Web Video / Campfire Stories

Campfire Stories is a series by Mike BurnFire and Zach Hazard. A spinoff of their let's play series, it has the hosts... well, sitting around an in-game campfire and telling random stories from their lives. A complete playlist of them (including some podcasts without tropable material) can be found here.

The page also includes tropes present in stories from compilation videos, which can also be found on the above playlist.

Campfire Stories provide an example of:

• Armed Farces: A recurring theme, with Zach (and Mike, to a lesser extent) having plenty of stories about the incompetence of their respective branches.
  The description of Beret/Inspections: The military being stupid? SHOCK!
• As You Know: Frequently during stories about their time in the Army/Marines, either Zach or Mike will include details about the military that civilian viewers need to understand the story, details that the other person obviously knows but will pretend they don't.
• Bring My Brown Pants:
  • Zach described his reaction to being mortared while in a portapotty as literally getting the shit scared out of him.
  • Inverted in the anecdote from one of the Military Stories compilations: Zach needed to pee into a cup for a military drug test, simply couldn't, and the sergeant's (baseball bat) threat of "Private, if you don't pee right now I'm going to cave your skull in and fuck you to death!" made it even harder for him to pee.
• Chew-Out Fake-Out: Zach recalled a time where his sergeants played a 'game' with a rubber stress ball shaped like a grenade. Soldiers who heard a sergeant yell 'frag out' were expected to fall on the fake grenade if they were nearest to it. Except that one time, when Zach was nearest to the door when a sergeant threw the fake grenade, he simply kicked it back outside... prompting a sergeant to yell "WHO DID THAT." Zach confessed and was told to get into the sergeant's office, where he expected to be punished with a presumably absurdly large number of push-ups while being yelled at. Instead, the sergeant immediately went back into a normal tone of voice and acknowledged that, in a combat situation, Zach's choice was technically the most correct choice, but the purpose of the grenade drill was mostly to encourage compliance with prior instructions and being willing to take one for the team. Zach was let off with little more than a warning, though the sergeant said that he was going to yell Zach out of his office in order to keep up the charade of being a Drill Sergeant Nasty.
• Clingy Aquatic Life: In Leech, Zach describes an incident where he went swimming in a lake near Fort Polk and ended up with a titular worm on his testicle - an experience he described as more terrifying than being mortared.
• Color-Coded Speech: Like in the let's play series, Zach's subtitles are white with a blue outline, and Mike's are white with a red outline.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: The single scariest thing to ever happen in his life was a drill sergeant, according to Zach, even worse than the time he was blown up by a mortar shell while trapped in a Port-A-Potty. He served during era where the Army had mandatory drug screens on all service members returning from leave. Unfortunately, Zach has a shy bladder, and his inability to urinate on command resulted in several increasingly angry drill sergeants, culminating in one sergeant taking a baseball bat and smashing things around the room, culminating in the immortal threat:
  "Private, if you don't pee right now, I'm going to cave your skull in and then I'm going to fuck you to death!"
• Exact Words: Zach frequently employed this during his time in the military, at one point showing up to a weapon inspection with an (empty) RPG-7 because he was never told that he had to bring his M16. Another notable example being using an officer's exact words to justify putting an M203 grenade launcher onto his M16, as he was asked to simply affix six launchers to any six M16s of his choice.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: When discussing what contraband he brought home from Iraq, Zach mentions several items, then realizes that mentioning any more might be a violation of international law, and immediately begins backpedaling.
• Faux-To Guide: Zach's instructions for shaping a beret open thusly:
  Remove beret from plastic bag. Cry for hours, because you know that you have to put this dead rat on your head.
• Flat "What": Zach's reaction to Mike mentioning what happens when a Marine runs out of toilet paper.
  Mike: Um, there wasn't enough toilet paper so what they used was... fiberglass cloth.^Explanation Exactly What It Says on the Tin—cloth made of long, woven strands of fiberglass. Horribly itchy when applied to skin, and can cause rashes and inflammation, and therefore the last thing you need to put near your poop-smeared butt in a desert.
