The New Englander

Lost Time

2012-01-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally found that semi-quiet night here (thanks, Mother Nature) and a chance to grab some of that wonderful Camp Phoenix chow hall wi-fi to put a few thoughts down.

I could/would blog more -- much more, in fact -- but the high-speed Internet we have in our TOC (Tactical Operations Center) says no to blogspot. The funny thing is, Facebook, Yahoo mail, and Gmail are all somehow okay. I can access richardhowe.com but somehow nothing else that's on Wordpress. There's a crappy public wi-fi access spot on the base, but it seriously took me about a half-hour just to get to where I could type...and the connection keeps coming in and out, but thankfully blogger will automatically save any drafts I have.

The other limiting factor is time. The 16+ hour days are just sort of stacked endlessly on top of one another, and the demands placed on our intel section are constant and endless.

The good news, though, is that this will be all over in not *that* long. The first wave of new guys (Advance Echelon, or ADVON) is already here, and the rest of the crew will be here in two weeks or less. After moving through Manas Kyrgyzstan to Fort Dix to Reading, MA I should be home in early to mid-FEB.

Thankfully, I haven't heard a single shot fired in anger or felt the *pucker factor* of combat in the entire ten months I've been here. So coming home I'm not dealing with PTSD, or the after-effects of violence, related nightmares, or anything like that. The strongest single feeling that I have though, is the need to recapture lost time.

By that, I sort of mean everything. First and foremost, it's the time that I haven't spent with my wife and daughter, who I tend to think about more and more the closer I get to the big C-17 ride. That would apply no matter what I had been doing over here. After that, there's also the personal time that just doesn't exist here in this position. Don't get me wrong -- there are many jobs here that, based on duty MOS or paygrade, require only a fraction of the hours that mine does (say, someone who works in the Finance Office or in Admin). Then there are others that require long hours but are essentially just downtime punctuated by short periods of work (say, a radio operator in the TOC, esp. on the overnights). There are others still that require physical labor and occasional long days but come with lots of in-between time (say, a crew member on an MRAP movement team that ferries people around Kabul).

Either way, what I'm looking forward to most is seeing and spending time with Ratriey and Lily. Next to that, though, is just having a bit of personal time to do just about anything...whether it's walking along the canals, whether it's reading the Sunday Globe in bed or on the couch, or it's going to dinner with Ratriey and her mom and not feeling constantly rushed, it's going to feel dream-like for the first few weeks. Third, I would say, is what I'd call re-joining the world. Without even getting into an assessment of what I've done here, or who I think it's helped (or hasn't), where it's been relevant to the overall mission (or not), there's a big disconnect between what I work on here and anything that I will do, or want to do, back home. Rejoining the world is sort of how I envision catching up with friends, getting back into the groove with groups (i.e. LDNA, VFW, Global Vets, reading group, etc.), and getting on track with professional networking type of things.

Eventually, everything will sort of just become normal again, and I sincerely hope never to be mobilized for a twelve-month clip ever, ever again. (I am trying to angle my way into a unit at Devens that directly supports CENTCOM, and tends to do shorter tours when called up).

But for the first few weeks or months back in the states, if it seems like I'm still *on a mission* -- and maybe even obsessively so -- it's probably because I am. And the mission is to take advantage of every nanosecond that I can spend immersed in my reallife.

In the meantime, that time thing is nagging at me again. Just taking the time to write this means a delay in the reports that are due in the morning, which means being here until nearly noon, and with convoy duty in the mid-afternoon, it means another night of, well, you get the idea. More of the bleary eye stuff.

With that said, I have no plans to blog again until at least Manas, if not Fort Dix or even good 'ol Lowell come February. When I do, I'm looking forward to doing some local traveling (a modified 351 club is the goal), and taking the blog in a more interview-y type direction.

In the meantime, thanks for reading this far, and I greatly look forward to catching up with you next month...and when we get the chance, I hope we can both take at least a brief moment of quiet, or reflection, or maybe just laughter that goes on for that extra second or two to appreciate the time afforded to us to be able to do it.

Radio Silence

2011-10-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

I didn't realized how long it had been, but for a while there I know I went "radio silent," or as the Comms guys say, "RF Cold" here on the site. Only when three separate friends e-mailed me on three straight days last week to check up did I realize it had been almost a month since I'd posted. The very GOOD news I have to report is that things are steady-state over here.

All that really happened was that when I got back from the quick trip home in September, my boss was on R and R. Which meant I was the boss, which meant the endless days and other staff shenanigans. And then as soon as HE got back, our lead NCO went on R and R. Which meant I picked up a lof what he'd been doing, plus my lane in the proverbial road. If blogspot weren't blocked from the computers on our network, I could probably find the 15-20 minutes to write almost every day, but all the *fun* sites are a No-Go. So it goes.

Thankfully the wireless connection near our chow hall is actually working right now, which is enabling me to write.

I would say things definitely *suck* here, but just as quickly as I'd say that, I would qualify it for a mostly non-military audience by saying they don't suck in the way someone in Kunar or Khost Province is dealing with the *suck* of dodging frequent rocket fire from Pakistan, or the way someone in Helmand is doing daily foot patrols and worried about IEDs in the ground.

Perhaps ironically, you might be in more physical danger if you're taking 128 every day (esp. that godawful interchange onto Rte 3 that forces you to cut across multiple lanes while the people coming onto 128 are trying to get across you to do the opposite), but the special feature of the American military staff is the go-go-go all-the-time mentality (and the one really cool thing about being here is that I've gotten to see how lots of foreign militaries operate, and they aren't all like that!)

So anyway, with a nod somewhere in Tolstoy's direction, I would say that every less-than-ideal deployment scenario sucks in its own unique sort of way.

And on the bright side, we all noticed the snowcaps up in the Hindu Kush foothills around the base today. Seeing the snow up there, and feeling the first few cold snaps of the season, is a great reminder that February might not be all that far away.

Graffiti Worth Reading

2011-09-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

When I was passing through Bagram Airfield, and I mentioned something particularly witty I had read scrawled on the wall of the Porta-John near the Green Beans and PX, a Sergeant there told me that he can always get a sense of a unit's mood by reading the graffiti in the latrines.

It may be a slight bit counterintuitive, but a good healthy back and forth of vulgarity and profanity (where the scrawls are interactive)is the best thing to spot. Complaints are okay, and actually even good sometimes because they show that soldiers are engaged.

The Sergeant (who is now on his second full-year deployment to Afghanistan and who has already deployed to Iraq) said he only begins to worry when things get really quiet, which shows disengagement.

Since coming back to the unit just over a week ago, I've noticed a sharp uptick in things like intra-staff arguments, clipped phrases, and f-bombs dropped in anger. While in some ways that's a *good* thing (as I always like to say, show me someone who's upset and I'll show you someone who cares), I think it also speaks to us being in the *doldrums* of the seventh month of a deployment, where we've been scorpions in a bottle long enough to get on each other's nerves, but it's still too soon to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

The tension makes things a bit crazy at times, but I'm applying what the guy at Bagram said about graffiti to the overall staff climate here -- I won't worry about the guy ranting in the TOC who substitutes "f***ing" for the first names and/or ranks of his NCOs and Officers, but instead I'll look out for the soldier who seems like he's becoming disengaged and shutting off the world around him.

A Dissenting View from Kabul

2011-09-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, a group of well-armed insurgents forced their way into a vacant building which was under construction, and used it as a platform to shoot rocket-propelled grenades towards the Embassy, the NATO headquarters, and other Afghan and international military and government targets.

The attack was quashed mostly by ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) with some help from US advisors, several of whom wear our unit's "Yankee Division" patch.

A lot of the initial reaction in the western and local media was that the attack raises doubts about ANSF's ability to establish order and protect its people.

Here's why I disagree: If you could put together ANY group of a dozen or so folks with AK-47s and RPG launchers, how hard do you think it would be to get them into a public place where they could cause mayhem and havoc? Pick any American city, and it doesn't matter -- there's no security net that's going to stop a small group of well-armed people intent on causing harm from achieving that goal.

Eventually, that small group will be overwhelmed by the superior firepower of the local response force (police, SWAT, gendarmerie, etc.) And that's exactly what happened here.

Yes, it took awhile to finish the *clearing* process, but again, think back to hostage standoff situations and other such incidents in the States. Even with some of the best-trained and best-equipped constabulary forces, that stuff is never easy.

I wasn't downtown on Tuesday and I didn't hear any of the small arms rounds or the RPG impacts. But I was close enough to the nerve center of what was going on to say that the entire episode said more to me about the capabilities of ANSF than it did those of the insurgents.

The Route That I Took

2011-09-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

So, I'm all the way back at the same little Internet terminal place in Kuwait where I last updated the blog. I'm getting ready to head back to the 'Stan tomorrow (neat way to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11, eh?)

Everything went well on the 7th at MEEI, and the best part was that at the end, the doc said, "Everything looks great, and I don't need to see you again for 3-4 months." Well, if we're taking a sort of loose definition of that timeframe (like if we checked September off, and then skipped four months ahead) I would be back in the States. To stay.

Which is awesome. No more special anything, no more byzantine travel routes through airports, changes of clothes, and no more awkward explanations (both there or here) about why I'm *not really* home and dealing with people who don't know what they're saying spout off about they wish they had "whatever it is" that got me the extra trip back home.

Once again, I vow to try and write more, and photograph more. Buying a camera might be a wise next step, and I think I can knock that out here in Kuwait.

Although coming home for what wound up as nearly a week was phenomenal in many respects, the strongest feeling I had on the way back to Logan Friday morning was just eagerness to "get this show on the road." Just as it is now, my overriding feeling was wanting to get back to Camp Phoenix and back into the routine for the homestretch of the deployment.

What's VERY different this time, as opposed to OIF in 2006 and 2007, is the conflicting feelings about what's left behind. Besides the obvious and most important (wife and daughter) there's also the issue of having other professional ideas and opportunities on the plate...on active duty, of course, that was never an issue.

Regardless, it's all mind over matter for the next few months -- the conflicting feelings about being gone can get tucked away and stored in some corner of the brain where they won't be needed for a while. The trick is just immersing myself as completely as possible in the moment of whatever it is I'm doing, and then cheering a bit as the calendar gets flipped over every couple of weeks.

A Pretty Sad Excuse

2011-08-31T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if some witty neologist has already come up with a word for this phenomenon, but there oughta be at least a five-yard-and-repeat-of-down yellow flag that concerned citizens should be able to throw down somewhere when they see badly forced acronyms, i.e. where it's clear that the word was chosen first, or at least most of the way first, and then the terms thrown in to the point that they only *sort of* make sense.

I'm sitting at a computer terminal at Ali Al-Salem (it's either an Air Force or Army base in Kuwait) and the poster above the computer says, "SHARP: Sexual Harassment Assault Response Prevention." For the record, there's no ampersand thrown in between the words 'response' and 'prevention' that would actually tie the whole thing together and make it make sense.

Whether someone just really liked the word 'SHARP' or they saw it coming together when the S, H, A, unfolded in sequence, what they're literally promoting there is the "Response Prevention."

I don't mean to make light of something that is actually a serious matter within the military, but I'm trying to imagine some very "empowered" organization focusing on "response prevention" and I can't help it.

It Will Be

2011-08-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

You may not have known this, but there are three sitting US Senators in Afghanistan...on Annual Training.

Senators and Congresspeople visiting the 'Stan is nothing out of the ordinary...in fact, it's so ordinary that many units consider the Congressional Delegations (CODELs) a huge nuisance that drain their time and manpower away from their actual missions. But in the case of Senator Brown, Senator Graham, and Senator Kirk, they are actually spending their congressional recess here, in uniform, serving in actual billets.

Sort of.

Because they also *just so happen* to be sitting Senators, their visits come with a lot more pomp and circumstance than would those of any other pair of O-5s and an O-6.

Getting to meet with LTC Brown was still pretty interesting, and he talked to us about making sure we preserve the gains made in Afghanistan rather than pull the plug on this thing too precipitously and risk losing the momentum that the Afghan government has. That momentum is real, by the way, and I see it every day...in fact, the entire size and scope of the training mission is precisely what makes us NOT the Soviets, the British, Genghis Khan, or Alexander the Great, all of whom failed to build lasting institutions that survived much beyond their respective departures.

I can, and will, write more about that another time.

For now, I'm mostly just thinking about a trip I'm about to take. It's a scheduled follow-up thing with Mass Eye and Ear...and it was a requirement in the med waiver that allowed me to go on this deployment. Basically, I get to go home just long enough to get poked and prodded a bit and have a camera shoved up my nose and into the back of my throat (seriously). After this visit, the next periodic check-up will be once I'm *really* back home, so I can get back on a normal schedule with them then.

I was dreading it for a while, just because it's a LOT of pain-in-the-keeshter of moving through Bagram, Kuwait, Atlanta, and Logan in a nonstop blur that might also involve Leipzig and/or Shannon...and on top of that, I was not looking forward to putting my wife through roller-coaster trip number 5 (the icy parking lot in Reading, then pat leave, then the pass from Hood, then R and R, and now this), but the closer I get to home (the journey starts today), the more I realize I am looking forward to it.

I don't mean the medical part of it, but I do mean the time with Ratriey and Lily. Even if it's just a couple days, I know it will be special, and I know it matters to us.

Plus, it sort of breaks the time up. Once I get back from all the traveling, there will only be three flips of the calendar before the Georgia guys come for the RIP/TOA (Relief in Place/Transfer of Authority).

I vow, just as I did last time, to try to write more, to photograph more, and to document more thoughts in the moment.

Getting My Transatlantic Alliance On

2011-08-24T00:24:00.001-07:00

I have to give a hat tip (not in the blogger sense but in the old-fashioned one) to the retired O-6 in the room who warned me things might not be so easy post-R & R.

I thought I would sort of waltz back and since I was no longer the "primary" for my section, I would get to hide behind Dad most of the time, work a cushier schedule, and have more time for lengthy PT sessions, watching movies, learning Dari, etc. Not so fast.

As Cliff Krieger warned me more than once when I was home, if the O-5 boss has his druthers, he'll put the motivated O-3 to work. Sure enough, the new boss does, and he has.

Not that that's a bad thing -- the long, long days make the time go faster (on a clear day, I can see past the Hindu Kush foothills clear into September). As I wrote about a couple entries ago, the big picture is that no matter what I was doing here -- no matter how good, bad, exciting, boring, stimulating, or mind-numbing -- the most fundamental, central fact is that my unit will be off of our active orders come February.

Nothing really changes that, so I'm quite happy to be put to good use. It does of course mean that I put any e-mail in my Facebook or Yahoo inbox low enough on the daily to-do list that the box never gets checked (and if you've e-mailed me on either, I won't even say the 's' word because I know you understand), and that I'm not exactly taking time for some of the touchy-feely Morale, Welfare, and Recreation stuff that occupies some soldiers here.

But anyway, back to Camp Phoenix. Seeing some footage of the events this week in Libya naturally got me thinking about NATO. If you forget the whole issue of the-world-is-better-now-but-let's-brace-for-whatever-might-be-taking-shape-in-Tripoli-next and strictly look at things from a tactical perspective, score one for the Treaty Organization.

Things looked quite bleak for a while, and there's no question -- at ANY level of classification -- that NATO airpower and maybe even some, uhh...other power helped tip the scales on this.

NATO has been beaten up a lot lately in intellectual circles, but down at my level (senior Company grade and Field-Grade Officers) things honestly couldn't be much better. A huge portion of my day involves liaising with the French and Canadian militaries (I don't say 'Army' because they're not really divided the way we are), as well as the Bulgarians, Romanians, and once in a while the British.

Everyone shares. Everyone helps each other. Yes, we all have slightly different 'lanes in the road' (it wouldn't make sense otherwise, now would it?) but we have a common goal, which generally involves security operations in and around Kabul, and training the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). No one comes to it with a 'zero-sum' mentality, and a lot of us go out of our way to push information out to the others when it really matters.

It's easy for me to start to fall into the mentality of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (not at the end, though, but towards the beginning when he sees only futility in the repetition), and let thoughts about little peeves or the big things I'm missing at home get in the way, but one thing I know I will look back on after the deployment is the way our guys have forged strong relationships with the Canadian and French "J2 guys" that have gone way beyond the initial small formalilities and the shared laughter of trying to literally translate each other's bad words.

We won't all be Generals some day aspiring to be SHAPE, but I think that on some level, that stuff really matters.

Saluting My Sister-in-Law

2011-08-21T01:39:00.000-07:00

It's been said many, many times that the toughest job in the military is the one that falls on the spouses and children of deployed soldiers.

Maybe it's almost a cliche, but I don't think that makes it any less true. Yes, we've got the stress, the anxiety, and the Groundhog Day effect going on, but we're with our unit, the folks we know, and we're (theoretically, at least) doing the jobs we were trained to do.

Our families, meanwhile, are going about their business but with a void at home that they'd probably rather not think about or talk about, but can't help from keeping on their mind. Always. For 365 days, which I'm learning can be quite a lengthy period. Unlike this, they don't really know what's going on *over here* even though we have a generally good picture of what's going on *over there.* That can't be easy for them.

And when I think back on stressful professional and personal situations, the toughest times have always come when I was doing something alone, or at least perceived it to be that way. That's what a lot of military spouses go through on deployments, day after day after day after...you get the idea.

Even with a large extended family to offer some help, my wife definitely has the challenging, full-time/all-the-time job of raising an infant while I'm off on the mobilization. The large family is a great help, but the tricky thing there is that most of them have things going on that keep them busy...like lots of other little kids to watch after.

But the one key player for us this deployment has been my wife's younger sister, who has been living at our home and helping out a metric ton with babysitting, general support, and a presence which goes a long way.

This really sank in for me when she went away to California to visit some other family members, leaving my wife alone with our daughter. I noticed the tone of frustration that came through in some e-mails and over the phone, and when I tried to calm everything down as only someone 8000 miles away can, what I heard back was a feeling of "This sucks...I'm here dealing with the screaming and crying (which I could hear through the phone) and it just won't stop."

Then, when her sister came back, everything went back to the way it was -- she's not thrilled to be dealing with all of this right now, but the day-to-day aspect was manageable again.

I don't think it comes down to any secret formula or special skill, but it's the general presence of a loving, caring sister and aunt in the house that conveys an unspoken message of 'You're not alone in this' that calms everything down and allays fears.

And that, in turn, puts me back at ease, which I appreciate tremendously.

Less than five months now 'til the replacements come...hooah!

What Pete Said

2011-08-13T01:27:00.000-07:00

So there's a guy in our unit who's a partner at a Boston law firm.

And not just ANY law firm, mind you, but a white-shoe firm where even senior associates are proabably getting into quarter-mil territory. I mention that because it's rare to meet Senior National Guard Officers and NCOs who don't either work full-time for the Guard (it's called AGR, or Active Guard/Reserve) or work in a public-sector field like local/state police, or federal/state government GS-type stuff.

That probably has a lot to do with correlating interests, but it also has to do with the fact that the time demands on senior people in the Guard aren't super-compatible with jobs that have strenuous time demands of their own, let alone time for families and other pursuits.

So the partner guy, who's a JAG O-3 (Captain) here, and only a few rings-on-the-tree past me, came into my office the other night, and I got a chance to pick his brain about what it's like over in this Corporate America place.

What he said confirmed everything I think about why I want to check that place out. While there are aspects of his job that basically suck, like the fact that he has to track his time at work down to 6-minute increments (yes, 6-minute increments!) in order to properly bill clients, the basic fact is that no one there has to justify his/her existence, even for a second.

Because it's a firm that optimizes profits, there are people who constantly review its budget for places to cut corners, trim fat, and improve the bottom line. As a result, there's no one in the building who's there just to breathe oxygen. Obviously, people are there to perform different functions, but everyone is needed, and if someone weren't measuring up, well, they'd soon be looking for something new.

Yes, the hours were long. I tried to corner him into telling me about a 'typical' day (there's never such a thing, right?) and it sounded like 8:30 a.m.-7 p.m.-ish, with an emphasis on the 'ish').

Sure, that's a lot longer than the typical 40-hour government week, but at least during my active duty and Guard time, days like that have always been the norm. They may have started a bit sooner and ended a bit sooner, but they day length sounded about right.

Another major difference is that there's true zero-sum competition for certain spots. The firm uses one of those pyramid systems, where such-and-such a number of first-year associates will be hired, and then there will be a percentage asked to come back each year, and so on, all the way up to partner. I'll admit that that will be a culture shock coming from seven years in a non-zero-sum type environment.

Still, all told, I'm intrigued by this whole suit-and-tie thing.

At least until I write a follow-up entry a few years from now, lamenting everything about corporate culture and getting wistful about the days in the *actual* green-collar industry.

Just Saying No to This Bailout

2011-08-13T01:10:00.000-07:00

I read an article in Stars and Stripes about a week-and-a-half ago about active duty military folks asking for government aid because houses they had purchased were no longer worth the purchase price.

The justification they used in asking for the bailout was that since Uncle Sam had made them move, they had gotten screwed over by the government...in other circumstances, they would just stay in the houses they'd bought and ride the storm out, but here they had no choice but to either take the whack on a sale or continue making payments.

And yes, of course, they made a bunch of sympathy-evoking pleas to their Congresspeople to try to get this legislation through.

I may sound like the evil grinch in August for saying this, but if I were in Congress, I would vote AGAINST a bailout in this case.

To explain, let's put all the 'support the troops' stuff to the side, because I think we can generally assume peoples' hearts are in the right place on that (and if it seems like I'm scoring an own-goal there, well, at least I'm doing it from Kabul).

The facts are, the active-duty military moves its people around every few years. That's part of the deal all along. No one should be surprised by that. Except for a VERY small number of people in a VERY select, small number of units, the military does not allow its people to *homestead.*

The next fact is, the military pays its servicepeople a generous BAH (Basic Allowance for Housing), which is not taxable. With a couple Google searches you could look it up for your ZIP code, but as a married Captain living in "the Hanscom AFB area" I get somewhere north of 2500 but south of 3000 (I could look it up myself, but yes, the Wi-Fi here really is THAT slow). Anyway, that's a very generous sum...even with my massive mortgage, that covers the whole enchilada, plus my condo fee and a few other monthly bills. And that's totally separate from my 'base pay' or overseas incentives. But anyway, I'm digressing.

The military treats its people like adults by giving them the BAH, adjusted for rank, ZIP code of duty station, and whether the servicemember has dependents. Then it lets them do what they want.

If you wanted to rent a room in someone's house somewhere for $250 a month and pocket the difference, you could.

If you wanted to rent a 1BR apartment in the Back Bay and blow the whole stipend, you could do that, too.

And yes, if you chose to invest in a house, you could do that, too. But if you were doing that knowing you'd be moving within three years, a lot of people would say you were speculating. And if you were speculating based on the old logic that housing prices only go up, while interest rates only go down, then it's too bad things didn't work out. But the whole *I was forced to move* sympathy bit would only work on someone who didn't realize you knew you would have to move all along.

The fact that the market tanked, and your investment went in a direction you didn't expect is not Uncle Sam's fault. We have to draw the line somewhere, and here I'd say it's a pretty fair place to draw it nice and thick.

Thinking About the Crash

2011-08-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

No stock market references in this post, though.

I've been keeping up on all the stories to have come out in the media since the Chinook carrying 38 souls was brought down in neighboring Wardak Province the other night. One of the things I feared -- that someone on that bird had been a guy I had deployed with (Habbaniyah, 07-08) has already come true and I'm bracing for the full release of names by the Pentagon.

One of my best friends is a Naval Officer who supports *those guys* in Virginia Beach. Though he's not a SEAL either, he's a part of the greater community and, considering he's just committed another three years to a constant in-and-out overseas deployment rotation cycle with them, he is fully vested in what they do. I haven't written to him yet, maybe because I don't really know what to say.

What I do know, though, is that op-ed writers, bloggers, and others who are looking for some kind of great symbolism or meaning from this on the strategic level are misguided. Coalition aircraft get shot at every day in Afghanistan. Trust me, I read the reports. A lot of times, it's small arms, which don't pose a huge threat (though if they hit the hydraulic lines in just the right way, look out), but when we're talking RPGs (Rocket-Propelled Grenades) there is a risk to the aircraft. And in Afghanistan, where there are mountains everywhere and most roads are impassable, we rely on those Chinooks quite a bit.

