'Men don't go to baby showers:' Soldier hits back after 'leave request' denial
Is a baby shower a manly enough reason to go on leave? Apparently not, according to a hilarious piece of paperwork which has found its way onto the internet.
The slip appears to show a soldier being denied leave to attend a baby shower because “men don’t go to baby showers”.
Not to miss out on the magical occasion without a fight, the solider resubmitted the form with a new reason listed.
“Going home to the Appalachian mountains to drink whiskey, wrestle bears and shoot lots of guns,” the second version read.
“I also plan to grow out a beard, chop down a hundred trees with my axe and eat 10lbs of thick cut bacon with my wife, whom I plan to have lots of unprotected sex with because I’m a man and that’s what we do. Football.”
The post to Reddit did not reveal if the second application had been approved.
But it may prove a moot point.
Speculation is running rife that the forms are pranks or just military jokes. While soldiers and sailors may enjoy a reputation for rugged pursuits, they also have reputations for dry humour and good paperwork.
That lead one redditor to conclude there was no way the forms could be legitimate, because the penmanship wasn’t up to snuff.
It was also viewed as highly questionable that the funny part of the form was the only part of either piece of paper that had actually been filled in.
“It's bogus,” user Kaarous wrote.
“No CO would ever, ever use a red pen for corrections on a leave form(let alone even carry a red pen).
“Anyone who's made it to Captain (the first rank in which you are a company commander for the most part) has done enough paperwork as an LT to know to only use black pens for every single f***ing thing with a "DA" in the corner.”
Even the original poster, /u/backpacks_got_jets, was not in a hurry to insist the images were real.
“Wait... people make things up?” they wrote when questioned on the veracity of the claims.
In perhaps the most damning piece of evidence against the forms though, other internet sleuths have discovered that, if indeed it did happen, it definitely was not recent.
Several instances of the same paperwork being uploaded several years ago have since popped up around the web.
