*Note: I apologize in advance for how much I cut in on this story. Catherine is a close friend of mine and I sometimes get excited*
Ok, so when I was in El Paso I was looking for a job and it was the beginning of the summer and I didn’t want to work at a convenience store – which is what I ended up doing anyway – and I found this ad in the paper that said “Be a Role Player for the Army!” because – I don’t know if it was Army or Air Force and that was like what half of the people in the city worked for. Well I thought that sounded interested, something that would make a good story for after I lived there. So I called them and asked what I could do to apply for this and they said well you got to come to this stadium at about seven o’clock in the morning. I found out it was the sports stadium for the community college in the very north part of the city and so I was determined to go but I didn’t have a car or anything. I had to get on the earliest bus there was which came at like 4:15 in the morning and like go as far as that would go which wasn’t even all the way and I got off at the last possible stop and then I started walking, it was like dawn breaking over the dessert and there was tumbleweed and it was the outskirts of the city and I see barbed wire on the ground and then finally I see a stadium in the distance. I walk over there and it’s 7:30 and I’m already late for the meeting and there’s this guy standing near a truck and a bunch of people and they all looked young maybe like they were college students on break and so I was thinking maybe I could get this and he gave me a separate little talk and application packet. So basically they wanted people to pretend to be Iraqi civilians for the soldiers that were training to go to Iraq. You had to dress in costume, they would provide all the costumes, all the training, all the repeat lines and stuff in obviously not English and it wasn’t just Iraq it was all sorts of countries and you’d have to pretend to be insurgents or whatever and I really wanted to work there, it was the craziest thing, just to have this experience. The flip side of it was that it was in the dessert at there White Sands Artillery Range you had to go out to this place and it was really hot and there was no shade and it was supposedly going to be really physically taxing, and also because it was apart of a military operation you weren’t aloud to like talk about anything that might be potentially problematic – you couldn’t tell anyone what you were doing or talk about religion, sexuality, political views, anything that might be a problem. I really wanted it though so I applied and I never heard from them. So I was like oh well, I’ll get something else, and then like my roommate who was listed as an emergency contact got a call from them and they were asking me to do it but it turns out it wouldn’t work out because like the bus schedules I would have had to be at that stadium everyday at like seven o’clock which wasn’t feasible at all so I worked at Circle K and sold slushies and hot dogs.