Humble Pie

For the past three days, we have been working on some urban warfare stuff. The first day was some short range marksmanship which entailed some shooting and the second day we learned about the specifics of room and house clearing (see "Better Every Day" post below).


Yesterday we had the collective training event that tied a lot of what we have been learning for the past six weeks together.


Our link up with the Iraqi Army (IA) went well (some American soldiers posing as Iraqis, augmented by some locals who were playing the part, and the commander was an Arab-speaking giant of a man named Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed). "LTC Ahmed" (not his real name) briefed us on his plan through an interpreter to go to the town of Bashur and meet the local sheik and mayor. The sheik had asked LTC Ahmed to pay his town a visit, as there has been a rash of violence and an influx of people who were not locals. He suspected that al Qaeda was using his town as a staging base. He requested our presence at great risk to his personal safety.


LTC Ahmed's plan was to set some outer security and then go in and see if we could narrow down the search area by observing the locals and meeting with the sheik and the mayor. We split our force of 11 into a mounted element that pulled security from the outskirts of the town, and a dismounted element, which I went with. The American soldiers shadowed the Iraqi Army as they went about their searching and tactical questioning, and I stayed with LTC Ahmed and we did more of the same.


After about 20 minutes of searching, we found weapons, captured a bad guy, and gathered enough information to learn that the newly inserted al Qaeda leader, Mullah Abdul Mohammed, was in a town called al Hawej nearby. We loaded up and headed out to go and capture him.


A good day-- so far.


Al Hawej was not a good place for IA or coalition forces, so we were more aggressive going in. The plan was to go straight to the house where the bad guy was, apprehend him, and get out. All was going well until a sniper popped out of the weeds across the street from the town and shot one of our outer cordon security guys. Our team reacted well, and they quickly actioned on the sniper, and subsequently began treating our casualty. Simultaneously, another shot rang out from some random place and another one of our team was hit, this time the casualty was from the dismounted element. As Doc went to work, another shot rang out, and Doc was suddenly wounded.


We then noticed that the Iraqis had loaded up their highly valued target and they hauled ass, leaving us on the objective to fend for ourselves.


I'm told they'll do that from time to time.


Then, to add to the chaos, as I was trying to assess what was happening, one of the Observer-Controllers walked up and handed me a casualty card and said, "Sir, stop talking. You've been shot."


"From where?" I replied, astonished, as I was surrounded on three sides by high walls and I was kneeling behind a junked car. I thought I was in a pretty good spot. The card showed that I was shot in the right thigh, I could talk but could not move, and that I could NOT assist my unit in any way.


Ouch.


I pulled out my aid kit and began to self administer a tourniquet from my apparently profusely bleeding leg. That dude must have been a hell of a shot.


At that point I realized I had been shot to prove a point.


From there it pretty much went downhill... Unplanned contingencies I should have thought of planning for surfaced, and they were ugly. We struggled to get off the objective, and it was apparent we had failed to consider a lot of things in planning for our operation. We somewhat arrogantly thought we would just roll up and do the thing, LEEroy Jenkins-style.


Up to this point, I thought our team had been doing pretty well, but based on this exercise of Camp Funston-isms and extremes, we have a lot of stuff to still figure out. I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to finally do some collective training, and I'm pleased these things are coming to light here and not in Iraq. I suppose as long as you are learning, you are doing OK.


We have a couple of days left to fix some stuff, which is good. This Friday we have our capstone, which will wrap up everything we have been working on. Hopefully it will go better than this drill.


Hope you had a good weekend. Take care.


Ron

Chinese Delivery Guy Wars

So here in the barracks, you can eat at one of two places: Chow Hall 1 or Chow Hall 2. They are approximately 300 meters apart, and they probably collectively serve around 1500-2000 people per meal, per day. They do their best, but you can only cook baked chicken so many ways before it gets old. We start week seven tomorrow, and quite frankly, I'm a bit burned out on the food. It's not bad; it does the job.

Others hit burnout at about week 1.5. So they resort to delivered pizza, and some local delivery places. In observing the Chinese delivery guys in particular, I have observed quite a rivalry in the chinese food delivery business, almost to the levels of requiring UN Intervention and the creation of a Zone of Separation (ZOS) to allow both chinese delivery companies to peacefully coexist.

When a guy comes to deliver food, he will place extra menus and flyers touting the authenticity and deliciousness of his chinese grub. He will place them everywhere, on just about every horizontal surface he can find.

