than 15 seconds is because of that short skirt you're wearing!

DoR: It is a nice skirt isn't it?

FC: Don't flatter yourself, I'm not here to talk about your damn skirt.

DoR: Now then, may we dispense with the formalities and get on to the questions? Would that be alright?

FC: Ask away, you have 3 minutes left.

DoR: Very well then, you are familiar with the article "Our GI's Earn Enough," what did you think of the article saying that soldiers make more than enough money?

FC: WE MAKE ENOUGH? I THINK IT'S BULLSHIT! The civilian slime that wrote it has never slogged mud with any Stormtrooper of the Imperial Field Command, much less any other regular Army soldiers. Hell I have to dig into my food budget to make the insurance payments on my wife's limousine! How in the hell is a military leader like myself supposed to be charged with invading countries and killing people if I can't even make limousine insurance payments? If I'm not here to do your mass killings for you, then who the hell is going to do it? An "army" of journalists that would inflict fatal paper cuts upon the enemy? HAH! You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall! You mortals do not have a clue as to what my Stormtroopers are capable of, and at what personal risk. Anyone that has the gall to write trash about how rich we are can kiss my Paratrooper ass. They can also go home and nurse their paper cuts by sucking their thumbs. Keep in mind that these same pseudo-intellectual left-wing extremist non-patriots also make 5-10 times as much money as a rifle-carrying, load-bearing, knuckle dragging Airborne Infantryman charged with "kill-or be killed" missions at the direction of the government. No wait, let me re-phrase that last remark: the missions are now, "Don't shoot! Return fire only if deemed appropriate." Does that answer your question?

DoR: Yes, but wasn't the article well-written?

FC: Who gives a fuck?! Times up, I have to ask you to leave now.

DoR: Thank you for your time, your Excellency.

FC: Don't mention it. Oh, and hand me one of those cigars from my humidor on the other side of the room on your way out, willya?

DoR: Anything you say, sir!

For Sale: M1025 HMMWV found in the desert just outside of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Has some sand damage, $150.00 Or Best Offer. SFC Stevens 910-485-6097

First off, I see you must have done something wrong while in that low-speed strat-bat to get a high-speed JRTC assignment. Listen cocksucker, just because you don't like Leesville or SSG Knadler, that's no reason to try and weasel

_____________________________

your slimy little ass out of the DA Directed assignment instructions that you got your dirty little dick-beaters on. Furthermore, SFC Vigh is helping your sorry ass by giving you a cake assignment as an O/C and you have the nerve to try and squirm your way out of it like a sorry little bitch! Look Morales, I told you who to talk to already, but you chose to ignore my fucking advice. Therefore I hope you die of thirst in the box and burn your ass off in the Louisiana heat while O/C'ing those fine reserve CA and PSYOP troops for the next 3 years! The only advice I can give your rotting carcass is to stop at Bourbon Street on the way to Leesville and drink yourself into oblivion while you can.

PAGE 3 GIRL

Berlin 1944 - You’re a military leader expecting an all-out assault. What do you do? If you’re a toothbrush-’stashed, anti-Semitic psycho, you sleep in. On June 6, 1944, when U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower launched 3,000 assault vehicles, 2,500 ships and 500 naval vessels for the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Nazi officers called up der Führer to authorize reinforcements. But Adolph — never up before noon — was out cold, and nobody wanted to wake him. When he did get up, he enjoyed a nice, leisurely breakfast, goofed around for a while, then gave the go-ahead at nearly 5 P.M. By then, Allied troops had crawled up from the beaches, rained from the sky and started to steamroll straight toward Hitler’s bunker.

Russian Kamikaze Dogs - America had the Manhattan Project, Germany had the V-2 rocket, Russia had … wait for it … dogs with bombs. The technologically advanced Russian Army had the ingenious idea to strap explosives to the pooches’ backs and train them to run under tanks, using special treats as bait. Foolproof. After weeks of training, the mutts were sent out to blow up German panzers. Treats were fired at the Nazis, but the pups had come to associate the nice doggie stuff only with Soviet tanks and wouldn’t leave their masters. The project went the way of the Romanovs on Day Two of the experiment, when a tail-waggin’ pack of ticking terriers forced an entire Soviet division into retreat.

