What's Really Important?

So here we are at my sister-in-law's house, eagerly awaiting the midnight hour, so we can drink bubbly, then go home and sleep. In two days, we will head to Indy, do the "send off" (which I think is really more for those sending us than those being sent), and flow south to Georgia. With time being of the essence, my thoughts begin to turn to wondering about what's really important. I told a buddy of mine today, "dude, there are three things I really want to do - drink wine, chase my wife and play online...the things I really can't do in Georgia or Iraq." Aside from that, I've enjoyed the time with family this last week. Family has prayed over me, have taken special time to really express how much they appreciate me and otherwise put up with my dumb ass more than normal. All in all, an enjoyable time. With a "line in the sand" having been drawn, I began a while ago to take more note of those things which are really and truly important. Time with family is important. Not that I would have spent more time with them in the next twelve months if I were to be here at home, but just the thought that we can't get together at a moment's notice changes things.

Anyhow, time with family is important. Thanks to everyone who's made this time valuable.

Tools O' The Trade

One school I did not attend, and intend on doing so, is Information Operations. I was originally slated to do this for the Brigade, and now am not. No hard feelings, and I don't think hooking into the school will be all that tough. For one, it's not "sexy" or about maneuver, so the Infantry, such as it is, is absolutely not interested (save our commander, from whom I've learned a ton about IO). It is, oddly enough categorized as "targeting", which makes it a Field Artillery function. Round peg in a round hole.

Now, why would I mention all this? Easy. It seems friends and family are beginning to receive attention from the Mass Media (thanks to their own talents, not mine), and so I'm offering what little Information Operations wisdom I have to (hopefully) help.

Let's get one thing straight. The difference between Info Ops and Public Affairs is that PA must tell the truth. *grins*

First: Never do a media interview that you don't want to do. If you're not on your game, tell them "no". Or give them a different date. If they really want the interview, they'll come back. Heck, if it's such a slow news day, they'll headline the weather for goodness sake. This leads to Ultimate Rule Numero Uno: YOU are in charge of the interview. Always, always, always.

Second: ALWAYS DO TARGETING. What can this media outlet do for me and my organization? What message do they typically send? What can I tell them that will both help them sell papers/airtime (let's be honest, the media's about selling, not truth) AND get my intended message out? This leads to lemma 2A...
2A: What're the talking points? No matter what, ALWAYS have three to five bullets written down that you want to get out no matter what. These are the talking points. Now, typically we prepare talking points for each Center of Influence we deal with, but that's deeper IO stuff.

Third (and Lastly): Find that comfy middle ground between you and the media. Let's face it, the Army isn't the only organization with skeletons in its closet. It stands to reason, therefore, that we must let some of them out in order to satisfy what passes for a "free press" in this country. The same goes for any organization. Some middle ground exists between what they want to know and what you're authorized to tell them. The answer of "I don't know" works better than "I'm not at liberty to say", the latter of which leads them to think there's more out there (kind of like Scully and Mulder).

Never forget, nothing is EVER off the record.

Enjoy!

Responses and Reactions

Warmest Holiday Greetings!

We're all home on Holiday Exodus, so life is good. I didn't want to go anywhere originally, but the "not more than 125 miles from the armory" rule the military slapped on us makes me want to almost get off my butt and travel to someplace odd...Petaluma, for example. And not tell the Army. Just to do it.

Thank God I'm too comfy and lazy to do that.

First, thanks for all the great input and comments! Liz, not sure my masculinity can handle buying and toting tampons around on the FOB. On the other hand, the armor has plenty of little straps, so I suppose tying them on would be easy, not to mention fashionable. The Army, in it's infinite wisdom, issued each of us a really snazzy med kit - plenty of gauze, bandage, tape, tourniquet, etc. It's far more advanced than the simple traumedic bandage we used to tape onto the suspenders and call good. Add to that, the armor itself is pretty impressive. I'm covered from groin to jawline with shrapnel protecting goodness, including kevlar on top and ballistic eye protection. All in all, not too shabby for a desk jockey. Having looked ahead at the horseblanket for Georgia (it's what I do, I'm the Plans Officer), I notice they have 14 days of combatives planned. How cool is that? After a month of living in a tent with 100 other guys, I'll definitely be ready for the combatives pit: "YOU, the one who snores a lot, into the Octagon!!"

