It just keeps getting better

So here we are. We sit. We smoke. We go get coffee. Once a day there's a meeting, and the poor soul we designated as the "movement officer" shares some vital piece of military information.

Ummm..the duffle bag that was called the A Bag? Now that's the C bag. And the rucksack? That's the new A bag.

All the team leaders and team sergeants nod, make a note of the change (or perhaps just draw a stick-figure unicorn) in our little Rite In The Rain notebooks. The movement officer continues.

Also, on the packing list, it says four pairs of socks in the C Bag. Two of those have been moved to the B Bag.

A hand goes up. Hey, the question is offered, is there going to be any kind of inspection of these bags at any point? Like, is anybody going to count how many socks my Joes have in each one?

The movement officer glances up from his clipboard.

No. Actually, they're not.

Another hand goes up. I know you said the sharps have to go in the belly of the bird, but are we doing to TSA liquid thing?

The movement officer flips pages. Ummm...yep. Little bottles in the carryon.

An officer mutters. We're hand-carrying rifles but we have to bag liquids?

Seriously, people. I am continually amazed we do not all speak German. My Grandpa went to war on a troopship. Today's Army, given that much time to screw around with Soldiers, would disembark the most confused but best-packed troops in history.

A note: There is an exception to the no-sharps, no liquids over three ounces rules, but I still can't believe anybody publicized it with a straight face, so I'm going to let it go unaddressed.

Things you really only see in the Army

(okay, well, maybe the other services, too)

The other day we got to run around do Advanced Combat Pistol (mostly drawing, weak-hand firing, etc) and transition firing (that'd be the transition from M4 to M9). This is good stuff. The first part was about 250 rounds of Uncle Sugar's ammo, and the transition fire was also a good armload of pre-filled magazines. Pre-filled mags, free ammo, and a sunny day. T'was fun.

And then it ended, and we did the Brass Police Call.



This is kind of like...an Easter Egg hunt that's not much fun. After you run four or five relays of twenty shooters walking up and down the range firing, you get everybody out to dig through the sand and pick up all the brass. You separate the brass by caliber, and collect the live rounds in another pile. You can use boxes, or hats. Either way, it's a hoot. Extra fun bonus points if you do it at night.

It hasn't all been fun shooty goodness, of course. The vast majority of military activity is routine and dull. And nothing is more routine and dull than a chow hall that is serving eight bazillion mobilizing people a day.

The food's not awful, but it's not very good, either. They really hit a new hit in crappy and weird the other evening, though.



That, ladies and gentlemen, is fried ravioli.

I know. I was not aware that such a thing exisited. Here's a hint - if you ever have the opportunity to enjoy military-issue fried ravioli - don't. I ate half a piece, then shared up another hunk with the guys at my table. We all eyed the plate suspiciously.

It's like a cheese stick, one sergeant said, but with no flavor.

No, corrected another. There's some flavor. It's bad, but it's there.

But the sauce, I asked. It doesn't have any flavor, does it?

In the end, I enjoyed some red jello and a cup of coffee. Thank god for jello and coffee, and the reserve of candy I keep in my cargo pockets.

Camping (again)

Sorry for the relative silence - this time we ended up in the ghetto block of the Big Army Campsite, and we don't get wireless. Our MRX (I actually have no idea what that stands for, although I'd guess Mission Readiness Exercise) has kept us quite busy the past several days, and so this is the first evening I've had time (or energy) to walk around with an open laptop and a hopeful expression.

I guess I got lucky in that I didn't have to be out here running missions on the first day of the MRX. The downside? That was because I was attending UPL training.

My Army folks out there just started laughing. See, the UPL is the Unit Prevention Leader. Basically, the Urinalysis Czar. The job is nice in that it means I won't have to be an observer for a pee test for another year. Bad because it means I'll have to handle warm and slightly damp plastic jars of warm piss.

You win some, you lose some.

After that wonderful day (yes, we did conduct a training urinalysis. Yes, I did have to handle pee. Yes, it was warm), it was all high-quality training, all the time.

