BREAKING NEWS
Military Vacations
Fly a plane, drive a tank, wear face paint and fatigues: military vacations are blowing up.
One evening, I was hanging out in Virginia Beach with my military contractor buddies from the Blackwater Training Center. I'd just guest-instructed a course on terrorist tactics for a group of ex-Special Ops soldiers. After a few beers, one of my friends turned to me and said, "I know this guy, Fraser, who runs a Navy SEAL training program . . . for civilians."
Fraser is an ex-SEAL, and he once ran a program for civilians called "GI Jane." Instead of grizzled vets, GI Jane was packed with attractive women looking to get that ripped-and-ready look Demi Moore perfected in the movie of the same name. Fraser essentially put the participants through tough physical training, took them on relatively extreme outdoor events, and remained a gentleman throughout. At the end of the course, the women raved about their invigorated sense of confidence and bolstered self-image.
There's been a surge in quasi-military adventures lately, from hostage training with former U.S. Special Forces, to touring recent battlefields, to flying Russian MiGs. If you're looking to combine travel with military culture (without the incoming fire!), your day has come. Here are a few options inspired by the front lines.
Boot Camp by the Day
A number of courses promise to transform Joe Blow into Rambo, but the ones that have really exploded are the boot camps. At the Original SEAL Physical Training Course in Galveston, Texas, participants can sign on for their own personal Hell Week ($700), which culminates with gung-ho drill sergeants keeping you awake, wet, and working-out for a 24-hour finale. At the KGB Military School in Ukraine, you learn a litany of spy techniques, such as demolition and high-speed driving, that'll make you wish the Cold War hadn't melted away. Still the most extreme has to be a week in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with Team Delta ($1,400). Besides running you ragged, these vets will, for no extra fee, kidnap you, interrogate you, and make you run for your life through the woods while their team hunts you down. Now that's a vacation!
Bang For Your Buck
Funding shortages and creative marketing have spawned a bizarre new trend. At Alaris, a one-stop-shop military theme park outside Kiev, you can fire an AK-47 (a buck a bullet), launch all the RPGs you can handle ($180 a blam), drive a tank ($50), and even take to the skies in an actual MiG fighter (a cool $8,500 a flight).
National Geographic Adventurer
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War Holidays Signal Turn Toward the Real Deal
By: Pete Kendall, September 14, 2006 |
Instead of a grassroots jogging or aerobics craze, the hot new thing in exercise has been toward regimens with bearish overtones such as kick boxing and military style workouts. Seven-hundred gyms now offer boot-camps. In other words, the [latest rally in social mood] has more to do with self-defense and punishment, than self-improvement. The genuine article, a fresh grassroots passion for getting fit, will come again, but not for years and not until people swear off finance as the best road to self-improvement.
The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, February 2004 |
I found the story [at left] in a show that was titled "Mercenaries & Military Conflict." I enjoyed it.
--Dan Friedly
The growing interest in all things military is probably another example of social visioning, the socionomic theory that says an emerging downtrend can find initial expression as “shared fantasy images [that] are an intermediate step between mood change and resulting action.” People seem to be adopting interests and mindsets that will equip them for the confrontations and aggressive social interaction of the next phase. The drive to military styles (for a look at the full depth of the trend, check out the fashion layout in the September issue of Italian Vogue) appears to fit with the early phase a bear market just as the early part of the bull market manifested itself in a collective leap into jogging and aerobics. Back in the early 1980s, people got moving, and our forecast is that more sedentary lifestyles will grab hold in the bear market. This is evident in the waning demand for the premier fitness stock, Bally Total Fitness, (see entry of August 15 for further details). Boot camps are the fitness industry’s way of countering “exercise ennui,” says the Wall Street Journal. As far as we know, tourism is still doing well, but in the article at left, we see the same not so subtle shift to “quasi-military adventures.” Apparently, firing off live ammo and driving around in tanks is what people do when they feel compelled to build up their bear market muscles. In time, the training should come in handy.
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