Lately, I've been following Michael Yon's blog, which is just fantastic! Very down to earth. Most recently, he posted two items of note, both written by GEN (Ret) McCaffrey. Basically the general offers a professional AAR of how the war is going to date. Before any of you follow the link and read it, keep in mind, it's not all roses and light, nor is it all doom and gloom. It's fairly balanced and well resourced. When I started reading the list of sources for the AAR, and it included company commanders and battalion executive officers, I figured it was going to be spot on. I mean, how many generals take the time to sit and listen to captains and majors who are out there getting the job done? I was very impressed by the AAR. So, here it is. Just so you all know I'm balanced, McCaffrey posted a piece in the WSJ too. Here's its text. I will warn some of you that it does not paint Rumsfeld in a favorable light. Honestly, I'm OK with that. Not being too fond of politicians in general, I'm not too concerned when another soldier says, "hey, this guy didn't do what he was supposed to do." Maybe it's me, maybe it's the professional culture of the Officer corps. I'd like to think it's both. I have no time or energy for politicians nor their games.

Enough soapbox.

So....next two months we're going to be in Georgia. Considering the alternative (Atterbury), I'm actually looking forward to it. Yes, the living conditions will be less favorable than in Iraq. Honest, in Iraq, I'll have my own room, heated, air conditioned and will be able to sit down to eat any time of the day or night. Georgia will be far warmer than Indiana, will likely be rainy, but at least it'll get us into the right mindset. I know I'm looking forward to it. Most of us, I believe, are ready to move on from all the individual level tasks we're forced to accomplish (set a claymore...I mean let's be honest, NOBODY uses claymore mines in theater) and begin building the collective competencies we'll need to function overseas. The feedback I've read about this training is that the reservists who go through it find Iraq to be far easier than the training they had had. I have no doubts we'll be more than ready to fight alongside our regular Army counterparts when we arrive.

All that said, I don't know how often I'll be able to post. Most likely, I'll email the text to Kim, show her how to log on, cut and paste and let that be that. I do know we'll have very limited email capability, so be patient.

Thank you for your prayers, please continue to pray that I keep my cool.

Enjoy!

Vacationland USA

Greetings from sunny Camp Atterbury! I'd like to say lots of folks swarm here for fun and excitement and the great tourist attractions, but that wouldn't exactly be the truth. We have snow and wind, and some sun, and plenty to keep us busy.

Was thinking about that again today - the days have plenty to fill our time with, between preparing equipment to go forward, preparing ourselves as soldiers with training and such, and just accounting for it all. Right now it just feels like another AT period, being here at Atterbury. In fact, one reason the Big Army gave us for not conducting all the training here over the next few months was that we're so accustomed to this place, we would be challenged to take it seriously. That and Indiana in the winter is absolutely nothing like southwest Asia. I don't see it. I mean, there'll be dunes, wind storms that bite right into one's exposed skin, extreme temperatures...plenty of similarities. Naturally, the fact it's all based on ice and cold instead of sand and heat might have something to do with it. More to the point, my wife texted me that she misses me. I miss her fiercely, but it doesn't hit me as often as I think it does her. Thank God for text messages and Cingular's $29.99 unlimited texting plan. It's nice to be able to just reach out and pop a quick message out when I'm sitting in a meeting I don't need to be in or attending the same class for the third time and know that she's at the other end of that connection. It's a good feeling.

On a personal/professional level, I've been successful in not losing my temper in the last several days. It's a challenge for me, as constant change has rubbed me the wrong way in the past. In my journal this week, I noted that living on this mortal plane implies that we live in a state of constant change. To live is to be in a state of change. To stop changing is to not grow. To not change is, for all intents and purposes, to die. Change can be frustrating. Our rosters change, our operational plans change, we change our minds, our socks and our tires. So when I stated thinking about it earlier this week, there was an eiphany, call it God, Allah, Yahweh, a Higher Power, whatever (flash to Gross Pointe Blank for that one), but it was pretty clear: I have to accept the fact that things change, let my mind be like water, and not take it personally. Been much happier since then.

One slight frustration and I'll sign off for the night. I've noticed, the Internet has very few sites where one can find a list of things to bring on deployment. I'm not talking about uniforms, military equipment and the like. I'm talking about a no shit, here are the things that will make life exceedingly more comfortable on the FOB in theater list of things. I am fairly certain we won't be needing toothbrushes and toothpaste (although I know Kim would happily send them to me if I asked). For example, I searched the web for a few hours and finally found someone's blog, who mentioned he had purchased a hot pot for use in his can while on the FOB. Now, as someone who loves coffee, this held out hope for me. I have a camp stove, and am certain I won't be able to find the fuel cells for it (they're surface ship only too, so please don't air ship them). This created a challenge - how to heat my water for coffee in the morning. Knowing that the possibility of getting something like that on the FOB was encouraging. See, it's that sort of thing I think folks need to know. To quote my brother, if I want to know something like this, I know others will too.