  Zach: What.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In The Hentai Incident, Zach's impression of a printer spitting out pages of hentai is accompanied by pages of foot fetish comics going past the screen quickly.
• Gone Horribly Right: In one anecdote, Zach recaps how he tried to build a gunpowder cannon in Iraq, using ball bearings and gunpowder from damaged ammo. After a few underwhelming iterations of it, he managed to build something loud enough to temporarily damage his hearing and fast enough to make a hole in his motorpool's roof.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform:
  • Zach discussed the Universal Camo Pattern, a Real Life example of this, in one of the episodes.
    It blends in with nothing! "UCP" is the camo pattern, which stands for "Universal Camo Pattern", because it universally doesn't blend in with JACK. FUCKING. SHIT.
  • Humvees / APCs has Zach discuss the initial equipment problems the US had in Iraq, and he names issuing woodland camo to the troops as one of the examples.
• I Call It "Vera": Zach mentioned that back in the military when others were naming their weapons after their wives or girlfriends, he named his rifle Piper, because it sounded cool. Mike jokes that he named his rifle after its serial number.
  Mike: Good old 0309823!
• I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham: In Amnesty Box / Good Steak, Zach describes how he used to hate steak, because his dad "cooked" it by grilling it way past well-done and considered condiments a personal insult to his cooking. He describes trying out a proper restaurant-cooked steak as the best thing he had ever eaten.
• Insane Troll Logic: Zach describes how the US Army considers Bushmaster chainguns mounted on Bradley IFVs and howitzers to be small arms. Though they don't consider miniguns to be small arms: those are aircraft weapons systems, even if they are mounted on something other than an aircraft (though some special forces members asked if he could fix one. He tried, but couldn't).
• Jumping on a Grenade: Zach recounts in one of the stories that in basic training, the drill instructor threw a dummy grenade into the barracks right near him, who was trained and expected to jump on it. He simply punts it outside the nearest door and closes it. Said officer privately praises his quick thinking and reflexes but publicly chews him out because that wasn't the point of the exercise.
• Left for Dead: Bradley is a story of a rookie driver ending up being left alone in a Bradley in the middle of Iraq. The gunner and commander moved to a different vehicle in the convoy after hitting one too many IEDs, and didn't bother to check on the driver after it hit another IED, knocking out both the driver and the comms. The rookie survived with a concussion, but unaware of his situation, and the vehicle was spotted going up and down the road by some gate guards. The story is one of the few times Zach sounds genuinely enraged at the parties involved, even for his usual acerbic demeanor; given the sheer amount of command incompetence which allowed this incident play out, it's hard to blame him.
• Mundane Object Amazement: In Losing My Religion, Mike compares his excited reaction to the contents of a biology textbook in college (after attending Christian schools and only learning creationism) to a five-year-old finding out about dinosaurs.
  Mike: How did you know [which two chromosomes in a human body fused together]?
  Book: Inactive telomeres.
  Mike: OH MY GOD!
• No, Except Yes: After stealing, and then returning, a bunch of contraband from an Amnesty Box, Zach admits that he didn't get to keep anything... except a bunch of M16 magazines... and a flashbang grenade.
• No Longer with Us: The Bradley story opens with Zach being woken up to clear a Bradley APC. When he asked about what happened to its crew, the response he gets is "they're gone". It turned out they weren't dead, but the situation was messy enough without that.
• Noodle Incident: Mike recaps a story where one of his bunkmates, without prompting, asked him if he has ever seen a man's balls stuck in a vice. When Mike replies that no, he has not, the bunkmate replied with "yeah... don't ever join a gang".
• Not So Above It All: At one point during his deployment in Iraq, Zach swiped a bunch of stuff from the Amnesty Box (where soldier can dispose of contraband, such as pornography and grenades, without getting reprimanded). On his way back, he was stopped by his squad leader, who immediately ordered him to return everything he'd taken...after the squad leader took a porno magazine.
• Place Worse Than Death: According to Zach, Fort Polk^note known as Fort Johnson since 2023 in Louisiana is by far the worst U.S. Army base in existence (even counting the ones near combat zones), and that everyone who ends up there never ends up re-enlisting. In his words, "I don't have PTSD from being in Iraq, I have PTSD from being stationed at Ft. Polk and its shittiness!".
• Punishment Detail: Several of Mike and Zach's military stories talk about the horrible punishments they were either forced to do or saw others suffer through.
  • In one episode of Campfire Stories, Zach describes how, during boot camp, a fellow recruit wore his running shoes instead of his boots, so the drill sergeant made him run everywhere they went.
  • In the same episode, Zach describes how one recruit got into so much trouble that they were made to go outside in the pouring rain and mop the water up for hours.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Most of Zach and Mike's superiors discussed during the stories don't apply, but Zach described one straight example: after Zach kicked away a training "grenade", instead of jumping on it as expected/ordered, the superior calmly explained in private that while that wasn't the point of the exercise, Zach's solution was perfectly valid. Zach was loudly dressed down in public, but the superior explicitly told him it's to keep up appearances.
  • The "gloves" anecdote in Bradley/Gloves has a small enough example that Mike nevertheless finds notable enough to remark on: when everyone cut off fingers in their gloves to imitate Zach cutting off the trigger finger in his glove, the brass didn't dress Zach down because he did it for a legitimate safety reason, and he had actually brought the issue up with them and asked before doing it.
• Shout-Out:
  • Anger Management has Zach commenting on a different company assisting him more than his own with a shout-out to Telltale's The Walking Dead games.
    * Clementine will remember this.
  • First Sergeant / Damaged Firearms opens with a short anecdote about Zach knowing about two friends, Sgt. Lieutenant and Lt. Sergeant, which Mike compares to the names of characters from Sheep in the Big City.
• Skewed Priorities: Mike and Zach occasionally discuss how higher-ups in the Army and Marine Corps often... mismanaged their time and resources. Whether it was C.O.'s prioritizing their mechanics and techs having squeaky-clean boots all the time over doing actual work, or using a multi-million dollar infrared camera blimp to enforce on-base speed limits rather than spotting enemy activity in Iraq.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The titular First Sergeant from First Sergeant / Damaged Firearms - Zach describes him repeatedly mouthing off to people above his rank and/or outside his jurisdiction and getting dressed down when people above him notice.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: When Zach is recapping an incident with one of his roommates leaving a plastic cup with a hole in the bottom in the bathroom, Mike guesses its purpose on the first try:
  Mike: Maybe he likes to fill it up with water and then unplug the hole and let the water pour over him. Like a shower!
  Zach: How did you know that's what he was doing with it?
  Mike: Wait, what? What?!
• Unishment:
  • How Zach describes being sent to Anger Management after mouthing off to a supervisor - it was a comparatively light punishment for telling a superior officer to fuck off, and he found himself among other people that empathized with him.
  • In Meds / Raven Drone Zach describes a recurring scenario where the position of an armorer is given to someone as a punishment, to get them out of the way. He then points out that it gives them the ability to mess with everyone's equipment or just sell it illegally.
• Unusual Euphemism: In the story about Zach passing out during "mandatory fun day", Mike asks him if he got "the silver bullet", which is military slang for a rectal thermometer.
• The Watson: Carrying over from the Let's Plays, Mike usually plays this role to Zach, asking follow-up questions and keeping the conversation going.
• Waxing Lyrical: The episode talking about their disillusionment with organized religion is called "Losing My Religion". The description quotes the titular song:
  That's me in the corner. That's me in the spotlight.
• You Are the New Trend: The "gloves" anecdote in Bradley/Gloves describes a minor case of this. Zach ended up cutting off a trigger finger of his glove because it got stuck between the trigger and the trigger guard of his machine gun, and the gun ended up firing even with the trigger released^note He had brought it up with the brass, and got permission to do so. Other people saw that, declared it looks cool, and cut off all fingers off their gloves. The brass complained:
  Others, as paraphrased by Zach: Yeah, but I saw Specialist Zach do it, so that means I can do it, too!
  Brass, ditto: Specialist Zach had a legitimate safety concern, you guys are just frickin' idiots!