The top stair.

Recovery day, we have been running for almost a month on five hours a sleep a night. Every day a new challenge, a skill to be learned, practiced and tested on. The body gets in the groove. Then the recovery day hits. Wake up at 0600, formation at 0800. Like running up a set of stairs and thinking there is one more. The higher the rank the worse the shock. If I am getting five hours of sleep then SFC Big Daddy is getting four. Half the Platoon Sergeants have gone down with some sort of creeping awful flu.

SFC Big Daddy has been hit by the flu, worked through it and now paces the barracks like a caged lion. Like a cadged lion with a tooth ache. Worse, a cadged lion with a tooth ache and a sense of humor, and someone left the door to the cadge open. He prowls, paces and teases. In true military fashion he begins with the squad leaders. Then he paces down the bay looking for a team leader of opportunity. Then he paces back to the squad leaders.

I have seen cases where this behavior has caused soldiers to find things to do to get out of sight repeated vehicle maintenance, or long classes in how to move tactically. It says something about Big Daddy that the NCOs smile, and respond then he moves on. SFC Big Daddy isn’t the only one having trouble adjusting to recovery. The squad leaders go down stairs, and check on the enlisted. Weapon inspections and accountability stuff.

I wonder how the other platoons are doing. The army in its infinite wisdom has provided a day for us to get caught up on sleep, clean our gear and do laundry. After days the stretched from 0500 to 2300 it is a god send. I pick up my boom stick and pat myself down for required items. Orders, MEDEVAC card and casualty feeder report card in the left shoulder pocket along with my teams sensitive item serial numbers? Check. Reflective belt that is required wear between 1900 and 0700 in left ankle pocket? Check. Wallet? Check. Pack of cigarettes in the right ankle pocket? Check. Spare pack in right shoulder pocket? Check. I wander down stairs and suggest that PFC Mighty Mouse and newly promoted SPC Diabetes (a silent killer) go and do laundry. Then out the door I roll.

Smokers are the back channel communication of the modern army. Exiled to porches or, in some cases roped off areas at the edge of the living area the swap lies and tell tales. I roll up to the first one, bum a light, loan a smoke and listen to the griping. I immediately feel even better than my platoon. Sure they are cleaning weapons and squaring away gear. But the are cleaning weapons to a turn in standard. There is normal clean, free from carbon and lightly oiled. Then there is armory inspection clean. No carbon or oil anywhere on the weapon. Thousands of bore patches and pipe cleaners are sacrificed on the alter of an armory inspection. The M16 series has dozens of nooks and crannies where carbon hides.

I finish the smoke and get the roll on again. Mighty Mouse and Diabetes walk by with bags of laundry. Good troops, they took the hint. As a side note all they had to do was wipe down their weapons, they cleaned them a piece at a time every night since we last fired. The biggest gift a leader can have is competent subordinates.

I keep the roll on, stopping by, smoking and joking listening, learning. Then head back to the cadge with the Lion. The grass is not always greener, sometimes it is the red of poison oak. I get back in time for SFC Big daddy to call a formation just to see how long it takes. The troops don’t grumble, it takes five minutes and they are back to cleaning and watching movies on the ubiquitous lap top.

Living conditions

This is not your father’s military. In today’s armies troops live in 2 to 4 man rooms, the duty day ends at 1630 hours and weekends are often days off. Gone are the days when conscript troops live in open bay barracks with twenty to thirty men to a floor. The modern army, the all volunteer army, is more like an ordinary job than ever before. There are people who enlist and after basic spend their entire careers going to work like any one else, with less clothing choices. For the fashion impaired, like most soldiers I know, this can only be considered an advantage. This is not your father’s army. That is unless you are in the National Guard.

The National Guard never experienced the culture shift that brought on this drastic improvement in living conditions. When we did away with the draft the government had to start treating soldiers as valuable commodities instead of an infinitely renewable resource that you could throw away after two years. We generally serve one weekend a month a two week annual training, usually in the summer. There is little to no expectation of ‘normal’ living conditions.

Our first stop on this journey was a little post in California. For a number of reasons this post received the absolute minimum improvements since its establishment in 1940. The barracks were almost identical to the cut out section of a WWII ‘Patton’ barracks in the Smithsonian. The one in the Smithsonian was in much better repair. My first stay there was way back in 1996. It was beastly hot, and I could look over my shoulder when I lay in my bunk and see through a gap in the wall about a quarter inch thick. Today they are marginally better. Two of our battalion’s barracks had dry wall and the claim there was air conditioning that would kick on when it got hot enough. Apparently triple digits inside wasn’t hot enough.