That's all for this evening. I need to extricate myself from my perch, kick everyone from the day shift out of here and get to sleep myself.

Enjoy!

Happy Sunday!

This has been a very, very busy week, so my apologies for not posting. Normally, I maintain that "busy" is a state of mind, and somehow I still think that's true. On the other hand, when I'm at the armory until, oh, 1800 a few nights in a row, I tend to categorize that as "busy". Not frenetic or frantic or panicky, just...busy. I'd like to write that I've finally rolled up all the training data we have from the last five months, everything's scanned and on CDs and ready to go. It is not. There is one small binder of rosters I forgot, and have to hit on Monday. No biggie, but it keeps me from brushing my hands off as if we don't have to track anything. Which we do, so it's not as if I'm out of a job.

Spent a lot of time on the phone this week with friends. One dear friend and I spoke, and he asked me how Kim and I are doing and how the process is going. This is a common question. Kim and I are doing better than we expected to be doing at this point. We're trying to keep life here at home pretty much the same as it has been, which is nice. Not knowing what's coming up or what to expect tends to cause some trouble for us, me being focused almost solely on the deployment causes some trouble for us, but otherwise, we're doing well. We've been married sixteen years, and have developed some great coping skills, and we have built up the habit of talking things through. So while we have occasional blow ups (more often now than normally thanks to the mobilization), we're good at talking through things. And the Battalion support group has done an excellent job of giving us information on what to expect relationally while we're going through this, which helps too.

How the deployment process is going...interesting question. Most of it is as smooth as is can be, given that about two to four dozen people are managing it all for the other 3900 of us (this is where Paul rolls his eyes and makes the claim of being able to do it better). The Army has outlined the process in general with a couple of manuals, no surprise there. The folks who are in charge of the process overall are also pretty good at keeping us informed about changes, products they need from us, that sort of thing. All that said, one would think it's a seamless process. I mean, we've done this before, right? It is not completely seamless. It's like playing a card game and the rules tend to change each time someone picks up or lays down a card. The big rules don't change, rather the little ones...like which card is wild, that sort of thing. All in all though, it's not as bad as it sounds. Not surprisingly, open communication is really the key to making it work as smoothly as possible. The mantra of "fluid is too rigid" continues to apply.

Today I have wine to bottle. Was going to do it last week, set everything up and realized I had no corks. Tough to bottle wine without corks. Granted, I could have used 12 ounce longnecks or Grolsch flip top bottles, but wine really needs wine bottles. Now I have corks and can bottle and label. We'll run some other errands today too, that sort of thing.

One quick note about Thanksgiving, since Aunt N was good enough to reply to the post! :) Everything went well. The guests were happy, the bread was great (I did three loaves of french bread) and visiting was mostly good. I did, indeed, overimbibe after the guests left, which I suppose is my right. Had to bite my tongue when someone likened Iraq to Vietnam, which is, in my opinion, completely untrue. The body count alone attests to this, along with the fact that the "insurgents" are mostly Iranian SF and Hezbollah trained Muslims from elsewhere in the Arabic world. Add to that, Iraqis have begun to point out the "insurgents" to coalition forces and I begin to wonder if the Iraqis really want us out of there. True story and all that information is open source...nothing CNN would publish, of course. Anyhow, I kept my peace.

Enjoy!

So...it seems I have much to learn...about the Army, about deployment and about blogging. OK, let's take it from last to first. Blogging...a good blog, according to Tim Ferriss' "Four Hour Work Week" requires an update around twice a week. Obviously, I haven't done that, so mea culpa. Loyal readers, I promise to make efforts to update this. My concern is that I will post something I ought not post, you know, something like saying, "LTC So-and-so is a Doody Head". That's not cool to post, so I'll watch out for that. The other thing I don't want to post is something along the lines of, "I hate First Army/My Brigade Because Of One Particular Odd Thing That Has Nothing To Do With The Deployment In General." Well, that's not acceptable either. I don't want to go off on tangents and rants about stuff that's really just me venting and not helping me to become a better Officer or helping you all know some of the stuff going on. To be honest, the brigade I work for is pretty decent, as far as Guard brigades go. Overall, they want to do things right, and I respect that. The leadership shows up daily with the intent of doing the right thing regardless. Like all other Army units, we have issues to work on, but who doesn't?

