Jake Wood's Got Science

... for any occasion, be it on the Wisconsin football field or in Fallujah:

I definitely had an advantage going into bootcamp having played for Wisconsin. In all honesty, playing for [former UW Offensive Line coach Jim] Hueber and [former UW Defensive Line coach John] Palermo was maybe scarier than getting thrashed by my drill instructors at bootcamp. I think the biggest thing that it prepared me for was the verbal abuse and constant mental assault. In bootcamp, nothing is ever good enough and you are always told about it. Hell, I had been in bootcamp for four years already at Wisconsin.

Character-building experience are a real bitch, but they do apparently pay off. Wood is no doubt making an impression on that Iraqi kid he'll never forget. We again thank Lion in Oil for directing us to Jake's blog.

The Skull-Faced Guy With the Axe Is Actually a Pretty Good Writer

Many thanks to Lion in Oil for unearthing the blog Jake's Life. Jake is apparently a former Wisconsin football player stationed in Iraq, where life seems to often suck an awful lot.

His Tuesday went like this.

• In the AM, he found out that a friend of his died.
• In the PM, he had two mortar rounds fired his way.
• That evening, he logged on and Yahoo told him about the massacre at Virginia Tech.
  

The guy seems to take it all in stride ('Basically, the government owns me and does with me as it pleases,') and does it while linking to a site called Love Your Body Already. Which is a pretty trifling detail given the scale of the stuff he's dealing with, but it still makes him even more admirable.

If he's bothering to write this stuff down, you might want to do him the favor of checking in on him and leaving a comment every now and then.