Living in cave like bare beamed two story buildings does not tell a soldier you care, it tells a soldier you don’t know and don’t care. If the living conditions were bad, there were worse things like the water. I went to pick up water in a 400 gallon trailer called a ‘Water Buffalo’ for some odd reason. We test the water at the pick up point and the drop off point to see if it meets army standards for safety. The army standard is 1ppm of chlorine at the point of consumption. We did our little test, then we did it again. Then I sat back and had a cigarette while the tester and I discussed our results. The color scale measured from 0, unacceptable to 10ppm, but there was no instructions about what to do if it was at 10ppm. We brought the trailer back, and went to test the water coming from the taps and drinking fountains. Same result. In every case the result was off the scale. We report it up. There is no other option is the reply.

Wearing body armor when the temperature is above 90 degrees consumes gallons of water a day. You can adjust to living on stuff that has more chemicals than pool water, I did, it just does interesting to the digestive system. Most troops just sucked it up, went to the closet sized PX and bought bottled water. We are nothing if not adaptable.

At our next stop we are living in the remodeled cousins of those dilapidated morale sumps. This were once WWII POW barracks, both German and Japanese soldiers were brought here to be held until the war was over. They are also two story and on the same general design, but they are much wider, and most importantly have been remodeled. There is both heat and AC, bathrooms on both floors with functioning showers and shower stalls. Most importantly the toilets have stalls around them. Back at the last stop the showers were four shower heads to a 30 man barracks in a single concrete room. We felt lucky to have stalls on out toilets in our barracks, some did not have them. Privacy is a luxury both rare and prized in my current world.

I live in a single room with 20 other soldiers, all sergeant or above. At the end of the room lives SFC Big Daddy and two other SFCs in a single room, and the senior enlisted man in the company, 1SG Pappy has his own room. There are things you learn living in an open bay. Like all things you learn about other people, some are important, some are not, and for some, you need mental floss. I could have gone my entire life without ever seeing one of our older NCO’s run out of the latrine, holding his t-shirt over his crotch to get a towel.

Living in a big hollow room you have to learn to get along, there are no tall fences so you have to be good neighbors. It is polite to take cell phones outside to have conversations with your loved ones, there is little more annoying than having half a conversation occurring next to where you are try to sleep. Earphones are a requirement for movies watched on your computer, unless you are sharing. Then there is the principal that if you show it you are inviting commentary on it, from video to body parts. Thick skins are grown they do not simply appear over night.

The irony is that when we finally get to the war zone we will be living in 2 man rooms, in living containers (shipping container sized housing units each with 3 2 man rooms). Here, in training there are no secrets, no place to hide (except the crapper stalls) and this is not always a bad thing. On the other hand it means you occasionally have to see SGTs Dragon and Nighthawk sitting on a bunk, wearing mullet wigs will they discuss the merits of NASCAR, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and why the onlyh good music came out in the 80s.

The letter O

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter ‘O’. ‘O’ is for OPSEC, in military jargon that means Operational Security. There are entire manuals written on OPSEC, there are bulletins, briefings and, I am sure, a large number of highly paid senior personnel who spend a whole lot of time on OPSEC. Like most things in the military it really is quite simple. Don’t say things that can be used against you on the field of mortal combat. Kind of like using your Miranda rights.

Why is this important to you, the reader? So you have an idea of what I will and will not write about, mostly specifics of where I am, and the real capabilities of our equipment. I do not intend to simply hand some net smart bad guy the tools to hurt my buddies.

I know you are all so very disappointed, both my readers that is. (Hi Mom!) I can’t talk about our real mission guarding those crashed UFO’s in Afghanistan. I must be sure not to mention the telepathic implants they put in our ears so we can read peoples thoughts. I really need to keep the secret of the X-ray mirrored sunglasses they issued us so we can look through women’s clothing. (I grew up near a beach, if I want to see women in next to nothing I just go there on a hot day.) Most of all I can’t mention the magic tattoo they give us that regenerates any injuries we get, just like in the video games.

Most importantly I will not talk about the mind control laser we can transmit through computer screens to sap a person’s ability to leave their chair. (The tech guys call that last one Free Internet Porn.)

In all seriousness, I write this to provide a mirror for my thoughts, and a record of where my mind wandered on any given day. Most importantly I know some of the other troops read this, and it may give them a bit of a chuckle when they need it.