So one learning curve is the deployment. Basically, I'm to the point where I know I have to write down what I want my wife to send me every other month and every month, starting in February. This includes my copy of Outside magazine, body wash, deodorant, etc. That sort of thing. Then I'm trying to figure out what to pack (which is pretty obvious...I mean, uniforms, equipment, coffee, what else is there?), what to put in each duffel bag, paint the bags appropriately, that kind of thing. Right now, it's still at the "academic" stage. I'll probably go get the yellow and black paints, the stencils and mark my bags this weekend. Right now, the "big rocks" in the pile are to get the plan for next week put together and get a couple more loaves of french bread baked for Thanksgiving. I hate rolls, and since dinner is at my place this year AND we've been given "responsibility" for rolls, I've chosen to bake bread. Essentially it's easy enough to bake when drunk, so I'm covered in any state of mind. And the house will smell great for a week - freshly baked bread, espresso, and turkey. The challenging part here is to keep my mind like water, and to encourage the other Officers and leaders around me to do the same. Most of the time, I'm the one being encouraged.

My apologies for the short post, but I'm out of steam writing-wise, and I have to get up kind of early. Be well, enjoy the post and I promise, Kelly, to post more often! ;)

Drama Free Zone

One week in from the field and I'm ready to return. Not because I hate spending time in MY bed, with MY wife, drinking (literally) MY wine. Nope, I want to go back because it takes our companies and gets them busy on Army operations instead of the "high drama" of home station. I hate drama. Please, dear readers, do not make the fatal mistake of thinking high drama is limited to the female gender. Oh no, men are more than capable and willing of generating, participating in and feeding the phenomenon known as "high drama". Before I go on a real tirade and start naming names, let me define "high drama". From where I sit, "high drama" is that behavior which places self far before the whole (if it considers the good of the team at all), goes against all the Army stands for, and forces those in charge to spend 90% of their time addressing. Usually "addressing" the high drama doesn't really involve a true solution at all, it usually just involves paying attention to the NCO or Officer who is demanding the attention.

For those of you who have two year old children, this behavior should sound familiar to you. Unfortunately, the Drama Queens I have the privilege to deal with are commissioned officers and senior NCOs in the US Army.

This is the challenge of leadership - to turn the focus of the Drama Queen back to the good of the whole instead of being self centered. The Benedictine in me (the saint, not the liquor), would go to the individuals in question, gently remind them once, maybe twice, then boot them clean out of the brotherhood. I'm not kidding, read the Rule sometime, Abbots are charged with some pretty serious responsibility and authority, both spiritual and temporal. So, the solution, I think, is to remind everyone of this at the next Monday meeting (which, thanks to Vets' day will be Tuesday, which I consider to be a far more appropriate day for a Big Meeting than Monday). Maybe remind everyone that the success of the whole - both company and battalion - is more important than looking good individually. Maybe remind folks in general that we're a battalion team and that "battalion" really isn't out to screw anyone (well, I won't go that far, nobody in the battalion proper, anyhow).

All I know, some of these Officers and NCOs have some serious individualism to get past before we go downrange. I also know, I have to help that process.

Enjoy!

PS - oh, go visit my wife's blog!

Over. Finished. Done. Through. Curtain call.

We have all sorts of terms to use to signify that we've completed whatever it is we might be working on. In all reality, nobody is really and truly finished...we just move from one project to the next, constantly in motion. This is especially true in the Army. Today we came off of our second three week training period in the last three months. The intent was to prepare us all by reteaching us all the basic Soldier skills we're supposed to already know, document that particular fact in mind numbing detail and then further prepare us to move on to the next stage in training, which would be crew and section level training (this isn't anything classified - the Army is very structured with training, starting at individual level and moving through each organizational level up through brigade). I was placed in charge of tracking and validating the training documentation. Essentially I'm the Access Database guru in the battalion. Not only am I not done, I'm not even close. We're still taking the paper documentation and entering it into the database, so I can collate, structure, poke, prod, pull, stuff, shake, post and push it to whatever reporting form my headquarters wants. I'm not complaining - I like playing in Access, and I constantly have yet one more thing I can do to make it better. The tough part of this whole thing is the scope of the operation and what that means to things like, oh, Access databases that track training documentation for each and every Soldier. Normally we just send company level units to Iraq. Nothing bigger at once than 150 joes. Sometimes a battalion might go, which usually hits the 550 Soldier mark, on average. This time, we're kicking a brigade out the door, which is dragging over 3,000 souls with it. That's a lot of people. I don't think I know that many people. When I taught high school, I managed to know all 140 or so of my students, but never 3000. So we have a few hundred soldiers (maybe more, maybe less, that's something I can't say) in our organization. Each of us (yup..."us"....I don't get a Get Out of Jail Free card for this) have to train on three groups of tasks or briefings ranging from how to clean my rifle to the care and feeding of insurgents. Then, some of us have a fourth grouping. Oh, and some are legitimately on duty orders doing something that requires a specialized school (Electronic Warfare is a good one), which has to be tracked. Then, some of those extra duties are compatible with other extra duties, so those folks tend to get tagged with two or three or four schools on top of everything else. Oh, and all that needs to be tracked. Thankfully, my tracking responsibility ends with the first four sets of stuff.

