At the end of 2009 I was recalled to active duty in the Marines to deploy to Afghanistan, where I would embed with an Afghan Army Unit. Since I was coming from the reserves, I got to spend a couple of months stateside getting retrained on the sort basic Marine stuff you forget unless you're doing it every day. A big portion of that was getting re-familiarized with radio protocol and the "standard" messages for doing things like calling in a helicopter casualty evacuation, unexploded ordinance, combat contact, etc. For example, there is a NATO-standard "10-line" message for calling in a casualty evacuation that contains things like, "how many people were injured?", "how were they injured?", "what are the manner of injuries?", "what is the location of the nearest landing zone?" and "how is the LZ marked?"; that sort of thing.

As part of that training I had to spend a lot of time on a static-y radio talking to helicopter pilots sitting on folding chair the next building (pretending they were flying helicopters), but the part that is relevant is that we were given a set of "cheat sheets" that contained all the standard formats in tabular format. I remember looking at them and seeing similar tell-tale bumps on the lines of the tables and thinking, "hey, this looks like it was formatted using troff!"

After the initial retraining, I got sent to an active duty unit to go through their "workup" and actually deploy with them. Naturally, once I got to Camp Pendleton to join meet up with the active duty folks I wanted to give all of my Marines (I also had two sailors and a US Army soldier under my command too, but that's another story -- suffice it to say that the USMC doesn't have medical personnel and we get them from the other services) copies of those same cheatsheets and get them trained up on talking to the birds and so forth so that any of us could call in an evac if necessary (or call for fire, call in a TIC, or whatever). But my little cheatsheet was laminated and didn't photocopy well. So, that evening when I got back to the "BOQ" I fired up a laptop and typed in the troff to reproduce those little cards. The result was *exactly* the same output, pixel for pixel (as near as I could tell). I printed out a bunch of copies, took them to the local Kinkos and laminated them, and distributed them the next day.

Yup. Troff. I took it to war.

        - Dan C.