There was no secret that a special brand of Coalition Forces was in Sayed Abad a couple nights ago, as Direct Action missions followed by huge firefights in the middle of the night tend to fall right into their lane.

Everyone in the area knew they were there. An insurgent saw the target, and he fired at it. A terrible tragedy ensued for a lot of people -- not just in Virginia Beach, but in lots of other parts of the US, and in Afghanistan, too (remember, there were seven Afghan soldiers plus some of our regular, non-SEAL Joes).

Whether you agree, disagree, or are somewhere in the middle on the question of whether we should stay committed to Afghanistan, militarily, that SIGACT (Significant Activity) shouldn't change your calculus much.

As for me, I think we're generally on the right track as far as reducing troop numbers gradually (although we play a shell game with troop numbers by hiring 90,000 contractors here...yes, 90,000). We can still stay committed in a more subtle way, as we do in places like Colombia and the Philippines, where insurrections can be quietly thwarted without too many headlines or too much interest back home.

I would also point out that there are a lot of cultural factors in play here in Afghanistan that don't get covered in the "if it bleeds, it leads" 24/7 news media cycle. Driving around Kabul, the signs of western influence are everywhere. Things are way different I'm sure in the Nuristans and the Kunars, but the trend here, where 10%+ of the population actually lives, is a sharp turn away from the folks who would roll the whole thing back to the stone age.

That's not just about televisions, and energy drinks, and American pop music, but it's also a statement about the basic preventive health care introduced since 2001 that's estimated to have saved over a million lives (that's based on Afghan Ministry of Health stats, partly drawn from decreases in infant/child mortality, and partly by reductions in easily-preventable/treatable diseases).

Even though I'm not actually outside-the-wire every day, or even more than twice a week in most cases, a lot of my job involves following trends, writing reports, and developing an understanding of the society around me that can be pushed both up, down, and laterally across the battlespace.

After a few months deeply immersed in observation, reading, writing, and conversing, I don't have any grand conclusions to draw, other than to drown out the shrillest, least informed voices on both sides of the proverbial aisle and come back to this shade of gray: It's complicated.

The Secret Out Here

2011-08-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

In "Band of Brothers," there was one certifiably badass Officer who was either very brave, very crazy, or perhaps a mix of each. One day, as Easy Company was digging their "improved fighting positions" in the woods of Belgium, someone asked him his secret.

"That's simple," Lt Spears said. "The whole trick in battle is that once the shooting starts, just assume you're already dead. At that point, you stop caring, and then you just can't go wrong."

Of course, that advice doesn't really apply in this portion of this theater at this time. Because we're Fobbits one day, drinking tea with Afghan police chiefs the next day (see picture), then truck commanders the day after, and liaisions with our NATO buddies from France and Canada each morning around dawn, that advice doesn't really apply. On the one hand, our mission is far, far safer than what Easy Company did on its journey from Georgia to England to Germany. Then again, ours is way more complex and varied.

If there were an equivalent "mental trick" out here, it'd be this: Just bear in mind that nothing you do, or are asked to do, is going to get you home to your family any faster or slower.

I think that all the high-performers I see around me intuitively *get* this. As I've even heard our Commanding General say, "I'm not thrilled to be in Afghanistan, away from my wife and kids, but while I'm here I'm damn sure going to make the most of it." The people who don't quite take on this gung ho attitude (and why is it that the most disgruntled tend to be the worst performers?) are too busy complaining about what someone else is or isn't doing, and often spend more times trying to avoid duties or complaining about them than they would just knocking them out.

I'm not even halfway done with the mobilization, though I can't help but notice that "halfway day" is coming closer and closer on the calendar. But what I'm not going to get into is a countdown mode. Besides the fact that it's just too soon for that, the better mentality to have, I believe, is to take whatever comes each day, get *lost* in it (errr...maybe I mean 'immersed' there) and then just sort of let the calendar take care of itself.

When the World Happens

2011-07-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

A Lieutenant Colonel from another unit saw me in the chow hall the other day.

"Greg, what happened to you?" I know you did your R & R in June, and it's like you fell off the face of the planet since."

"Ma'am," I said, "I work nights now to get all our products done, so that's roughly 2000 to roughly 0800. I'm only up during the day now for the mandatory meetings and the trips off the FOB every couple days."

"That's not easy," she replied. "My mother worked third shift for years and years...and you never really adjust."

For a second, let's throw out the whole biological, circadian rhythm, Vitamin-D absorbing technical side of things. Some of that might be correctable if planned out right.

The world happens from around sunup to around dinnertime. Here's what I mean by that: that general timeframe is when meetings get planned, when appointments get made, when drop-ins drop in, and just about when pretty much everything goes on.

So, as the Lieutenant Colonel told me, her mother never got less annoyed when she had to explain to someone for the gazillionth time that no, she couldn't come to [insert name of kids' event] at 3 p.m. because she had to sleep. And no, she didn't have some disorder, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or anything of the sort -- that was her equivalent of 3 a.m.

Don't worry, this post isn't about a vent or a complaint -- I'm lucky to have a boss who generally *gets* this concept and doesn't watch the clock with regards to my work. He does expect me to make all the mandatory stuff (no surprise) but completely understands when that means coming in two, four, or even six hours "late" as a result afterwards.

But to others, not so much. I got so tired of trying to explain that your 2 p.m. is my 2 a.m. that I just stopped. I'm quick to duck out before the day's events start "spinning up" and suck me in. There's nothing that can't be turned over, and no legitimate situation in which I ought to be the Single Point of Failure.

But a lot of the interpersonal awkwardness of the whole thing is mitigated by the fact that we're all here. We all worry about our families, homes, etc. but not in the day-to-day way that someone would if he or she was living at home. None of us have a commute, none of us have social obligations, and none of us have relatives calling us to come over for tuna casserole.

Just imagine, though, having to deal with all of that but still having to work from, say, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. every day.

I don't even want to know. It just sounds like a huge pain that I hope I don't ever have to personally deal with back stateside. Each time I have to ask people not to have loud conversations outside my door at 10:45 a.m., and they look at me like I have a horn growing out of my head, however, I'm reminded that people who work third-shift back in the stateside world have a tough spot that I wouldn't want to trade for. Not that I didn't respect that before, but I'd say I feel it just a bit more acutely now.

Thanks for the Charity, Whitey

2011-07-24T23:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Dan, who is a helicopter pilot here in the Guard and an East Providence cop back in our other lives, came in late last night to talk to me.

"You wouldn't believe what happened today with Operation Outreach...a guy at a school asked us for concertina wire."

"Huh? I don't get it."

"We went down to a school located right near a prison in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Kabul. After the team leaders handed out a bunch of stuff, to include towels that had "USA" stamped on them, and everyone mugged to take a bunch of pictures with the kids, we asked the principal if there was anything else he needed. He asked us for concertina wire (basically, barbed wire on a roll) to put around the school. At first, we couldn't understand why, so we had him explain.

"A lot of the people in this neighborhood moved here because of the prison," he said. They have relatives that are going to be here for a long time, and they hate [Coalition Forces] and [the Afghan government]." Now that they've seen all of you come to see me, and especially if they see some of this stuff, they might try to hurt us.

I couldn't believe it. Especially on the heels of the entries about gratitude, and about unintended consequences, it seemed like an amazing convergence of ideas.

The group that chose that school was never sought out, or even asked, to come.

To them, and for their incentive structure, though, none of that matters.

They'll take a few cute pictures, they'll document the trip in their After-Action Report, and they'll write it up in their End-of-Tour Award Citations. In addition, they'll get a "Thanks for Playing" Volunteer medal.

Meanwhile, some guy in Arzan Qimat is going to bed at night worried about whether his school might get attacked now because of the way someone else perceived the incident.

Second- and third-order effects are fascinating stuff.

The Rhyme and Reason Behind "No Candy"

2011-07-20T01:34:00.000-07:00

The other day, I heard a Lieutenant from the new infantry battalion (1-182, Melrose) talk about a policy shift since they had relieved the old infantry battalion (1-181, Worcester).

"We're not giving anything out on the foot patrols. Period. No water, no candy, no snacks, no pens...nothing."

At first, I'll admit, I didn't *get* it. What could be so bad about soldiers smiling, waving, and giving some sweets out to the local kids in Ud Kheil (the neighborhood near Camp Phoenix), who are materially poor in a way that most Americans will never know?

As it turns out, lots.

Kids, I've learned through my experiences here, love to follow foot patrols around. That's generally all well and good, except when groups of slightly older kids (say, 12-15 years old) convince all the other kids to start throwing rocks at us. Given the restrictive Rules of Engagement (ROE), and the fact that all that's getting tossed are rocks, there isn't much we can do. Sometimes the rock-throwing is just the younger kids falling in line with the older kids, sometimes it's them expressing hatred, but other times it's just them expressing frustration with the fact that they're not getting something from the guys with the big green suits and the shades.

What the guys who do this every day tell know is this: Once you start doing something like candy giveaways, you create an expectation. Then, once that expectation isn't met, the next thing you'll see is hostility.

The biggest offenders are the "combat safari" types -- the JAGs, the docs, admin, logistics, and yes, even the intel weenies who finagle their way onto a foot patrol...they want to save the world by filling their pockets with sweets to hand out to the kids.

Which is all well and good until the NEXT time the ground-pounders go out. Now, if they don't have anything to give out, they get the rocks. And the rocks make it very hard for them to do their jobs, because the ROE says there's pretty much nothing you can do in return.

So that's why the policy is very cut-and-dry: NO giveaways to the kids. Humanitarian drops and civil affairs missions can be coordinated through local authorities, but no one is going to try and play savior to a bunch of extremely poor kids by emptying a pocket full of Jolly Ranchers.

Which sounds fair if you ask me.

Breaking the Rules

2011-07-17T02:24:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm a Dad, I can't help but remember the lines I heard most often at home from my Dad, and I seem to catch myself using them more and more... "The deadline for all complaints was yesterday." "The effective range of an excuse is zero meters." "The best question you can ever ask is 'What can I do to help?'" "Make sure to say thanks to the [insert last name of family who took me somewhere]." and so on. Of course, I don't subject my own daughter to any of this, as she's a bit too young to understand, and a bit too 8000 miles away to hear me, anyway. In the meantime, the blog is my outlet to do this type of stuff, and it's just way more efficient than e-mail for keeping up with the dozen or so people I'd call close friends.

One of my main hobbyhorses is the "If life had a rulebook" theme, and the #1 rule I would include if I wrote such a rulebook (and in the world of self-publishing, that might not be such an 'if') is this: When someone does goes out of his/her way to do you a favor, don't criticize the WAY the person is doing it. There's a corollary, of course, which is not to expect gratitude for things that there was no 'demand signal' for in the first place...in other words, don't mow my lawn on your own initiative and tell me I now 'owe you one.'

But back to Rule 1. To use some rather extreme hypotheticals, if you were near-starving, and I cooked you a meal, you would basically lose the right to whine about how there wasn't enough salt in the food. Or if you were broken down on the side of the road at three a.m., and I came to get you, the speed and manner in which I drive are sort of off the table. Anyway, I think you get the idea.

And I write all this because I actually have a not-so-hypothetical to share. Someone who I don't know personally, but *know* through Facebook and LinkedIn because we share some common professional interests went out of her way to organize a niche sort of veterans' group. On top of that, she went out of her way to organize a Skype-from-anywhere conference call so that members could dial in and talk about professional goals, network, etc. Of course, there had to be some stake thrown in the ground as far as a time and date, so she chose next Sunday, obviously realizing some would be able to make it, and others wouldn't. Below, in italics, is a person's actual response:

I'd love to join the call. Sundays, especially Sunday evenings, are the worst possible times for me. It's hard to imagine a family person being able to join a call at that time of day on that particular day. Sounds like a young singles type of thing, as I recall that time in my life.

Huh? I'm neither single nor in my twenties. How is either relevant to the time that a conference call might work? If it were Monday or Wednesday, I might have a commitment (I'm imaging I were stateside). If it were Friday or Saturday night, I might have social plans. If it were during a weekday, I'd have a school or work commitment. The bottom line is that no time is perfect for anyone.

If you can't spare 20 minutes on a Sunday night, then great, just RSVP negative or don't respond at all. But don't make some grand extrapolation about the 'married people versus the single people' based on the way you perceive it would inconvenience you (As if, somehow, people's families stop mattering from Monday through Saturday?) But anyway, it seems to me that the organizer or a small group has gone out of their way to set all this up. The last thing they need is a ration of 'you-know-what' from someone simply because a particular time/date combination doesn't work.

To reiterate rule 1 -- you don't necessarily have to show gratitude for everything. Sometimes you'll forget, and sometimes it just won't occur to you...both are totally understandable. But if someone has gone way out of his/her way to try to do something NICE for you (i.e. include you on an invite for a professional conference call), don't start throwing daggers just because it isn't perfectly tailored to your life.

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings in Tokyo...

2011-07-17T02:07:00.000-07:00

...and a Category 5 hurricane hits the Caribbean.

Or something like that. Anyway, if you follow Afghanistan very closely, you might've read this week about the first major US Army unit to leave theater without a backfill. Put into plain English, that represents a big step in the math problem that means you have to turn 101,000 into 91,000 by the end of the year. The 34th ID, out of Iowa and Minnesota (with attached units such as the 67th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade out of Nebraska) is now happily back in the US of A, while no unit now in Afghanistan arrived to take over what they used to do.

Any guesses as to what happened?

To flip an old saying around, fewer hands now make for heavier work. And the ripple effects, or the chaos theory in practice, has many fascinating implications. Because for every task or mission that you need to pull bodies out of hide to staff, you've now created another void.

Units like ours now suddenly have way more convoy duties, way more guard tower duties, and, yes, way more chow hall head-counting duties (hey, not everything is glamorous in a war zone).
I've had the chance to partake in said activities in the past week, so hence the "radio silence" here on the blog...and I snapped some cool pics, which I hope to post (There are some tight CENTCOM rules about what can and can't be posted, but I promise to start making this more visual...no, really, I mean it).

But anyway, what all THAT means is that whoever is now sitting on duty in the chow hall, or up in the tower, or ferrying people to Kabul International Airport (but remember, that's always KAIA, pronounced "kai-uh" and never abbreviated KIA) isn't doing whatever else they were doing. On the one hand, yes, that trims a bit of fat ('worked' does not equal 'overworked' in my book) but it also leaves some things shorthanded.

What it also does, though, is takes a unit like ours, that was generally not too jazzed about its mission, and it flips that on its head. We're just a lot busier than we were before last month, but because we've got a lot more purpose, our morale has gone up proportionally. It's the simplest, oldest rule in soldiering, but the most discipline and morale problems occur not when people are too busy, but when they're too idle. Idle or under-engaged times are also when people turn inwards and bicker with each other the most.

I would say the time is flying by now -- not being a primary staffer, I now have a lot more opportunity to see and do things I wouldn't have before.

Still, it's crazy to think that we're still not at the "just 200 more days" mark. We're not that far, but still, we're not there.

I'll go ahead and chalk that last one up under the "things not to bring up on the phone with the missus" header.

170.55 in 'The Kabul K'

2011-07-08T22:42:00.001-07:00

Before we got on the plane at Fort Hood, our Commander (who was promoted yesterday...congratulations General Hammond!) announced a simple, straightforward "deal" to everyone in formation:

Anyone who runs 1000 miles during the deployment ('The Kabul K') will get an Army Commendation Medal for the feat.

As you might imagine, the honor system is in the works here. For those participating in the challenge, there's a Lieutenant to whom we have to send our running logs every 100 miles, which kinda-sorta keeps the whole thing honest (no one can 'suddenly' run 800 miles in the last month, for instance).

Anyway, with about 7 more months or so to go, I'm a bit behind the curve. I've got 170.55 miles as of today. The beauty, though, is that as anyone following this blog knows, I now actually have the time to get away and log some miles each day -- workdays have magically shrunk from 16- and 18-hours to that happy "12" spot where I can still find a wee bit of time to run, Skype with the missus, and yes, write on the blog (as soon as I can get my new phone/camera up and running, I promise to finally get some pics too...I mean it!)

Anyway, here's why the Colonel's...I mean, General's idea is a great one (and no, he doesn't read this...and he doesn't sign my OER anyway!):

(1) It keeps people's minds focused on a goal. As I'm seeing now, a year-long mobilization feels like a loooong time. Especially when you feel like it's been forever, and somehow you're still not even halfway done. Having a day-to-day goal to think about besides things like staff work, guard duty, convoys, chow duty, etc. helps soldiers' mental state. Plus, the hour or so people dedicate each day to it is an hour they're not idle...and then there's the endorphin benefit, the better sleep, extra energy, etc.

(2) It helps get people in shape. One of the neat things about a deployment is seeing people who are a bit round (hey, we're the Guard!) get a bit, well, less round. I'm no exception -- I know I ought to be closer to 185 (fighting weight) than to where I peaked last fall (220...yikes!) Running a daily five-miler is sure getting me a lot closer to the *right* side of that equation. Anyway, as with anything that needs work, it's somehow always easier to notice it on others...and I've seen several of our guys lose 30, 40, and even more pounds so far trying to reach this goal...and yes, the guys with knee, foot, joint, etc. problems can go Elliptical for this.

(3) It's a team-building thing. The guys (and gals) that are going for this goal have this as a common reference point...Hey, what's your plan? How far are you gonna go today? Treadmill or track? (Yes, Camp Phoenix as a track, right around the Helicopter Landing Zone). It's easy to get de-motivated to run every day "just to run" but when you're pushing towards a concrete goal, somehow it's easier to get moving...and more fun.

Some Army purists would disagree with the handing-out of ARCOMs for running but let's be honest...ARCOMs have been handed out for a lot less. I'm only 170+ miles in so far -- definitely not on pace -- but have a plan to steadily increase my runs and get way ahead of the curve soon. Will post.

The Producers

2011-07-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

If you thought this was a lead-in to a Mel Brooks reference, it's not, but I've got to tell you, I like the direction in which you were headed.

I work with eight people.

Four are what I would call "Producers." I could try to find other, neater, spiffier ways to say it, but simply put, there are four people who I could leave with a specific-but-wide-enough-for-some-wiggle-room order, give it a deadline, and never have to think about it until the deadline, because I know it would get done. They'd either do it, find the right person to do it, or find where it had already been done, and appropriate it.

There are also four who, despite their many other great qualities, don't fit that billing. Without getting into too much detail (this is one of those entries that has to stay kinda vague for self-protection purposes), I can guarantee with equal certainty that *it* would not be done after that hypothetical twelve-hour "off" period. There might be reasons, excuses, taskers, ADD, and other such maladies that got in the way, but trust me, after countless hours, days, and weeks from Reading to Killeen to Kabul, I can pretty much predict this stuff without much effort.

But the point of this entry is NOT to vent. Nor is it to ask for help with management, or for reading recommendations involving Seven Ways to Move Cheese in One-Minute while Winning the Influencers Over on Tuesdays in Heaven.

The point is to say this: I would've totally screwed up the hiring.

Let's say it's a few years down the road. NOT so hypothetically, with an MBA and maybe a couple years' consulting in Boston under my rigger's belt, I'm looking to start a small firm closer to home, somewhere in the Merrimack Valley.

The budget is tight. The outlook is uncertain. One of the most difficult decisions is going to be "Who gets hired?"

Let's get back to my original setup. If I had started out with the eight people, but could ONLY hire four, and was given, let's say, their names, ranks, ages, military bios, resumes, and even the chance to interview them, I'll completely admit I wouldn't have chosen the right ones. If you think OERs and NCOERs (military equivalent of *report cards* would've helped, well, then, you need a lesson in how those things work.

Now, the List of Four seems really obvious, and I could do it in seconds.

But in the real world -- or at least in the real world as I understand it -- it never works that way. There aren't 90-day job interviews. Maybe there are internships, and there are probationary hiring periods, but on those things I hit the I-don't-know-what-I-don't-know problem about feasibility.

My resolution -- during the "down" period I'll have post-deployment (I'm purposely socking away a healthy rainy-day fund for the four-month period after my terminal leave, but before school starts), plus the time at school, to include the Entrepreneurship and Innovation track (E & I), one of the major questions I want to pose to entrepreneurs is this -- Given your limited time and your limited budget, how the heck do you hire?

I'm not as interested in the large corporate behemoths, who can afford to carry some extra weight around, nor am I interested in government contractors, whose purpose is to place 'butts in seats,' but only in small firms who can't afford to keep *nice guys* around who can't turn a tangible result out the back end. Especially as I steer this blog more towards regional business *stuff* and towards interviews, I will be sure to post whatever I find out right here.

What They Call Themselves 'Round These Parts

2011-07-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

Before heading overseas, I sat through a bunch of the standard Army Afghanistan 101-style cultural briefs.

Don't gesture with your left hand. Check.

Don't expose the soles of your feet. Roger.

Don't ask about female members of the family. Check-raj.

And remember, an 'Afghan' is a person from Afghanistan, where as an 'afghani' is a unit of currency. Don't confuse the two, or you'll come across as just another ignorant American.

The first three I knew from Iraq (though it might surprise you how little police and soldiers there care about those rules, or how often they violated those rules themselves), but the last one I hadn't heard before, so I stayed careful to remember it.

Then when I got here, I heard a few people point out in a thou-shalt-not sort of style after hearing someone call a person from here an 'Afghani' that it was culturally insensitive, and wrong.

Except here's the funny part -- I started to notice that when the people from here referred to other fellow countrymen, while speaking English, they used "Afghans" and "Afghanis" interchangeably when referring to other people from here.

In fact, I heard it enough times that I had to just start asking them, every chance I got. As it turns out, the distinction isn't really something they think about, or care about. Yes, the currency unit is the afghani. As for the people, every Kabuli (yes, that's the term!) that I speak with tells me the same thing -- it just doesn't matter.

So I have to laugh a little at the idea that people putting together some of the basic Army cultural training are far enough removed from the culture itself to be emphasizing stuff that just, well, isn't so.

What Mitt Missed

2011-07-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

This story is already a wee bit dated, but my reaction to it isn't.

At some point last month, Mitt Romney, presidential aspirant, was speaking to a group of unemployed people when he tried to make a funny, stating words to the effect of, "I'm unemployed too, so I'm one of you...but as some of you may know, I'm looking for a job now."

The joke, of course, went over like a lead zeppelin, as it well should have.

His reaction didn't help any, either. He, or his campaign, made some lame comment about how Mr. Romney enjoys "self-deprecating" humor, and how others need to lighten up.

Lighten up?

Mitt Romney is worth hundreds of millions. For him to get in front of a group of people who truly know what it means to be involuntarily unemployed -- to lose sleep at night wondering about mortgage payments, to make tradeoffs about which bills to pay, which to let go, and what day-to-day niceties (I purposely didn't say 'luxuries') to shirk, shows, at best, a complete lack of self-awareness.

Frankly, I'd expect better from a would-be Commander-in-Chief. I had already had my waterskis-over-Jaws moment when he had to have his own son stage a prank call supposedly from "The Governator" but this helps prevent any chance that I will reverse course from 2002 and ever vote for Mitt Romney for anything.

The second charge I'd throw is that his response is a total bastardization of what self-deprecating (or, more technically accurate, self-effacing) humor is all-about: poking fun at your actual weaknesses.

Genuine self-effacing humor is refreshing, disarming, and often downright funny. But the key word there is genuine. Let's say, for example, your boss stutters, is clumsy, can't type memos, sweats profusely, etc. If he or she makes jokes about that, it tends to go over well.

But if someone who obviously takes his or her own intelligence seriously says, "Well, my wife says I'm not real smart, but she keeps me around because I can lift heavy objects," and expects the whole room to break into side-splitting guffaws, or thinks that's somehow endearing, that person is a huge tool. It's kind of like when someone who looks like a model thinks they're winning others over by saying things like, "I must have helped meet the quota for ugly people then" when looking at pictures of themselves among groups of friends. Far from endearing, it's just awkward and disingenuous.

I could do a lot more hypotheticals, but I think you already get the point.

On a slightly different note, a friend of mine sent me a great link to something that comedy writer/stand-up comedian Harris Wittels put together. It's based off a term he coined called "Humblebragging." You can go to his Twitter page right here, where he collects shameless celebrity name-dropping cloaked in so-called humility "I can't believe I was at John Travolta's house last night...who can believe it -- little old me?!!?" or "I totally tripped on my way up to the stage to receive my Oscar."