OUT HERE

Ice Cream

Ice Cream

Since I enlisted in the national guard I have been issued new or current equipment exactly three times, shortly after September 11th, then just before my last trip to Iraq. The first set of gear I was issued was straight out of Viet-Nam. Seriously it was stuff that would later be used on the set of We Were Soldiers. Cotton harnesses, old school ruck sacks and the like. The National Guard gets new equipment right after the Marine Corps. From tanks to uniforms we are always a couple of decades behind.
I remember talking to a friend who had been active in the 7th Infantry. He had time to serve a term, go to college, get a degree, hang out for a couple of years, enlist in the national guard, serve his term, reenlist and get out again, before the packs he was issued on the active side showed up in the national Guard supply room.
Here we are, getting new, up to date modern equipment. Packs, and duffels, bags and bags of stuff. From body armor to fire resistant jumpsuits it kept coming. Cleaning kits, and multi-tools, flash lights and gloves, it just kept coming. Piles of gear and they just kept growing. Like a kid in a candy store I just loaded up on toys galore for the men who love guns. In rough numbers the average soldier carries about ten grand in stuff on him when he goes out on patrol. Some might carry thirty to fifty thousand dollars worth of equipment. When you consider what a poor grunt got issued in WWII and all the way to Grenada it couldn’t have been more than a couple grand, and in WWII maybe as little as a couple hundred dollars.
In the middle of all this largess of the army a thought leaps fully into my mind. This is ice cream. In the show Band of Brothers they are waiting on the airfield. There have been all sorts of false starts over the months, then they deliver ice cream. Just before the big jump on the night of 5 June 1944 the guy had ice cream delivered. I love gear, but just like ice cream there are strings attached.

Last days.

It starts early. First there are a handful of men in gray uniforms, unloading their bags and stacking them inside the empty armory. The polished drill floor empty, waiting, expectant. These are the shortest goodbyes. They are the single men, the guys with a trip already under their belt. Some are first timers, the volunteers and the eager. This is the last day.
We stand around and wait. Smoking cigarettes and drinking giant coffees. We watch and welcome the new arrivals as they come through the gate. I watch one soldier do it absolutely right. He arrives in a new BMW 5 series driven by an older man. The driver gets out. He is wearing the retired military uniform, a light blue button up shirt and tan slacks. He helped his soldier unload, shook his hand gave him a hug and then got back in the car and drove away.
The rest of us do less well. The longer the good bye, the more it hurts. We stand in Limbo. No fake limbo is this. We cannot leave behind the warmth and comfort of home, nor can we shoulder our packs and march forward to an experience of a lifetime, again. Anchored to one world and with the next not quite ready for you. We stand in clumps, wives, parents and girls standing close but not too close. They want to hold on, to get one last touch or conversation. Each taste a little cut, a little pain to carry along.
Families stay around, wondering when will be the actual last moment with their soldier. SLA Marshall says that a lack of information breeds fear. Here it also breeds pain. Then there is the problem of selective hearing.
Later the soldiers have departed for lunch, some with their families, some with their comrades. I am sitting with the wives of some senior enlisted. Because I like to complain, I mention that the family support people have not covered some of the important information. Like how to get a hold of their soldier in case of an emergency. During the last trip families would call the Red Cross because Sergeant Rodriguez’s father is in the hospital. They know the good Sergeant is Iraq, but not exactly where or with what unit. The Red Cross does their best. Do you have any idea how many men by the name of Rodriguez, between the pay grades of E-5 and E-8 there are in Iraq?
So messages are sent to all the likely units, and the hunt begins. It begins to be like Saving Private Ryan, but via E-mail and phone calls. Then there are families who have an emergency and notify the soldier but not the Red Cross.
We have had a soldier packed up and ready to come home, but no Red Cross message. That message is the key that unlocks the magic carpet ride home. I explain this, and give all the information to this poor lady.
She hears that the only way to ever talk to a deployed soldier is to call the Red Cross! That a senior NCO has not told his new bride how this system works boggles my imagination. I had my spouse fully briefed on these things and I was only married a week when I deployed last time. (And isn’t that a tale of woe.) She goes ballistic, he has three hours of crying to deal with. Who gets blamed. Your favorite Pinball, never mind the mis understanding, the two other wives of men equal or senior to her husband. Never mind that if the family support people had included it in their briefings I would have been spouting old news. Or just maybe she was a little stressed about her husband leaving and not knowing when would be the for real last time she would see him.
Commence the ass chewing. SFC Daddy chews my ass a little and warns me it is coming. Then SSG Lifeguard flips me some shit over it. Finally SFC Caine chooses to pull a public ass chewing and a superiority complex on me in a crowded office with my seniors and peers all over the place. I ‘Yes sergeant’ and execute a hasty withdrawal.
Maybe there is something to this family support thing. I may have been incorrect in my prior smack talking. I hate to be wrong.

There is a good cause for clean breaks. It may hurt, but like pulling off a band aid faster is better. Since I got bit by the riding bug I have learned the art of packing my gear, putting on the helmet, jacket and gloves, and riding off into the sunset. I am quickly out of sight, and so both parties may be spared the pain of seeing the others tears.
My sister said it best. Ride Hard, Ride Long, Ride Safe, Ride Home. Now I sit and type, waiting for the ride to start. For the most part the civilian world behind me, my gear packed, the motor purring, If we would just grab the clutch, stomp on the shifter and ride off. But for now we sit in a strange holding pattern, and the tension builds.