GRATUITOUS ADVERTISEMENT

April 26, 2000

By GREG JAFFE

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON -- Earlier this year, Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an unusual order to U.S. military bases around the globe.

His message: enough with the bells and whistles -- just get to the point.

It seems that e-mailed military briefings larded with electronic "slides" of booming tanks and spinning pie charts were gobbling up so much of the Defense Department's classified bandwidth that they were slowing more-critical communications between headquarters and units in the field. "The chairman basically told everyone that we don't need Venetian-blind effects or fancy backdrops. All we need is the information," says one senior Defense Department official.

Gen. Shelton's order is only the Pentagon's most recent assault on a growing electronic menace: the PowerPoint briefing. Sure, business executives complain about the seemingly endless PowerPoint presentations put on by overeager middle managers in darkened boardrooms across America. But in the military, the Microsoft program, which helps users create computer-based graphics and sound effects, has become one of the most dreaded facts of life. And it's even shouldering the blame for at least some of the armed forces' ills.

Congressional support for new weapons programs isn't as strong as expected? Army Secretary Louis Caldera suggests that PowerPoint presentations are alienating lawmakers. "People are not listening to us, because they are spending so much time trying to understand these incredibly complex slides," he says.

Too many bright, young junior officers are leaving the military for the private sector? A recent survey of captains at Fort Benning, Ga., cites the "ubiquity of the PowerPoint Army" as a prime reason for their disaffection.

"The idea behind most of these briefings is for us to sit through 100 slides with our eyes glazed over, and then to do what all military organizations hope for ... to surrender to an overwhelming mass," says Navy Secretary Richard Danzig.

Old-fashioned slide briefings, designed to update generals on troop movements, have been a staple of the military since World War II. But in only a few short years PowerPoint has altered the landscape. Just as word processing made it easier to produce long, meandering memos, the spread of PowerPoint has unleashed a blizzard of jazzy but often incoherent visuals. Instead of drawing up a dozen slides on a legal pad and running them over to the graphics department, captains and colonels now can create hundreds of slides in a few hours without ever leaving their desks. If the spirit moves them they can build in gunfire sound effects and images that explode like land mines.

"There is an arms-race dimension to it," says Peter Feaver, a military expert at Duke University and frequent PowerPoint briefer at various war colleges. "If there are three briefings in a row, and you are the one with the lowest production values, you look really lame."

PowerPoint has become such an ingrained part of the defense culture that it has seeped into the military lexicon. "PowerPoint Ranger" is a derogatory term for a desk-bound bureaucrat more adept at making slides than tossing grenades. There is even a "PowerPoint Ranger Creed," a parody of the Marine Corp's famous "Rifleman's Creed": "This is my PowerPoint. There are many like it, but mine is [PowerPoint] 97 ... I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its fonts, its accessories and its formats ... My PowerPoint and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our subject. We are the saviors of my career." The parody is zapping around the Defense Department as a PowerPoint slide complete with the sound of explosions and featuring an animated John Wayne in Army Ranger garb wielding a laser pointer.

How did a piece of technology that was supposed to improve communication become a barrier to it?

Some military sociologists say the endless presentations are a product of the military's zero-defect culture, in which one mediocre review by a superior can torpedo a career. "Young officers are worried that they might leave something out of their briefing, and a supervisor might say something about it. So they pack their presentations with every detail that they can think off," says Charles Moskos, a military-culture expert at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

Others blame the problem on the absence of a formidable enemy. "We crave something that explains who we are," says Ret. Army Col. Henry G. Cole. "The PowerPoint game creates the illusion of control. All those moving arrows and graphics become reality for a military that is trapped in this permanent state of shadow-boxing an enemy that no longer exists."

Whatever the cause, a handful of senior Pentagon officials have decided to attack the PowerPoint problem head-on. The Navy's Mr. Danzig announced late last year that he was no longer willing to soldier through the slide shows. He maintains that PowerPoint briefings are only necessary for two reasons: If field conditions are changing rapidly or if the audience is "functionally illiterate."

