I had to share this article about soldiers in Iraq seeing the futility in driving around constantly getting shot at or targeted with IEDs. They are basically slacking off or using the ‘look busy’ technique. Thats all we did while on base. It was a constant game of avoid ‘work’ and appear busy.

One soldier said “We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralised, so we decided the only way we wouldn’t be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.

“So we would go find an open field and park. Then we would call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine.

“All our enlisted people became very ­disenchanted with our chain of command.”

Another soldier said, “We’d go to the end of our patrol route and set up on top of a bridge and use it as an over-watch position. We would just sit with our binoculars and observe rather than sweep. We’d call in radio checks every hour and say we were doing sweeps.”

Why would troops want to drive around and potentially get blown up when they could drive off to a field and avoid conflict?