Skoshi Warriors

Here's your Japanese lesson for the day:  skoshi means small in Japanese.  So what do I mean by small warriors?  Well this was an awesome event that the Kadena Youth Center put on for kids 6-12 years old.  It was meant to model a mock pre-deployment in order to give kids an idea of what real Marines, airmen, soldiers and sailors actually go through.  When I saw the ad for this, I thought it would be right up the boys' alley, and I wasn't wrong.

We dropped Cannon and London off for their "deployment" on Saturday and left them in the capable hands of the volunteers. 

They were going to have 4 hours of different stations and every one of them sounded fun.  There was the trebuchet where they launched water balloons at targets, target practice with the fire truck's water hose, an obstacle course, a paint ball course, crawling on a Patriot missile launcher, stations to handle different kinds of guns (including a 50 caliber), learning how to take down a man with a baton, getting "painted" for war and many more. 

I think the part they enjoyed the most was eating the MRE for lunch.  Cannon had chicken and noodles with pesto and Lundy had meatloaf with all the fixins!  They were fascinated by those meals.

Love this pic of London

Cannon's looking a little too happy about that gun.

Cannon taking down "Red Man"

London taking down "Red Man"

I popped in half way through to see how they were doing and to snap a few photos - guess I couldn't do that during a real deployment, huh?