This tactic of leaflet bombing seems to upset his counterpart, and chinese guy #2 will instigate a scorched Earth policy of sterilization, and he will replace all of chinese guy #1's propaganda with his own, which highlights how much more delicious his chinese chow is from chinese food guy #1's chinese food.

It all came to a head yesterday, as chinese guy #1 met chinese guy #2 in the parking lot.

Chinese guy #1 was inbound with a fresh load of MSG for a trooper who slept in and missed breakfast. Chinese guy #2 was conducting a zone reconnaissance, replacing chinese guy #1's flyers with his latest own, and soliciting chow requests in person. Heated words were had in the parking lot. I don't know what they were saying-- If they were going at it in Arabic, I might get some of it, but my Mandarin is a bit non-existent. But it was evident that this was an epic battle of deliverymen.

And then it happened. Chinese guy #2 knocked the carryout order that chinese guy #1 was carrying out of his hands.

I anxiously awaited as the two chinese guys squared off and shouted some more. I thought I would be treated to a flurry of ninja-ness, excited to see a kung fu movie plot unfold before my eyes.

But instead, chinese guy #2 ran to his delivery vehicle and sped away and chinese guy #1 let loose with a flurry of obscenities.

This rivalry does not exist with the pizza guys. They apparently have an accord or something.

This competition for business runs counter to my theory of chinese food restaurants. I believe the Chinese Government secretly owns the rights to all chinese food buffets and restaurants in the US, and the only way to open one is to agree to franchise it from Mother China. All of the food tastes the same, the decor is all the same, and the accounting when the bill comes is always mildly sketchy. But this delivery guy competition somewhat disproves my theory.

Perplexing.

Better Every Day

Things keep on getting better...

I found a guy who wants to buy my truck, and negotiations are complete. Now it's up to the banks. I'm a bit sad to see it go; while it was (and still is) a good truck, it is another sign that my time here in America is drawing to a close and blast off is eminent. The flip side to that is the sooner we get to Iraq, the sooner we get to come home.

Also as a bonus, my NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge) Sergeant First Class Pate (AKA: Big Mama) found out he was selected for promotion today. Super news. It's good to see the Army reward good NCOs and entrust them with more responsibility.

Today was a good day of training. We did what the Army calls 'Short Range Marksmanship.' It was the first day of a three-day block where we learn to conduct operations in an urban environment. It wasn't quite like a week at the Direct Action Resource Center (http://www.darc1.com/) but it is the best Riley can do for a half a day and limited ammo. It involves shooting and moving, transition to pistol, and shooting around barricades. Basically I got paid to do my favorite hobby today, which was nice.

Tomorrow we are going to learn about clearing rooms and buildings. The end state of training is some force on force stuff with an expensive version of paintball. Should be a good time, as well as a chance to do some team building and some urban problem solving. These types of training events are good for the team in that we get to exercise our decision making abilities, and we also get to see second and third order effects of decisions, and we also learn more and more about each other.

These two days will take us up to a scenario on Saturday where we have to do another combat patrol, link up with a platoon of Iraqis, and accompany them on a cordon and search mission and a raid in two towns where bad guys are. Our job is to coach and advise the Iraqi Army (IA) in the conduct of their operations. In these scenarios, there is no right answer, only different methods and consequences to each method. The optimal goal is to find a solution where the Iraqis solve the problem themselves and we bring everyone home. Stay tuned for Sunday's exciting blog entry on how this turns out!!!

Not looking forward to watching the Arkansas vs UT game this weekend. Hope the Iraqis at least fare better than the Hogs.

Hope all is well- Take care.

Ron

Getting Anxious

Things are going well. Our team has jelled, and we are getting it done. This past Saturday we had a series of hands on tasks to complete, and the fellas did good. One particular area we seem to be doing well with is our Non-Commissioned Officers (NCO), or Sergeants for the old school.

Sergeants make the Army do what its supposed to do. They 'make shit happen.' They are the trainers of both soldiers and officers, and they are the backbone of any unit. I have fond memories of my NCOs growing up in the Army, from my first squad leader (Staff Sergeant Darren Bohn, AKA: Jesus) as an Infantryman, through my first Platoon Sergeant (SFC Harris) when I was a Tank Platoon Leader, to my gunner (SGT Pettibone) and First Sergeants (Carlin, Grott, Hess, and Sturgell) as a Troop Commander. This trend continues here on the team... The NCOs are no-nonsense and they want to get it done, and they don't want to fail. It makes it easy to build a good unit when you have good building materials.