No, seriously. It was, of course, an organization not part of the yahoos mobilizing us that provided said training.

Lots of good civilian role players, lots of pyro (devices that make smoke and noise and fire), etc etc. I got whacked once and injured once. Yesterday's injury was a testament to how difficult it is to move a 140-pound woman (me) wearing combat gear. My "body" only needed to go about 75 feet, and between the armor, helmet, and my "dead" status, it didn't even have to be gentle. It's not very hard to drag someone six or eight feet to cover, but sclepping someone who's dead weight, while packing a lot of extra gear yourself...well, it'll kick the ass of pretty much anyone.

Today's wound resulted in a field IV for SSG Abby. The specialist sticking me hit the vein on the first try, and although there was blood, there was no real pain.



(I swear, by the time the real Big Trip starts, I'll have possesion of the normal digital camera so you all aren't subjected to cell phone photos anymore)



Alas, the same cannot be said for the gentleman I had to stick on the following iteration. I got the IV going, but it was more of an adventure than my poor "casualty" probably would have liked.

And, a final note to any female NCOs who may read here. I think - by which I mean I suspect but am not certain - that my male soldiers lie to me more because I am a woman. So, gals, if your boys ever nod and tell you they know how to work an M240B, that they've done it a million times, that they are damn proficient to nth degree...well, have them demonstrate. Or you will find yourself on the hood of the truck during a test fire explaining the concepts of "open-bolt weapon" and "brass to the grass." Using a lot of four-letter words.

Highly efficient

yep - that's us.

We actually had a down day yesterday. Now, since we've all volunteered to be here, we obviously deserve to be treated rather like especially dull privates. Thus, we are not permittd to leave the post, to consume alcohol, or to wear civilian attire. Nonetheless, we embraced our day off, jumped through a few hoops, and went fishing.

We even caught a few.



I caught a lot of fish, but that one is about average. Oh well - it beat doing anything for which there are sign-in rosters.

And now it's back to regular grind, which started with more shots in the hours before sunrise, and now seems to be set on "do nothing" until a class which - I kid you not - is scheduled to run from 2200 to 0600.

And no - it's not a class that involves doing anything in the dark.

That's obviously pretty high on the stupid scale, and our Leadership is out driving around asking (for the third and fourth time), if that block of time is typo or simply a really dumb idea. But forcing logic on the mobilization process is like trying to teach Sparky to land the space shuttle.



Yeah. I'm thinking it's going to be a long night.

On the positive side, we have a crack team of guys who've made it their mission in life to ensure we've always got a five-gallon coffee jug at these training evolutions. We might have to write those guys up for Distinguished Service Crosses after this.

Commence Scam Operations...

Time - now.

That's what we've got going on this afternoon, after we all successfully made it through the "live stick" portion of CLS. I'd never done it before, so I was mildly concerned about damaging one of my soldiers, but I hit a nice vein on the first try and all was well.

This evening promises to be a hoot, with another fascinating COIN (that's COunter INsurgency, for anyone who isn't aware) brief on the schedule. The Army has decided to renounce all its prior religions and affiliations, it seems, and offer our total devotion to the philosophy of General Petraeus. The Army has decided to wholeheartedly embrace COIN with an enthusiasm not seen since they embraced Velcro.

Which is fine, really. I mean, hey - it seems to be working better than whatever we called our prior strategy.

But really - the briefs. Now, remember, all our predeployment training is run by a specific organization that exists strictly to mobilize and demobilize soldiers. A lot of the folks who hang out in that specific organzation...well, they've been hanging out there for a while, and have no actual deployed experience. And there doesn't seem to be any...umm...any requirement as far as an area of expertise.

I would say that 80% of the Civil Affairs folks here have at least one deployment to either Iraq or Afghanistan. I'd venture to guess at least 50% have two.

So I'll stipulate that there is some population of deploying soldiers that really benefits from having a series of briefs wherein a random soldier with a random background reads verbatim from a set of slides boiling our national counterinsurgency philosophy down to a few easily digested phrases. I'm sure that helps some people. Really.