If you're as bad as I am about following links, you won't click, but I strongly recommend you do. I can promise you will laugh, and will think of some "Humblebraggers" in your own life.

One last point -- I always wonder what genuine really means. I've had trouble with knowing when to use that word when describing people, and just sort of settled on the idea that it's akin to the old Potter Stewart-ism about "knowing it when you see it."

I'm not sure who to attribute this quote to, but someone, somewhere, at some point in time once said, "I don't say all the things I think, but I do think all the things I say." Probably about 10 seconds after I heard that, it instantly skipped a long list to become one of my all-time favorite quotes ever. If someone really lives by that, I'd say they're about as close to genuine as anyone I could imagine. Obviously, no one is going to say all the things they think (besides, their jaw might quickly get tired), but if you truly "think all the things you say" to include everything from compliments to constructive criticisms to just all-around conversation, I would have to count you among company worth keeping.

An Interesting Stat

2011-06-29T23:09:00.000-07:00

I had the chance to talk to an Afghan guy a few years my senior today over some sweet chai. He made a really interesting point about the various ways people in Kabul feel about what they see (rightly) as a coming drawdown of American troops.

Most people are scared, he said. More than anything, they just don't want "those other guys" to come back into power. Interestingly, though, he pointed out how a lot of young people were either totally apathetic or generally happy to see the Big Guys in the Green Suits leave.

"Check the average age of an Afghan and compare it to your country," he told me.

Right away, I did. The median American is 35.3 years old, whereas the average Afghan is 18.2 years old.

"Think about what that means," he said. Most of the people in this country aren't old enough to REALLY remember what it was like during the time the Taliban were in charge."

It was an interesting point, and a good reminder not to just see the world through my own frame. The very fact alone that the average person here is only half as old as the average person in the country I came here from is enough to seriously impact the national mood.

Ready in the Night...to Visit Violence

2011-06-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

If you can read between the lines of the headlines when they say "NATO helicopters strike gunmen" on the roof of the Inter-Continental Hotel, you'll know what it actually means.

The helicopters themselves didn't do it.

If you think there was some kind of Apache or Cobra "gun run," near a crowded civilian structure with hundreds of people inside and nearby, you still don't get it.

To borrow Liam Neeson's phrase from Taken, that's a reference to people with "a very particular set of skills."

Before I lay down to sleep peaceably in my 8' x 10' air-conditioned CHU (yes, that's a Containerized Housing Unit), I want to go on record saying that I'm grateful for those folks...not just because of the Maersk Alabama, or even UBL, but also because of the number of lives they saved this morning by preventing a terrible situation from becoming something far, far worse -- not just for the people at the hotel and their families, but also for the 32 million people here who need anything BUT a propaganda coup for those who would bring this country back to their twisted ideal of the 7th Century.

Just a Bit Less Invested

2011-06-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

So far, so good.

Things have REALLY turned around since I've gotten back to Kabul. The big change that I blogged about and told friends and family about came true -- there's a much more senior Officer here now doing the job that I was doing, and I was successfully able to angle my way onto the vampire shift (2000 to 0800, every day), where I'm not constantly being grabbed and pulled in a million directions.

*Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope things don't change too much.*

When I think about why my stress level has plummeted so much, two major factors come to mind:

(1) I've actually got an off-switch now. It might sound funny to say to someone that 84-hour weeks feel like a vacation, but it's the complete truth. Even when you factor out the 6-7 hours or so for sleep, that STILL leaves me with a few hours each day of - dare I say it - *me* time. I haven't quite figured out how to channel it...yesterday it meant watching a movie, today it meant working through an Atul Gawande book, and every day it's meant getting an hour or so on the beloved treadmill. If I don't come home in February in damn-near Olympic decathlete shape, I'll be disappointed.

Anyway, the reason the off-switch is such a big deal is that since the big shift back at Fort Hood, when our old boss got suddenly reassigned, my routine has pretty much been get up, clean up, work/train, go to meetings, prepare for more meetings, prepare reports, go on the occasional convoy or patrol, and then frantically catch up on all the stuff missed thanks to said movement.

That takes its toll. Again, no comparisons here to the guys out in Khost and Paktika (though I certainly didn't choose NOT to go that route...but that's a story for another day, and I'll have to readdress that with Uncle Sam in February) but probably more in common with a junior investment banker in midtown Manhattan. Either way, the adrenal glands can only take so much.

And if the time off at home with Ratriey and Lily was heaven, then this is purgatory -- not that great, but honestly, not that bad either.

(2) I've got less of a sense of *investment* in the section. This factor is actually way more important than the first. For a few months there, I was actually in charge of a dozen or so people. In the civilian world, that would mean a manager, but there's an important distinction here -- because the military *owns* its people in a 24/7 sense, commanding even a small group of people is a pretty big deal. Their successes are yours, their screw-ups are yours, and, yes, the paperwork that goes with all that is yours. Even stepping down and being the "#2 guy" is a quantum leap downward...the analogy isn't perfect, but it's kind of like being a backup quarterback in the NFL -- the other guy is running the huddle and under-center for all the snaps, and you're rocking a baseball cap and telling jokes behind the thick white lines.

So this factor probably has even more to do with why I'm smiling more and spinning-up less. It's not that I don't care (in fact, now I get to *actually* do the job I'm trained for in a much purer sense, and I take a lot of pride in the results), but I'm less invested. When one of our guys misses a duty shift in the guard tower, when one of our Officers pisses off our Canadian counterparts (900+ are now in Kabul!), or when someone drops the ball on a meeting, it's honestly just NOT my fire to put out. And even if I tried to make it so, that'd be inappropriate -- sort of like trying to discipline someone else's kid.

To summarize everything I've learned in a back-of-a-postage stamp sort of way:

Being in charge is really hard.
NOT being in charge is not so hard.

With a nod towards Ben-Hur, I will continue to row well. I will also try to get a bit fitter, a bit smarter, and keep in better touch with folks at home.

Being away is still a challenge, but this is way more sustainable.

Footloosin' in Kabul

2011-06-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Yup, that base looks mighty familiar. Not our unit, but no surprise to viewers that these are Mass Guard guys:

Words I Won't Be Eating

2011-06-16T22:10:00.001-07:00

"Words that fall like rain/Lie on the ground like snow." -- The Toasters, "Don't Say Forever"

The reality is starting to sort of loom over me that yes, come Monday, I will have to return to work. Err, rather, come Monday I will begin the process of returning to work. Sandstorms, flight delays, scheduling bottlenecks, and who-knows-what-else may throw that off in who-knows-what-direction. And it's not lost on me that by the time I make it to Atlanta on Monday afternoon, it'll already be Tuesday morning *over there.*

Anyway, one of the cool things that I'm looking forward to -- something I've written about here on the site and shared with friends and family here in Lowell -- is that I'll be stepping back into a less-prominent position. To fully explain it would require a good chunk of time, but let's just say my old boss left in a sudden fashion, and for a few months there I was doing my old job plus his. With his relief now there, I go back down to *just* my position...this ought to leave a wee bit more time for personal pursuits like running, weightlifting, keeping up on foreign news, and, yes, the Lowell blogosphere.

For the couple months or so before the new boss came into the picture, he and I stayed in fairly frequent contact over e-mail. I peppered him with schedules, briefings, photos, operational vignettes, etc. not so much in a coherent format, but just in a way that would enable him to build some semblance of the *big picture* from all the little ones I was sending his way. Considering he commanded a Company of soldiers during the Big Northward Trek from Kuwait to Balad, Iraq in March 2003, he had plenty of personal memory and material to draw from when piecing everything together.

One of the very few things, perhaps the only thing, however, that I did NOT provide him with was the candid assessment he asked me to send with regards to all our soldiers, to include strengths and weaknesses, and some delineation of the "A" Squad from the rest.

Uncharacteristically, I stalled, hemmed, and hawed on this one. Even though he asked more than once, I never went all-out on this request, despite having done so for every other piece of data that he had me put together. Simply put, here's why: I've seen that type of stuff go bad too many times before.

Even if we can assume the best intentions all-around, there are still WAY too many chances for a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip...what if he printed that e-mail and left it atop his desk? What if he quoted from it over the phone and a curious set of ears was nearby? What if it biased his incoming attitudes towards people in an all-too-obvious way? Any of those moments, in which the wrong things could've come out devoid of all context or intended tone, would've spoiled 8 months of coming intense working relationships in close quarters.

I stayed pretty vague on the subject of personnel, and he hardly even brought it up during the couple days of overlap we had after he arrived, and before I went on R & R. As a result, when I head back to Atlanta, and then Kuwait, and then Kabul, I'll be dreading the fact that I'll be away from my wife and daughter, and missing home, but I won't be dreading the prospect that some frank, candid statement of mine got twisted and bent into some unintended shape...because it was never made to begin with.

I like to muse a lot about how "If Life Had a Rulebook..." and sometimes imagine putting one together where I could explain lines like, "When someone is going out of their way to do you a favor, you forfeit all rights to criticize how they're doing it."

If I ever did put one together, though, right near the top would be something like, "Be careful in the extreme say with what you say about others. Whereas your opinions are subject to change, the words you write or speak for attribution are not!"

The real problem isn't whether I'd have the cojones to stand by something I had said. I know that I would (as the expression goes, I don't say everything I think, but I do think everything that I say). The bigger problem is that some gripe I might've had on, say, April 18th might've been totally overcome by events by, say, June 18th. If I called someone an underachiever then, well, maybe they were just slow to adjust to a new environment. Maybe they weren't clear enough on the guidance they had gotten. Maybe that would've been my own leadership issue that needed addressing.

The military evaluation system is extremely flawed (just Google the name 'Nidal Malik Hasan' on that) but one thing it really gets right is that it's considered a below-the-belt cheap shot to put anything less-than-stellar in an Officer Evaluation Report (OER) unless it has already been addressed via formal, written counseling. In other words, you can't suddenly whack me with a report card that says I'm spelling at below-grade-level and my breath stinks to boot unless you've already sent a few progress reports home saying as much. That may not seem totally 'fair' to the reviewer, and may strike some as a bit too touchy-feely, but it's the same standard I would want used on me if the shoe were on the other foot.

It may also not seem fair that you can make nine great statements about someone and his work, but just one 'constructive' one, and the nine somehow get out-remembered and out-emphasized. But that's an issue and a question for another day. For today, at least, I just know how glad I am to have stayed tight-lipped and to have passed on the chance to vent in the wrong direction, via the wrong channels, and in the wrong forum, on the less-than 5 per cent worth of material I would've had ready from a group and an experience that was more than 95 per cent outstanding, and memorable for all the right reasons.

Ice Cream, Social

2011-06-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

I had a great time last night at the blogger meet up at Gary's Ice Cream. Rather than try to summarize (besides, richardhowe.com has already vlogged this), I'll just pick one point to slap together into a paragraph:

Differing views towards 'Wings Over Lowell': It was interesting to hear people's thoughts about the new wings joint that's going to come into the property recently vacated by the dearly departed Dharma Buns. There seemed to be a pretty stark split among long-time residents, who were almost uniformly pessimistic about Wings' eventual fate, and newer residents (like yours truly) who were a bit more hopeful/optimistic. I'll admit that I don't know the first thing about how difficult it is to run a small business, esp. in the food service industry, and I also haven't lived through enough openings and closings of downtown businesses to be jaded (though since 2008, it seems a bit too easy to rattle off all that's been shuttered around here).

Of course, I wish them the best and look forward to the convenience of being able to order from a place just down the street that can deliver to my home using the oldest known form of transportation. I'd also like to think they can make big inroads with the college kids up at the UML ICC, and can generally improve on DB's business model with higher volume and better pricing.

But as much as I like the idea of wings and all else they'll offer (Lynne was saying the same today over at LiL) the split last night reminded me of the discussions I used to have about the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) with a former neighbor of mine who grew up in Israel, served in '67, and emigrated to the U.S. well into his adult life. Just when I was getting old enough to start reading the New York Times for more than the box scores, I would read stories about peace proposals and excitedly tell him, "Itzhak, did you hear about this new idea?!?! It seems like this is what's finally going to work...Arafat is coming to the table now, too."

He would just sort of grin a little without showing too much emotion, and say something to the effect of, "No, actually I haven't seen the latest developments in the MEPP. It's not worth following too closely, in fact. I'm too familiar with that part of the world to expect any changes, so I'm not holding my breath."

I sort of felt my bubble deflate a bit whenever he said this, but I finally learned to understand what he meant. There is a forest, there are trees, and someone familiar enough with the forest doesn't get too swayed one way or the other about the changes.

Self-aware enough to know how green I can be, I'm still pulling for Wings and really believe it could work if they get the marketing piece down and can tap into all that's available in the city.

Oh, and one of the very cool but totally unexpected results of attending the Ice Cream Summit last night was learning that a new Iraqi-themed restaurant recently opened on Merrimack St. Its name is Babylon, and it's where Mama Lia's used to be. I checked it out today and was able to get a phenomenal chicken/beef shawarma and a fatoosh salad for a reasonable price.

Besides the great food, Babylon has another important but often-overlooked thing going for it:

niche. As much as I love Irish-themed pubs and beauty salons, it's nice to see something downtown that's a complete break from the norm of what's tried-and-true. Sure, there's risk associated with that, but count me in as someone who hopes to become a regular customer...though not 'til February.

The Air Over There

2011-06-09T10:53:00.001-07:00

I just did a Google news search for "Kabul" (yup, I'm one of those type of -holics) because I just couldn't resist.

The first story that popped was about the air quality, or lack thereof, in Afghanistan's capital. That story, linked here, makes the claim that more Afghans die per year in Kabul alone from pollution-related ailments than die from all the violence associated with the war nationwide.

As crazy as that may sound, this is one of those things that needs to be filed in the 'you'd have to experience this to realize how serious it is' drawer. It's a combination of dust, lack of sewage treatment, old cars, and the locals' penchant for, well, burning things, that make the air so bad. The fact that the city is sitting in a geologic *bowl* compounds everything. With mountains all around, there's no outlet for all the contaminants in the air. You can literally taste the air on some days....and as someone who respects the literal use of the word 'literally,' I would swear on a stack of Bibles about that claim.

Thankfully, ground is being broken now on the Deh Sabz District, which by way of comparison to here is sort of like a Hamilton Canal District times a 1 with lots of zeros after it. It's a massive planned residential/business/all-purpose district in an area adjacent to Kabul District but now sitting largely vacant. The idea is sort of modeled on the Shoeless Joe Jackson-in-a-cornfield idea that once the development starts, people will flock to it, which will draw more people, and so on. Right now, so many Afghans flock to Kabul for the simple reason of economics. That puts Afghanistan in league with most of the developing world, which is urbanizing at a breakneck pace.

On one of my first mornings back here, I got up around 8-ish (emphasis on the ish!) and ambled down to Brew'd Awakening. The first thing I noticed was the difference in the air. Kabul's bad air was sort of like the proverbial annoying buzzing sound in a room that you stop noticing until it goes away, and then realize how much it bothered you subconsciously.

Everywhere along Market Street, there were trees and other flora in full bloom. The bright greens which contrasted with the red bricks were a nice break from the drab gray at Camp Phoenix. More importantly, though, I could take a deep lungful of the air anywhere along the route and feel great about it.

The other big change was the quiet. There was a bit of standard vehicle and pedestrian traffic, but it was nothing compared to the constant noise of...constant noise. Here, I'm not being entirely literal. Since taking over my old boss's job unexpectedly back in March, I've kind of felt like one of those silver spheres inside a pinball machine...bouncing around from spot to spot, dealing with whatever it required, and then just frequency hopping over to the next thing while trying to steer clear of the flippers and the gutter. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not referring here to physical danger. I don't, and won't, try to compare my deployment experience to an Infantry Company Commander out by the Pakistani border making life-and-death decisions on a more-than-daily basis.

That said, I could fairly compare it to that of any high-stress white-collar professional putting in north of 90 hours a week without a day off. It's sort of like taking a wind-up toy, spinning it all the way up, but never letting the dial spin back down. I half-jokingly called it the "Night of the Living Dead" phenomenon, because of all the hands reaching out from the ground and all four corners at any moment with an asking (peers and subordinates), or a tasking (from seniors).

The past few days have been absolutely surreal. I don't know if it's because of the joys of seeing my newborn baby thrive in her new home environment, if it's because of the wonderful time that my wife and I have had together without having to adhere to a schedule, or if it's just because things got so much quieter in the sort-of-literal/sort-of-figurative sense of that word. Probably, it's a mix of all three.

I flew home with a buddy of mine who is a Company Commander out in Khost Province, at FOB Salerno. He was mentioning to me that the General who just left command of Regional Command East (Major General Campbell, 101st Commander and, yes, garrison commander of the famous eponymous fort) had been talking out loud about shortening Army tours to just 9 months but scrapping the R & R program entirely. That might have tremendous cost-saving power, but now that I'm seeing all this from the other side of the fence, I'm not so sure how great of an idea that is.

This time right now is nothing short of magical, and it's giving me the effect of a full battery recharge before I head back through the rest of the time deployed.

And the best part of all? By the time I get back, the new boss will have been *in the seat* for nearly a month, and I will be requesting a spot on the overnight shift to help prepare the reports and other analytical work he'll use during the day. It'll be so quiet then that I actually might be able to hear myself think!

Blogger Meet-Up

2011-06-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

The italicized text below is a direct copy-and-paste job from www.richardhowe.com:

Next Thursday (June 9) is our third annual Greater Lowell blogger meet-up. This year we will gather at Gary’s Ice Cream, 131 Gorham Street, East Chelmsford from 6 pm until 8 pm (and we’ll likely stay later). This event is completely informal. There is no agenda, no sign-in table or advance registration. Unless you buy an ice cream (which you absolutely should), attendance costs you nothing. Everyone who is interested in or curious about blogs, blogging and bloggers should attend.

I definitely lucked out on the timing here. I had a great time at the Hot Dog Summit/Hot Dog Diplomacy, missed out completely on Top Donut because I was in Bourne, and now have just a short window of time at home...I'm looking forward to this not only for the chance to talk about the blog world, or to trade Congressman Weiner puns, or to catch up on the past few months, but also because it puts many of the people I'll want to see while I'm home in one place at one time - from an efficiency point of view, that's hard to beat!

When the Baddies Get the Goodies

2011-05-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

So an opportunity for a course recently presented itself. It's a training course that certain soldiers would eventually need for their promotions. There are tons of those courses out there, but what makes this unique is that the major Army training command (TRADOC) realized that there was enough of a critical mass of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan who needed the course to warrant an iteration being run...for three weeks, all the way over here.

Sounds good enough, right?

A lot of the soldiers from one of the busiest, most-tasked sections here (the Engineers) actually need this for their MOS. Several of them tried to sign up, but eventually their OIC (Officer-in-Charge) realized that if they all took it, his section of guys would be as useful as a hockey cleat for a three-week period in the middle of the deployment.

So what did he do? Without many better alternatives, he just told his guys that they could either take that class, or have R & R leave...but not both. Predictably, every single guy took his name off the list.

And who'd that leave? The folks who are already skating by without half the responsibility of the first group (who, ironically, need that course and will eventually have to take it back in the States), and who just want something "cool" to add to their military resume and look even better on paper.

For what it's worth, I'm not involved in any of this directly (I neither needed that course nor signed up for an in-theater junket), but that gives me some credit for objectivity. Objectively speaking, then, situations like this tend to suck.

The busiest, most-engaged people get indirectly *punished,* while the skaters get a chance to break away and then look even better on paper in the end for having done it. This happens on active duty all the time...too often, the folks that find their way into all the non-operational tours wind up with the best professional and civilian educational opportunities, while the deployers just sort of miss out.

As with a lot of things associated with large bureaucracies, I'm not saying I have a better answer. I don't. But when I hear grumbling about this sort of stuff in the chow hall, I can empathize.

Thinking Locally, Drinking Locally

2011-05-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

One of the crown jewels of Kabul's "New Economy" is the Bagrami Industrial Complex, which is located about 7 km east of downtown. Inside the Bagrami Industrial Complex, a huge Coca-Cola bottling plant was opened in 2006. Some residents complained that the $25 million investment, made by an Afghan family mainly based out of Dubai, could've been better directed towards hospitals or schools.

The plant, however, directly employs 300+ people, and indirectly employs a couple thousand more ('indirectly' here refers to the drivers, store owners, streetside vendors, etc.) Those jobs help put Kabul on the road to stability, and that stability will enable the existence of needed institutions to help the city get on its feet and stay there.

I'm glad to know that all the Cokes, Diet Cokes, Sprites, and Fantas in our chow hall are bottled in Bagrami. Not only does the local purchase help stoke the local economy (and because we pay market rate, we're not creating an inflationary burden on Kabulis), but it means we don't have to rely on a long logistical tail to get the products. No ships to load up in the Persian Gulf, no port call in Karachi, and no hazardous trek through the Khyber Pass to get American soldiers and contractors their sweet, nutrition-free drinks.

That's a better way to do business. I know sodas aren't much good to begin with, but I'll also admit I enjoy them from time to time...and it's nice to know they're coming from right down the road.

Up Time

2011-05-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

There's no shortage of comparisons out there between the experiences of deployed soldiers these days and those of past wars and conflicts.

In the past, soldiers had way fewer creature comforts. No unlimited Baskin Robbins, not to mention unlimited food and water, in a chow hall inside a landlocked country with a semi-functional road system, for instance. No wireless Internet to keep up on news from home. No DSN switches at Hanscom for free phone calls home 24/7.

There were also a few, uhh...creature comforts that soldiers enjoyed that are now prohibited by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It might surprise you, but technically no soldier out here can have a sip of beer or look at prurient images.

But this has all been said before. And we've all heard the narratives...the old guys were tougher, the new guys are better-trained. The old guys could get by with less, but the news guys have a broader mission set.

Here's one key difference that's often overlooked: In a break from ALL past conflicts, to include everything from well before the Vikings right through Desert Storm, the experience of a deployed Officer or Sergeant on certain bases, in certain positions, is marked by virtually no 'downtime.'

This has everything to do with connectivity.

Ask any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine from the pre-Global War on Terror (GWOT) era about his or her deployed experience, and you will inevitably be regaled with stories about waiting and boredom. Now, if that person was in a combat zone, that boredom may have been punctuated with brief spasms of violence, but that violence was likely followed by more...boredom. Those periods were necessary times for bonding with fellow teammates, and for the physical healing that comes with sleep, and for giving the ol' adrenal glands a break (the old term 'battle fatigue' actually has to do with what happens when the adrenals are taxed dry).

Years ago, whenever you were moving somewhere, that's basically all you could've been doing. Anytime you were waiting to move somewhere, that's probably all you could've been doing. Once your mission had been wrapped up, your weapons were cleaned, and your patrol debrief was done, there's not a whole lot more you could've done.

These days, not so much. We're wired for sound and effect in our workspaces, our living quarters, and even in our MRAPs. Our leaders understand we're human, and need time to sleep and to workout, but there's a pretty clear expectation of responsiveness to all the various forms of communication that we have. I sit at a desk with three machines (one unclassified, one on an Army network, and one on a NATO network), and inboxes that are hundreds-deep with messages. If all I ever did was try to read and respond to them all, I never would...so I prioritize the most important ones in order to keep my boss and the rest of our staff as informed as possible.

When I do get to leave the FOB (Forward Operating Base), it's just to go to another FOB. Still, that's such a welcome relief from the monotony of Camp Phoenix's gray hues that I welcome the chance. Leaving also means reporting on the early side of early (even a 0900 departure means lined up and ready at 0815), which I always enjoy because it's the only real downtime I might get for days -- I literally have to be there, but there's nothing else I could be doing than just standing or sitting around. (I have purposely avoided carrying a cell phone out here, although most of our Officers do).

I won't ever, ever, ever, ever (did I mention ever?) play the who-has-it-worse game when I realize there are soldiers out in places like Kunar and Helmand Provinces who get into near-daily firefights and have to fear booby traps and underground bombs at every turn. What I will say, however, is that endless 12, 14, 16, and 18-hour days while constantly in an "up" state of readiness takes its own sort of toll in its own sort of special way.

Telecommuting to War?

