Not The Biggest Threat In This Neighborhood

Today as I was walking out of the hospital, I paused to put on my boonie hat and safety glasses. This there is a soldier sitting in the waiting area looking nervous. He asks how I’m doing. I reply fine and ask how he’s doing. It soon became obvious that he was not concerned about my welfare, but instead need someone to listen. He told me that he was not doing well and was in fact very nervous about getting his anthrax vaccine. Based on the looks of his uniform, he had been in the dust for more than one day and by his unit patch on his sleeve I knew he had been in country for a while. What could make a soldier in Baghdad nervous? Of course the answer is getting vaccinated. It was not fear of needles that our brave young soldier confided. To me, an officer he had never seen before, he proclaimed that he would refuse orders to get vaccinated if the vaccine would threaten his fertility. He was the last of his line, he told me in the fifteen seconds we talked, and he didn’t want his family name to be extinguished. What was this family name that he felt a moral burden to carry on you ask? Why, Jones, of course.