Welcome to Bombshell. I'm Erin Simpson. I'm Lauren DeAnne Shulman. And I'm Rod Iengar.

And we're here for kind of a year-end episode. We had such a good time in Alabama at the Air Command of Staff College last year,

but we're doing this in much more traditional environment, I think, this time around. But we figured

we owed it to our listeners to try to tell them what the hell happened this year. Not that we

necessarily know, but we'll give it a shot. What are we drinking? Is anybody drinking anything interesting?

I'm drinking not alcoholic, but warm apple cider.

It's like almost interesting.

Almost.

But it's 8 in the morning for me, so I feel like.

It's true.

I mean, I'm drinking lemon lacroix, which has to be the most like hashtag basic thing that I

could be drinking right now.

I'm drinking warmed up coffee from yesterday afternoon.

Oh, that's terrible.

So, so it's like a very.

So that was pretty much 2018 in a nutshell right there.

It's a very rainy Sunday here in Washington.

As best I can tell, it's been raining for three days.

I feel like it's been raining for three years. And we don't even have a bottle of rosé between us. So with that,

shall we press on? Oh, we have some announcements. So in two weeks, instead of an actual episode,

we will all be on holiday. And instead, you will get the recording that Aaron and I did with Steve Leonard

and John Ismay at the World War I Museum in Kansas City. And it will be a fabulous and delightful

...