On another note, I'm feeling a bit anxious this week. We really have only three major training events left. One is urban operations, which we will do Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, another is a mounted live fire combat patrol and all of the prep work that goes before it, and the last event is a Capstone, where we will put it all together. It would of course be ideal to jsut ping from one event to the next, but due to the amount of people here vs. available resources, we have to phase the training so everyone gets a chance to do it, and therefore drag it out over two weeks. So we pace ourselves and use the time to improve as best we can.

Back to feeling anxious... It's not an anxious feeling like I am running out of time, like when I am on leave and I know the good time will come to a close and it will be time to get on with it. It is a feeling of anticipation; not quite dread like going to the dentist, but not quite like an excited kid waiting for Christmas morning, either. Maybe more like a date where you have no idea what the outcome will be... You hope for the best, but at the same time, try to not be unrealistic about your expectations.

We all also realize the faster we get there, the faster we can come home.

Maybe it's anxious like the Razorbacks playing Texas this weekend: They know it's going to hurt a lot, but they want to get it over with. That one is gonna be ugly...
Woo Pig Sooie....

Ron

See the post below about the machine gun range and then watch the video, and you'll better understand....





Hope all's well-


Ron

Machine Gun Nostalgia and Bad Loans

Tonight is a “two-parter:”

Part One: A trip down Memory Lane. The past couple of days have been pretty good. Although we are advisors, and the bulk of what we do will be, um, advising, we have to be trained to take care of ourselves out there in “Indian Country.” So for the past couple of days we have been doing some machine gun training, which for me is quite nostalgic.

The first job I had in the Army as an 18-year old Private First Class Infantryman in the 101st Airborne Division was an M60 machine gunner. It was the only thing I wanted to do in the Army—Everything that I did in the Army after that was icing on top of icing. I had a blast doing it, and I relished the simple life: Walk a lot, set up, wait, shoot, walk a bunch more, wait some more, then walk home. Clean gun, get off work.

It was a very simple life. Sure, we walked a lot, and we got rained on a lot, but it was simple. All of life’s complications reduced to Maslow’s Heirarchy of needs: Ammo, water, food, a dry place to sleep, all in that order.

20 years later it was just as fun: An M240 and a .50 Caliber machine gun, two days and two nights of beautiful weather, and a buttload of free ammo. Add to that a nice sunset, a couple of hours of sleep under a full moon on a cloudless night on a Humvee hood, and a beautiful sunrise.

The fellas on my team all shot well-- We were the only team to all qualify on the M240, and half of our guys shot a perfect score at night with the .50 M2. I’m proud of them. Get sum.

_______________________________

Part Two: The rant on corporate accountability. AIG and investment banks like them make poor leadership decisions, lose billions of dollars on poor investment decisions and inaccurate books, but no accountability for the leadership. They get fired, but walk with multi-million dollar severance packages that were negotiated in advance. In my opinion they should be tried on criminal charges. As a commander, if I lost or misused property, I was held liable and accountable for my actions. These guys screw up and walk away unscathed and untouched.

This is not why I am spending years away from family, living with 39 other men in one building, and not why my family is going without a husband and a dad. I’m not doing this for free chicken so some irresponsible corporate CEO with a lack of morals can get rich off of other people and not be held accountable for his decisions.

Sure, Capitalism and Globalism both have their roots in individual greed, but I think we may have gone too far.

I don't have an answer, just an angry viewpoint.

Sunday in the barracks

Sundays are interesting here.

Well, ok, they aren't really all that interesting... This morning consisted of a breakfast I could sit and enjoy and watch some TV, a little bit of laundry, and maybe a trip to the gym but mostly out of boredom. And then football.

But I did notice something yesterday... Last night I went to go see Righteous Kill with Pachino and DeNiro. (Not bad. Not great either, but not bad.) It was my first time to get away from the barracks and get away from the people in the barracks in a while, the same people who have the same background and occupation and goals and views as I do.

I discovered that I have become acclimated to my little world of Camp Funston. At the theater people wore different clothes. There were all kinds of people there: Men of all different sizes, women of all different sizes, people with hair-- just lots of different. The cars were all different. There was a choice of food. They talked of different things and they engaged in something other than work. I sort of felt as if I was an outsider; almost like it was a foreign country.

Well, it is. It is KANSAS, after all.....

I find it interesting to see how you can adapt to different environments. I sort of went through this when I came back from Korea-- I couldn't remember where the spoons were in the house-- My own house was foreign to me. Yet what was previously foreign became the familiar, and my own home was foreign. The really funny thing is that I didn't think that this place was all that different, until I left it and went back to the 'normal' world. It's only been about two months since I showed up here (13 to go--- woooo...) but the change and acceptance of familiarity happens so quick.

