“That one?” I responded, pointing my finger like her. “In the green shirt?”
“Yeah.” She nodded, but then, as though to make absolutely sure I’d gotten the right one, she repeated me. “In the green shirt?”
“Yes. Green shirt. I see him.”
“Mmhm. With sunglasses?”
“Sunglasses, yes.”
“Yep. That’s him.”
I was trying to keep a straight face -- as were the four people lounging on the bleacher around us -- while I teased the unknown chatterbox who’d attached herself to me. The area we all were looking at was packed with about a hundred males, nearly every one of them decked out in camouflage pants, a green shirt, and shades.
Because it’s precisely the sort of thing I ♥, I went to the 9th annual SWAT competition in Harrisonburg this past weekend.
I got to see representatives from eleven departments, divided into fifteen respective teams, do things like breach doors, maneuver an obstacle course, climb a wall, and shoot.
Firearms-type challenges are always my favorite. So much so, that, on this occasion, the first day I climbed up a scaffold that was on the immediate edge of the range to watch the bullets fly. No better place to be than above participants, right? Too bad the object had been relocated for police use by day two.
Many of the officers could no doubt take out a mouse on an elephant’s tail from fifty yards away, though there were a couple of them that probably couldn’t hit even the elephant. I can’t remember which team it was, but as a sniper climbed down from turf on the roof after obliterating his own targets he good-naturedly said to his teammate below “what -- were you shootin’ blanks?”
I spoke to numerous Law Enforcement, raced a Sergeant on these monkey bars (he beat me by like two seconds!), plus got a new shirt, screensaver, and suntan. Also, I couldn’t help but notice the Charlottesville teams had their names stitched to their asses -- which I think is hilarious.
I could go on and on, and on, about all the awesomeness of the event and how nice the people were but this isn’t the site for that. In fact, the only reason I bring it up here at all is because Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement has SWAT guys and they were in attendance:
Hell-Oh. Stud. It just wouldn’t be an echt I HeArTE JADE entry if I didn’t mention I do believe the most handsome man there was, of course, Spot:
