Somewhere between 2000 and 2005, while I worked as a contractor for the Air Force in Germany, we came to have this new four-star Air Force general arrive. In a matter of days (not even weeks), this guy had created a turbulent atmosphere with massive chaos and people began to question his sanity. Somewhere in his 'we need to do this' orders....was the creation of various fake-programs, which all revolved around the use of the word 'combat'.
There were programs for health care, the chapel folks, keeping the base clean, etc. Each program was addressed as 'Combat X' or 'Combat Y'.
At some point, he insisted that commercials needed to be developed to inform the public on bases about these programs. The reaction was....a lot of Army folks watched the AFN (Armed Forces Network) as well.
As they began to watch the 'Combat X' commercials (usually 30 to 60 seconds), they eventually started laughing. In Army-bluntness.....the Air Force folks didn't know what combat was, and invoking combat on base cleanliness was a joke.
So I had to go one day over to Mannheim to visit a small AF office there and ended up in a conversation with two Army guys, and a AF NCO. This 'combat' commercial thing came up.
The Army guys explained that a new drinking game had been created in the Army dorms. In a TV room.....the young Army guys would come in and sit down on a Saturday evening with a bottle and a shot-glass. A challenge would be mounted in the TV room to the group (usually five to ten), and each time that a Air Force 'Combat X' commercial came on....with the word 'combat' uttered....they had to do a shot.
On normal work-day evenings, it wasn't that bad....maybe the word 'combat' got uttered just ten times. But on a Thanksgiving weekend, with football games on and the necessity for AFN to fill commercial time, you might have the word 'combat' uttered 40 times in one evening (over 4 hours). You'd walk into a TV at 11 PM and find six guys passed out, on the 'combat' challenge.
I've been watching this news media business over the past couple of months, with CNN's constant round-the-clock Trump coverage, where his name is uttered forty times in an hour, and collusion is uttered at least twenty times per hour.
I'm beginning to wonder when college kids will go to a drinking game with CNN, where 'collusion' is the key word for a shot, or the word 'Trump', and you find some kid passed out about thirty minutes into the prime-time newscast.
The question is.....if the kid passed out at the half-way point of the show, does he count as a full-up viewer, for national statistics.
And for the record, within 24 hours after the 'Combat X' general left his job....the commercials stopped. I imagine it was hard for the Army guys to recover in this period, and while at some rehab episode....they had to explain how they stupidly got into this shot-game.