The training continues. On Thursday we qualified on all of our indivifual weapons (and of course it rained). We have a busy week coming up. We have two late nights on ranges and we are starting to get into the weeds of some collective training.

Saw some of the pictures from Ike and its redecorating of Galveston. Wow. My thoughts and prayers go out to those folks.

Hope you are well. Take care.

Ron (AKA: Barracks Rat)

Marauder Consulting, Inc.

From left to right, standing: CPT Ryan Watsosn, CPT Stephen Arceneaux, me, SFC Milton Pate, SFC John Ogena, SFC Carroll Chambers, SFC William Berry, CPT Lee Williamson. Kneeling, rom right to left: CPT Stephen Hancock, CPT Johnny Kasper, and SFC Tim "Doc" Frock, laying down on the job.

Pretty good day of training. We played an hour and a half of "Ultimate Football" before the sun came up (with no injuries! A record!).

This afternoon we conducted a practical exercise where we had to go to a house in a small village and detain a bad guy. We knew who he was, but we didn't know what he looked like, so we had to do some interviews to paint the picture. When we got there, we encountered two Iraqi Army (IA) soldiers and six civilians, none of whose story matched up. After some drama, some confusion, a bunch of searching, and some creative tactical questioning, we discovered that the IA soldiers had apprehended seven people, took them to this house, and began beating the crap out of them in order to randomly gain some intelligence. It seems they were looking for the same guy, but their methods weren't quite as scientific as ours were. We also discovered that the house had been used as a location for bomb making. By the time it was all over, we got a pile of digital and paper intelligence, a computer, and some weapons, and we figured out who the real bad guy was (the leader of the cell), and we got him and the chemical mixer off the street. Not a bad day.

There wasn't much advising or consulting involved-- as advisors we should not be in the business of searching houses-- but it was also our first real chance as a team to work together (other than playing football) and solve some problems. The fellas did good; everyone wants to be here and there was genuine interest to understand and improve. Not sure how much site exploitation we will be doing as a team, but it put us in some unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable positions, which is good. We learned a lot today about what we don't know, and from that we can figure out where we want to go.

One place I know I'm NOT going tomorrow: The football field. I'm a little sore from this AM, and from walking around all afternoon wearing 50 pounds of gear.

Gotta get used to that.

Information as a "Non-Lethal Weapon System"

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up camp rumors and print them as fact. In regard them as spies, which in truth they are. If I killed them all there would be news from hell before breakfast."

William T. Sherman wrote that back in the Civil War. And from what I've studied in the past, that attitude was prevalent throughout the Military culture until this war. It has taken us a long time to realize that Sherman was working hard and not smart, and that it makes a lot of sense to make the effort to get our message out in conjunction with the rest of our operations.

The second day of our two day seminar from the Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peace focused on two interesting topics, one was the media, and the other was about "human terrain" and Influencing Operations.

The media presenter was a guy named Dodge Billingsley. He does a lot of freelance work, was embedded with the marines a time or two, and has recently been working in Georgia and Chechnya, and he was the first guy on the scene in the Shah i Khot valley in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, and he helped us understand that your message is a weapon system, and in a counterinsurgency, it can be used to influence the "key terrain," which is the people. Mao said it best: Control the people, control the country. al Qada does a great job of this... Every attack they do has a camera guy there, and the footage is on the web in a matter of minutes.

The second guy was Andrew Garfield, a former British Army 'Armour' and Intelligence officer who spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland. His presentation focused on the point that every action has intended and unintended consequences. He also had a lot of French Army jokes, which are always entertaining.

Both of these guys had messages we had heard before, but it was good to hear it in another perspective. I equated it to parents coaching: I can give my daughter some advice on technique or conditioning, but somehow the same advice sounds more authoritative and therefore better if I pay somebody to coach her and the coach tells her the exact same thing. Overall, good stuff.

The team is coming together. This week will be the last week of mostly individual skills, and now we will begin to get into more collective training. We hit the range later in the week for some bullet launching (for when negotiation, kind words and chi tea fail), and we also draw our set of vehicles so we can start to do more training on our own.

Nice to see the Razorbacks eek out a win last night. The next month is going to be ugly.

Sorry for no pictures lately-- not much to photograph of late. This week should be better.

Hope you are well.

Ron

The Past is the Present

Did some neat stuff today. I had to pick two guys from the team to receive "additional cultural training." I was a bit skeptical, and I wanted to see what it was about so I picked myself and my Operations guy, CPT Steve Arceneaux to attend. The rest of the fellas went off to Monster Truck Training (AKA: Driver's training in Humvees-- I'll get mine later).