2011-05-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'll take the Captain Obvious Award for pointing this out, but the Obama Administration is under serious pressure to: (1) save money; and (2) bring down troop numbers in Afghanistan to show 'progress.'

One innovative way this is happening involves the movement of certain headquarters-y, administrative-ish units out of the theater. That simultaneously accomplishes the goals of reducing the BOG number (Boots on Ground) while saving on the tremendous costs associated with the logistical tail involved in supplying a landlocked country with 19th-century infrastructure.

If you can believe it, the "dumb math" shows the cost per soldier here is more than $1.1 million per year (I call that dumb math because it's a crude calculation of costs divided by soldiers, which involves a lot of fixed costs associated with equipment and infrastructure)...it depends who you ask but the marginal cost per soldier is closer to half a mil when you count base pay and bennies (with higher margins for Reservists and Guard, who wouldn't normally draw federal base pay from the Pentagon), incentive pays, food/fuel/water costs, other contracted administrative support, etc.

But anyway, if you put some of those headquarters folks in friendly Gulf countries, you still get the long deployment days out of 'em (they're pulled away from the distractions and creature comforts of home), but you save huge amounts of money by reducing that logistical tail. Because so much data can move so quickly and easily over e-mail, voice comms, and even video teleconferences, its effect on operational capabilities may be minimal or even nil.

Once you factor out the reduced force protection costs (somehow averaged out per soldier...let's just pretend there'd be a way to do this), the decreased logistical convoys, the ease of moving goods across water instead of land, etc. let's just be real fast and loose and say you'd chop the per-soldier per-year cost in half.

For a 200-person staff headquarters, you're now talking about $50 million. Multiply that once or twice over, and soon you're talking about real money!

It wouldn't work for our unit (we run the bases in Kabul, so a lot of it necessitates base-to-base movement and physical involvement in projects), but for certain other units it really makes sense. It could even work in the U.S., but the trick would be that you'd have to move people far enough away from their homes for the deployment rotation period to where they wouldn't constantly be distracted.

The Tough Conversation

2011-05-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Senator John Kerry swung through here today and stopped to eat at our chow hall. It was a pretty neat experience.

I got to shake his hand, and then our Commander said, "Captain Page used to be a Navy Officer."

Senator Kerry then had to ask, "So why'd you leave?"

"I wanted to be closer to the action."

His comeback: "But c'mon, you could've stayed on to catch bin Laden."

I'll admit that was pretty quick. I knew he had to make his way through the room so I just said, "Uhh...I guess I should've gone to BUD/S, sir."

The whole visit was standard stuff. The 181 Infantry Commander handed him a plaque, and then our Commander gave him a decorative thingy, and he said a few words and left. The most interesting part for me was having dinner with James Traub (NYT, Foreign Policy).

But the most interesting part of what JFK said to us was about how he was about to head back to Pakistan. He was off on his way to some heated negotiations. Besides our need for Pakistan to work to "drain its own swamp" of extremist elements, we also rely on them for transshipment of nearly 70% of our materiel for Operation ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF).

But here's the thing -- since 2008, NATO has steadily brough that number down (it used to be 85%). It's more expensive this way, but we can bring cargo through the Med, and up into the Black Sea to be offloaded in Georgia and then ferried across the Caspian (before then going from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan because Turkmenistan still won't play with us). Alternatively, we can offload at Riga in the Baltic and then move it through Russia via rail. Yes, I said Russia. NATO goods through Russia.

It's great that we've developed this Northern Distribution Network to wean ourselves off total reliance on Karachi -- that strengthens us tremendously at the negotiating table, and helps people like Senator Kerry when they go to Islamabad to try to extract concessions.

Reading the Tea Leaves

2011-05-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

"While no decisions on numbers have been made, in my view we will be well-positioned to begin drawing down some U.S. and coalition forces this July even as we redeploy others to different areas of the country," Gates told reporters.

No one really knows what this means.

It definitely has a lot of people excited, though, and it's got the rumor mill flying.

I'm not reading too far into any of this -- the troop reductions have been talked about for over a year now, so I'm not expecting anything too sudden or precipitous. There's quite a bit of speculation going on in Kabul now, though.

Rolling in the Rhino

2011-05-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I got to head to the Embassy via the Rhino. The Rhino, by the way, is an uparmored bus that's operated by a FLE (Forward Logistics Element) and flanked by MRAP trucks (Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected).

Taking the Rhino meant being subject to the whims of the FLE's schedule, so even though the meeting was only an hour, the entire journey lasted 12 hours from door to door. I wound up getting an impromptu bus tour of Kabul and saw everything from the crowded bazaars to the King's and Queen's Palaces near Camp Julien and Camp Dubs.

One of the things that stood out was that once it started getting dark, there were no women to be found...anywhere. During the day, it's common to see women walking around Kabul -- sometimes in groups, sometimes alone...and ranging in dress from anywhere from a full burqa to the chador with face exposed to just a hijab. Sometimes within the confines of the 'Green Zone' you might see an Afghan woman walking around without even a hijab. Either way, I thought it was remarkable that after dark, even while the bazaars and streetcorners bustled with cars, bicycles, pedicabs, and endless pedestrians, there was literally not a single female in sight.

One other funny anecdote from the day...a huge portion of our daytime trip actually just involved Specialist Brown and me waiting for the Rhino to come pick us up to take us back to Camp Phoenix. We weren't sure exactly when it would come back to get us, so we played it safe and waited in front of the Embassy for what turned out to be hours.

That might sound frustrating to a lot of people, but remember, everything is relative. More than one State Dept. person came out to ask if we were okay/what were we doing, and we explained. When asked why our spirits were so high, we basically told them that neither of us had really just sat and relaxed like this in months. Yes, we were doing nothing, but there really was nothing we could do...moving meant taking the risk of missing the bus.

I've caught myself feeling less wound-up today, and I honestly think it has something to do with the fact that I got to decompress a bit and *just sit there* yesterday.

The Trouble With 'They'

2011-05-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

"The only way three people can keep a secret...is if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin

I've been in a few meetings lately where questions have arisen about whether 'they' knew about UBL's whereabouts.

The 'they,' of course, is some veiled reference to either the Pakistani federal government, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the Pakistani military, or some portion of the intersection in the Venn Diagram thereof.

If you read this blog regularly, you might already know that conspiracy theories and references to the all-powerful or all-evil but never-defined 'they' are two of my favorite things to pick apart. First, I'll repeat what I say every time I hear some nonsense about how Flight 77 wound up in field in the Midwest where the passengers' voices were recorded bidding farewells to their loved ones because it was really a missile that hit the Pentagon (because we all know that when airliners crash into hardened structures they ought to leave neat imprints of their fuselage AND their wings), never mind how the timeline on that would've worked: conspiracy theories are the playground of the pseudo-intellectual because they're all the fun without the work.

If you scratch your chin and break into an all-knowing Cheshire cat grin as you explain that 9/11 had to have been an inside job because 'look who benefited' you get to sound really smart without having to even break a sweat in the stacks at the library, but the really HARD part would be figuring out how these conspirators could have completely invented the storylines of the lives of 19 men, who all had families, friends, and identities stretching back decades prior. They must have been at this for generations! Hearing Rosie O'Donnell and Charlie Sheen talk about controlled demolitions and burning steel is quick and easy, but stopping to read William Langewiesche's account of how the towers fell actually takes time and effort...no fun in that!

I see some of the same with the UBL reactions. It seems a bit more sophisticated and worldly to offer your take on the Pakistani government, or the ISI's blind eye to terror, to support the idea that 'they' just had to know than it is to just say, "Uhh...maybe he just kinda lived in that house." (although props are duly noted to Kad Barma, who suggested as much in a comment about 'hiding in plain sight.')

Want to know the 'real' truth?

He really did just kinda live in that house. I'm not saying I have any special insider knowledge of that, but let's go back to the quote at the top of this entry.

UBL was the MOST-WANTED man in the history of the world.

I could repeat that for emphasis but I don't see the need...besides, I'm exhausted and need to sleep.

If you lived in Abbottabad, and you knew, or even suspected, that THAT MAN was your neighbor, you would tell someone. That person would tell someone. Gawkers might start to take a look at the house. All of that attention would be quickly noticed. And then guess what?

He might move! He certainly had the resources, right?

It's not much different for 'Pakistani intelligence.' They may have some training in how to keep a tight lip, but let's not forget that Pakistani Intel Officers are subject to the same whims of human nature that we are. Put aside whether they do or don't sympathize with UBL or other extremists. That's just way too big to keep to yourself. Humans have developed over many thousands of years with certain inherent traits, and one of them is to share important information with others. You can call it news, or current events, or gossip, or whatever, but it's one of the most central things that all societies, genders, races, ages, etc. hold in common.

If someone knows where the most-wanted man in the world lives, then more people know. And if more people know, then even more people know.

UBL may have been able to trust one or two people to run his errands...beyond that, he kept family nearby but (wisely) offered them no outlets to the larger world.

I take the risk of sounding naive and unworldly by stating so boldly that the Pakistani government had no widespread, or even narrowspread, knowledge of UBL's whereabouts, but that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

Rowing Well, Towards the Light

2011-05-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

So I thought things might ease up a bit after the first couple weeks.

They haven't.

I already kind of explained how a lot of the days go by here in my last post, so I won't rehash.

What I will do, though, is explain an awesome Army policy: R and R leave.

Even though the actual deployment time here comes out to 10+ months (that's the full year minus the time at Fort Hood), every soldier gets 15 days 'free' (i.e. non-chargeable) leave during the deployment.

Here's the even better part: The clock doesn't start ticking until the soldier gets to his or her leave destination. So if it takes 4-5 days to actually get from Kabul to Logan (it sometimes takes that long because of the delays at the various military transit hubs), and another 4-5 days to get back, the R and R time away from the deployed duty station winds up being closer to a month.

For me, R and R is just a few weeks away (I checked the 'I don't care' box, so they gave me one of the first available dates...most people preferred to break the deployment up more evenly). The icing on the cake is the knowledge that when I get back from R and R, the Lt. Colonel coming out here to be the 'primary' will have already arrived, and I can fall back a bit from the spotlight as his deputy.

I know the endless days mean no time for the PT I wish I could do more of. It also means I've mostly given up on writing back to personal e-mails, reading other blogs, or even doing the comments-to-the-comments that I started doing here as long as I've been writing, and wish other bloggers did more of, too.

However, my nearness to R and R is what keeps me, to paraphrase Ben-Hur again, rowing well.

On a clear day (and there aren't too many of those here!) the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is almost in view.

A Rare Break From All of That

2011-05-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

So right now there is a scheduled power outage in the building where I work, so I am on what's basically a forced break.

I ain't complaining. This is the first time I've left my office before 8 p.m., and it feels awesome.

There are many good and bad aspects of what I do, which I'll get into with future entries, but one thing that sort of sucks is that there isn't any time built in anywhere for relaxing, unless that comes at the direct expense of time spent sleeping.

I wake up every day at 0445 to go PT. That usually involves a 40-50 minute 'run-walk' on the treadmill at the base gym. I then squeeze in a set or two of weights before hurrying back to my half-CONEX box of a home and then a shower and shave before breakfast. After breakfast, I'm at my desk anywhere from 0700 to 0800 (lately it's been closer to the latter) ready to work.

And then it starts. I jokingly refer to 'it' as "The Night of the Living Dead" because I picture all the hands reaching up from the ground grabbing at me. As a principal Officer on a staff section, there are lots of meetings to attend, pre-meetings to attend beforehand, meetings about meetings, and sometimes even post-meeting meetings. Then there are all the random 'pop-up' targets throughout the day that suck time away. There are drop-ins. There are phone calls. There are inquiries. Being on a staff means answering a lot of RFIs (Requests for Information). This process basically continues until somewhere roughly around 2100, at which point I realize I'm exhausted and head back to try to get some sleep before starting over the next day.

The couple of times that I've gotten off base so far have been great not only because they've broadened my horizons and knowledge of Kabul, but also because they've snapped me out of the 'Groundhog Day' effect of being here. If I were able to get away more, I would. The other thing I wish I could do more is really think about everything going on, rather than just react to the proverbial alligators closest to the canoe.

Thankfully, all that will change soon. It's a long story that I won't get into (no, really, that one I mean) but while we were at Fort Hood my boss got 'sacked' because of an alleged something-or-other. As a result, I'm now doing what I used to do as well as what he used to do. The Army is bringing in a Field Grade replacement (a Lieutenant Colonel, in fact) soon, so I'll be freed up from nearly all of the interminable meetings that populate our 'battle rhythm.'

I might even get to be a vampire.

What that would mean is that I'd work an overnight shift where all the daytime distractions would be gone. I could actually have time to think. Either that, or I'd be freed up to do more of the liaison work that I love with all of our other American and international parters here.

Daydreaming about that is what gets me through the endless days now.

May: Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Month

2011-05-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

May is Head and Neck Cancer Awareness month, and you can get a free screening next Friday (Friday week, that is) by checking out this site. As I point out here in this short clip, the best thing going in the fight against cancer is early detection.

It took me a while to go the ER, which eventually led me to a dentist, which eventually led me to an oral surgeon, which eventually led me to Mass Eye and Ear. When I think about the whole experience, what I'm most grateful for is the fact that I had access to the dentists at Hanscom, and then to the oral surgeon in Winchester, who could reach out to the pathologists at Wright-Patt, and then get the referral to a world-class facility like MEEI. If I lived in conditions like those of the people I met two days ago in Kabul, I wouldn't be writing about the experience now.

The doctors and staff at MEEI took incredibly good care of me, and actually went to extraordinary medical lengths to save my career by removing enough lymph nodes to conclusively rule out metastasis and thereby spare me from radiation. They also went to bat for me when I explained how much I wanted to come on this deployment, and they found a way to make it work with the check-up schedule.

Like I said when I first blogged about all of this, I don't want to become "cancer guy." I'm not against yellow bracelets, kitschy pink products about "saving ta-tas," or even the gratuitous use of the word 'survivor' (aren't we all?), but that stuff just isn't me. I don't even think I've dropped the 'C-bomb' here on the site since October.

Still, I'm not going to miss a chance to open my time, heart, or pocketbook to the people who develop cutting-edge technology that saves lives... I mean, your forearm turning into your tongue...who can believe it? I almost feel like I've moved so far along in terms of speech and appearance that I sometimes 'forget' the whole thing happened. It did, though, and as Fate would have it, my daily commute for the next couple years will have me walking right past MEEI in the morning and evening. I don't have to dwell, or even stop my feet from shuffling across the Longfellow Bridge, but for at least a split-second when I look up at the monolith hovering over Charles St., the strongest emotion I'll feel will be gratitude.

Kabul Dispatch: The Beat Goes On

2011-05-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the chow hall this morning, rushing through my breakfast after barely having slept, and worried about how I would prepare for all the morning's meetings, when our Operations Officer came by my table to say that UBL had been killed. I keep telling myself I won't overreact to rumors that originate here in Kabul, so I turned to the Sergeant with me and said, "That might be the case...but I'm still finishing breakfast."

I tried to make good on that, too.

After a couple minutes, though, I realized my appetite was gone, and I darted for a TV. Sure enough, it was true, and I felt like things had *sort of* come full circle on the event that indirectly drew me into the military and defined the last 7 years of my life. Obviously, it was emotional.

During our 1100 update briefing to the boss, our Colonel turned to the Operations Officer and me, saying, "Greg, Mark...throw your battle-rattle on and be out in the square at 1300. We're doing a dismounted patrol."

At 1300, off we went. There were ultimately 16 of us who went out, and we patrolled up part of Jalalabad Highway and then into a nearby village. Here was my first reaction to the morning's news:

No one seemed to really care.

The cars on the main road still sped by (though I couldn't tell if some of the horn-honking was celebratory or just, well, horn-honking). People smiled and waved, which was cool, but there were no "bin Laden" references flying around. There were a few kids who basically joined the patrol for a couple miles, and trudged right along with us in their sandals and raggedy clothes. One kid even pointed to my "Yankee Division" patch and said, in perfect, unaccented American English, "Massachusetts, Boston," as he high-fived me. As was confirmed by the Infantry Captain who came along with us, and has spent the past 8 months at Camp Phoenix, that made this similar to just about every other dismounted patrol he had ever seen.

As for our command, the UBL capture lifted everyone's spirits for a while, but not enough to even slightly interrupt the staggering workload related to what we do (running the bases in Kabul involves a lot of contracts, construction, and logistics).

I think concerns about insurgent or terrorist blowback are a bit much. Here's why:

(1) Insurgent groups who ALREADY hate us aren't going to hate us more because we killed their leader/figurehead/icon. Just look at a capabilities/intentions matrix. Nothing really changed for any local insurgents who like to shoot rockets at US bases. The incentive structure of opium smugglers, kidnappers, or crooked politicians in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else is now no different. I don't see how this helps recruiting, either...if anything, I think it HURTS recruiting for these guys because of the message that says, "You can run, you can hide, but if America is determined enough to find you, she will."

(2) People who DIDN'T already hate us aren't going to start hating us because we killed our most infamous sworn enemy. In fact, they might say it made lots of sense to do what we did...a pinprick strike, as opposed to carpet bombing from a B-52, and a 'burial at sea' as opposed to corporeal desecration or the creation of a 'martyr's shrine.' Seems like the most humane, sensible option for that sort of thing.

Judging by the way a bunch of Afghans and Americans seemed to be reacting, or not reacting, in Kabul today, I'd say for a little while we'll be able to walk with our chins up a little higher and our chests out a little further. But mostly, we'll just move on with whatever we were doing.

I wouldn't expect much different anywhere else -- not even in Kandahar or Karachi.

What They're Reading in Reading

2011-04-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

Arrrghhh...okay I admit I couldn't help myself with that title. I tried not to, really.

Here's a neat piece about the Yankee Brigade Commander thanking the town of Reading for the sweatshirts and the send-off ceremony back in February. The picture was taken in Patriot's Square, and yes, that's the French flag at half-mast in the background (see yesterday's entry).

Freedom-Fried Humor

2011-04-29T11:03:00.001-07:00

The photo you see here was taken at Kabul International Airport (that's KAIA, because we'd never call it KIA) on the day we touched ground. Everyone is smiling just because after all the work-up, and then the long layover in Krygyzstan, we were finally there.

Yesterday, all of our unit got our right-shoulder patches (colloquially referred to as the "Combat Patch," even though it doesn't require actual combat, just serving in a combat zone.

The ceremony was a combined one, as our unit also used the opportunity to present some of the French soldiers with whom we serve here with some tokens of friendship to commemorate the storied linkages between the Massachusetts militia and the French military. As you might imagine, they go way back since before the United States was, well, just a bunch of rebellious colonies. Our slogan "First to Fight" has to do with the 26th Yankee Division commander deciding to bypass Army bureaucracy in 1918 and charter a ship with his own money to bring his soldiers to France. Our old slogan, "Ready to Move," dates back to the Yankee Division's service under Patton's Third Army in World War II's European Theater.

Since arriving here just a couple weeks ago, I've already noticed the French flag at half-mast in "Patriot's Square" (main courtyard area at Camp Phoenix). It was because one of their guys died in the Surobi District of Kabul Province, one of the worst places in the theater.

Fighting under a NATO mission.

Because the U.S. was attacked by extremists nearly ten years ago.

When I stop and think about how many French soldiers make up Task Force Lafayette, and the contributions they make to this effort, it reminds me of how stupid some of the reflexive anti-French humor that makes it rounds in the States sometimes can be.

I already did this to the best degree possible, but especially now that I've been here long enough to work epaule-a-epaule with a group of French soldiers, I am going to try to nip that knee-jerk France-bashing stuff in the bud whenever possible.

Eikenberry's Guy

2011-04-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

The other day at the US Embassy in Kabul I bumped into a guy who works as the Strategic Intel Analyst for Ambassador Eikenberry.

"That's got to be a tough job," I said. "Between his command time here, and his post-Army career as a diplomat, he probably knows more about Afghanistan than just about anyone else."

His response was interesting, and it's stuck with me since he said it: "Actually, Eikenberry is one of the easiest principals I've ever worked for. Yes, the guy is a near-genius, former General, fluent Chinese speaker, area subject matter expert, etc. but all that adds up to mean he's got nothing to prove."

It's like, the guy is so accomplished that insecurity isn't even an afterthought for him. He asks questions each afternoon to his Strategic Intel guy, and that guy (an Army Major) stays up all night researching and answering them so he can turn something back around to his boss. At which point the Major then rests -- lather, rinse, repeat for a year.

That sounds like an awesome set-up. One of the quirkier aspects of being on a staff is that Field-Grade Officers sometimes like to see if they can "trump" or "punk" someone by having, or claiming to have, some piece of knowledge first.

It's enough to make this Company-Grade say, "Good for you, but who cares?"

As much as I complain about Staff Life, though (and yes, I'm giving myself a free pass on that one...all year long) I promise never to lose perspective of what it might mean to be operating at a platoon or squad level somewhere in Kunar, Helmand, or Kandahar. That's a whole different type of stress and worry, and no, I wouldn't rush to make the trade.

Tapdancing on the Battlefield

2011-04-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back online.

Since we got here, I've been living in temporary housing, but now that our predecessor unit left, I'm in a single room...and have Internet access.

The General of the unit we replaced made an excellent point the other day. In a meeting, one of our guys mentioned a VIP visit (either a visiting Four-Star or a Congressman from the States) and said how we'd have "someone there to cover down."

"Not so fast," was his reply. "No one cares about you and your staff. They're visiting to see the ANA trainers...not you."

He went on to say a little bit more, and I hope our key staffers were listening. He went on to explain the importance of knowing your role and scope on a large, mature battlespace that's been functioning for nearly ten years now.

Kabul is a complicated place. There are more foreign militaries running around than I can name (we've got the Turks, the French, and the Bulgarians, just for starters), and they've all got their "lanes in the road." Then you've got the alphabet soup of the myriad three-letter government agencies alongside all the NGOs. Throw the Afghan organizations and their security forces into that mix, and you've got quite an eclectic stew.

What does this all mean? Now is a great time not to be "all stick, no rudder." Before taking any initiative, two important questions to ask concern footprint and demand signal.

As to the footprint question, it means checking first to see whether someone is already doing what you're trying to do, and what level of effort (and personnel) is optimal. More is not always better.

As to the demand signal question, it's important to stop and ask whether something is really needed or wanted. Maybe the local neighborhood you're trying to *engage* would just rather prefer NOT to be visited by the big guys with the green suits and the shades, thank you very much.

Settling In

2011-04-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

The past week has been kind of a whirlwind of travel. From North Fort Hood to Manas AB outside of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan...by way of Bangor, ME and Leipzig, Germany. And then onto Kabul, where I'm 5800 feet up, jetlagged, and disoriented by the 8.5-hour time difference from home.

Along the way, my iPhone just flat-out died on me, so out went my plans to take a single photo each day and write about it. For OPSEC reasons, that might not've been a brilliant idea, anyway. Still, there's plenty that can be said, so once I have a camera going again I would rather show you than try to tell you about the breathtaking views I have of the *foothills* of the Hindu Kush each morning when I wake up and walk to work.

It's still not really our show yet, as we're still undergoing what's known as the RIP/TOA period (Relief in Place/Transfer of Authority). As with any other RIP/TOA, there's a begrudging respect the two units have for each other, mixed with the excitement that the outgoing unit has to be headed back for home and loved ones, while the incoming unit bides its time until the "takeover," just waiting to show how much better they will be able to execute the mission.

True to form, we're probably living up to all those cliches. And I *really do* think we're going to do it better than they did - though somewhere in the back of my mind I know those words will be coming from someone else next year, and we'll be the subjects.

So it goes. Either way, I'm just happy to have Annual Training, the Mobilization Station, and the multi-day travel event squarely in the rearview mirror. Tomorrow will be my third full day "in country," and there's so much to do and learn (today started at 0400 and it's just wrapping up now at 2234) that I sort of lose focus on the fact that there are things in the world going on beyond this base, city, and nation.

With a Patrol Cap tipped somewhere towards Ben-Hur, this is the time to "row well, and live."

The 1st and the 15th

2011-04-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

There are tons of unknowns in the military. You might think you're joining the Guard to do Civil Affairs, but get shunted off to Staff Work. The Staff Work might be really interesting at times, but your role may chafe at you. It might even think about making you transfer to the Reserves to an actual Civil Affairs Unit. The mission might change, and then change back again, all before you even left your home state.

