The USO

As you may have seen on DIY/ManCaves, the USO at Camp Virginia is large and quite well equipped. We have 5 Playstations 3, 5 X-boxes 360 and 5 Wii portals. There is a "cinema" with 24 reclining lounges on which we show movies on a large screen. The seats are usually full with troops watching the movie and/or sleeping. The most requested movie by far is 300. Most of these guys have seen that movie 5+ times. The most requested games are Call to Duty. We have 4 copies of each and they are almost always out. The guys like Tiger Woods (on Wii) and John Madden too. Too much useless information?

We're now open 10:00 to midnight, but soon our hours will change to 10:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m., with the two hours closed for cleaning and cooling off the computers. There's usually 20-50 people waiting for us to open in the morning.

We have a soundproof music room where soldiers can jam on electric guitar. It's not used that much, maybe 2-3 times per day, but the people that use it just love it. They are surprised to find they can play music so far from home. We have 6 computers with Internet and four phones. By far the most popular items we have are the phones. There's always a line of people waiting to call home for free. There's also two TVs, one tuned to AFN and one for movies. If you want to watch the movie TV (TV1) you need to wear headphones. There's enough noise in here without one more TV. Yesterday we were playing "Superbad" on TV1. It was pretty funny to hear everyone laughing at the silence. There's a game area with lots of games, but unlike USO and LAX we do not have many snacks, just what we buy at the PX. I bought 4 bags of Werthers at the PX yesterday and all were gone in 4 hours and that's because almost no one was here and because RJS didn't steal any. SEND FOOD. SEND SNACKS. SEND GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. SEND MICROWAVE POPCORN. SEND SEE'S CANDY. I will not eat it all by myself. I promise to share.

The USO operates like one very disfunctional family. There were 4 guys plus the Center Manager (a guy) and one girl ("Ritz") here before I arrived. That's five egos way out of control. Ritz is leaving on Thursday to transfer to Camp Beuring USO, but we are getting 3 new people; all women. Hopefully things will settle down when we have more of that gentle female touch. Of course it's a long story that I cannot go into here, but suffice to say we're all in need of a good whuppin'.