There are many schools of thought on how a man ought to prepare himself for a night on the town. When the road you’re treading is paved with good intentions, you have to think two steps ahead. Alcohol is a catalyst, and anything can happen when you soak people in it.

What starts with drinks at Happy Hour may turn into a Five Alarm disaster at any moment. A shit-show is only ever a round of shots away. If there is one thing I have learned through years of trial and error, it is this: Always have a plan.

Allow me to introduce the 8 Steps of the Troop Leading Procedures.

Receive the Mission > Issue a Warning Order > Make a Tentative Plan > Initiate Necessary Movement > Conduct a Recon > Complete the Plan > Issue the Order > Supervise and Refine

Oh my God, you’re thinking. That looks way more complicated than Gym, Tan, Laundry. I’ll bet you’re already using some of these steps and you don’t even know it. Allow me to explain:

Receive the Mission

It’s 2 PM on a Friday and your best friend sends you a text: His girlfriend dumped him. You know what this means . . . Tonight it’s Game On! Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go out and score some Strange for you and your friend to console him. With any luck, he’ll immediately forget the fact that his high-school sweetheart blew the Starting 5 during March Madness.

Issue a WARNO

Shit is about to get wild, and you know it. You had better call for back-up.

You immediately text your Tier 1 friends and explain the situation. Then you Facebook them with an iPhone app. At no point do you actually call them, that would be way too fucking analog. For Military purposes, a WARNO typically includes things like priority of rehearsals and equipment.

All you really need to start are hard times and a few co-ordinating instructions: Where are we meeting? Who is coming? What supplies are needed, and who is bringing them?

Make a Tentative Plan

This is the tricky part. Civilians normally just argue over what lame chain restaurant to go to, and what club to go to. You aren’t raiding a trench complex, so you can afford to play it a little fast and loose. However, you will never appreciate how beautiful a well-oiled machine is until you’ve been a part of one.

A leader must consider a laundry list of variables. Having a plan helps limit those variables, and allow you to systematically predict and prepare for them. Are you meeting at a restaurant? If not, will you and your friends be able to get a bite to eat before you start drinking? Do you have a designated driver, or are you calling a cab? Can you all fit into one cab? Are you cabbing it both ways, or is someone driving you downtown? If so, who is going to help that poor bastard get his car in the morning?

I haven’t even got you in the door of the bar and already there are issues that need to be resolved. If you go out without eating, then someone might get drunk too soon. Before you know it, someone shouts Titty Bar! and the next thing you know you wake up in a bush with a swollen face and a broken wrist because you tried to finger a dancer’s asshole.

Initiate Necessary Movement

Once you hash out the details and update your Facebook status, it’s time to hit the road. So you hit the liquor store, the ATM, and the mini-mart. The Packing List includes: chewing gum, breath strips, condoms, 14 different energy drinks, and a small bottle of Febreeze. You charge your phone, locate your digital camera, and dig out that one outfit you always wear. You primp like an idiot in front of the mirror, do a bunch of push-ups, and stare at yourself some more.

None of your friends are calling you back. One is still playing Xbox. Another is napping. The Break-up Boy’s roommate started pouring Jagermeister down him, and now that asshole wants to come too. He also thinks you should go to some other bar you didn’t plan on, because his friend’s band is playing.

You update your Facebook status again, via Twitter.

Conduct a Recon

Here is where so many people make a critical mistake: Waiting to go out until the bars are packed. The situation always looks different on the ground, and no amount of planning can compensate for this.

You roll into the bar around 8 PM. Your friends are all being idiots, and everything is a crisis. Trying to co-ordinate them to do anything more complicated than drool on themselves is like herding cats in a House of Mirrors. Meanwhile, you have discovered that Bar X has a hot new bartender working the early shift. She gets off at 9, and she’s giving you the run-down of neighborhood events.

Maybe there’s a shot special somewhere, or maybe her friend is a stripper and she’s meeting up for drinks later. Whatever the case, it is much easier to make new friends (especially with the wait staff) when you go out early and sober!

Furthermore, you might find out that there is some lame band or stupid theme night at a bar you planned on going to. Even worse, you check your buddy’s Ex’s Facebook and find out she’s going to the same bar you are.

In that case, start Texting/Tweeting/Facebooking and issue a FRAGO.

Complete the Plan

Armed with new information, you are ready to go. You change whatever details you have to, making sure to plug important phone numbers into your phone, like a cab company or that bartender.

Issue the Order

Tired of getting no response, you start making phone calls.

Supervise and Refine

Your friends show up half-drunk from pre-gaming. Fortunately, you have a plan for that. You all stop for pizza, which slows their drinking and helps them pace out the night. Then you stop by your car to chug cans of Red Bull while Breakup Boy runs up and down the sidewalk shouting about what a cheating whore his ex is. You shield him with your body and pretend to be on your cell phone as he pisses on someone’s front steps.