But...having stipulated that these briefs are very valuable in their own right, I would think that we could enhance their value to deploying civil affairs soldiers significantly. Since we're required to have several phases of COIN briefs, it would be vastly more useful if we had someone who had recently worked in CA, PSYOPS or SF in the theater of operations come down here and discuss how the Army change in philosophy is effecting the way we (CA) "support U. S. national objectives by assisting the government of a host or occupied area to meet its peoples’ needs and maintain a stable and democratic civil administration."

But that's just one gal talking. Since I doubt my proposed solution will be adopted in the next several hours, I'm going to cease and desist bitching. My immediate priorities include a nap and a little PT.

The party just never ends

I haven't had much for y'all the past couple of days. We were on the range with our trusty M4s and shiny new M68 CCOs over the weekend. Tell you what - only the Army could make new toys, free ammo, sunshine and range time suck.

Got my team qualified without any major drama, although one needed a couple of tries and the other one will have to return to the zero range once they get him a front sight post that's, like, you know, straight up and down.

We did something today, but it was such an irrelevent check-the-box evolution that I've already forgotten what it was. Something with a sign-in roster.

The fun part after that was the retrieval and dragging upstairs of our unit's Big Black Boxes.



That's the ever-popular Stanley Mobile Job Box. The trusty old-school wheeled Contico is also popular. These make a fabulous sound when you drag empty ones up three flights of barracks stairs. We did have to call the entire operation to a halt so we could rustle up the officers who'd packed theirs full of crap, as we are not dedicated enough to schlep field-grade officer knick-knackery any further than required.

I have no idea why anyone would have packed one of those full coming here, since we'll probably need the space to pack all the not-really-necessary crap out of the piles of gear they keep issuing.

Highlights of this week are anticipated to include Combat Lifesaver training, the issue of more crap, and plenty of last-minute changes. Hilarity may well follow.

The upper body workout of Satan

The Interceptor Body Armor is good stuff. I've got a couple of wicked chunks of shrapnel at home on a shelf I pulled out of mine last tour. I am a believer. There's always word of something newer and better out there, but this stuff is nothing to turn up one's nose at.

However...in the ongoing attempt to make even combat as safe as is physically possible, and, in fact, to let nobody ever die for a lack of equipment, the Army has added, by my count, six pieces of additional crap to the IBA since the last time I had one. And, since they are new to us, and since this is a training environment, we are staring out by wearing every single piece of the system.

Ugh.

When I last did this, we wore the vest, plates, collar and throat pieces (well, gunner wore the throats). There was some other arm stuff I wore when riding in the turret, but most of our guys opted for mobility and skipped that when they were dismounted. And pretty much nobody ever wore the much-maligned "pecker protector."

It's a fine line between protection and agility, and it gets sorted out as time goes on. But as for the first day back in this system, attaching all available bits and pieces had us all grumbling this morning. Well, wearing all available pieces had us grumbling this morning. Attaching all the pieces had us grumbling last night.



"How the Hell does this..."

"What in the fuck is the supposed to be for?"

"How many damn pieces are there here?"

[sigh]

A bitching Soldier, they say, is a happy Soldier.

Free Stuff!

Okay - that might not be entirely accurate. Crap the Army gives me is not, I suppose, technically "free." You've paid for it, and, with only a one-year exception, so have I.

But I got a big bag of cool stuff, and I didn't have to fork over any cash, so that's good enough for me. We call it RFI - Rapid Fielding Initiative.

The long and short of it is - all the cool stuff that's out there that hasn't had time to filter through the Army's procurement and distribution process is simply handed to us during mobilization.

We kicked the old ALICE pack and frame to the curb, and got this adorable pair.



Aren't they cute? On the right we have the Great Big MOLLE Rucksack. Beats the heck out of the old metaland-pipe frame on the ALICE packs we were using. It's also supposedly a big improvement on the briefly-attempted plastic ALICE frame that seems to have crashed and burned shortly after release. One the left we have the companion assault pack, which can be attached to Giant Ruck or carried separately.