"In the Pentagon the second seems to be the underlying presumption," grouses Mr. Danzig, who now asks to get all his briefings in written form.

Mr. Danzig's Army counterpart, Mr. Caldera, says he, too, would ban the presentations if he thought he could get away with it. "For some of these guys, taking away their PowerPoint would be like cutting off their hands," he says. Mr. Caldera's strategy is to interrupt the show with questions when he gets bored.

Despite such countermeasures, PowerPoint is showing no signs of retreat. Indeed, it seems to be spreading. James A. Calpin, an officer in the Naval Reserves, just returned home from duty in Operation Northern Watch in Turkey, where PowerPoint has just begun to surface in officer presentations. "I was able to come in and spruce up their briefings, and they were just wowed. People over there just loved it," he says.

Foreign armed services also are beginning to get in on the act. "You can't speak with the U.S. military without knowing PowerPoint," says Margaret Hayes, an instructor at National Defense University in Washington D.C., who teaches Latin American military officers how to use the software.

Unfortunately, Ms. Hayes admits many foreign officers, including those fluent in PowerPoint visuals, still struggle to understand their U.S. counterparts' complicated slide presentations. "We've gotten away from inviting our colleagues from the Department of Defense to brief our visiting officers. Some of their presentations are a little bit too complex and too inhibiting," she says.

All of which makes Duke University's Mr. Feaver wonder if the U.S. military is misusing the technology. "If we really wanted to accomplish something we shouldn't be teaching our allies how to use PowerPoint," he says. "We should give it to the Iraqis. We'd never have to worry about them again." -----Mike

Damascus, Syria--With the world breathing a collective sigh of relief following the violence-free passage into the year 2000, an international coalition of terrorists issued a reminder Monday that the new millennium does not actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001. "Technically speaking, we are now in the last year of the 20th century," said Mahmoud al-Habib, a spokesperson for the terrorist organization Hamas. "Since there was no year zero, next New Year's Eve is the real time to detonate bombs in Times Square and blow commercial airliners out of the sky." Speaking from a secret bunker in the Kashmir hills, Osama bin Laden agreed. "We were all set to blow up the Eiffel

Tower," bin Laden said, "when one of my suicide bombers pointed out that it should actually be done next Jan. 1, not this one. We terrorists are not as stupid as you infidels think we are," said the reclusive mastermind of terror. "Everyone knows the real beginning of the new millennium is January 1st, 2001, because there was no year zero. While every stupid infidel capitalist pig western journalist on earth thought we were gearing up for a year 2000 jihad, we were all laughing at their foolish ignorance of the fact that the new millennium really takes place a year later!" Watch out for Osama and his boys to crank up the heat later this year!

The Drive-On Rag's staff came up with the following reasons to allow beer drinking at all times during working hours while on duty:

1. It's an incentive to show up to work early.

2. It reduces job-related stress.

3. It leads to more honest communications.

4. It reduces complaints about low pay and the heat.

5. It cuts down on time off because you would be allowed to show up at work with a hangover.

6. Enlisted soldiers would tell officers what they really think, not what the officers want to hear.

7. Increases job satisfaction because if you have a bad day you don't care.

8. It eliminates 3 or 4-day passes because people would rather come to work.

9. It makes fellow soldiers look better.

10. It makes the mess hall food taste better

11. Bosses are more likely to hand out great NCOER's when they're wasted.

12. It's a good re-up incentive.

13. Suddenly, farting during a briefing isn't so embarrassing

14. No one will remember your strip act at the Change of Command ceremonies

15. The Drive-On Rag is funnier if you're bombed!

The Drive-On Rag has been nominated for the excellence in journalism award. This comes as absolutely no surprise to the staff, who has believed in what they do to provide Fort Bragg and the Internet with an alternative to the normal trash or lack of normal trash available to the deployed soldier.

Remember: here at Fort Bragg, you can't buy The Drive-On Rag. The Rag is free, but it ain't cheap. So if you're on The Rag, then your buddies must want to be on The Rag, too. So git off your cheap ass and make some copies for them.