Guard Duty is Good Duty

 Nobody mans a guard post for 16 hours a day, it's two hours on and four hours off for 24 hours.  During your four hours off, you can eat, sleep, read, or play cards, but you can't leave the guard house except when they march you to the mess hall if it's close by.  If it's not close by, they bring you your chow in a truck.  It takes about an hour for the oncoming shift to go around relieving the off going shift.  This leaves you about two hours to actually sleep, providing that you don't waste any time reading or playing cards, but you go through this cycle four times in 24 hours, giving you a total of eight hours sleep, which is more than you usually get on a typical infantryman's day.  We were not supposed to pull guard duty two days back to back but, for awhile when we were under strength, we pulled it up to five days in a row.  If you are on permanent guard like you would be on the border, they work out some kind of rotation so that everybody can get a day or two off a week.  I agree that the photo in the article looks staged.  It may have been a drill to see how fast they could deploy a bunch of guys along the border in a situation.  If the situation became permanent, there would be little shelters or towers for the guards to get out of the weather.  Walking a perimeter in cold or rainy weather is not bad if you have the proper clothes, but standing still for two hours in the same weather would be brutal.

We have discussed this asylum thing in the past.  I don't believe the asylum laws were meant to deal with the sheer numbers of refugees involved in those mass migrations.  It seems that Poland is ahead of the US in making theirs more feasible.  As for international law, which I understand to mean treaties, that can also be changed.

When I logged on tonight, I couldn't access any internet sites, although the little icon said that I had connectivity.  After checking all my wires, I unplugged everything and plugged it back in again.  When the screen came back up, it said that an update was 100% complete and to not turn of my machine.  This only lasted a few minutes and everything came back to normal, including my blurry monitor.  Indeed, I can't remember when it ever looked this good.  My guess is that an update from Microsoft got stuck in there and was dislodged by my unplugging and re-plugging.