For carrying stuff one might want faster access to, they really hooked us by providing this year's premiere ensemble - the MOLLE Rifleman's Kit.



Although I'm not sure entirely why we were issued eight zillion rifle magazine pouches, it's a nice setup. However, experience in an M1114 teaches valuable lessons, and so the interesting part is minimizing the "pieces of flair" to keep one's sides and back more or less clear. I have a much easier time envisioning a requirement to unass my truck at a high rate of speed without hanging up than I do envisioning a situation in which I need 360 rounds and can't get to a fellow soldier or my vehicle.

We also have a Giant Pile of Extreme Cold Weather clothing, but that picture didn't turn out very well, and who wants to look at a giant heap of long underoos?

My personal highlight was the part where we chicks each got four desert tan Patagonia sports bras. That's one item we know the supply sergeant won't want back when we come home!

This is a dramatic improvement in issued gear over what I received when I did this in 2005. If we didn't want to use woodland ALICE gear clipped awkwardly to our DCU IBA that time, we had to go out and buy our own stuff. That sucked, and I'm glad we're not doing it any more. They're giving us what we need, at the beginning of the process so we can train with it, and everything matches.

Of course, there are more supply issue evolutions ahead of us, so we'll see how much crap we finally end up with. But if it continues to progress as well as the RFI did, I am prepared to be happily impressed.

All fun

all the time.

I've executed another move, and am back at the Groundhog Capital of the Eastern Seaboard.

We've made the jump from pre-mobilization to actual mobilization. Which means that things are about as annoying and confusing as can be imagined. They will remain annoying as long as we're here, but the confusion should ease in a day or so.

I got another anthrax shot today, narrowly passed a hearing test (I was sitting next to some LTC with a very active digestive tract, which didn't help me trying to catch the tones), and listened to several excruciating briefings.

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. However, it's not all dreary from that perspective. In my next post, I'll tell you about RFI - Rapid Fielding Initiative - in which process we receive a giant bag of really cool stuff.

Escaped!

Not from the greater San Antonio area (yet), but I did get away from lovely Camp Rustic by throwing myself into a 15-passenger van that was headed to Gandalf AFB and pretending I had some pressing business here.

Lord knows that as we wind down, I have no pressing business there.

I thought I'd share with y'all a couple of shots of our lovely quarters. They're really not too bad, as little hut-things go.



Occupancy is 12 - six per side on cots. That's a little tight, but not awful. We have two female huts, and so we've got a little more space than that to stretch out. Concrete floors, little heaters, fan system.



There's a big long line of 'em - 17 in our row. I thought about taking a picture of the interior, but decided we can all do without that shot.

A plumbing problem in their latrine building has forced the men to share ours (we managed to get our own building after much lobbying). Normally, when we have to share a latrine, we designate and hour in the morning and an hour in the evening as "female shower time." It normally works out so we have a good hour on one end of the day, and a less desirable one on the other end.

But now...we are a little giddy with power, because, as our time here is short, a powerful ally sided with us and the men have the designated times.

Overheard yesterday from a male: You mean if I'm busy between 2000 and 2130, I don't get a shower?

Female soldier with shit-eating grin: That's about how it works! You get another block of time in the morning, though!
It truly is the little things in life that keep one going.

(an aside - it would be truly difficult to maintain this schedule for long. Not because of the shower issues, but because of the washing machine access. There are two washers and two dryers in each latrine, and it's very difficult to get your laundry done in a latrine you can't be in most of the day. We'd have to give the men the greater share of the day if we were going to be using the arrangement for very long)

More fun

Just as we were starting to feel ahead of the power curve, it was decreed that we needed to complete more...[can you guess it? I bet you can!]...online training.

[sigh]

I'm also getting a little traffic from a news story about the heat issue.

I've got to admit to being a little uncomfortable with drawing any attention, but this is no fun if we're not pointing out the silly stuff and laughing about it.