You might think you're bound for the safest place in the country, but then read about coordinated suicide attacks on the post. The bottom line to all this is that you just don't know.

One of the few certainties, however, is that on the 1st and 15th of every month, you're going to get a direct deposit sent your way by Uncle Sam. That's important, because with automatic bill payments these days, a big chunk of that might be needed for the real humdingers like the mortgage, the insurance, and the utilities. And one of the few upsides to a deployment -- for the soldier and for his/her dependents -- is that the incentive pays make that twice-monthly check just a bit sweeter. It's really one of the few saving graces, and it's even the reason that many unemployed or semi-employed Guardsmen and Reservists jump on deployment after deployment.

So when we heard today that the whole "1st and 15th" thing might get interrupted, people were pretty much shocked. I have no idea whether it'll really happen, or whether this is all some kind of media/political stunt. My days are too jam-packed to follow politics, so I won't even attempt to go there. On a way more practical, personal level, I'm glad for one thing -- even though I have a good chunk of consumer debt to pay off, I didn't liquidate my *rainy day* fund to do it. Some financial advisors and writers start all their screeds with, "Pay the cards off first."

I think that's bad advice.

The FIRST thing anyone should do, if possible, is build a six-month cushion that could soften the blow posed by a sudden layoff, illness, or "black swan" scenario like a natural disaster or government shutdown. THEN worry about the cards. If the government shutdown really happens, I really may miss some paychecks. But the good news is that all the money will come back to me down the road. I'm not really sweating that part. More important, I'm not sweating the impact this could have on the two souls back home who depend on me to provide for them. The piggy bank is there, and the hammer is at the ready.

Is Rote Always a Four-Letter Word?

2011-04-06T19:02:00.000-07:00

So we're in a bit of a holding pattern right now, somewhere between here and there. One of the things I'm making my guys do before we head into country is to be able to identify all of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and all of Kabul's 15 districts on an otherwise blank map with only the political boundaries drawn in.

It's one of those *homework assignments* that's sort of fallen out of fashion these days in the Education world (yes, that was a big 'E'), and, by extension, the rest of society. Somehow, someone got it in his or her head that "old-school" teaching methods involving memorization were bad, and then out went the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

What did we get as a result?

A more ignorant society, for one. Of course, education should force people to think critically and to develop higher-level thinking skills. It shouldn't be all about mindless recitation or memorization. But guess what? Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Think about how much we laugh when Jay Leno does "Jaywalking" and shows how few people can identify Canada on a map, or name the Prime Minister of the UK. Yet at the same time, many in Education resist any teaching method that would require students to identify those things in a straightforward way. They say that Education should be all about deep thinking instead.

Here's a major problem with that: People are always thinking. They don't necessarily require a school, or even a teacher, to help them with this. Sometimes, "just knowing stuff" provides a pretty good foundation for that thinking. That's why I was pretty thrilled when I was home on pass and saw my 1st-grade cousins starting to be able to pick out some states, including Massachusetts, on a U.S. map. It may not be worthy of Rousseau and Descartes, but having a clue where they are in relation to everything else is a great first step.

When we stray too far from valuing knowledge, I think we're in trouble.

King Star Coffee on Market: Your New Third Place?

2011-04-03T07:16:00.000-07:00

Walking around downtown Lowell on this beautiful early spring Sunday morning, just before I get ready to head back to Texas tomorrow and then "over there" later this week, I was reminded of the Rip Van Winkle effect that one experiences every time he goes away for an extended period and then tries to readjust to the old surroundings, not sure what exactly to expect. (As a kid, even a week away at basketball camp in Syracuse was enough to make me fascinated with 'what had changed' during my seeming eternity away).
Even though I was only gone for six weeks (minus the paternity leave, but that was almost all in Boston), my sense of time was very warped and it felt like much longer. I hadn't noticed much new at first but as I looped back from Goodyear and the Diner I noticed a storefront sign for "King Star Coffee" nestled in between Athenian and the Dubliner.

My initial review here is positive - I am sitting at my kitchen table enjoying the Red Tea that Kin Wing Wong tells me is all the rage in Hong Kong, and I noticed that the cheap eats (the snacks and other food items were like a couple bucks a pop) and the free Wi-Fi make for an appealing potential "Third Place" for downtowners and others who like to hang out on Market St. Especially since the UML ICC set up shop downtown, Brew'd has become hard to find a place to stand in, let alone a place to sit on, on busy weekend mornings...I could definitely see King Star finding a foothold as an alternative for a slightly older crowd who prefers a quieter milieu for their morning caffeine and news fixes. At the same time, the unpretentious, low-cost/no-frills atmosphere may attract a lot of the bubble-tea drinking crowd looking for authenticity downtown.

Hours are 8 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.

Validated!

2011-04-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm coming up for air.

I went "radio silent" here on the blog for the last week-and-a-half, give or take, as we were finishing our Culminating Training Exercise (CTE), which validated the unit for deployment to Afghanistan.

To put it succinctly, it sucked. Imagine trying to do your job, but with people standing around you with clipboards constantly asking you what you're doing, and why. And then demanding more reports from you. And then asking you why you haven't accomplished task x and task y. But you would have accomplished each had they not been there in the first place to pester you!

I've heard it said a few times that the purpose of the MOBSTA (that's 'mobilization station' in longhand) is to make you want to deploy to the war zone). If that's true, then it definitely did its job -- I know that once I get 'over there' I'll be able to get into my routine, do my job, and organize my guys in the way that I see fit.

Right now, we've got a four-day pass. We're one of the very last units to get this...one version of the story says that's because of the need to condense training requirements, but another, more informed version says that the Army doesn't want to give the 4 "free" days to Reservists and Guardsmen just before deployment because of all the trouble that results from cooping people up for 2-3 months, and then letting them run free for three days before the big plane ride.

Either way, as I sit here typing this from Gray Army Airfield (GRK) in Killeen, I'm grateful to have the time off.

I'll spend as much time as possible with Ratriey and Lily.

I may try to blog a time or two, and might even try to make a dent in the growing "unread items" side of my inbox. Catching up on some sleep would have to score higher on the priority list, though.

For right now, though, I'm not really thinking about much -- just glad to be able to un-fog the brain for a little while and try to relax a bit.

The Tao of Lorne Michaels

2011-03-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

On the plane ride back to Texas a couple weeks ago, I caught a great New Yorker piece about Tina Fey. In it, she talked about starting out at Saturday Night Live and meeting Lorne Michaels.

During a particularly stressful week in which she had to vet a large number of proposed comedy sketches, pare the best ones down to appropriate timeframes (while also satisfying the egos of the other writers and actors), she turned to Lorne Michaels and asked, "Does the show go on because it's ready?"

"No," he said. "The show goes on because it's 11:30."

Such a great quote there that I had to go for the bold-italics-underline trifecta. It's a wonderful thing to keep in mind during stressful times.

This is such a time.

As a Brigade staff VERY close to heading overseas, we have tasked ourselves to exhaustion. As a key member of that staff, I am working at an unsustainable pace and trying to manage far more tasks in the day than there are hours in which to accomplish them.

The Lorne Michaels quote has been a huge help. I've had to brief the Colonel twice in the past two days on some heavy-duty subjects with virtually no preparation time. Rather than just be a ball of stress, I just acknowledged that the products would never be as good as I would've liked, or if I were back in Reading and had all week to prepare 30 minutes' worth of slides about Kabul.

I knew I wouldn't be ready. But I knew the show would go on because it was 1700 yesterday, or 1600 today, or whatever other "time hack" had been put out.

The other stress management technique I've been falling back on is just maintaining focus on the immediate task at hand. That's a positive step, because one hour of concentrated, uninterrupted work may be enough to cross that entire task off the to-do list. There's no reason to fret about everything else on the plate at the time -- all of that can wait.

One last note I'll make about stress: I've observed here that as certain people become increasingly stressed, their listening skills decrease proportionally. It may be because their patience diminishes, because the stress clouds their thinking, or who-knows-what-else. More than once in the past week, though, someone has asked me a clear, direct question to which I or the Master Sergeant with whom I work has given a clear, direct answer.

Whether it's because the answer wasn't what the questioner had hoped to hear, or because the questioner was just too frazzled by the day's events to take the time to listen, it became very obvious to both of us (either immediately or several hours later) that the person asking the question hadn't listened to the response.

At which point the question was repeated.

And then the initial answer was repeated.

That's what stress can sometimes do.

Threat Detection

2011-03-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

"On this crap desert highway / hot wind in my face / Everything smells just like low tide / Garbage all over the place / Up ahead in the distance / A dead donkey eaten by dogs / I swear there's a wire coming out of his butt / leading over behind some logs" -- opening lines to "Hotel Camp Fallujah", sung to the tune of Hotel California

We spent the past couple days doing counter-IED training, where we got to work in small teams during mounted patrols (in a HMMWV) and dismounted patrols (that's a really fancy way to say 'walking').

When I saw the dead animal by the side of the road, I knew to be suspicious...and sure enough, if you look closely at the picture, you'll see the wire leading off into the brush beside the road.

Overall, the training was excellent. Today I had the hair-raising experience of trying to do crowd control in a foreign country (with role players, of course), but not wanting to be too aggressive by even training a gun barrel on the crowd or sending a warning shot into the air (they were blank rounds, in case you're wondering). Of course, one of them detonated a simulated "suicide vest" and everything sort of went from bad to worse, quickly. It was definitely enough to make me second-guess the original *kid gloves* approach.

Finishing that training sort of marks a milestone in this process, because the next couple weeks are going to be more purely staff work. I enjoy the field stuff, and don't really mind the staff stuff, but what has been really taxing lately has been the whole burning-the-candle-at-both-ends deal: The field from 0800-1700, and then never-ending meetings and briefing requirements. I'm about to leave the workstation now, and it's pushing 0100. I'll be back up after a quick battery recharge to start working on briefing slides with other staffers.

I've heard it said many times before that you're supposed to hate the mobilization station...it's all set up that way so that you start wishing you could be deployed overseas. A lot of the people in our unit who have deployed before realize that the daily schedule overseas is actually less stressful and taxing, so I'm hearing the laments all the time now about, "Can't we just get on the plane?"

The People That You Meet / They're Jamming in the Street

2011-03-17T19:17:00.000-07:00

Although this phenomenon was first reported while I was on leave by Lost in Afghanistan, I couldn't help but make this the highlight of my first post since returning to the blogosphere after a need-to-catch-up-with-work hiatus.

Someone has taken it upon himself/herself to go around North Fort Hood spraypainting a likeness of Lionel Ritchie, and then the name of a hit Lionel Ritchie song below the image, as seen here on the plastic Jersey barrier pictured.

Instantly, I have to give credit to whoever this person is, as they're scoring quite high not only on the gutsy scale, but also the originality scale. As I might say these days when saluting, "Hooah." Thanks for bringing a big smile to my face every time I pass one of these things.

In other news, a recent personnel shift has brought me from being the Assistant to a Key Player (which is great fun because I can do a lot of the meaningful work but then duck out of all the interminable staff meetings), to being an Actual Key Player. No more hiding behind Dad when the neighborhood bullies come around. No more free time, either. Right now a 16-hour day would seem like a vacation.

Still, I'm finding ways wherever I can to make use of RAPOTs (Random-Ass Pockets of Time), such as the 10-minute breaks that come up on the hour when we're doing classes, briefings, or training lanes. It's push-ups, pull-ups, and flutter kicks wherever possible to stay in reasonable shape, with my nifty iPhone Dari apps sprinkled in here and there for good measure as well.

Thankfully, I can blog from my *office* so my lack of reliable barracks Internet isn't a problem. If you've e-mailed or called me in the last month or so, I know I haven't been up to speed (I would say *sorry* but try to reserve use of that term to only the strictest of circumstances), but ironically my life should become easier once we get "over there" and fall in on a more predictable, 12-on/12-off 24-hour cycle.

Golfing with the Boss

2011-03-09T07:05:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of "golfing with the boss" jokes out there, but I've always understood the basic premise to be that it's a no-win situation.

If your boss loves to golf, and you're a hack, then you wind up looking like a dope. But if your boss loves to golf, and you're a 1-handicap on the back nine, then you run the risk of making him feel insecure. So you can't be too good or too bad.

It's the same reason you should never go to a gentleman's club with your brother-in-law. Not into it, and you're a square. Too into it, and you're suspect.

I bumped into Kad Barma the other day, and we were saying the same thing about "mandatory fun" events with co-workers (i.e. cocktail hours, pub crawls, etc.) If you're a teetotaler, you're no fun, but if you really just let loose, you'll be getting whispered about in front of all the water coolers on Monday.

I now have an entirely new category to add to the list: Never leave your office during an intense work period.

Sometimes, you can't control it though. Last week, I skipped town with one day's notice. I did a quick "battle handover" of a project I was working on to another soldier. By a crazy coincidence, some of our leaders began inquiring about the project immediately afterwards, some information was misrepresented (not necessarily anyone's fault, but it would be sort of like someone coming to your house to look for something, but you were away on vacation and couldn't help them look, so they couldn't find it).

Anyway, crisis ensued. Being barked at by senior officers is never fun, and the guy I had handed the project off to was sort of left twisting in the wind. He stayed quiet about it for a while, but sent me a distress call on Saturday night. He was taking heavies and needed help.

So what did I do?

It's not in my nature to run away from problems, so I dove in. I got on the phone. I got on the various e-mail systems. I reiterated all the stuff I had turned over, sometimes several times, to the guy left in my stead. I sent a friendly but terse cease-and-desist letter to someone overseas who was causing some of the problems. I e-mailed some of the leaders directly to ask them to calm down. I sent supporting documents and I told them I could and would explain it all on Friday the 11th.

And what happened?

Well, the end result is that things calmed down quite a bit. I can already sense I'm jumping back into calmer waters now that the tsunami flood has started to recede. Plus, I'm glad to have the situational awareness so I'm not blindsided on Friday. However...the intervention also led itself to cries of "micromanagement" from some other corners, and even some armchair psychoanalysis about needing to control something, not wanting to lose the spotlight, and not letting the "temp" handle the show.

That would all be well and good, but I would've happily stayed out of the fray had I never gotten than "Oh, shit, I'm in over my head and need help" phone call. In fact, prior to that time I had not initiated a single phone call or e-mail "back that way."

If I could relive all the events, I wouldn't have changed what I did, or how. But seeing where some huffing and puffing resulted, it reminded me to add "leaving the office during intense times" into that certain category of life situations that don't tend to end well, regardless of the way they're executed.

Navel Gazing: Embracing the BEI

2011-03-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

So on Thursday morning, I have a Behavioral-Event Interview (BEI) lined up at a prospective graduate school just a couple dozen klicks to our south.

It would've been done over the phone, which I think would've been to my significant disadvantage, but the recent events described in my last two posts sort of changed things up enough to reinforce my belief that all plans are written in sand on a windy day.

Anyway, a BEI is a way for a *screener* to avoid the standard-fare job interviews which basically ask people to rehash their resumes, boast about achievements already described in other material, and then give shamelessly obnoxious, canned answers to the "toughies" like "What is your biggest weakness?" ('Too much of a perfectionist,' 'too dedicated to my job,' and 'too likely to put others' needs above my own' would all instantly disqualify applicants from the imaginary firm I imagine myself someday running, just in case anyone's keeping score at home).

Instead, a BEI goes off the idea that how you've reacted to and solved problems in the recent past is the best indicator of how you would do those things in the future (in the intelligence world, that'd get the five-dollar term 'historical pattern analysis for predictive modeling'). The questions are more likely to start with, "How did you react to difficulty when..." or "Tell me about a time you felt frustrated because..." and then followed up with lots of probing questions about where you went right, left, wrong, or indifferent, and what you'd change if you were faced with it all over again.

As with any other interview, preparation is critical. And as with any other interview, those most in danger of flubbing it are the ones who think their 'gift of gab' can pull them through anything (it can't), and therefore the only preparation needed is on the part of the to-be-dazzled interviewer.

I'll spend a couple hours each day this week prepping, with this old military adage kept firmly in mind: "Embrace the suck...before it embraces you." People might look *forward* to a BEI in the same way they would a root canal, but they don't have to. If the preparation forces you to take a truly close, critical eye to the management decisions you've made over the past five years, that might be a really great thing in and of itself. That's irrespective, of course, of any one person's opinion of how the whole thing goes, or the thickness of the envelope coming in the mail next month.

Whether it's a BEI or any other stressful event looming on your calendar, the process becomes a heckuva lot more meaningful when you learn to embrace it. I'll let other people stress the outcome.

Making Time for What Counts

2011-03-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

"Cuando el doctor dijo, "Senor, lo felicito..."
Como poder explicarte?
Como poder explicartelo?
El amor de un padre a un hijo no se puede comparar
Es mucho más que todo
No si vos sabes" -Los Fabulosos Cadilacs, Vos Sabes

I'm very grateful right now for some legislation that was signed in 2008 authorizing paternity leave for Title 10 (Federal) and Title 32 (Active-Status non-mobilized Guardsmen) soldiers. I actually pasted a bit of the ALARACT (All Army Activities) message announcing the policy below:

3. PURPOSE: THIS MESSAGE ANNOUNCES ARMY GUIDANCE FOR PATERNITY LEAVE AUTHORIZED BY THE RECENT CHANGE TO LAW (TITLE 10) CONTAINED IN REFERENCE A ABOVE. ON 14 OCTOBER 2008 THE PRESIDENT SIGNED THE NDAA FOR FY 2009 TO AUTHORIZE 10 DAYS OF PATERNITY LEAVE TO BE USED IN CONNECTION WITH THE BIRTH OF A CHILD. PATERNITY LEAVE MAY BE GRANTED IN ADDITION TO OTHER LEAVE AUTHORIZED.
4. APPLICABILITY: PATERNITY LEAVE IS ONLY AUTHORIZED FOR A MARRIED SOLDIER ON ACTIVE DUTY, TO INCLUDE TITLE 10 AND TITLE 32 ACTIVE GUARD AND RESERVE (AGR) DUTY, WHOSE WIFE GIVES BIRTH TO A CHILD ON OR AFTER 14 OCTOBER 2008. PATERNITY LEAVE IS A NON-CHARGEABLE ADMINISTRATIVE ABSENCE. PATERNITY LEAVE LEGISLATION CANNOT BE APPLIED TO SINGLE SOLDIERS FATHERING A CHILD OUT OF WEDLOCK.
5. PATERNITY LEAVE WILL NOT EXCEED 10 DAYS, AND MUST BE TAKEN CONSECUTIVELY AND WITHIN 45 DAYS AFTER THE BIRTH OF THE CHILD. THIS AUTHORIZED ABSENCE (NON-CHARGEABLE PATERNITY LEAVE) IS APPLICABLE TO SINGLE PREGNANCIES, TO INCLUDE THOSE THAT RESULT IN MULTIPLE BIRTHS (TWINS, TRIPLETS, ETC.). DEPLOYED SOLDIERS HAVE 60 DAYS AFTER RETURNING FROM DEPLOYMENT TO UTILIZE THE 10 DAYS OF PATERNITY LEAVE. IF NOT USED WITHIN THE ESTABLISHED TIME FRAME LEAVE IS LOST.

This looks like a lot of administrative mumbo-jumbo, but to me it means a chance to take a pause from training, to see Ratriey and help her recover from the gestational hypertension that brought Lily to us early. Yes, it's 10 "free" days I'm getting back from the Army, but from a retention standpoint, family-friendly policy is a wise long-term investment.

The picture above is probably something I'll force the poor chap who shows up on prom night to suffer through. Last night, Ratriey and I were down in the NICU with Lily. I put my index finger by her side, and she wrapped four of her fingers around it. Eventually, when I tried to pull it away, she mustered up all the two-day-old strength she had to not let me out of her vice grip. Of course, I obliged and stayed in said position until she had fallen back sound asleep.

I'll be back in Killeen next week, and the proverbial beat will go on with everything the Brigade needs to get done. Once again, my sense of time and perspective will flip. I'll lose track of what-day-of-the-week-it-is-today, not from idleness and Kangaroo Care and loving smiles but because the endless busyness of the operations will render the distinction moot anyway.

Still, the time here at Tufts is going to soften the blow of separation from the ladies for all parties involved, and it'll lift some of the 'missing-out' guilt off one Captain's shoulders.

Consider me grateful for it.

The New New Englander...

2011-03-01T18:56:00.000-08:00

...is the Littlest Lowellian.

I was quite surprised last night when I woke up around 2:00 a.m. and rolled over to check my phone for no particular reason. There were two yet-unread text messages, which surprised me but didn't seem completely unreasonable, as we still had people at some of the ranges.

Both, however, were from my sister-in-law Morea. The first informed me that I had just become a father, and the second was a picture of Lillian Seyla Page, who came into the world at 1:04 a.m. on Tuesday, 01 MAR at Tufts Medical Center, nee Tufts New England Medical Center. She came in tipping the scales at a wee 2 lbs, 9 oz, but she's doing great and she's been breathing on her own for quite a while now.

Thankfully, the new enlightened paternity leave policy will allow me visitation rights to my Bundle of Joy, 1 ea.

Two Days in the Life

2011-02-28T18:53:00.001-08:00

The days are kind of a blur.

Yesterday morning, we pushed out at oh-dark-thirty to start a 24-hour exercise that involved convoy movement, reacting to IEDs, *quelling* ambushes, and towing disabled HMMWVs. It was pretty cool. Very scripted (it was the same thing 3 x in a row, just first without firing shots, then with blanks, and then with real rounds), but still very "hooah" for me because this is the first time I've done this stuff, which is unusual for someone wearing the two bars.

We did it all over again at night, so another big "first" I can check off my list is being able to move, shoot, and communicate while wearing night-vision goggles. Previously, that sort of not-quite-focused greenish imagery was something I only saw in movies and CNN.

Then today, four other soldiers and I trekked down to "regular" Fort Hood for a class on CIDNE (Combined Information Data Network Exchange), a really cool software tool that helps users understand their environment by graphically depicting the Significant Actions (SIGACTs) that occur in the neighborhood.

So in just a span of a few hours, I got to go from jumping out of a gun truck to put down an imaginary ambush with real bullets to "dorking it out" with imagery overlaid with important events on a software system that we'll use in our TOC (Tactical Operations Center).

Two key observations here, both about the nature of modern warfare.

First, the modern U.S. soldier carries way more stuff than his counterpart from any other era or country. In fact, adjusting to all that *stuff* has been one of the toughest transitions for me. It's like, no matter how solid I am with PT, cultural knowledge, Dari, or the day-to-day taskers, I'm still going to look like a soup sandwich if I've got loose straps hanging off my gear, or my helmet looking cockeyed on my head. I know all the stuff we carry is useful, and much of it potentially life-saving, but it sort of makes me think back to Band of Brothers and long for the simpler times when a guy went into the field with his rucksack and rifle. Period. However, those *simpler* times probably meant leaner chow, worse combat medical aid, and greater risk, so I'll stop short before really wanting to make the trade.

Second, the modern U.S. soldier is expected to perform more roles than most peers across time, countries, and cultures. I hesitated and then balked there to use a superlative (I was sure of the first because I know the Roman centurions weren't carrying heavy radios and laser range-finders, but I don't know if they were doing what we'd call Civil-Military missions...and I'm not arrogant enough to say they weren't). My transition from emptying a magazine of 5.56 rounds to plotting points behind a laptop screen isn't even considered remarkable in today's Army. If you'll pardon the awful pun, that's just how we go rolling...along. In fact, that doesn't even factor in the roles of medic, aid worker, social worker, radio operator, diplomat, negotiator, and trainer that any single deployed soldier might be performing in a single day.

Time to go to bed. Stepping off to lead PT tomorrow at the crisp hour of 0450.

Skill Sets

2011-02-26T19:27:00.001-08:00

One of the cool things about being in the Army, or just the military in general, is that it gives you a hands-on way to learn about a lot of practical things.

For our convoy training tomorrow, we had to get some HMMWVs ready today. Part of that process inolves PMCS (Preventative Measures, Checks and Services). In other words, we had to make sure the vehicles were ready to go. I could've pulled the "I'm an Officer" card and sort of just slunk back to the rear, but that's not my way. Now, I know my way around the area under the hood of a Hummer, and can do all the basic services, checks, and fluids. I can also load frequencies into the radios and set up the vehicle's interior comms system.

