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

Stick Day!!!

Been doing some pretty good training the past couple of days called Combat Lifesaver training. The topics include casualty evaluation, opening airways, treating chest trauma and decompressing a tension pneumothorax, controlling bleeding, and starting and administering an IV. Pretty good stuff. Most of it was taught by the school here, but our medic, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Tim Frock filled in a lot of the gaps and gave us a bunch of supplemental stuff.

The best way to learn is by doing. So yesterday we stabbed each other repeatedly until we found veins and got IVs started. I got mine on the first stick, which is a good thing. The guy who stuck me, Captain Ryan Watson, our personnel guy, got it in but made a bit of a mess. I'd rather get stuck than stick somebody, but confidence will build over time. Doc says he'll have us being able to stick someone at night under NODs (night vision goggles) in a vehicle before long.

Sweet. Bet that's gonna be messy.

Today we have the hands-on test, then another three hours of Arabic tonight from 6-9.

We get a 4-day weekend starting this Friday! I am going to be able to make it home Friday night, which is a good thing. Looking forward to seeing the family; first time since July 27th.

Hope all's well- take care.

Ron

I went to Fort Riley and all I got was this crappy haircut

So I went to the PX to get a haircut... It was closing time. When she asked me how I wanted (what's left of my hair) cut, I said "short..." Before I could get out the rest of the phrase "...on the sides and trim the top" she had already initiated what I would describe as a reverse mohawk, straight down the center of my head.

At that point, there was no turning back. So my head is now 'buzzed.'

I did not tip her. I should have tipped her with some carreer advice: She isn't very good at her current occupation, and perhaps she should pursue a career in garbage collection or maybe in asphalt application. Or maybe as a crash test dummy. Or window licker. You get the idea.

Inshallah, as the Arabs say.

I am going bald over time, but this may have expedited the process. I haven't had it this short since Basic Training at Fort Benning (The Land That God Forgot), which was 20 years ago.

Hope it grows back.

What do you think? Is the Uncle Finster look for me? It works for Bruce Willis, right?