That aside, I think we're about done with these journeys to the Land of Internet, so a little silence from here for a while should not be a cause for a alarm. We're not far from the end of this phase of our journey, so there's a light (and good A/C) at the end of the tunnel.

But in exciting news - tomorrow is LAND NAV! The potential hilarity level is high.

Looking silly

Yesterday, when I discovered I had to spend some quality time on the internet, I borrowed my team leader's car so I could drive to the Land of Internet.

My team leader, somewhat oddly, drives a VW bug. One of the newer ones.

Upon hearing that I was heading to Civilization, one of our captains volunteered to ride along with me. So we loaded up in the VW and prepared to take off. It was then that I first looked down. The Bug is a stick-shift. Not a problem, thougt Abby, so is the Jeep.

But the R...well, it was on the left of the 1. Not way over to the right, after the high end like I'm used to.

But the letters on the knob are like a guide, right? You put the knob in the appropriate pictured spot, and there you are. Right?

Wrong. I tried a couple of times and couldn't get the thing into reverse. So I pulled slowly forward out of the parking space, and all was well. The captain and I reached the land of the Internet, did our respective things, then took off. Or tried to take off.

The car would still not go into reverse. Finally running out of patience, the captain gave in to his Inner Guy and tried to find reverse while I stood on the clutch. Nada.

There was a curb in front of us, which precluded the creeping forward approach. So we opened our doors, extended the outboard legs, and rolled it far enough back to be able to pull out.

A repeat performance at a fast food place where we stopped, and we made it back to Camp Rustic without further drama. I caught up to my team leader later in the evening at a company meeting.

Sir, I asked, does your car have reverse?

He looked at me as though he had just realized he was going to be trapped with a retarded team sergeant for a year.

Umm...yeah. He paused. You know you have to push it down to get into reverse, don't you?

No, sir, I replied. But that explains it.

He paused, since we were having this conversation quietly while the first sergeant expounded at length about something or other. Suddenly, the picture in his head made him look back at me.

Hey, [Abby], he whispered. How did you guys back up then?

I glanced at him, extended my left leg, and made a pushing motion.

My team leader dissolved in giggles. The first sergeant shot him the Look of Death, and I did my best to sit and look appropriately innocent of any part in the loss of military bearing. You learn something new every day - I had never heard of such a thing. Down to get into reverse. How 'bout that?

Another Day

And I am almost finished with the Online Security Form From Hell. I actually shouldn't complain - I have some friends who have the really high-speed security clearances, and I know their process for granting/refreshing/renewing those is truly the Eigth Ring of Hell.

I'm managing to accomplish this while hanging out at a place that sounds like Gandalf Air Force Base. I'm still not sure what thought process led our leaders to do pre-mobilzation training that largely consists of administrative requirements at a camp with zero internet access, but it does give us an excuse to drive over here, where there's coffee, A/C and a good PX.

We keep picking up more soldiers, since we've had some at Civil Affairs school and other locations getting qualified to do a wide variety of things. We just picked up a company supply dude who is a PFC straight out of school. The poor guy showed up without his military ID card, so that adds just one more thing to wrestle with. [sigh] He has no idea how tortured he's going to be once we bring him online.

For the amount of actual stuff we accomplish on a daily basis, we're abnormally busy. That's both a characteristic of the Army, though, and a particular characteristic of the mobilization process. With people wandering in and out, here and there, it can take an amazing amount of time to get everyone to fill out a one-page form correctly. Then, when we get word that it isn't the correct edition of said form, it can take another day and a half to redo it.

Last time I did this, we came to the conclusion that the entire process is set up so that once you've been good and thoroughly mobilized, you're so annoyed you're begging to get on a plane headed overseas.

Too much fun

[ugh]

Has anyone noticed how much fun South Central Texas is this time of year? Especially without a/c?

The bad news is, the days are really hot. The good news is, it cools off enough at night to sleep comfortably.