So where am I going with all this? Basically this: there's never an end.

There's another point I need to make here. That is this: Mobilizing a military organization is a necessarily complex process, whose complexity increases exponentially for each level of command involved. Let's say, for example, that mobilizing a company has a difficulty rating of 2. That means a battalion's complexity might be on the level of 8 (which is 2 cubed), and that of a brigade might be 512 (which is 8 cubed). The scale is about right, but I think the exponent is more of a power or 6 or 7, not three. For you folks who aren't "math people", imagine organizing a trip to Europe for an entire high school, or just one class of juniors (assuming a high school of about 3000 kids, of which there are a couple in my area). Now, besides the itenerary, you get to plan and resource the lodging, transportation, ALL of the food, ALL of their clothes (this is simple for the military) and provide ALL of the luggage and ancillary equipment. I won't get in to weapons, ammo, legal issues, learning to drive in Europe (where nobody usually shoots at folks driving), etc. That's basically what Indiana is doing right now. It's a huge undertaking.

All that said, it's tough enough dealing with a battalion. I'm not alone in doing this, of course, but it's still a lot of work. A battalion of even just 300 souls brings with it a complexity of personal issues and needs that are challenging enough on their own, let alone the complex issues which arise from the daily tedium of preparing for military operations. It's a big job and I'm glad I'm not alone in working on this. To be honest, for all the tough training and conditions our soldiers have had to endure this last month, they're in pretty decent spirits. We have enough veterans, who know that this stage is very temporary and that living conditions actually improve in theater, which helps tons.

Still, I'm glad we're past the first training phase and can work on the documentation and prepare for the next part of this operation. We have a lot to do yet, and not a whole lot of time in which to do it.

All The "Official" Stuff

Welcome one and all! This being the first post, I need to lay down a few guidelines, ground rules and explain what all's going on here. New readers ought to come here and read this.

First and foremost: I am a copycat. My brother had a blog while he was deployed, and it worked remarkably well for him to reach the wide audience of our family and friends. It was easier than mass emails, and allowed for remarkably witty banter. That said, since it's now my turn to go to Iraq, this is the blog.

Everyone needs to know this very important fact: I am an Army Officer. This means there is all sorts of stuff I can't post. As I don't believe in reprinting Army Regulations in my prose, go to Google and type in "OPSEC" and read about it (or go here). Having said that, thinking that I represent the Army's opinion on anything is like assuming a penguin speaks for whatever zoo he or she lives in: it's patently ridiculous. But, people being people, if anyone wants to think I speak for the Army, go ahead - you've been told. I don't, but folks tend to believe what they want to believe. Which brings me to my third item.

My background. This is the disclaimer, which means if anyone doesn't like what I write, go somewhere else (I suggest Craig's List "Best Of", which I find amusing). I am a (relatively) orthodox Roman Catholic and actually agree with Holy Mother The Church on many points. I am willing to discuss them academically, but that's my limit. I am, thanks to my Dad, on the right side of moderate in a political sense. Thanks to Dad, I have a healthy DISrespect for the mainstream media. These two points mean that quoting the NYT, WAPO or CNN here is a bad idea. Moreover, trying to quote death counts to me isn't kosher either. I know the stats and know that the war we are fighting in Iraq has both a KIA and WIA count that's far, far, far lower than any other conflict we've fought, regardless of the drivel the mainstream media is trying to feed us. Oh, and I have a rough sense of humor, if you haven't noticed.

Last item: I chose the Profession of Arms willingly. I do not consider myself a victim for being deployed. In fact, I've been wanting to go ever since I called a buddy of mine and notified him he was going to Afghanistan four years ago. Based on feedback I've received, I'd like to think I'm a halfway decent Officer. That being said, I could care less why we're in Iraq. We are, and that's that. I'm more than willing to discuss it academically, but this is not the forum to rant about "Dubya" or rave about what the Democrats think they're going to do if they get elected next year- or vice versa. We're there now and it is what it is.

Enjoy!