H/T to David Stanford at The Sandbox for this one. Since the original poster of this got it from someone else I felt ok in borrowing it. It is just too funny. Of course there is no way I can let this go without adding some of my own in. They are at the bottom starting with #41.

HOW TO PREPARE FOR DEPLOYMENT TO IRAQ / AFGHANISTAN

1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.

2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.

3. Six hours after you go to sleep, have your wife or girlfriend whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble, “Sorry, wrong cot.”

4. Renovate your bathroom. Hang a green plastic sheet down from the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. Keep four inches of soapy cold water on the floor. Stop cleaning the toilet and pee everywhere but in the toilet itself. Leave two to three sheets of toilet paper. Or for best effect, remove it altogether. For a more realistic deployed bathroom experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor’s. Choose a neighbor who lives at least a quarter mile away.

5. When you take showers, wear flip-flops and keep the lights off.

6. Every time there is a thunderstorm, go sit in a wobbly rocking chair and dump dirt on your head.

7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it on “HIGH” for that tactical generator smell.

8. Don’t watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.

9. Leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24 hours a day for proper noise level.

10. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.

11. Once a week, blow compressed air up through your chimney making sure the wind carries the soot across and on to your neighbor’s house. Laugh at him when he curses you.

12. Buy a trash compactor and only use it once a week. Store up garbage in the other side of your bathtub.

13. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a saltine cracker.

14. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator. Then serve some kind of meat in an unidentifiable sauce poured over noodles. Do this for every meal.

15. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get to the shower as fast as you can. Simulate the lack of hot water by running out into your yard and breaking out the garden hose.

16. Once a month, take every major appliance completely apart and put it back together again.

17. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for five or six hours before drinking.

18. Invite at least 185 people you don’t really like because of their strange hygiene habits to come and visit for a couple of months. Exchange clothes with them.

19. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.

20. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip over the threshold or hit your head on the sill every time you pass through one of them.

21. Keep a roll of toilet paper on your night stand and bring it to the bathroom with you. And bring your gun and a flashlight.

22. Go to the bathroom when you just have to pass gas, “just in case.” Every time.

23. Announce to your family that they have mail, have them report to you as you stand outside your open garage door after supper and then say, “Sorry, it’s for the other Smith.”

24. Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don’t know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.

25. Go to the worst crime-infested place you can find, go heavily armed, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet. Set up shop in a tent in a vacant lot. Announce to the residents that you are there to help them.

26. Eat a single M&M every Sunday and convince yourself it’s for Malaria.

27. Demand each family member be limited to 10 minutes per week for a morale phone call. Enforce this with your teenage daughter.

28. Shoot a few bullet holes in the walls of your home for proper ambiance.

29. Sandbag the floor of your car to protect from mine blasts and fragmentation.

30. While traveling down roads in your car, stop at each overpass and culvert and inspect them for remotely detonated explosives before proceeding.

31. Fire off 50 cherry bombs simultaneously in your driveway at 3:00 a.m. When startled neighbors appear, tell them all is well, you are just registering mortars. Tell them plastic will make an acceptable substitute for their shattered windows.

32. Drink your milk and sodas warm.

33. Spread gravel throughout your house and yard.

34. Make your children clear their Super Soakers in a clearing barrel you placed outside the front door before they come in.

35. Make your family dig a survivability position with overhead cover in the backyard. Complain that the 4x4s are not 8 inches on center and make them rebuild it.

36. Continuously ask your spouse to allow you to go buy an M-Gator.

37. When your 5-year-old asks for a stick of gum, have him find the exact stick and flavor he wants on the Internet and print out the web page. Type up a Form 9 and staple the web page to the back. Submit the paperwork to your spouse for processing. After two weeks, give your son the gum.

38. Announce to your family that the dog is a vector for disease and shoot it. Throw the dog in a burn pit you dug in your neighbor’s back yard.

39. Wait for the coldest/ hottest day of the year and announce to your family that there will be no heat / air conditioning that day so you can perform much needed maintenance on the heater / air conditioner. Tell them you are doing this so they won’t get cold / hot.

40. Just when you think you’re ready to resume a normal life, order yourself to repeat this process for another six months to simulate the next deployment you’ve been ordered to support.

41. Keep empty water bottles by your bed for those nights you don’t want to talk to the bathroom, and then pretty much just start using them all the time during the day becuase you have gotten your aim down pretty good.

42. Have your neighbors bring their dogs to your yard and let them off the leash just so you can get your aiming down pat and check your sight picture.

43. When you take a shower have one nob wired with a 6volt battery so that when you touch it under the water you are remined where you are.

44. Clog up the drain pipe from your house into the city sewer system so that the shower is guarnteed to have grey water come from the drain every time someone is washing clothes or flushing the toilet.

45. Replace your shower curtain (if you decide to have one) with a see through Sponge-bob kids shower curtain from K-mart or TJ Max.

46. While taking a shower have someone randomely fling the curtain open and then say sorry and walk off (even though the water is running and you are behind a see-through shower curtain).

47. Whenever anyone in your house wants you,have them call your cell phone which is always on you (sometimes in the magazine holder for your pistol).

48. Occasionally wash your hands in mil-tec so you always have that smell following you everywhere.

49. Boil your hamburgers in grease and let them drip dry before eating them.

50. Have entire meals of nothing but fried food for 3 meals a day. (do this at least 3 days in a week).

51. Make salad with nothing but lettuce.

52. Increase your cussing by 200%. Pretty much every sentence must contain the “F” Word, and every 3 sentences must contain Bastard or Son of a B*****.

53. Start smoking cigars, even if you don’t smoke.

54. Quit using your Weber or other grill and instead take a 55-gal drum, cut the bottom 1/3 of it off and grill your food on that (using regular wood and gasoline to start it).

55. Every once in a while throw a bullet in the new grill (mentioned in #54) to simulate some dumba$$ throwing live rounds in a burn barrel.

56. In the winter time, turn down all heat in the house and put a full sized 55 gal drum outside and put trash in it to burn and keep warm (yes like the bums do under the highway).

57. In the Summer time, turn off the AC (simulating it does not work) and keep all the windows up on your car.

58. If sitting in traffic, have your kids stick their heads out the windows and holding toy guns and swear at everyone else telling them that you don’t sit in traffic and to push off the side of the road.

59. Put a wet-bulb in the front yard.

60. Put up a sign in the kitchen informing your family the color status of air and the roads that day.