Even just 24 hours ago, I woudn't have been able to say that.

For the rest of our time mobilized, I'll periodically try to *capture* new opportunities to develop new skills. Covering them here will give me a great way to look back down the line and say, "Oh yeah...that's where I learned about setting up that MacGyver-looking tennis ball toaster bomb. That thing was pretty cool!"

But seriously, though...people always talk about making themselves better on their deployments. 9 times out of 10, that's going to be a diet or exercise reference, but another way I might take it on is by concentrating on practical skills (basic mechanical, building repair, vehicle maintenance, etc.) and thereby growing my personal toolkit in an area where it feels a bit light sometimes.

Hey, Who You Callin' a POG?

2011-02-25T18:56:00.000-08:00

"The older I get, the faster I was." -- Anonymous

Roughly two thousand years ago, just after a legion of Roman soldiers stopped in front of a steam to take a drink and a break before making the rest of their way across Carthage, one turned to the other, and said, "You know what, man? This isn't the shit that I signed up for."

Of course, I wasn't there...I was late for the party by roughly two millennia, give or take a few years. So what makes me so confident that it happened?

Because the italicized line above is among the most common laments of soldiers across all cultures, countries, and eras. Once or twice since we've been mobilized, I've even let it slip a time or two. My sob story is that I came over to the Army to do Civil Affairs -- the MOS that I thought best matched my interests, abilities, and ideals. The spot the Guard offered up wasn't there for me once I got there, so I sort of fell back on the world I had come from. I love that world, but it's not as hands-on as Civil Affairs, where the real backbone of counterinsurgency lies.

As a staff puke with a Brigade Headquarters Unit, I am certainly a Person Other than Grunt (POG). POG, by the way, is a derisive term used to describe Fobbits, REMFs, or whatever other term is used to describe those who primarily work on bases. However, the important thing to bear in mind is that the appellation fits for ALL of the unit, which is a Brigade Headquarters. The problem, though, is that everyone has some type of "Action Guy" background to bring up whenever dismissing the other people in the unit as being a bunch of snivelly POGs.

Never mind how old, out-of-shape, or tactically unsound someone might be today...the fact that they held an 11B infantry MOS and used to do 12-mile ruck marches uphill both ways in the snow during the 1980s is their scoundrel-esque last refuge for settling any tactically-based argument.

At some point, I'll admit, it becomes hard for me to listen to (Hey, I warned you...not all the entries here are going to be 100% positive). I'm just not that impressed with the "Combat Arms" credentials of someone who spent a few years' worth of weekends in a Field Artillery unit and has spent the last couple decades talking about it. Ditto for someone who did a four-year enlistment in the Marines, followed by twenty or so years in the Guard, but still calls himself "Devil Dog." Huh?

I think if you're going to walk the walk, awesome...and I'll measure anyone's ability to do that by what he or she can do today. I'll embrace my "Combat Support" role for the next 300+ days with gusto, but I think when I get back home to Massachusetts it might be high time for another unit and Military Occupational Specialty.

I'd prefer the company of those who do, now as opposed to those who did, then.

Living FOBulous

2011-02-24T20:16:00.001-08:00

So North Fort Hood isn't really Fort Hood proper. In fact, it's a completely different posts with different Entry Control Points...and it's about 45 minutes from the main post. We live here with several other National Guard units -- mostly bound for Afghanistan, but some headed to Iraq (including a Maintenance Co. from Maryland that has the interesting mission of traveling around the American bases still left in Iraq and helping get rid of broken gear).

The conditions sort of replicate a Forward Operating Base (FOB). We carry our weapons wherever we go, we eat in a chow hall reminiscent of the ones overseas, and we're restricted to either the Army Camouflage Uniforms or our PT uniforms.

Despite some of the stressors of training, the sleep deprivation, and the fact that I'm living next to or on top of so many people (the picture here doesn't really do our squad bay justice...it's 68 guys living like this in a big room with a few lockers in between rows of bunkbeds), life here is pretty routine and it's not that bad.

I have three meals a day, I never have to wonder what to wear or where to go, and I've always got something to be doing. I could sort of go on like this indefinitely.

The tough part, however, comes when I stop and think about how much I miss Ratriey. Still, I consider myself very lucky that she has a huge, supportive family.

I think the military model really breaks when people marry young, plant their wife down somewhere like Watertown, NY or Fayetteville, NC where she no knows no one and has little support structure, and then go on repeated combat tours overseas. On top of the normal stressors of separation and anxiety, the real challenge for the spouse that's *left behind* there is how to find constructive, positive ways to cope with the isolation. There are aspects of this deployment that will be hard on both my wife and I, but neither of us will struggle to find our place this year -- I'll be putting in the endless days with my unit, and she'll be essentially living the life she lived before we met, in the same physical environment with nearly all of the same people.

Maybe this is an absurdly "glass half-full" way of looking at it, but it may even make all involved parties stronger.

Why It's Different This Time

2011-02-23T20:05:00.001-08:00

24 down, 300-something to go. Acclimated to the Texas heat and humidity, and actually enjoying the break from the Massachusetts winter, thank you very much.

So my Internet access is sort of spotty, and my time is sort of limited. Blog productivity is down a bit lately and may stay down for the next month or so. When I do post, I am generally going to focus on "snapshots" -- either actual pictures or quick stories that give little vignettes into the ongoings of a National Guard unit getting ready to do peacekeeping, or security providing, or full-spectrum operations, or whatever else someone might want to call it. It's not necessarily going to be anything philosophical or thoughtful, so please don't read into it too much (the tone may swing from frustrated to ecstatic to overtired and back again all within a week's worth of entries).

That said, one thing worth reflecting on, now that I've been down here for just over a week that feels like just over a month, is how different this deployment is from my other trips overseas.

The most major difference here is that when I was in the Navy, I did spend 15 months in Iraq, but they were in an explicitly *support* position. Now, while I'm admittedly going to be quite a ways away from the riflemen down in Khost or Kunar, both literally and figuratively, I'm still at the end of the day a soldier in the war zone who may be tasked with any of a myriad number of potential tasks, and who must be trained in several core competencies.

That makes this go-around totally different from the times before.

While I undoubtedly did some pretty neat stuff over there, most of what I did was constrained by the confines of a large Forward Operating Base. Even when I left the FOB, I was literally surrounded by Marines or SOF operators who were the "rough men ready to commit violence" that George Orwell credits with our sound sleep at night. Only now do I realize how woefully underprepared I had been if the fit really had hit the shan. Would I have been able to perform immediate actions on my rifle it didn't fire right away? No. Now, I can knock out a functions check in my sleep and can field strip the thing in under a minute when it needs cleaning.

And as much as it frustrates me that regulations don't allow inter-service transfers to wear the "been there" patch, and the way that some people don't seem to take the idea that sailors might actually be risking their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan seriously, I have to concede that they're *sort of* on to something.

I never had to drive HMMWVs or ride in deuce-and-a-halfs before. I never had to maintain my personal weapons for inspections. I never had to practice an escape from an upside down MRAP in a simulator at Fort Hood while three Staff Sergeants grilled me for risking my guys' lives by not pulling security in the right position. I had a much narrower lane, and all I really had to do was stay in it. It was still meaningful, and important -- in some ways, moreso than whatever the people who roll their eyes at me when I mention Iraq may have done -- but I can see why, in the eyes of some soldiers, that it doesn't really *count.*

There are still some tough growing pains with the adjustment to the Army, like when I reached "Winchester" on my rifle qual with half the targets still yet to pop up, because I didn't realize I had only 40 rounds to shoot at 40 targets (I had been taking second and third shots at pop-ups that I missed). Wearing the gear properly is still challenging at times, and it still causes confusion among Privates and Specialists who wonder why "that Captain" has all kinds of loose straps dangling off of his body armor.

I think that'll settle out when we get "over there," and the confidence I've gotten from having been to the rodeo a few times before will pay off in a major way. Knowing what I know about Kabul, having an Officer on staff who understands Afghan culture and can carry on a 15-minute conversation in Dari is infinitely more valuable than a comparable soldier who doesn't understand the operating environment but can put steel on 40 consecutive pop-up targets on a range.

I'm feeling readier and readier for that C-17 ride all the time.

All Good in the Hood

2011-02-18T11:38:00.000-08:00

19 in, 381 out.

So far, so good.

I've been taking notes here and there, I've been snapping away some photos with my handy iPhone here and there, but the biggest limitation I've had here w/blogging is the lack of Wi-Fi in the barracks. Internet access is limited to a shared, public area with more people trying to get online than there are available terminals.

I'm hoping to be able to blog a bit more as there are rumors of Wi-Fi coming around soon. Amazingly, I may have a much easier time blogging from overseas.

I hope all is well in your corner of the world...and as always, thanks for reading.

The Warehouse of Nothing

2011-02-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

14 in, 386 out.

If you can understand and appreciate the ending of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," you already know pretty much everything you need to about being on a staff.

A lot of your success has nothing to do with marksmanship, land navigation, tactical first aid skills, or even physical fitness. Instead, it mostly has to do with whether you're a self-starter, and whether you have a dogged persistence in you to follow up on taskings from higher up the food chain.

If your boss is worth his salt, he or she will NEVER settle for "it's in the works" as a complete answer to a follow-up query about a tasking. Instead, the second-and third-order questions that should follow will be along the lines of "Okay, well, where exactly in the process is that?" or "Whose hands is it in right now?"

Those aren't unreasonable questions. What no one wants to have happen is for an important document or product to wind up in the virtual equivalent of the warehouse shown at the end of the first of the Indiana Jones flicks.

If everyone on a staff landed in the upper-right corner of the Competence and Motivation Matrix, a lot of the follow-up wouldn't be required.

I'll admit that it's tough for me to see how people whose motivation level seems to register barely above a "flatliner" suddenly become very engaged when the subject of 'goodies' comes up...whether it's a cool new piece of gear, a chance to get some bonus leave or a pass, or an opportunity to clarify their own clerical issue, people who would otherwise be content sending things off to the warehouse featured in the 35-second clip can suddenly find that innovation, creativity, and motivation that don't seem to apply when we're talking about the mission or its requirements.

Boston's Other Boggs

2011-02-12T21:02:00.000-08:00

A few days in, a whole lot more out.

The Globe ran a great story today about Major George Boggs of the Massachusetts Army National Guard, who was recently recognized for his excellent work with the BPD K-9 unit. (And yes, there's a Lowell connection here...it was Commissioner Davis who recognized him).

He is now getting a ready to spend a year away from the Department as he'll be serving in Afghanistan.

This story, much like the WCVB coverage referenced in my last post, or the story here about Lieutenant Colonel Bazer, the 'rabbi for the heroes,' shows that the media isn't necessarily 'out to get' the military. Yes, the media plays a role in exposing wrongdoing (in the military or anywhere else) but it also highlights positive stories such as these. I would argue that both sides could benefit from more mutual understanding.

WCVB...Reporting from Kabul

2011-02-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

11 days in, 389 out.

There is some really great coverage of the Massachusetts Army National Guard, all the way from Milford to Reading to Bourne to Kabul and everywhere in between, all linked here on the WCVB website.

If you click on the Sean Kelly embedded stuff, you can see a reporter who has been over to Kabul with the 1-181 (that's an Infantry battalion based out of Worcester). The videos give a sense of the soldiers' experiences living at Camp Phoenix, conducting foot patrols out in town, and some of the day-to-day stuff they deal with.

It's worth checking out.

Don't Sweat the Staff Stuff

2011-02-09T16:49:00.001-08:00

10 in, 390 out.

If you want to get a glimpse of what things are like in the wild and crazy mountains along the Af-Pak border, read "War," by Junger or watch Restrepo.

Now imagine the total opposite. Imagine Office Space, but everyone's wearing a cool-looking camouflage-pattern uniform. That's more like being on a staff.

I haven't even left Massachusetts yet, but my days have been long (from the alarm clock going off to the key turning in my front door we're talking 16 hours, easily) and somewhat stressful. I haven't come up with a great analogy yet but I sort of imagine it being like the ball inside a pinball machine -- always bouncing around, dodging obstacles, occasionally racking up points for being in the right place at the right time, but never really resting.

When I think about the crazy things that happen in a day -- the fiesty Captain who somehow thought it was my fault that some e-mails sent overseas were bouncing back, the people who freeloaded off the pizza I ordered even though I put it out as a $5 take-it-or-leave-it buy-in offer, and the confusion among some of the staff sections about which duties belonged to whom, something becomes very clear: None of that stuff really matters.

Life, limb, and eyesight matter. Afghanistan getting up on its own two feet matters.

Stolen pizza, arrogant Officers, and top-heavy staff shenanigans don't.

The beat goes on.

Hey Sarge, Can I Blog This?

2011-02-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

If you've ever wondered whether deployed soldiers are allowed to blog, the answer is a resounding, "YES." There were a lot of issues with blogs and social media at first, but at some point the military realized that if you can't beat 'em, you might want to join 'em, and that they can be a great way for deployed soldiers to stay in contact with loved ones, and also to share information with future would-be soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, or coasties.

The obvious points are, well, obvious. No talking about future operations, capabilities, known enemy capabilities, etc. The big picture stuff is fair game, though, and this dawned on me when I sat down at Mickey D's on Main Street in Reading today and saw this:

The 26th “Yankee” Brigade Headquarters and the 26th Signal Company stationed right here in Reading at Camp Curtis-Guild will deploy to Afghanistan for one year beginning this February.

There is going to be a deployment ceremony held at the Reading Memorial High School Hawkes Field House on February 15, 2011 at 9:00 AM. The 300 Soldiers attending this ceremony will board busses at the conclusion of the ceremony and depart for their planes at Hanscom Air Force Base.

Frank Driscoll, Reading’s Veterans Service Officer, is asking the residents of Reading to donate the cost of a specially designed sweatshirt, purchased locally, to be given to each Soldier as they board the bus to show the support of the town, and to boost morale for the journey ahead. The cost for each shirt is $25 and your donation can be dropped off at the Town Hall or mailed to Frank Driscoll at Town Hall, 16 Lowell Street, Reading MA, 01867. The deadline for donations is Thursday, February 3rd.

The t-shirt deadline has passed (and they exceeded the goal!) but the point is this -- not everything involving the military is shrouded in secrecy and it shouldn't be. 'Citizen' still makes up half of 'citizen-soldier,' and if the military wants to complain about media or widespread societal misunderstanding of what it is and what it does, a good place to start is by sharing the shareable.

The Eleventh Floor

2011-02-07T16:45:00.001-08:00

8 in, 392 out. The 'period not to exceed 400 days' just keeps rolling along.

So how 'bout that Super Bowl prediction, eh? That guy is amazing.

I saw a great YouTube video of Daniel Gilbert speaking at a conference. He asked the audience, "Who do you think is happier -- a paraplegic or a lottery winner?"

As it turns out, it's not a trick question, but the answer might be counterintuitive to many. Of course, for a short burst of time immediately following either a lottery win or a life-changing accident, the involved individuals are likely to see a big spike or big drop in happiness, respectively. However, once the waters settle back down, so to speak, people just revert to however they were before. So if someone who wins the lottery is paranoid and insecure, he or she will be right back at it within a short period of time. If someone with a pleasant demeanor and positive outlook gets hit by a bus and loses the use of both legs, that same personality isn't really going to be affected in the long-term.

When Gilbert mentioned how people almost always revert back to their baseline happiness levels within three months of a traumatic experience, I wasn't surprised at all. It's hard to believe, but three months back from the time I had heard it, pretty much all of my major bodily functions involved tubes, and the prognosis was unknown.

By the grace of God, that's no longer the case at all...and the few periodic checkups won't even affect my deployment schedule. I braced for the worst, but eating and talking are, by and large, just like they were before.

Personality-wise, I'd say I'm the exact same.

I still believe in transparency, inclusion, and a wariness towards the *hard sell.*

I still get frustrated on the road when drivers act like everything is zero-sum and they will somehow *lose* by ceding an inch or letting someone in who needs to change lanes.

I still act just the same towards colleagues at work, towards my wife at home, and towards friends anywhere else.

And, even though it'd be no surprise to Daniel Gilbert, someone who studies happiness for a living, the same small day-to-day things bring a smile to my face.

Still, today was my last periodic visit before the big plane ride, and I think one of the things that hits me by going back up to Floor 11 of MEEI or Floor 7 of Yawkey is the way that certain thoughts, fears, and memories can crawl out of the places where they're normally stowed away.

I've obviously moved forward -- and that's undoubtedly a good thing -- but going back to such places is still an important reminder about what not to take for granted.

Break Time

2011-02-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

7 in, 393 out.

Well, it's really nice to be home right now. After a long week that really felt mostly like a long day, I'm home at a normal hour tonight as we were cut loose for the Super Bowl. My wild and crazy plans involve Pizza Hut with Ratriey and (hopefully) falling asleep early enough to recover from the nagging cough/head cold that I've been trying to fight all week.

I've been kicking around all kinds of thoughts about being a staff officer, about how the unit is coming together now, about how things might change at the mobilization station, etc. but right now I'm too exhausted for it all, so I'll kick it off to another day.

I will say this, though -- I know a guy here in Lowell who predicted every single NFL playoff game this year. I was there when he did it, and then when he got to the AFC and NFC championship games, he said "The Super Bowl is going to be the Packers and the Steelers," and just sort of stopped there.

I'll admit I had some goosebumps when it happened, and I just had to check in with him last Saturday.

His prediction? Packers, covering and going over. Maybe just to show off a bit, he even threw a score out there -- 33 to 26.*

* I am writing this 15 minutes before kickoff.

Maybe It Oughta Be...You

2011-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

4 in, 396 out.

After two straight nights of catching z's on a linoleum floor under a desk in Reading, it's nice that work and weather have let up just enough to get me back to Lowell -- even if it's just for an hour or so before hitting the hay and then waking up at 0400 to drive back.

Before I do that, though, I'll say this: we are very top-heavy. Emphasis on the very. We are an HQ staff, so nearly 1/3 of us are officers, and if you add in the senior enlisted (E-7 and above), you're way into the numerical majority.

That's not really how it's supposed to work. In a normal line Company, you would have a handful of Officers (including the boss, a Captain), several more NCOs, and then you'd have a huge *base* of junior enlisted (Privates and Specialists). Think of a pyramid as a model.

We kind of flip that on its head, which is generally okay, but it drives me nuts every time I hear someone say, "I can't believe I'm doing [x]. Isn't there some Specialist or Private who should be doing this?"

Well, oftentimes there simply isn't.

So the way I interpret that is that if the water bubbler is empty I can simply grab a full one, rip the top off, and replace it...rather than kick it, curse, and walk away.

If a trash barrel is being stuffed past the brim, I can tie it up and put in a fresh liner...rather than play the trash 'jenga' puzzle of seeing where I can stack my garbage on top of something else.

And if something needs to be cleaned up, that means the choice is sometimes between doing it now, doing it later, or not doing it -- but certainly not expending just as much effort finding someone to pawn it off on.

Top-heavy units aren't all bad...they bring a lot of operational experience and perspective to the fight.

But the whole thing only really works when the people in them can check their egos at the door. Sometimes, if a Master Sergeant or a Major wants to make something happen, the simplest and most effective way might be the self-initiated one.

When Summer Camp Happens...in February

2011-02-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

3 in, 397 out.

The pic you see here was blatantly heisted from www.lostinafghanistan.com. You might recognize its author as the "Pride of Attleboro" featured in Monday's entry.

Someone asked me what day of the week it was today, and I honestly didn't know. I don't mean to be too dramatic here -- of course, after a few moments of moving back from Monday and then going forward from there I cracked the riddle -- but the way the days of the week can pretty quickly blur into irrelevancy during a deployment is well-known among all services and branches.

Maybe it's a little scary that I'm hitting that milestone so soon, but I think I can pass that off on how not going home last night threw me off just enough to kick the ol' day-to-day rhythm off its axis.

Still, how fitting is it that it would happen on Groundhog Day?

Snow Problem? Not Here..

2011-02-01T18:52:00.001-08:00

2 in, 398 out.

The First Sergeant's guidance on Monday was pretty clear:

"As we all know, there's bad weather in the forecast. That's not an excuse for being late to formation...leave your house an hour early, or just stay here on post, but if you miss formation on Wednesday, you will be spending some quality time with me in my office."

That made my plan here simple -- bivouac here in the office tonight, avoid tonight's evening commute along with tomorrow morning's commute, and rule out any possibility of being *that guy.*

Inevitably, someone will miss first formation tomorrow, and he or she will blame the weather. If there are disciplinary consequences, the soldier will complain to any sympathetic ear that the leadership is just being so ridiculous, because the treacherous commute is clearly the reason for the infraction.

Conveniently, the offer made by the leadership to stay the night will be left out in the retelling.

That's almost always the case with stories like that.

Yes, things get screwed up in the Army, as they do in any other organization. Sometimes the regulations don't make sense, and oftentimes they're enforced arbitrarily.

But anytime you hear stories about the heartless First Sergeant who punished the poor Private for a rules infraction despite the obvious mitigating circumstances, it's always important to remember this:

You're only hearing half the story.

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Tackles Junior Seau....and then it's Hysterical!

2011-01-31T17:00:00.001-08:00

1 in, 399 out. Hooah!

The guy in this video is one of the best Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) that I know -- he takes care of the guys, he knows his technical stuff, and he can walk the line between seriousness and the need to laugh sometimes.

Even better, he scored this unassisted tackle on Junior Seau during a Pats blowout against the Cardinals a couple years back.

You know what's even better than that? Seau was a total class act about it, didn't press charges, and actually deflected the blame onto Mike Vrabel, attributing Vrabel's age to the delayed reflexes that prevented him from seeing a Guardsman coming.

"A Period...Not to Exceed 400 Days"

2011-01-30T18:38:00.000-08:00

So I know I've had a dry spell lately with the blog.

Had time permitted this week, I might've hit everything from excitement for new possibilities in Egypt and its neighbors, the particularly dangerous snow banks in town (like the one that blocks visibility to anyone leaving Target trying to make a left on Plain), Patrick Murphy's excellent letter in the Sun, and some stuff that was just kind of neat, like the way the American flag flying high between Central and Prescott literally froze in some icy tree branches during that Arctic snap last week.

Anyway, as you can see, I was overcome by events and am now just dashing off this quick entry now. Tomorrow, I'll start a journey "not to exceed 400 days" (yup, it's in my orders so it must be so) that will just be local for the first couple weeks...technically, that part still isn't federal duty, but it's Annual Training...but rather than split hairs with Guard jargon let's just call tomorrow Day One.

The general theme will be a single snapshot whenever possible and then maybe just some kind of reflection on what it captures and why it does (or doesn't) matter. Some days I won't post at all and then may have to play catch up ball on others. Overall, expect more of the mundane than the profound. Maybe tomorrow it's just a full parking lot that didn't use to look that way. Maybe it's our guys doing pull-ups in the door frame between training events. Maybe it's some armchair philosophy about how the first people to complain about having their time "wasted" by taskings always seem to be the least busy in the first place.

There is no shortage of excellent storytelling out there on the Internet and on bookshelves about Iraq and Afghanistan. Typically, when written by a Company Grade officer (that's a Lieutenant or a Captain) the storyline goes something like, "I am awesome. I was the awesomest, awesomest ROTC cadet at [insert college name] and then I went to [insert badass Army branch and schooling], where I was admired by peers, seniors, and 'the men' alike. Then I went overseas, had a brief taste of combat - and could've won the entire war singlehandedly - but I found that everyone above me in the chain-of-command was incompetent...so I had to get out and write this book instead."

Well, I can't promise much, other than being the antithesis of that claptrap. I'm a lifer, I'm not a combat arms guy, and if you spent more than 5 minutes with me, you'd know I'm more likely to walk into a parked car lost in thought about an Atlantic article than to recount stories of broken glass and barstools from spring break.

I have no idea how the upcoming 400 or fewer days will unfold, but I promise you more thoughts and words in the spirit of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut than I do Rambo and Mr. T. Either way, it'll be fun...so, as always, thanks to all seven of you for reading! ;-)

286 for 105,000? I'd Like It!

