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.