I've been only semi-busy, engaging in all the fun stuff - re-entering the exact same info into multiple databases and onto multiple DA forms, getting a gas mask fitting, and taking mandatory classes. I'm two days through an "IED Defeat Trainer" class. That's consisted largely of looking at slides featuring photos of dirt and being asked, "can you spot the IED?"

Well, partner, if we could spot them, they wouldn't be such a problem, would they?

In more entertaining news, I was trapped in a porta-jon for a brief period of time by one of the colony of skunks here. Said skunks seemed to find it amusing to hang out in front of the porta-jon and watch me try to figure out if I dared to walk out right next to it. I didn't dare, but then again, I didn't get sprayed, either.

More updates as time passes, now that I've found a fellow Soldier with one of those nifty Verizon internet cards.

There's an alien baby

in my left, upper arm.

Some of you veterans of military vaccinations know what that means - Abby got an anthrax shot! (It's actually a tender lump that's visible to someone looking at your arm - it's creepy)

I had this entire series a hundred years ago on Okinawa, but, of course, I haven't had a booster since. So....

At least I remembered this well enough to get it on the left, because I sleep on my right side, and the "alien baby" makes that uncomfortable.

[rage]

I don't know which brilliant individual decided that official photographs should be included in Army promotion packets. But that individual is currently on the list.

Because I am a decent Soldier and I think they should pay me more and let me be in charge of more stuff, I will be driving my happy self down to the place that sounds like Port Wood because - I kid you not - it is the nearest Army-blessed photographic facility.

[grumble]

The only thing that could make this evolution more fun is if it required great amount of uniform futzing. Wait - it does!

Because the Army is big on self-esteem, they have a ribbon for everything. Including NCO schools, which I have been attending like a big dog all year. So I dragged a kid with me to JRB, bought that ribbon, an annoying little number to put on it (because I have been to two NCO schools, and thus am entitled to more plummage than folks who have been to only one, but less than folks who have attended three or four). I also bought a new ribbon bar, and devoted a chunk of time to trying not to destory other ribbons in the process of moving them over.

Girl Child was "helping" (that is, laughing at me while I swore).

What's that one?, she asked, pointing.

It's the Army Service Ribbon, I responded. In the Army, they give you a ribbon to wear on your Army uniform as additional proof that you are in the Army.

Oh, she said. It looks kinda...um....well, if it was a flag...



[sigh]

I know, I responded. But I am probably not allowed to refuse to wear a ribbon because it looks like a gay pride flag.

Class stretches on…

In the past couple of days we’ve covered culture (in three excruciatingly detailed classes), negotiations (in one brutal six-hour block), and a truly painful block titled “Coordinate With Interagency, Intergovernmental and Nongovernmental Organizations.” This last one involved lots and lots of discussion about how much we all value the United Nations and its contributions to building a better world.

Actually, the negotiation class was taught by a New Jersey cop and former SWAT guy who initially defined negotiation as a single sentence – Sir, could you move a little closer to the window, please?
Guaranteed laugh line in a room full of soldiers, that.

And again, although the course material is about as useful as the proverbial screen door on the submarine, the class interaction allows for us to reach consensuses on important issues for the Civil Affairs NCO.

Let me share some of those with you.

1 – Village cleanup projects are a giant waste of the American taxpayer’s dollars. Iraqis don’t care if their towns are ankle-deep in garbage. If they did, they’d ask for some of these projects. They don’t. It’s a common misconception of newly-arrived maneuver battalion commanders that paying for a bunch of some local bigwig’s cousins to pick up trash for a couple of weeks will enable these folks to see the light. They don’t care.

2 – Everybody likes to build schools because Children Are The Future. However, if there’s no system in place to hire and pay teachers, the utility of the new school is roughly zero immediately following the ribbon-cutting. If there is a system, but it’s entirely dependent on US dollars and contracting, it’s only slightly better than worthless.