2011-01-19T18:01:00.000-08:00

One of the most interesting things to come out of the Public Safety Sub-Committee meeting last week was a statistic presented by LPD Chief Ken Lavallee. Ideally, a city of Lowell's population *should* have 286 police officers. Instead, we have 200.

That's bad for pretty much all non-criminal elements involved in the equation. Presence is a huge deterrent to crime, esp. the street-level "crimes of opportunity" that make people feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods.

As a homeowner and someone planning to have a stake in the city for many years to come, I would certainly be willing to bear a proportional property tax hike if it meant the City could hire 86 more police officers. Unfortunately, though, the cost of those extra 86 cops is a lot more complicated than taking their average starting salaries, multiplying by 86, and then dividing by the # of taxpayers.

The retirements, health benefits, and other goodies are what led to a major reduction in the Newark, NJ Police Dept during its worst crime wave in years, and they're a major contributor to Camden, NJ (by several statistical measures the worst city in the United States...seriously) cutting half its police force. Yes, HALF of its entire police force...seriously.

Is there some way we could compromise here? How about 86 new police officers with a simultaneous compromise to limit all new public safety retirements to a defined benefit? A certain annual percentage could be offered by the city to an individual's 401(k), and that would be the end of the deal -- no major unfunded overhead to worry about when that officer retired and then lived another 50 years.

Resolution for Now...and Later

2011-01-18T19:14:00.000-08:00

I'm a couple weeks behind the 8-ball on this, but after taking my "day on" yesterday to comb through tons of personal belongings, organizing some while throwing away several bags full of trash, I finally have a resolution for 2011: to be lighter.

Don't worry, I'm not about to start talking about calorie counting or gym memberships here. I'm talking about actually lightening the load of *stuff* that I carry around (and yes, I still can't bring myself to use that 's' word without a nod towards the sky and a thought to one of the best friends that I never met, Mr. George Carlin). Anyway, after finally completing my iTrifecta with an iPad purchase this weekend, it's time to face up to the fact that I don't need to buy so many printed newspapers. Or books. Or CDs. Or DVDs.

I can read newspapers on the iPad. For the ones that make me pay for some content, like my beloved Wall Street Journal, that's totally fine. Newspapers aren't breaking my budget, they're just making me messier. I can read books on my iPad, too, and I can also use iPad-stored audiobooks to make better use of my *me time* on 128, or Rte 3, or the more fun and scenic 133 to 28, or the not-as-scenic but palate-friendly 38 to 129.

Between the Pod, the Phone, and now the Pad, I've long since ceased to buy CDs, which used to find homes of opportunity in all the strange nooks and crevices of my car.

And now that the Pad lets me watch streaming Netflix anywhere I go, I'm vowing not to buy DVDs, because I don't need 'em. I might even downsize a bit by just getting rid of the ones I have now.

I could try to pretend to ascribe to nobler motives, like eco-friendliness, but really I think it's about taking up less space at home and being less of a slob.

So anyway that's the resolution for now. I like it because it's not something pie-in-the-sky and impossible to measure (i.e. be nicer, be more thoughtful, more resourceful, etc.) It's actually about cancelling hard-copy subscriptions entirely and finding new ways to acquire and store knowledge.

The resolution for later is actually more specific to this blog. I won't be able to make this adjustment in 2011, but in 2012 I'm going to take the blog in a new, different direction -- I'm going to focus it on interviews. So rather than just me cranking up the centrifuge on the daily news cycle, or making Seinfeld-esque pontifications about why it's unprofessional not to leave voicemails in work settings, or why the friends who come to visit you should be thanked and not vice versa, I'm going to break out the old shoe leather and pull a page from the Studs Terkel playbook.

My Area of Operations will be New England, and my Area of Interest will extend down the entire Northeast Corridor.

I will link up with people for coffee, pick their brains about the few things that REALLY matter, take one single snapshot (from my iPhone, of course), and I will write about it.

It might be the mayor of Brattleboro, VT. And then it could be the Hillsborough, NH County Assessor. Followed by a sit-down in Worcester with the CEO of Polar Beverage. Mix in tons of non-profit directors, small business owners, local politicians, aspiring authors, university faculty, etc. and there are a million different directions in which it might go.

Obviously, time and money constraints might mean just a couple of these updates per week. But I think doing this could be a lot of fun, a great way to learn about economic and political trends as they develop on the horizon, and a ready-made opportunity to network.

The focus will naturally be regional, and I think the niche I might start working towards is a business-oriented one. That's partly just because I become more and more interested in business all the time, and see myself heading in that route in one way or another, next year and beyond. Also, it's because I think there's a void that could be better served in the blogosphere - there are tons of blogs that go heavy into politics, but there aren't enough that really get serious about business.

Congratulations, Jim!

2011-01-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of celebrating community service on this MLK, Jr. day, I am saluting Jim Wilde, recipient of the Norma Moseley Housing Advocate of the Year Award, presented by the Massachusetts Mortgage Bankers Association.

There was a nice Sun write-up about Jim's work with the Merrimack Valley Housing Partnership, which included the phenomenal statistic about how the last 500 families to work through the MVHP have not had a single foreclosure among them.

As someone who has had the good fortune to get to know Jim as a friend and neighbor over the past few years, I can assure you that he lives up to the good press.

Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor...D'oh!

2011-01-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

The Pepsi truck shown here obviously didn't fare too well this morning. Trying to get back onto Lakeview became a greater-than-anticipated challenge when the driver went right into a snowbank and a crew of six was needed to dig him out.

Overall, this situation wasn't too bad, because it happened in a parking lot. The city bus that got stuck in a bank on Bridge St, right near the French St intersection, seemed much worse off because whoever ultimately got it free had to deal not only with snow, but also with oncoming traffic from multiple directions.

Despite all the difficulties caused by the snow, however, I was cheering on my Commander yesterday when he issued a *Tough Love* directive to all the staff. Basically, it told people that today would be a workday. In nicer language, he said to suck it up and deal with it.

Pre-empting the instant, knee-jerk cries of "Not fair!" and "Don't you know how far away I live?" he offered ALL of us the opportunity to stay the night right there at Camp Curtis Guild. Pretty reasonable, right? And if those digs weren't good enough for some, there are inexpensive lodging options right in Woburn, or up in Andover, or wherever else might be better for cutting someone's commute time. And on top of THAT, there's the generous leave policy that grants us 2.5 days off every month. If staying on post, or in a hotel were really too much a source of heartburn for some, they could simply dip into their leave day "bank account" and withdraw one measly day for a situation like this. In my case, I had a leave day set aside long ago for a visit to Mass Eye and Ear, so I was spared the painful morning commute today.

Still, through some Facebook postings and a quick conversation with someone at the unit, I was able to gather that the complaints were flying left and right. Maybe they don't make soldiers like they used to.

Speaking of which, I was saddened to learn yesterday that Major Dick Winters passed away earlier this month. He died on the 2nd, but his family did not release the news of his death until this week. Anyone who has watched "Band of Brothers" will remember Captain (and later Major) Winters as the dedicated and heroic Commander of Easy Company during its push into France and then across western Europe. I never met Mr. Winters, but having read Ambrose's book and seen all the episodes of the mini-series at least once each, I always held him up as an Officer worthy of emulation.

Changes Afoot?

2011-01-10T15:34:00.001-08:00

I know the Lowell Sun links eventually die off, but at least for a fortnight or so you can click here to read about a meeting at the Old Court a l'il while back where some activists, pols, and bloggers were talking about potential charter changes.

I know I only follow the links in a small percentage of e-mails and an even smaller percentage of blog posts, mainly because of that inconvenient little "24 hours in the day" problem. An incentive I'll offer you to read this one, though, is that you can expect these issues to be swirling around for the rest of this year, right into campaign season. Candidates may all be "pro-citizen, pro-accountability, and pro-education," etc. but their opinions on serious questions like these (Should positions be professionalized? Should representation be carved out by district? Should terms be longer? etc.) may wind up being one of the key ways that the candidates break out from one another.

Just looking at the ways a question like district representation bounced over from Taya Dixon Mullane and Carol McCarthy to the rebuttal from Victoria Fahlberg, who cited the problem of fiefdom-creation, which McCarthy countered with a term limit suggestion, only to see the CNAG doyenne and neighborhood activist maven Ann Marie Page challenge with a downside to term limits all adds up to show one thing: Reasonable, intelligent people are going to look at these sorts of questions and disagree. There isn't any one 'right' answer to any of this stuff. As I said a couple entries ago, though, I just hope that we don't make the mistake of conflating an outcome we might not like with a process that is inherently flawed.

Hearts on Sleeves

2011-01-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

...burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' -- Kerouac

A couple years ago, a New York Times crossword puzzle clue was "Act unprofessionally." With five empty spaces for the answer, I had no idea where to begin. But as I solved other clues around that one, I cringed as I saw the answer come together: "EMOTE." It was the first time ever I had disagreed on principle with an NYT crossword answer. I don't think it's wrong to show your emotions sometimes because doing so means you care.

In fact, I've worked with quite a few people whose pulse never seemed to rise or fall too dramatically based on what was going on around us...with some exceptions, of course, those were some of the Least-Valuable Players (LVPs?) around. And the irony has never been lost on me when the people who offer unsolicited horn-tooting about how they're "cooler than Peyton Manning on third-and-long" sit around and relax while other people get spun up because those people have to roll up their sleeves and do the work.

Last week, I did something a wee bit out of character. A combination of factors led to it -- mainly, a string of consecutive, stressful 14+ hour workdays, and then having to schedule around part of Friday morning because I had a long-standing follow-up appointment from "that thing from October" at MGH. Well, anyway, I rolled into work just before noon, thinking about all the catch-up work from that morning plus all that I had to have ready for the coming drill weekend, our first AND last in 2011. Sure enough, someone who outranked me decided to make a snide comment about my "morning off." I tried to let it slide off my back and just kept walking, but he said something else. I asked for clarification, clearly in a tone/body language that I don't use every day, or even every month for that sake. He said it again, and I gave him another chance to clarify. After the proverbial third strike, let's just say I responded to those three verbal jabs to the temple with a verbal uppercut right under the rib cage. I shared some information about where I had just been, which threw him right back on the ropes. And then I just walked away, which might not sound like a big deal in the real world, but given the rank disparity could've led to an insubordination hearing.

I realize I may not be *capturing* what happened in a clear way, but I assume you get the idea. I basically told someone senior to me to pound sand, and walked away as he was responding. I wasn't even going to bring it up here, except on Saturday morning my boss did something similar. The command had directed him and all 12 of his guys to do some redundant, mandatory training that all of them had already done, in some cases several times over. He responded that he thought there were better ways they could use their time (with the word 'fuckin' inserted between every other word for emphasis, of course), and when the XO told him again that it was mandatory, end of story, he turned his back and walked away. This was followed by a few more four-letter words in a lively back-and-forth. When my boss relayed this all to me afterwards, I was like, "Well, we need more people around here who can show their emotions on their sleeves...and by the way, something like that happened to me yesterday."

So a few hours ago I was watching the clip from last week's Council meeting on Left in Lowell. I saw the ridiculous round of questioning from CC Caulfield which implied it must've somehow been CM Lynch's fault that the tax revenue had increased so much in the past few years. After CM Lynch tried to rationally explain that TOTAL tax revenue is actually a factor of many things, to include increased business activity, and that average rates had increased at 2.5% annually, CC Caulfield was either not listening or didn't care. It quickly became obvious from Lynch's tone that he was frustrated with the supremely-principled 'tax-nothing-but-don't-cut-anything' stance that Caulfield was taking. When CC Martin jumped in, his words and tone clearly conveyed his own frustration with what was going on. Could you blame him?

I'd go so far as to call this type of stuff the opposite of unprofessionalism.

I was wound tight from a hectic workweek spent solving problems and arranging events for the unit. I cared enough about it to fire back when someone made a crass judgement that couldn't have been further from reality. On Saturday, my boss cared so much about his people and their time that he resisted a directive, even doing this in a way that was well outside usually acceptable norms. At the meeting referenced above, the people who showed their emotions did so because they cared enough about the real business of the city to want to avoid wasting people's time with moot points and empty showmanship.

I take a lot of pride in what I do, and I'm invested in it. If I show that on my sleeve sometimes, I'll accept it, even if a crossword puzzle editor somewhere thinks that's unprofessional.

And just like the author quoted at the top here, I'll always prefer the company of the ones "who never yawn or say a commonplace thing" to the self-styled "Cool Hand Lukes" who scoff and snicker from the sidelines, and who stay parked in the dugout even after both benches clear.

Dharma and Greg

2011-01-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

Okay, yes, I'll confess I stayed up half the night on that one. But seriously, folks, don't forget to tip your waiters -- remind them not to smoke in bed.

There is some great discussion going on at Left in Lowell about downtown issues, closures, foot traffic, etc. I've been tied up with work all day but am getting ready to jump in with my old hobbyhorse about destinations for regular folks with regular tastes. I was glad to see Lynne's reference to Elm St. in Manchester...obvious parallels with Lowell but I think there's a key difference in terms of the location of the arena, and even a seemingly small distance matters a ton in this case (Providence and Worcester have us beat on this count, too). It's always great to read any of Corey Sciuto's stuff on Lowell or small cities in general -- no surprise that he got this ball rolling yesterday. By the way, Corey threw a great idea out there for a 'downtown summit.' I hope I'm not reading too far into what he meant but this could be as simple as a few of us sharing ideas over breakfast somewhere...not something self-serious with resolutions and Robert's Rules.

For what it's worth, Ratriey and I were a bit bummed about the Dharma Buns closure. For all the knocks they're now taking on-line, I will offer up that they had late hours (way too rare downtown), great delivery service, and hearty grub. They had Wi-Fi and a cool atmosphere that I think would merit nomination from anyone as a solid "Third Place." In fact, a month or so ago I met up with a buddy there on a weeknight (Brew'd was literally too packed to even enter) and it seemed like the place was doing great business.

When Isms Sting

2011-01-06T19:18:00.000-08:00

"I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember." -- Cullen

The other night when I got home from work, my sister-in-law (17 year-old junior, LHS) asked me to try to explain some things she had read on the Lowell Sun "online" that really bothered her.

It took me a second or two, and then I realized what she was referring to -- Topix. Sure enough, she had read a lot of online postings in the wake of recent events that were filled with hate-filled invective towards people of Asian descent. As she pointed out, there were no such comments directed towards white people after the Woburn policeman murder, and calls for deportation don't really make sense when you're talking about American citizens born here who've never come *from* anywhere else.

Still, I felt like she was looking for me to try to explain or at least make some semblance of sense of the Topix commentariat, whether because I was older, a blogger, a white guy, or because I was a mix of all the above.

I think I said what you might expect anyone to say..."That doesn't really reflect the way most people think," "None of those posters would be saying those things in person," "That's a very very tiny number of people shouting loudly but they don't matter," etc. Still, it's hard to take the sting away from out-and-out racism. As Countee Cullen relayed from his experience in Baltimore, words designed to cut against who and what you are, can really leave a lasting sting despite all the above disclaimers.

Racism is obviously a tough subject because it's like a political third rail. Criticize certain people at your own risk for fear of taking on the label. Throw it out against your opponents to instantly squelch all real debate and put them on the defensive.

One truly heretical thinker/writer on this subject is also one of my favorite authors -- John McWhorter. He's subject to endless straw man attacks from people who call him an Uncle Tom and a reality denier, but to boil down the entire book Losing the Race into two sentences, here's what he's saying:

1. Yes, racism in America exists, and it's widespread. However,
2. Racism in America is, in most cases, not a sufficient barrier to any one person achieving his/her goals.

Get it? So what he's saying is, if you are a person of color who dreams of being a heart surgeon, a judge, a Senator, a Fortune 500 CEO, etc. it's all possible. YES, you will unfortunately be subject to things like suspicious looks in certain quarters, stereotyping, labeling, etc. but none of those things is strong enough to defeat you as you pursue your dreams.

That sounds commonsensical to most people, but there are certain pockets of academia and professional victimology that lambaste him with some of the most acerbic criticism you'll find anywhere.

To personalize it a bit, I come back to a very McWhorter-esque stance every time the subject of nativism in Lowell comes up. I don't doubt for a nanosecond that there are plenty of people in this city who resent the whole "mills to martinis" transformation of downtown (even if the martinis side of that equation is less prevalent than sometimes imagined...look at the real stats and see). However, if I go back in time and look at my basic goals when I left Hampton Roads -- finding a place to join a community and *be someone* in it, and to settle in somewhere to eventually get married and start a family (moving every two years on active duty wouldn't have been too conducive towards either goal!) I'd have to say, "Check...and check." I will come and go for work, and possibly for school, but this remains the stake in the ground where base camp remains. To wit, I'm not denying that there's nativism (though I'll stick to my guns about how the people most conscious of who did or didn't draw their first breaths on the banks of the Merrimack are often us 'grow-ins'), but I most definitely AM saying it's not a sufficient barrier to people's basic goals.

But anyway, back to my original point -- that's the message I tried to instill in Paula when she asked the question....a few idiots who post on Topix may be venting their *real* feelings, yes, but that's not an excuse for selling your own dreams and hopes short!

Objectionable Language

2011-01-04T18:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning at oh-dark-thirty, I thought I could help myself mentally wake up on the way to work with some sports talk radio. Pretty soon, however, I had to change the channel due to some of the objectionable language coming across the airwaves. Mind you, at this point in my professional life, I'm pretty numb to the standard four-letter words that some folks might find 'objectionable,' so it takes other things to rile me up.

Like endless waves of complaints about the Seahawks making the playoffs at 7-9, while some teams with winning records (even with 10 wins) did not. There were calls for complicated rules changes, like a league that says, "All division winners make the playoffs...except the ones who aren't good enough, for whom we'll develop a complicated substitution scheme."

Here's the problem: The NFL now has 8 divisions with four teams apiece. If you work the math out, it's inevitable that from time to time you'll see some 8-8 teams getting in (happened before, too, but was a real rarity) and even some losers squeak by. It's hard to even say who is necessarily *better* than whoever else, because you would have to factor in strength of schedule before saying a 10-win team is better than an 8-win team, and so on. Statistically, it's much harder to become the Attorney General of California than it is that of Rhode Island, but that doesn't necessarily make one *better* than the other, either.

No sport can bring about outcomes to satisfy everyone. Baseball's NL East has two perenially strong teams (at least for the last decade or so) who could probably be hands-down division winners in many other locales, ceteris paribus. Basketball fans for years have complained about how much tougher it was out west.

Last I checked, division winners making the playoffs works, and it's straightforward. It may lead to some outcomes that make Giants fans upset while Seahawks fans celebrate, but it's preferable to a system filled with asterisks, ifs, buts, and goalposts that change after the proverbial ball has been kicked and someone THEN decides they don't like the way it's sailing through the air.

Which, of course, leads me to my next point. Last week, I was also privy to some objectionable language, though this time in the form of a massive e-mail distribution's back-and-forth about representation of such-and-such group, neighborhood, ethnicity, etc. here in Lowell. I held my virtual breath, of course, for fear of invoking a massive e-mail "flame war." Much like in real wars, I find, e-mail flame wars tend to leave lots of innocent people hurt without creating any real winners, because neither side is really listening to the other anyway.

Anyway, what stirred me up about a lot of the comments was that people were saying, "There's no elected official who represents my [neighborhood, ethnicity, constituency, etc.] so therefore the system must be in need of serious repair."

Okay, I'm not saying I have all the answers -- or even any of the answers -- about how this or any other city ought to be run. As to specific reform proposals, as Ross Perot might say, I'm all ears. THAT SAID, I wish people would stop and think a bit more before declaring something broken just because it doesn't work for them or their constituency.

Instead, how about someone saying, "I don't like the way my neighborhood gets short shrift, so why don't I organize a campaign around a strong candidate who can help fix that?"

Or, "I don't like the lack of ethnic diversity, so I'm going to register [x] number of new voters, find a great person who is a member of that group, and we'll rally behind her this time."

If people from a certain neighborhood or group were being turned away at polling stations, denied registration, or even discouraged from participating, I'd say that would be an unfair set-up. That would be something worth shining a spotlight on and trying to fix. However, if a process is transparent and equitable, someone not liking the outcome isn't reason enough in and of itself to call a system rotten.

For instance, the process of becoming an Olympic 400m sprinter is open, transparent, and fair. It involves running one lap around a standard-length track in something like 45 seconds. Even though I'm aware of that, I sort of missed out on Sydney, Athens, and Beijing. There are many reasons for my failure to appear in any of those, but none make the process inherently unfair. No great, outside forces conspired to keep me from making a go of it.

Just to reiterate my earlier disclaimer, discussions about things like districts vs. at-large vs. hybrid models, full-time professionalization of elected positions, term limits, alternate voting systems are all worthy points and all worthy of discussion -- even those who disagree with certain proposals will be forced to think critically and sharpen their own perspectives in the process.

But if you are going to say that any process must be automatically broken just because you don't like the outcome, you're committing a Herculean leap of logic.

Grand Street Procession: 01/02/11

2011-01-02T16:44:00.000-08:00

Paul Marion over at richardhowe.com already wrote this excellent summary of the meetup of local residents, city officials, police, neighborhood groups, and concerned teens at Armory Park today. I know Paul already singled this out, but one of the most interesting comments from the short speeches at Armory Park came from Capt. Sullivan, who reflected on the diversity among the group of 60 or so people who were there.

Here are some pics from today's event:

When I heard the news about what happened the other night, the first thing I thought about were the parents of Carinna Ouer. It's like, you can do EVERYTHING for your kid for 20 years -- feed her, clothe her, teach her, drive her, etc. but you can never protect someone from a senseless act like this.

Armory Park Event: Sunday, 02 JAN

2011-01-01T20:28:00.000-08:00

In the italicized paragraphs below is a message put out today by Taya Dixon Mullane, President of the Lower Highlands Neighborhood Group.

LHNG to Remember New Year’s Eve Victims of Violence on Grand Street

Event Begins at Armory Park on Sunday, January 2 at 2:00 PM

Please join the Lower Highlands Neighborhood Group (LHNG) on Sunday, January 2 at 2:00 PM in Armory Park to place purple ribbons along Grand Street in remembrance of the victims of violence that occurred at 104 Grand Street on New Year’s Eve. (Ribbons will be provided by the LHNG)

The event will begin in Armory Park at the corner of Westford and Grand Streets at 2:00 PM, and participants will walk along Grand Street and place purple ribbons on light posts and telephone poles. Lower Highlands residents and friends are invited and encouraged to attend. The purpose of this event is to honor victims of violence and send a clear message throughout the Lower Highlands and the City of Lowell that violence will not be tolerated in our community.
LHNG is supported entirely by volunteers and works to maintain and improve the quality of life in the Lower Highlands neighborhood of Lowell. Our work focuses on achieving three primary goals: public safety, neighborhood beautification, and community building. Please visit our website at http://sites.google.com/site/lowerhighlands/ for more information.

-Taya Dixon Mullane

Lower Highlands Neighborhood Group

When Good Deeds Get Punished

2010-12-31T14:34:00.000-08:00

I know everyone has heard the old saw about how "No good deed goes unpunished" many times before. I'm sure most of us have even said it to ourselves after trying to do the right thing and then taking abuse for it.

I sort of caught myself going down that road today but had to nip that pity-party stuff in the bud. Here's the backdrop:

For New Year's Eve, I decided to spring for a suite at a hotel in CT near the casinos and just throw an open invite out in the direction of some extended family who like to go down there from time to time and gamble. Personally, I couldn't gamble to save my life, but unlike people with gambling problems, I don't pretend to be able to (remember, nothing is funnier to me than the way every person ever dealt a hand of blackjack at Foxwoods is 'up' over the course of their careers). But anyway, I'm down for the spectacle, or the restaurants, or shows, or whatever other draws there might be.

A few took the offer up, and a few others didn't. No big surprise there, that's sort of how open invites tend to go. I figured it was time for a 'last big hurrah' before some Army commitments take me out of the picture for a bit, so I didn't mind the cost, and wasn't looking for a flowery 'thank you' from any corner.

What I wasn't really ready for, though, was a lot of extensive questioning and second-guessing from an extended relative who has been repeatedly demanding to know 'The Plan' since the idea was conceived. It's like, no matter how many times I've tried to convey that there was no plan (and that's the whole point!), it didn't seem to register. I just sort of meant to reach out, open some doors (literally), and let whoever it might be sort of do whatever they might do. Anyway, after SEVERAL new rounds of scrutiny regarding "The Plan" (hey, who appointed me for that anyway?) I'll admit my frustration started to show a bit.

