Adapt And Overcome

this war has brought several modifications to the vehicles the army uses. i'm not talking about new types like the MRAP, but about changes to the existing vehicles. for instance, every vehicle now come with air conditioning. very important if you want soldiers sitting in a metal box for hours in 120+ degree heat to be in top fighting shape.

other modifications are just as important and have reportedly come from the innovation of soldiers themselves, such as the current turret system. when the war began, humvee gunners essentially stood in the open, with no armor from the waist up. the story i heard is that one enterprising soldier took some spare parts such as metal plating and bullet proof humvee windows and placed it around the humvee turret to give the gunner some protection. you might think this is the point of the post, but it's not. it's merely a segue.

there's another modification soldiers have been making for years that has not yet been picked up by the army. first let me explain that the way we talk to each other inside vehicles is usually with headsets, each with headphones that cover the whole of both ears and a microphone. the modification, and why this couldn't have been done in previous wars, involves leaving one headset free, then taping headphones from an mp3 player to the microphone. this gives everyone in the vehicles a radio. strange the army left those out. they also missed cup holders.

it's the small luxuries that matter.