You are about to walk into your planned destination, only to discover that there is a bachelorette party inside. Instant No-Go. You can’t go to the lounge across the street because Breakup Boy’s ex is there. You don’t dare tell him that, of course. You text the bartender, who suggests you meet up with her and her friends.

It all turns into a complete disaster from there. Six Irish Car Bombs later your buddies are drooling on themselves. You steal the battery from Breakup Boy’s phone to stop him from drunk-texting his ex. You call the cab company and shovel your friends into a yellow Dodge Caravan. Things may not have worked out perfect, but at least no one got arrested.

Bartender Girl witnesses your poise under pressure. You are officially The Man.

I have no use for racism.  What is racism, really, if not simple intellectual laziness?  In man’s desperate quest to codify and understand the world, and his fellow man, he has never been able to get beyond the surface.  No matter how deep science pries, it can never overpower the half-informed inference of the common fool.

I am willing to bet hard cash that centuries from now mankind will have completely disassembled the human genome.  We will understand aging and cancer and disease.  We will be able to correct birth defects in the womb.  Medical science will swell as though it had the Hand of God to wield for itself.

But there will still be nigger jokes.

There will always be discrimination.  At his core, man is a discerning beast.  Any difference between men, no matter how small, becomes a number.  To each type a group; to each group a classification.  Group like with like, and watch each of them pick each other apart.

I want you to try an exercise.  I want you to draw a large square on a piece of paper.  Subdivide this square into four equal parts.  Over the left column, write the word “White”.  Over the right column write “Non-White”.  On the left side of the big square, next to the top row, write “Douchebag”.  Next to the bottom row, write “Not Douchebag”.

Still with me?  Good.

Consider each box carefully.  If you can think of at least 1 person that satisfies each category, put a check in the box.  If you are being intellectually honest, I am certain you can chalk up more than a few examples for each quadrant.  Personally, I don’t care if you can only think of 1 example for one category, and infinity billion for another.  Even if your statistics are accurate, that one example is enough to prove something.

If you can think of one White or one Non-White who isn’t a douchebag, then you cannot say that All People in (Set x) are douchebags.  No matter what criteria you choose for judging people, you need only that one exception to nullify your right to classify a group based on that criterion.

All blacks are lazy.  Wrong! Jesse Owens.

Ok, but they’re stupid.  Wrong! George Washington Carver.

Do you see how this works?  The point is, no matter how many statistics you pile up, they do not give you the right to be intellectually lazy.  Furthermore, you cannot make inferences based on biases in the statistics.  This is the correlation/causation problem.  There is a rather striking correlation between ice cream consumption and instances of rape.  Does this mean that ice cream causes rape?  No . . . There is no significant connection.  It is simply a statistical correlation.  There is no causal relationship whatsoever.

Statistics are damning animals.  The narrow scope of any one study can make the numbers imply whatever you can bend them to prove.  Statistically speaking, blacks make up around 15% of the US population.  Despite this, they comprise over 40% of its prison population.  There are almost as many blacks incarcerated in America as there are people incarcerated in China.  In fact, 1 in 9 black males is incarcerated.

So what do these statistics mean?  By themselves they mean almost nothing.  They mean that a damned lot of people are incarcerated in America.

These statistics don’t tell you anything about biases in law enforcement or the justice system.  They don’t tell you about poverty, or who can or can’t afford a lawyer.  They don’t tell you about the differences in enforcement between cocaine and crack, or how this effects different racial demographics.

These statistics certainly don’t tell you that blacks are predisposed to criminal behavior.  More blacks go to college than prison.  What kind of predisposition is that?

Racism is nitwit nonsense.  Pure intellectual laziness.  Supporting it with statistics is a pathetic (if time consuming) attempt to validate a bullshit belief.  It smacks of Hard Determinism, which is bullshit too.  Racism is the recess of a small mind.

The US Military took a survey. It asked service members across all branches whether or not they would accept a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The results were mixed – as a whole, service members said that they would not have a problem serving with other openly homosexual service members. The response from Combat Arms branches was another matter – where the majority disapproved of a repeal.

We all know who won that fight.

The government announced that it was repealing the controversial policy. Within weeks, the Army Times published an article declaring that Women Should be Allowed in Combat Units.

As a serviceman, and an Infantryman, my interest in the matter is a bit more personal than most. I started a discussion on my now-defunct Facebook account, the results of which showed the issue to be polarizing. I have my opinion on the matter, but because of my position I will have absolutely no say if the powers-that-be decide to allow women in combat. I will have to execute given those new conditions and standards, and I will be responsible for the training and success of such a unit regardless of whether it includes female personnel.