The culture training is two days long, and it is run by an element of the Naval Postgraduate School out in Monterrey, CA. They brought in a bunch of academic type folks with a bunch of letters after their names and they have Doctor titles. We got both historical and anthropologic backgrounds from some scary smart academic guys on Iraq, Mesopotamia, Early Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the Fertile Crescent. Very informative; I never studied that part of the world in this detail, and when you take Iraq's history into context, it all makes perfect sense why they are the way they are (which is un-western: imagine that). It of course corroborated much of what I have been reading in a book called The Modern History of Iraq, which covers Iraqi history from the 1920 Revolution to the present. It reads like a cross between a Bugs Bunny cartoon and a soap opera in terms of wackiness and drama. They've been busy.

Today I learned lots of modern things we take for granted are as a result of the Muslim Civilization conquering other civilizations, stealing their ideas, and spreading them as they went. Stuff like Aristotle's scientific works, Algebra and Geometry (I could have done without those), paper making, arabic numbers, the concept of zero, and lots of stuff on Anatomy.

That region of the world is also fiercely tribal; the family is everything to them, and the concept of a Nation State of Iraq is a foreign concept-- hence the apprehension to just jump right in, establish local and national governments, and sing Kumbaya all together, thus negating thousands of years of conflict and religious disputes over who the TRUE descendents of Islam are (one of many internal disputes). Add to the fact that the land of modern Iraq has been fought over for thousands of years. Seems everyone has a reason to hate someone.

Sure, they oppress women, promote non-secular education, will kill at the drop of a hat Hatfield vs. McCoy style, and believe in poligamy, but hey... Every culture has its flaws, right?

But strangely, when you take all of the historical stuff in context, it all makes perfect sense.... No wonder they are they way they are. No wonder they are resistant to seemingly imperialistic western ideas, no wonder they think we are only there for oil, no wonder they don't want to share power with anyone.

All of this stuff would have been nice to know in 2003-2004. I would hope we would have thought to learn about it back then. Them dudes with all the letters behind their names make it all seem so obvious. Their past is truly their present.

I wonder if it will change. Sort of arrogant of us to think we could just roll up in there and BLAMMO create a western style democracy.

Heck, it took us until 1783 to get a Constitution, and dang near everyone who signed it was banished or punished or wound up dead. Wonder if George Washington and John Adams worried too.

All that aside, it seems we are making progress, but there has been progress there before. Wonder how long it will last, and I skeptically wonder how long we will be interested in that part of the world, and what will happen next.

Good night and take care.

Ron

Good things and bad things

It was a good weekend, as the team got a 4-day weekend. I was able to make it home for our big 80's party that Shannon planned and threw together, and it also doubled as Hailey's 11th Birthday party. Everyone came dressed circa 80s style, and it was a blast.


I flew in Friday night and took a cab to the house. The cab driver was Ethiopian, so I threw some Arabic at him, and he laughed. Not sure if he was impressed at my gringo language skills, or if I said something that completely embarrassed myself. Probably the latter.


I had a blast with the family. I tackled some home improvement projects, and we took the dogs to the lake to wear them out. I also got to tour Hailey's new school, which is very nice. I was glad to meet her teacher and get a tour of the place for context for when she tells me they can't play football because the field doesn't have grass on it yet.


The bad part about coming home is always leaving. I have been gone for a year now, only making it home once a month or so. I get one more break before we head over, and I think Hailey is starting to realize that the next trip home will be "it" for a while. She is older now, and the separation is starting to take its toll. Sure, I haven't deployed to the big show yet, but I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't affecting me either. It kills me to make her sad, and leaving over and over again is getting old. She is a great kid for putting up with this, and I am so proud of her. I keep telling her it is a means to an end, and that while we are sad now, we will be happy when I get home. Sometimes I think I tell myself that as an excuse. Shannon is a champ for doing what she does: Holding down a career, managing the house, and playing the role of two parents. I'm not sure how she keeps track of everything.


This is the part that America doesn't see, and you really can't describe or quantify how much abandoning your family for an extended period sucks for both you and them. I think kids are the real victims of these adverse or non-ideal family situations, particular to the military. I just hope she understands why I have to do this, and hope she doesn't hate me for it.


But life goes on. Another busy week here at Camp FUNston. Tomorrow I get to learn about Biometrics, and the rest of the team continues with specialty training. And it's all topped off with another three hours of Arabic tomorrow night...


Good night and take care.

Ron