I love all those US Army commercials that show young men who were once mere mortals like the rest of us, until a stint in the Army turned them into self-righteous a-holes. You now the ads I'm talking about, like the one where the guy comes home and his friends ask him what he's doing in the army, and he tells them that he works with computers. The friends asks him if he could have stayed home to do that, and the soldier gives him a look like he's the village drunkard, and tells him "not really." I've got an idea for a new line of commercials for the Army: show a soldier returning home on crutches, with one leg gone, the result of a booby-trapped bridge near Tikrit. He opens his mailbox and finds a paycheck from the Army. Sweet, he thinks, I can finally afford groceries. He opens the envelope and finds he receives $0.00, because he has been declared AWOL by the payroll system. The Army knows he lost his leg, they even flew him home on an Army transport plane. "Do they expect me to report for duty already?," he thinks to himself. "Why didn't I just get a government loan and go to college like everyone else I went to high school did," he wonders aloud. Then he remembers the new Army slogan: Be an Army of one... one who doesn't get paid.
USNews.com: Wounded soldiers too often find themselves having to battle the Army over pay mistakes (10/24/05)