The General Brendan Eich, JWZ
The Great General Brendan Eich, JWZ was one day tasked with commanding a great army in a great war.
Owing to his fabled ability as both a General and a JWZ, he was of course at liberty to establish the equipment and training for his army, which entirely consisted of millions of dedicated, prostratedly obedient soldiers etc.
As befitting his great station as a Great General, he ordered each man to carry one Browning M-2 machine gun in each arm, and emplaced a regulation mortar tube on their helmets, resulting in some truly fierce fighting machines. It was calculated on paper as part of very serious war simulations done on paper that this arrangement minimaxes the available slots on the dollies representing the soldiers maximally, resulting in the most bang for the buck.
The army so equipped forthwith marched, and was its march something to behold! The arrayed platoons forming squadrons forming regiments forming whole armies! The shining metal! The tiny holes on the machine gun's bore! The splendor!
Down the road a platoon encountered an old man with his donkey. Just then, from the saddlebags on the donkey two enemy terrorist noncombattant soldiers jumped out, and aimed a subway sandwich irresponsibly packaged in shiny foil at the Great General's men. They returned fire, but there were unforeseen complications : the recoil from the machine guns made the soldiers spin like tops, spraying .5 bullets over a large area, approximately half of which was covered by the General's own men (lest it be forgotten - the other half was potentially covered in old men bearing donkeys!). The mortar fire similarly fell randomly, and to the same effect.
The other platoons returned fire as well, and by the time night finally fell the old man and the donkey as well as its contraband were neutralized, at a certain cost to the great army. Another old man came down the road with another donkey, packed up all the machine guns and ammunition still functional after the encounter, and left on his merry way.
News of the heroic confrontation reached the General, who, a modest man of far reaching intellectual abilities, immediately set to humbly learn and perfect himself from experience. The next army commissioned consisted of men each armed with one, single action rifle.
The men so equipped ran into old men bearing donkeys now and again, and after a stand-off that lasted an hour, or a day, neutralized the insurgent counter-antiterrorists or whatever they were (official nomenclature became increasingly complex by this point).
The war was progressing slowly, for this reason, and so in his wisdom the Great General proclaimed : forthwith and from now on all soldiers will at the same time be equipped for combat both heavily and lightly. They are to leave their barracks each morning in an ambiguous state which shall resolve later as per the dictates of needs and circumstances -- either one way, or another.
Research into the creation of quantum soldiers with programmable eigenstates is ongoing, but nobody can dispute the great wisdom of the great general : when going to war, the very best thing is to have all possible equipment with you, except if you don't need it, in which case it shouldn't be with you, and therefore the correct way to carry on any war is to both carry and to not carry, at the same time, all possible equipment.
God bless America, because without people this stupid what would the donkeys do for comedy ?