And then I realized something -- this is ignorable. I don't have to pout and shout about how "a simple 'thank you' would have sufficed," or get upset about it, or any of the above. To the degree that I can, I'm going to stay away from the refrain listed as the title of this entry, too, because I think it's often used obnoxiously. No one likes ingratitude, BUT:

(1) Before people complain about ingratitude, or about blowback from their 'good deed,' they need to ask about 'demand signal.' Way too many times, I've seen friends and colleagues complain about others' ingratitude in the face of their own generosity, but way too rarely does the complainer stop to try to frame it through the eyes of the other. It's like, let's say you're REALLY into a sport or a band. If you've got a spare ticket, the person you're offering it to probably doesn't care as much as you do, so if all you get is a muffled, "Thanks, man" then that might actually be a proportional response. Back when I was single, I had someone get upset at me because he'd given me the name and number of a female friend of his who lived down in Malden, and had told her to expect to hear from me. I never called or otherwise pursued, and he got really torqued about it...but I had never asked him to do it. There was an assumption built into the initial effort (which admittedly came from a good place), and that same assumption drove him to get upset later on. Ditto for any of the gazillion-million ways people think they're doing others a 'favor' that just might not be all that favorable!

(2) No one should do ANYTHING for which they automatically expect gratitude. Hosting might be a good example of this. It's like, yes, you've probably spent a good chunk of your own money on food and drinks, and you've opened up your home to people, but the key there is that it was all voluntary. Unless someone made you do it, you can't complain about who did or didn't bring or appreciate what. Going around expecting gratitude from people all the time is just a 'sub-optimal' way to go through life, IMHO. Stop trying to keep score, and start enjoying.

And last, the one that I'll have to adhere to now:

(3) If you think you're trying to do something nice, and someone is giving you grief for it, don't fan the flames. It's like, okay, I get it...somewhere, some wire got crossed, something was misinterpreted, and one person who thought he was doing something really nice confused another person who perhaps expected something more, or just different. Raising the ante, or even voicing my own frustration to the third-party who has been relaying all of this 'Planning' confusion, just makes it worse. All I can do is store it in the back of my brain somewhere, because if I do it again, then it really is my fault.

And on that note, time to stop blogging and start having fun -- it's America's greatest secular holiday!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR and best wishes for 2011! (And, as always, thanks for reading)

The Best Political Book...Ever

2010-12-31T14:21:00.000-08:00

I know I've written a time or two here about "What it Takes," by Richard Ben Cramer. It's an exhaustive account of the 1988 Presidential election campaign, with a page count that gets into four-digit land.

But the amazing thing is that it's all awesome. It's not one of those massive books that makes you wish it had been edited better, and that you just keep reading out of a sense of commitment. Instead, it's a magnum opus that addresses a myriad of contemporary American issues of all sorts, and gives revealing and meaningful biographical information about a lot of people who still loom large on the contemporary political landscape (like our current Vice President).

A buddy of mine sent me this link, which talks about how the book was not initially well-received, but has sort of flavored with age and developed a following among people who've discovered it at used bookstores (like I did) and fallen in love with it.

If you have the time and the dedication, check out "What it Takes."

Gooooood Morning, Wakefield!

2010-12-29T16:38:00.001-08:00

My command had a bit of a 'regime change' a couple months ago.

One of the things I love about it is that we ALL (that is, all ages, all ranks, and all MOS) go out on Friday mornings, throw heavy packs on our backs, and traipse around Lake Quannapowitt.

For the record, I really believe what they say about team-building through shared suffering...but this definitely isn't suffering. It is, however, a shared and collective experience -- undoubtedly, as we remember doing it years from now, the air will have gotten colder, the snowdrifts higher, and the wind nastier every time the stories are told.

With this Friday being a holiday, that makes tomorrow the 'ruck' day, which means I won't even have to think about the snooze button.

I don't know the office-place equivalent, but whatever your 'group' (say, your company, your family, your block association, etc.) a regular -- even if infrequent -- activity can be a great way to build some tradition and shared memory.

And if even people grumble about it, they might not 'really' mean it..

What WILL They Think of Next?

2010-12-26T18:28:00.001-08:00

Remember when you were a kid trying to use a vending machine, and you had to find just the right dollar bill, that never had a single crease or crinkle anywhere on it...and that split second pause just as you put it in, hoping the machine wouldn't spit it back at you?

A couple years ago, I was talking to a friend and we both remarked how much the dollar-bill technology with vending machines had improved. Now, you can jam just about any dollar bill in there, and assuming it's not ripped or torn, it'll *take.* Makes perfect sense, right? Customers have money, vendors have wares, and both parties' interests are served when it gets even easier for the customers to part with said money to get said wares.

Maybe this has been around for a while now, but I just noticed the first time I'd seen a vending machine that can take twenties. It spits fives out for change...and what a great convenience for people who have yuppie food stamps from an ATM but no singles to spare.

Just when I got done taking stock of that, I saw dual drive-through lanes. Go capitalism!

Panic! At the Market

2010-12-26T03:58:00.001-08:00

I might think this would be showing my hand as the new guy in Massachusetts, but I want at least partial credit for the fact that this isn't my first, second, or even third rodeo. I think I did an entry like this last year and I'll probably do the same next year, too.

Here's what is about to happen:

1. We are going to get walloped with some heavy-duty snow Sunday afternoon, night, and Monday morning.

2. It will be really hard or damn near impossible to get around on Monday.

3. By Tuesday, it won't be so bad any more. The roads will be passable, the supply chains will flow (remember, the profit motive isn't all bad), and somewhere, birds will chirp.

Does that make me an Apocalypse Denier? Am I just being skeptically contrarian by refusing to participate in Anthropogenic Idiocy in Supermaket Parking Lots and Aisles (AISPLA)?

I just feel that I'd be placing my safety and that of my family in far greater danger by trying to fight off crowds of frantic AA battery hoarders and maniacal milk stocker-uppers at Hannaford's or Market Basket than I would by taking the dire risk that we might go without resupply of those items for a roughly 24-hour period starting Sunday night.

I have a feeling that with some pluck and some know-how, we'll make it!

Why Interview Prep Matters...A Lot

2010-12-26T00:39:00.001-08:00

A slightly belated Merry Christmas. My blogging "optempo" has fallen off quite a bit lately, given work requirements, so thanks for keeping faith and tuning back in.

Last week I had an interview up in New Hampshire. I would say it went really well (but then again, studies show most interviewees overstate their performance), but could have been a Hindenburg-style disaster.

The week before the scheduled interview, a buddy of mine who is a) slightly older; and b) much wiser about such matters, called me. He insisted I come down to Boston to do a mock interview.

"You may think you can just wing it by being friendly and generally well-spoken, but trust me, you can't," he insisted. He couldn't have been more correct in that statement.

By no means was he out to sucker-punch me in that practice session, but he still had me squirming and stammering a bit on even some of the most standard interview questions (i.e. Tell me about yourself, walk me through your resume, and describe a professional failure of yours).

After we wrapped up, he started off, "Well, there's a small percentage of interviewees who absolutely blow it, either by being obnoxious, or standoffish, or timid, or whatever else could tank a person in 30 minutes' time. You're not in that category, but..."

He was being nice about it, but the fact was that I had put forth a "C+/B-" effort, and had come off as rather amateurish. A good interviewee has already thought about how he or she might answer such questions and also has several "hip-pocket" anecdotes ready to go for the inevitable follow-up questions like, "Oh, really...tell me about a time you acted that way," or "How have you implemented that concept in a real-world setting?" etc. A varsity-level interviewee has an idea of how he might crisply and confidently answer a wildly open-ended question like "Tell me about yourself" in under 30 seconds. If the interviewer wants to probe further, she has the freedom to do it, but under no circumstances would the interviewee be stammering and "uhh-ing" wondering whether to wrap-up or keep rambling.

I took his advice and spent the next couple of nights Googling likely questions and then thinking about how I might answer them. I came up with 8 or so "hip-pocket" examples of ready-made stories I could tell if asked about a success, a failure, or a difficult boss or subordinate, etc. The idea, of course, is not to sound rehearsed or too polished, but to not have to mentally *fish* for the answer you'd give to a 101-level question.

This preparation was worth its weight in gold.

After a little distraction about the snow falling outside (which may have been a test to see whether I'd sit down first...I didn't), my interviewer started off with, "So...walk me through your resume," and then a dozen or so boilerplate-type questions. I didn't answer them robotically or recall them from memory, but the fact was I never had that "uhh....uhh...." sort of moment that would've sent things downhill in a hurry. As a result, I stayed confident and relaxed, which fed itself into a neat little positive feedback loop throughout the interview. Concise, crisp answers, 30-45 seconds apiece, with follow-up only as requested.

That may all sound really obvious to you, but unless you're a frequent participant in job interviews (from either side of the table), it might not be. The trap that I think many people could fall into is this: "I'm friendly, I make good eye contact, I'm articulate....I can wing this -- what could go wrong?" The answer to that is that plenty could go wrong. If you haven't taken the time to at least ask yourself -- and then answer out loud -- some questions about your personal work history that require some introspection and follow-on analysis, you definitely don't want to be doing it for the first time in the booth. You might think you sound great, but much like the amateur stand-up guys who suffer from what Jay Leno calls "Laugh Ears" in the book Leading With My Chin, you might not sound so hot from the other side of the room.

As the buddy in Boston was telling me today in an e-mail, all people who are great at anything prepare. Michael Jordan shoots lay-ups and free throws during the shootaround. Punters stay limber with practice kicks along the sideline. Opera singers go through the scales in their dressing rooms. And so on and so on.

People who study performance psychology -- whether in academic, athletic, artistic realms, or wherever else -- consistently report that it's the people who are *slightly nervous* who perform the best. Not the Nervous Nellies, but also not the people who think they can just coast through without a care.

If you're getting ready for an interview, whether for a graduate school, a professional board, a new job, or whatever else, you should get a few butterflies. Then, you should try to anticipate the dozen or so most likely questions you'll be asked, and then make damn sure you're not a deer in the headlights on Gameday.

With a nod to John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood, anything else is preparation for failure.

Christmas in Kabul for the Mass. Guard

2010-12-26T00:24:00.000-08:00

This Boston Globe photoessay centers around the 1-181 Infantry, a battalion of the Massachusetts Army National Guard headquartered out of Worcester. Only the last five pictures are actually of Guardsmen in Kabul...the rest are centered around family members in Western Mass.

There was also a good article about this unit in today's Globe.

Frank You Very Much

2010-12-21T04:09:00.000-08:00

I was heartened to see the quotes from CC Murphy, CC Descoteaux, and CC Mendonca regarding the re-surfacing of the residency requirement issue for city employees. Here is a snippet from the Sun regarding CC Descoteaux's thoughts on the matter:

Councilor Franky Descoteaux said she supports the long-term of goal of more Lowellians working in the city, but also does not believe a residency requirement should be mandatory.

"Practically, however, as municipal employees' pay and benefits increase, and as taxpayers, and state and federal agencies place higher demands on government systems, I am more inclined to prioritize getting the best possible value in an employee -- including education, experience and aptitude -- rather than whether they come from Lowell or not," she said.

Descoteaux said she would be willing to look into policies that give new hires incentives to move to Lowell, including providing a one-time monetary benefit to those that do so.

As a sideline judge, I give the quote here a "10" because it hits on all the important points -- first, that an in-city residence mandate is a bad idea (chiefly because it would limit the available pool of people to draw from, and all the outside experiences/opinions they would bring to bear); second, because it hits on the idea that we're going to increasingly rely on government services in the years ahead, and that we should expect much from its well-compensated employees (Luke 12:48); and thirdly, that a commonsense middle-ground solution could allow the city to draw from a worldwide labor pool but then incentivize city residence and then benefit from the way that would enhance the tax base and generate more social capital across the municipal gov't/private citizen sphere.

Global War Vets' Day in the Sun

2010-12-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

Jen Myers did a great write-up in the Sun yesterday about the Greater Lowell Global War Veterans -- a big tent/wide umbrella veterans' organization open to all who served in any theater (including CONUS) in the post-Vietnam era.

Cliff Krieger eloquently answered the "Why this group?" [in addition to the dozens of other veterans' groups in the Greater Merrimack Valley] question on his site.

As he writes, every group has its own vernacular and its own common places. Global War Vets has its place, and the group has tons of growth opportunity.

Ethnicity and 'The Fighter'

2010-12-11T08:36:00.000-08:00

So right after 'The Fighter' ended last night, my wife and my brother-in-law were saying how some of the spoken Khmer language in the movie sounded inauthentic. This all went right past me, of course, because I don't know enough Khmer to appreciate how "Don't try to rip us off like that" and "Do you think we're all stupid or something?" should actually be said to someone promoting a pyramid scheme.

I didn't really *get* it because I assumed most of the Khmer speakers in the movie were found right here in Lowell, so I couldn't figure out why their way of expressing those things didn't sound right to a native Khmer speaker born in the States in 1985 or to another born in Cambodia in the mid-1970s.

Either way, I give some credit to the filmmakers for not whitewashing the city in the early 1990s. I didn't live here then, but I'm well aware there were already tens of thousands of Cambodian-Americans living in Lowell at the time. Even by just including the scenes where Dicky (or is it Dickie? I see a 50/50 split in the print media) walks by a friendly group of Cambodian-Americans, this film avoids the revisionism of productions like the blockbuster "Pearl Harbor" which rewrote Hawaii's ethnic makeup in order to make the Japanese seem more like *them* and the Hawaiians more like *us.*

Regardless, movie stereotypes cut many ways. For instance, how many people in Lexington were represented by the guy with the sweater thrown over his shoulder who butts into Micky and Charlene's conversation outside the art house cinema? Not many.

I'm always reminded of this when I think about how a friend of mine and his then-girlfriend reacted to the forgettable and formulaic 1990s film Maid in Manhattan. After the film ended, she started off right away about the tiresome way that Hollywood paints Latinas as "sultry" and "fiery," and how the storyline relied on a wealthy white man who saves the day.

Rather than become defensive or apologetic, he just said, "Well, I get tired of the way movies like that caricature white people as a bunch of soulless bumblers who are emotionally tone-deaf and uncaring towards others."

Fair enough. I remember a college class in which a student complained (in the same 90-minute period, mind you!) about the way African-Americans are negatively portrayed in popular media and culture, and then went on to say how she hated The Cosby Show because it showed a stable, wealthy, two-parent black household with a doctor/lawyer couple and well-adjusted kids. "We're not all like that! I don't want white people to see that and then draw a conclusion that all is just perfect in our community these days!"

I can empathize with both of her points, which are not necessarily self-contradictory. But I think everyone who enjoys TV and movies needs to first acknowledge that visual art forms with highly restrictive time constraints are never going to depict all the subleties of life, or of people, in an accurate way.

Let's agree on that first, but also be unafraid to call out offensive or tiresome stereotypes in movies, or the offensive way in which certain ethnicities can be multi-dimensional but others introduced for tokenism or just to teach the other, *real* characters important life lessons that will then make them more whole.

Goodbye, Pat

2010-12-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

I learned this afternoon via the local blogosophere that Pat McCarthy had passed away.

Pat was the first person I met when I came to Lowell in March 2008, looking to buy a condo downtown. On a cold but tolerable day, I popped into the office on Central Street, just before that little turn where it becomes Prescott Street (right next to 1 City Square, and across from the Post Office) to see a guy with slicked-back white hair reading a newspaper and chomping on a cigar. I explained why I was there, and he dropped whatever he had been doing to give me an animated, guided walking tour of Lowell...for the next two days.

He took me all around the downtown, explaining not just what everything was but what it had been, two, three, or more iterations ago. All points were emphasized by pointing the cigar towards the ground and an "I'm tellin' you, kid." He told me all about the old days of the trucks carting in booze, the epic brawls with hammers, and, of course, the "massage pahlahs." I think by the time we were done I had Jack Kerouac's daily routine damn near committed to memory.

We checked out many of the buildings downtown while he caught me up on Democratic party politics (he had been a big Hillary for President guy) and I told him that all the news from Iraq wasn't bad (I had just gotten back a couple months beforehand).

I wound up closing on the spacious place on Market Street with the breathtaking view of downtown and the mountains way out beyond, which I stretched myself to get into but am now just a year or two away from going from red to black on the equity thing.

From then until recently, I would run into Pat McCarthy every now and then, either at TEFKA* Sangria's, Brew'd Awakening, Towers News, or anywhere in between. Because we didn't see each other often, there would always be new milestones to report when we did, and a ten-minute errand could become an hours-long event. One thing that really stands out is that Pat always went way out of his way to introduce me to all the people he knew. He would grab me a seat right in the middle of groups of friends who'd know each other, literally, for decades. Effortlessly, he made it seem as if we did, too.

The topics were always wide-ranging, the stories were always colorful -- even if sometimes apocryphal -- but it was always lively and worth the time to talk with...er, listen to, Pat.

*The Establishment Formerly Known As

How Bureaucracy Happens

2010-12-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

"Nothing is ever a big deal...until it happens to you, at which point it becomes a very big deal."

So in the National Guard, there's a fairly steady undercurrent of tension between the part-timers and the full-timers. The attitude of the part-timers tends to be something along the lines of, "Those lazy bastards. They've got all month to plan just two days of drill, but somehow things always get messed up." Many full-timers tend to think, "Those ungrateful bastards. I work so hard to make sure all the paperwork is in order, and I'm lucky to even get as much as an acknowledgement for it."

I have a fairly interesting window on it all, because I sort of sit between the two worlds. The units can bring more FTSP (Full-Time Support Personnel) on board during special projects or near units' mobilization dates, who essentially augment the *real* full-time force by working during the weeks and the drill weekends but in a temporary status.

As with any longstanding dispute or misunderstanding, the truth falls somewhere in the middle. However, if I HAD to pick a side, I'm going with the part-timers. They're the ones who SHOULD have everything in order for them on the weekends. They're the ones who make the sacrifice of juggling two jobs, and they're the ones who lose financially when things get screwed up.

To use a not-so-hypothetical example, let's say someone who worked a civilian, private sector job planned to take the month of January off because he had been promised a course that ran the entire month (and would pay him his regular base pay, plus travel and allowance costs). Then, when the time came to input the order, the full-time Officer in charge arbitrarily decided, "No, I don't see the need for this...it can just be completed online instead on the soldier's own time." Never mind all the e-mails and phone calls during the months prior (during which time the desk jockey Officer could've voiced those thoughts). More importantly, never mind the well-being of that soldier. His civilian employer had already arranged for him to be gone in January, and the soldier had already made travel and lodging arrangements for the course. The person making that decision is going to be paid handsomely every 1st and 15th of the month regardless, and has apparently forgotten that it's not that simple for everyone else.

On a smaller scale, other things like this happen from time to time. Training events get planned or cancelled without all the people involved being notified. Bureaucratic snafus keep people from getting the proper (new) pay after a promotion. Security clearance packages get lost in the sauce. And so on and so on.

In almost all cases, it boils down to one simple thing: People not treating an individual situation as if it were *their own.*

In other words, let's say you send a mortgage check to Wells Fargo every month on the first. Let's say you usually notice it clear your account sometime around the seventh. If it gets to be the 11th or 12th of the month, and you don't see the updated bank activity, what are you going to do?

Don't worry, I'll answer for you.

You'll call to see what happened. You'll want to figure out if it was a Post Office issue, or if the bank had been backlogged, or if there was some type of problem with the check, etc. You might offer to have your check voided and write a new one, or to see what the manager can do for you, or some other proactive solution...What you WON'T do, however, is just sort of *let it go.* You don't want to get hit with penalties or other bank issues for something that wasn't even your fault in the first place.

Really good bureaucrats treat their jobs the same way. They follow up. If they don't hear back from an important e-mail, they call. If that doesn't bear fruit, they call around the office they need to find someone else. They double check. They keep lists. Basically, they take ownership of their role, and treat everyone's issue like it were theirs.

Unfortunately, not-so-good bureaucrats "fire and forget." Yes, they may show basic competency by sending someone's paperwork off to the equivalent of the "Top Men" warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but they don't take that next, critical step of making sure it actually got there. Not-so-good bureaucrats are very good at using the defensive mechanism of insisting that "it's not a big deal" to address other people's concerns.

The problem is, it is a big deal. If your application package for a Company Commander position, or your paperwork packet for a security clearance, or your eligibility data for a VA home loan were on someone else's desk, it would be a really big deal to you. If you lived paycheck-to-paycheck, and took a month off of your civilian job because you had been verbal and written promises to come on orders for equivalent or higher pay, but then had that rug pulled out from under you, it would be a really big deal then, too.

When people completely lose sight of that, they deserve a wake-up call that, unfortunately, usually never comes. This is sort of a tautology, but the people who least need the wake-up call in the first place (i.e. the most 'tuned-in' bureaucrats) are also the quickest to see the light when something gets screwed up and then try to fix it. And, of course, vice versa.

Bear in mind, this isn't just more public sector self-loathing stuff here. I think this sort of thing applies to ALL large organizations, and can be felt by anyone who has ever tried to resolve a bogus insurance claim, or moving violation, or clerical error on a bank statement, etc. It's YOUR big deal, and not theirs, and that's obvious from the manner and attitude with which it's being handled.

That's *sort of* okay and expected when we're talking about impersonal and anonymous settings, esp. when you consider the person handling it may have hundreds or even thousands of cases and could NEVER be expected to treat each like they were his or hers. However, when the scale is far smaller and the relationship between supporter and supported is more explicit, the type of callousness that leads someone to say, "Just do it online," without a shred of regard for how that might affect the person in question or his family is, well, unacceptable.

Newark, You Have a Problem

2010-12-01T20:45:00.000-08:00

A buddy of mine just forwarded me this New York Times article about a 13% cut to the Newark Police Department recently announced by Mayor Cory Booker's Administration.

If you don't follow the link, I don't blame you. I don't have such a hot track record of following links I see in blogs or in forwarded e-mails, so I'll steer clear of hypocrisy land and just give you the Readers' Digest edition:

The city of Newark has an $83 million budget shortfall. Its mayor -- who happens to be one of the most phenomenal people in public service today on any level -- needs to address that. He met with the Fraternal Order of Police, tried to get some negotiations but, in NATO terminology, wound up with NO JOY. So his only option, even amidst rising crime rates after years of positive trends in the city, was to make layoffs.

Camden had it much worse, by the way. That far more bedraggled hamlet across from Philadelphia just cut half of its police force. Bear in mind, Camden consistently ranks as "America's Worst City" in statistical formulas that measure quality of life.

The worst part of all?

This is just the beginning. Because the union was unwilling to compromise with the city, all those jobless policemen and their families wind up in the loss column, as does the Mayor, and, way more importantly, all the law-abiding citizens of Newark. The Union can claim some sort of Pyrrhic victory, and you could *sort of* say the other 87% of police benefited, but the new conditions of the city might not even make that true.

All this reminds me why President Obama deserves across-the-board applause for the two-year freeze on federal wages.

And who should be the first people celebrating that decision? Federal employees, that's who.

No typo there, and I'll wrap this up with my point, which I used before in reference to Vallejo, CA and also to recent events here in Lowell. When public sector salaries and benefits are allowed to spin out of control due to cozy negotiations or ridiculous, runaway annual *bumps* in a non-inflationary environment, the eventual effect is that the house of cards will come tumbling down and public sector workers will be out of a job. With the public services they perform taken away, there are lots of losers in the equation. This is what SC Jim Leary was getting at last week -- if the teachers' union tells the city to pound sand rather than compromise, the current school budget will be the victim. The assistant librarians and the media specialists and the coaches and the paraprofessionals would directly suffer, as would the students, and just about anyone with any education could tell you how that would adversely affect the rest of the city.

I'm not a gambler, but I know this: If someone said I could either keep my current wage -- albeit frozen for five years -- or choose an alternative where my agency would face 40% cuts over that time, possibly in an arbitrary manner, I would be plum crazy not to take that first option. I would even take a 10% cut rather than option two.

But looking at some of the visceral outrage to the President's decree, I'm guessing that not every servant of Uncle Sam sees it quite the same.