On self-styled "manly men".

I just got off the phone with the War Department who is at work. She's an RN and didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

For our mutual entertainment she related how the relative of a patient tried impressing her (probably attempting to put a run on her, lottsa luck there chumley!)

This dipzoid relates how he was a corpsman in the Navy, "which is just like an RN" (no stupid, the corpsmen are enlisted while all RN's are commissioned officers) and that he became a Physician's Assistant before his enlistment of six years ended (last time I checked, making PA involved becoming a warrant officer. That entails a career path of normally 10-12 years before you can apply).

For some reason he quickly shut up and walked away after the WD smiled and told him she was married to a retired senior chief with 22 years in the canoe club.

DUHH!

I'll never figure out why people have to try lying like that. Even at my drunkest when I was trying to pick up chicks I had enough self-respect to be honest. I mean if you're not proud of the life you're living, change it! We can't all be John Wayne or Rambo and to tell the truth, who would want to be? Life is a real pain in the ass when you're always getting in fights or shot at!

But bullshitters like him are all over and you can always spot them by the way they immediately try to impress everyone they can about who they want you to imagine they are.

I'll always remember the SEAL team we carried aboard my last command. Their senior enlisted man was a senior chief, a real nice guy. Never said "BOO" to anyone. When he had some down time he just sat in the CPO quarters with the rest of us shooting the shit about life in general. We didn't know squat about him from his own mouth. Just a quiet guy fitting in with the rest of us.

It was from the rest of his team we found out he was rated one of the top snipers they had. They didn't go into details, SEALs can be pretty closemouthed, but we could put all the pieces together.

There was a guy who probably could have told some hair raising stories. But he never did. Guess he was happy in what he did and didn't feel the need to prove anything.

The only time he bragged about anything he did was when another chief and myself were playing "one up" on each other about how we made sacrifices for our kids. There had been a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show that we both took our children to, I proudly bragged I'd sat in the front row. The other chief countered by telling me he'd come early and left late. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

We went on like that for about five minutes when the SEAL senior chief quietly spoke up and said, "I sat with my daughters in back to back concerts of the New Kids On The Block."

Now how the hell do you top THAT one?