I love the Army-Navy surplus store Surplus Value Center. They have really good long underwear and multicolored bandanas, cool camo jackets, and really, really scary-looking knives. If you're into that sort of thing.
Then, when I got in the military, I used to host - even in high school - I hosted the talent shows, and when I was in the military I would host all of our base Christmas parties and stuff.
Oddly, the military world is one of great sameness. There is an orderly quality to life on an army base, and even the children of the military are brought up with that sense of order and sameness.
I got fired from my first job in a store when I was a student because I kept wearing my own things, and people kept asking me where they were from, and the owner of the store got annoyed with me. So I got fired because I couldn't afford to buy the clothes from the store.
I was a military brat. My dad was in the military, so I was born in Germany. I moved around a lot; I was in church a lot.
As a lifelong Republican who served in the Army in Germany, I believe it is critical that we review - and overturn - the ban on gay service in the military. I voted for 'don't ask, don't tell.' But much has changed since 1993. My thinking shifted when I read that the military was firing translators because they are gay.
I went to the surplus store on Santa Monica and Vine (in Los Angeles) and went and got me a Navy outfit, put the black tape under my eyes. I got me a whistle and went in there with a hat looking like a full-on drill sergeant.
I think stolen bases are always a byproduct of doing other things well. Getting on base - you've got to get on base a lot, obviously. And you've got to be in the right position and your teammates have got to help you out a little bit sometimes.
The reality is, is that the military is full of native nomenclature. That's what we would call it. You've got Black Hawk helicopters, Apache Longbow helicopters. You've got Tomahawk missiles. The term used when you leave a military base in a foreign country is to go 'off the reservation, into Indian Country.'
My dad was in the Army. The Army's not great pay, but, you know, we moved from Army patch to Army patch wherever that was. The Army also contributed to sending me off to boarding school.
Because my father was an army officer, I was told to enter the military school during the war. Luckily or unluckily, one month before the entrance examination, I got polio, which made my right arm numb. It's still numb.
My camping experiences have been miserable. Beginning with my mother sending us off for summer camping with Forest School Camps. I swear the tents were WW1 army surplus.
I've got a lot of military kids who are not in on-base child care, and they should be. So it's things like that I'm going to change, either from a funding perspective or a policy perspective.
Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.
I think a lot of people don't realize that our military that defends our freedoms abroad, when they come home to the military base, are not allowed to carry weapons.
We lived in Germany; my father was in the Army, and they figured I would have more consistency at boarding school. That kind of gives you a thick skin.