I considered the matter carefully. Most of the feedback was the same from males and females alike. People talked about the physical differences between men and women, and whether or not women could actually hack it in the Infantry. The vocal minority – both male and female – talked about some of the women who have served in units that saw direct action, and the honorable service of those women.

I know that others will make every argument for and against Women in Combat. I will have no choice but to accept such a change on face value, if it were to happen, and iron out the kinks as they come. Rather than resist, I will embrace this change with full vigor.

To those women considering a career in Combat Arms, allow me to give you an introduction to life in the Infantry:

This is a Calling

The military is a profession, not a job. You don’t take off your uniform at the end of the day and become a civilian. You wear the mantle of a service member as you wear your own skin. If you are told not to act a certain way in your personal or professional life, it is because it reflects not only on you as an individual, but on all of your brothers and sisters.

People Will Hate You

For every polite nod and cordial “Yes ma’am,” you will be assailed by a vocal corps of people for whom flagrant hatred of America and its military are defining personal traits. Those that tell you they support the troops but not the war are spitting in your face. They want to deny you the means to carry out your appointed tasks because it costs money. They will not accept the explanation that as a professional they are paying you for the quality of the product you produce – they will demand you produce it faster and cheaper.

The Supreme Court has upheld the Westboro Baptists’ Right to protest your funeral. You will fight to defend that right, and die if necessary.

Expect No Respect

The enemy we fight wants to impose Sharia Law wherever it holds power. They view clean-shaven male soldiers as women, afford them no respect, and would bugger them in the ass if given the chance and not think it was unmanly to do so. How do you suppose they’re going to view you?

You Will Get Broke Off

No matter how physically fit you are, this job will crush you. You will climb over very high things. You will work in any weather conditions. You will freeze. You will burn. Then, when you are ragged and worn out and tired, you are expected to perform. The Infantry doesn’t do minimums. If you think you can hack this job because you can meet the minimum standard, guess again.

The Air Assault standard for ruck sack weight is 35 lbs. I cannot name a single time I have ever carried a 35 lb ruck. The last ruck march I did, I weighed my pack on a 100 lb hanging scale. It broke the scale and bent the hook. After half a mile, we started double-timing. My foot went numb, and then part of my leg. No one asked if I was ok. They yelled at me to run faster.

If you fall out, your brothers (and sisters) will carry you. If you go to sick call, no one cares if you were the platoon PT stud the day before. The second you go to sick call you become a shitbag and everyone will scorn you.

If you complain, your supervisors will ask if you “have sand in your cunt.” This isn’t because of your gender – they accuse everyone of this. No one cares what your complaint is because they are suffering the same conditions.  Which brings me to my next point . . .

Infantry Types are Crude

We are not crude simply for the sake of being base or crass. Part of this job means wallowing in your own filth for days at a time. You had better be clean shaven, but otherwise you will be filthy. You change your socks and t-shirt because your own sweat will cause you to freeze, and your disgusting feet will begin to rot. Otherwise, you will smell like a clamdigger’s unmentionables and you had better get used to it.

You will learn to piss wherever you can, because you will drink water by the gallon to keep from falling to heat stroke. You will learn to shit while crouching over a slit trench, with zero privacy. Almost everyone chews tobacco, and you had better learn to love the smell of a herd of men farting in unison.

Because of the conditions under which we operate, we tend to be very matter-of-fact. We deal with life and death as a part of the job because they are. When you are that intimately aware of the bodily functions of everyone you work with, decorum becomes pointless.

At Least There’s that Bond . . .

Ahh, the bond between soldiers. It’s a wonderful thing, sometimes. However, you will work shoulder to shoulder with the same group of assholes. Over time, you will grow to hate some of them. There will be infighting and contention. After days without sleep, when you are hungry and broken and sore, morale breaks down and everyone is at each others’ throats. You will learn what you are made of, and what everyone else is made of too.

Forget About Family

You will work 90+ hour weeks. You will come home filthy and exhausted and beaten. You will have just enough time to prep your gear for the next day, maybe pack a lunch and wash, and then grab whatever sleep you can before the next day. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to do it.

Your family may support you in your endeavors, but you will quickly become a stranger. If they don’t live under your roof, you will be more an idea to them than an actual person. If they do, they will get tired of cleaning up your mud and washing the dishes you are too tired or indifferent to clean yourself.

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. . . If all of this sounds hard to you, it is. That’s the point. The job of the Infantry is to close with and destroy the enemy. While others hang back and drop bombs and artillery, you cross that ground. You carry that weight. You fight that fight. Others might prepare the objective for you with their stand-off weapons, but you have to take it.

It takes a special breed. If you really think you’re up to the task, and you can prove it, welcome to the Infantry.

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You can find more of Max’s barely comprehensible scribbling at Fucking Inappropriate.