Priorities
I have a long and illustrious history of driving really crummy vehicles. My awesome Dad gave me two of them. The first was a basic no-frills Toyota pickup truck. It had manual windows, no air conditioner and an attractive plastic cover in lieu of a radio. At some point it had been driven behind a gravel truck, leaving it covered in little chipped paint spots. Dad rectified this by dabbing it with some enamel paint from Walmart, which didn’t quite match. The little truck looked like it had the pox.
The second was a Jeep Cherokee, also driven to the near-end of its service life before coming into my possession. The interior looked like a homeless person lived there. I once tried to toss an apple core out of the passenger side window and missed, splashing the upholstery with pulverized apple detritus. I intended to clean that up for years right up until I gave the vehicle away to yet another deserving soul.
Like me to a degree, in both cases these two trucks were so ghastly they were almost cool. I kept the mechanical bits nicely maintained, but the esoterica, not so much. For something that just took me to work and back, I expended what was necessary for maintenance but little else.
The worse thing that could happen if one of those old trucks failed between home and work was that I’d have to call my wife to come pick me up. However, what if I had to drive through Afghanistan’s Helmand Province or some of the seedier parts of Chicago? Were this the case I’d spend whatever it took to obtain the most rugged and dependable vehicle I could afford. If my life — or the life of my family members — rode on the dependability of some machine, I’d do that up right. So it is with the Red Arrow Weapons RAW 300.