A post without Republicans

Here's a story from the small-town newspaper of Barstow, Calif., about a local Army unit that's preparing to ship out to Iraq. Nothing new about that, but it turns out the speciality of this particular unit has been to act as the "opposing force" -- OPFOR in Army talk -- in war games when other units come to the desert for training. And the following paragraphs suggest a military comedy just begging to be written:

The 11th ACR serves as the Opposing Force training unit, playing the role of the opponent to the troops who train at the National Training Center. They will continue to play this role to the 256th Brigade Combat Team, Louisiana Army National Guard, which will complete training at the NTC Sept. 10.

After that, they will focus more on their own training, and the 1st Squadron, 221st Cavalry Nevada National Guard will temporarily replace the 11th ACR as the OPFOR.

"They have trained with us before, so we won't have to train someone from scratch, which is always a good thing," Odisho said. "We could go over there (Iraq) and do a good job, but if we left the OPFOR in shambles, then we'd do more damage to the Army than anyone could." (Emphasis mine.)

Yes, a clueless "opposing force" -- can't you just see it? While the phrase brings to mind what actually happened during the war, as the official Iraqi army evaporated, in the world of comedy, the opposite would occur. Imagine an "opposing force" organized by (say) Bill Murray, Chris Rock, and perhaps Larry Storch, the nutty guy on "F Troop." They'd lay waste to the unit they were supposed to be training, move on to decimate the town of Barstow, and keep going til they hit Hollywood, giving filmmakers a chance to re-do Spielberg's "1941."