3 – The nomadic subpopulation in Afghanistan is, apparently, the CA NCO’s worst nightmare, since this seems to be a group that travels around and has figured out they can get money and stuff from a wide range of US military units. Worst of all, they must be placated, since a large part of their economic heritage involves smuggling stuff across mountainous borders.

4 – Again, about the schools. Although economic growth initiatives don’t make for good ribbon-cutting pictures, we’ve decided that education without economic opportunity is bound to become either an expensive luxury, or the source of lots of well-educated Iraqis and Afghans working in other countries – neither of which is part of the overall goal.

5 – The Officer Efficiency Report should be changed to a GO/NO GO document in theatre. Far too many stupid ideas are initially conceptualized as “bullet points” on an OER. A good NCO can identify one of these ideas at 100 yards, but trying to stop one…well, imagine an armadillo on a Texas highway going toe-to-toe with a Peterbilt. Yeah. We know how that ends.

6 – The no-beer rule sucks. However, as dutiful noncommissioned officers in the US Army, we recognize that we are most effective when we train ourselves to live as warrior monks – rejecting personal comforts and vices in favor of an ascetic study of our field of expertise. Further, since we are, indeed, warriors, we must train our bodies and minds to accept deprivation. In that spirit, along with giving up beer, we have discarded mattresses, sheets and pillows in order to sleep on the ground outside the barracks. We have also taken to pouring sand and insects onto our food before eating it.

It appears that Those Who Know Best have decreed that we shall spend another week in the classroom getting made smarter. I can only hope it’s as illuminating as this first one has been.

(admin note - yes, I retro-posted this for ease of organization)

But the interesting part...

aside from the woodchucks and the sparrows, and the incredible evil of the no-beer rule, there is a nifty side to this class I'm taking.

I spend all day sitting in the world's most dull TRADOC-required classes. I taught four hours on the fine details of writing orders yesterday (just in case any of my fellow mid-level NCOs ever find themselves running a Division G3), and suffered through 4 hours this morning focused entirely on Annex Q to the Operation Order - the Civil Military Operations Annex.

Obviously, this sucks. But our instructors aren't real interested in the classes, either, as long as they fill the time required. And so every PowerPoint slide is the jumping off point for whichever of us is treaching the class to ask, "So, who has experience with [whatever] while you were deployed?"

And that's where it gets good. Because in our 16-soldier class, we have one soldier who hasn't deployed. We have people who've worked Civil Affairs in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and a couple who've been to both. We have people who've worked at Echelons Above Reason, and many people who've worked in the dirt. We have people who did the Iraqi invasion, and people who've worked the State Department at Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

It's a lot of experience, it's significantly more current than anything in our texts, and it's directly related to what all of us will be doing at some point again.

Best of all, the nature of our work being what it is, the discussions enable us to pool our knowledge and dream new ways to "slap the Good Idea Fairy out of the air." That is, tactics, techniques and procedures for managing enthusiastic, ambitious and idealistic officers. This is vital to NCO education, and probably is enough to make this tiresome outing worthwhile.

Three days more

til Revolution, we shall nip it in the bud...

Sorry, getting my Army crap mixed up with Les Miserables. Anyway, it's three days more, and then there won't be a revolution, but I will get to leave. Which will be nice, because this course is like one long bad joke.

Question: What is the effect of a nuclear blast on communications equipment?
Answer: Adverse

No - I don't really get it either. But for some reason, being here for two weeks is career-enhancing. Ugh.

The other thing I've learned is that some of us might think it was really simple if we had all our texts in .pdf format, and all the exams were open-book. Shockingly easy. But we'd be only partially right, because that assumption rests upon the stipulation that one can use the search function. Which assumes that one can spell.

We had one dude today who couldn't find the four "types" of something-or-other. Only after about five minutes did we realize that was because he was searching for "tipes."

Your tax dollars at work, folks.

Some things never change

Including this one - I'm sitting outside a southern airport with a few guys with short hair and pile of green baggage, waiting on some promised "shuttle," smoking cigarettes and wondering if the shuttle would show up if I ran inside for coffee.

Who am I kidding? Of course it would.