Blog Machine City

The amount of preparation that is given to each American fighting man (and woman) is staggering, and largely invisible to the average civilian. In the last three days, we’ve been subjected to a battery of administrative procedures and medical tests that boggle the mind, both in their scope and in their efficiency. All of the pay, legal, and other administrative issues were handled the first day, which included, but is not limited to: combat pay, housing allowance, subsistence allowance, life insurance, family life insurance, spiritual health, health insurance, emergency contact information, next-of-kin, wills and power of attorney, and free MP3 players with relaxation music.

On the second day, we ran the gauntlet of medical procedures, that dreaded ritual of Army life that involves sore arms and interminable line-waiting. My day went quickly, since I only had to get a hearing test, do a half-hour cognitive assessment, sign up for new glasses, get two vials of blood drawn (HIV test and chickenpox (!) test), get four shots (including the burning needle of anthrax shot #5), and talk to a doctor. Other activities included dental screenings, smallpox inoculations, and pregnancy tests for the ladies.

Today we got yet more equipment, totaling about $1600, which was only eight items: four ballistic armor plates, a duffel bag (my fifth), a poncho and poncho liner (in digital camo pattern!), and yet another neck gaiter.

As much business as we were put through, what isn’t immediately obvious is the tremendous level of organization that occurs behind the scenes to make the whole process work smoothly. How many people had to do their job before the medic stuck the anthrax needle in my arm? The medic who delivered the shot, the people who handled the syringes, the clerks who ordered the doses, the truckers who delivered the stuff, the workers at the factory who produced the vaccine…so the trail goes, and back again, until there I am in Wisconsin, woozy and sore from being stabbed and bled.

And so we’re the most exquisitely prepared fighting force in human history, with every possible administrative, medical, and logistical duck in a row, swaddled in thousands of dollars of Kevlar and ceramic armor, all to fight an enemy who shits on rocks and carries nothing but a bowl of rice and a Kalashnikov. There’s something profound about the clash of cultures in that image, but that’s best expressed in another post.

It’s just a footlocker, but that few cubic feet might as well contain a black hole, creating an event horizon beyond which I cannot see. Staring into the box, trying to decide how to fill it, I’m gripped with indecision. What to bring, when your life for the next year is reduced to three bags and a box?

This weekend, we loaded our bags for shipment overseas. We won’t see them until the peak of summer in the mideast desert, when the hot-on-the-eyeballs wind greets us and we curse it from the very first blast. It’ll be like a time capsule, opening that box to see what I thought was important months ago. I hope my foresight is accurate.

The load so far consists almost completely of comfort and entertainment, since all essentials will be provided. A blanket and some sheets will give color to our cell, and will beat sleeping in a bag for a year. A practice pad, books, and sticks will let me practice my drumming, since even a Rock Band set is impractical in our shared quarters. Board games, my new obsession, will help pass the time, though I have a burning desire to fill the entire box with them, so desperate am I to avoid boredom. Other tools and useful equipment round out the load, though I can’t help but think that I’m forgetting something critical.

The whole thing veers into life-as-RPG territory, as I visit the item shop to get geared up for the unknown mission. Inventory space is limited, so you have to try to cover all the bases, yet not spread yourself too thin so as to have bits of useless stuff. Luckily, my base stats are good, so equipment doesn’t matter as much, but still…

On the night before drill, I felt like I was really leaving the next day, as I scrambled to throw things into the box. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t really leaving, that there was still a month to go, and that it’s not like we’re deploying to Mars. If something gets left home, I can acquire it or have it sent to me. But now that the bags have been packed away I feel much better, as if the physical weight of that stuff was an emotional weight as well, a weight now lifted. Maybe it’s that by loading that trailer full of bags, it’s a concrete signal that this journey, so long discussed and anticipated, is really about to begin, and I’ll do it with nothing more than I can carry on my back. Or, maybe it’s that I should heed Friar Laurence’s advice to Romeo:

A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

Indeed, there are many worse ways to start a journey than  friends at your side, sixty pounds of bags stuffed with ceramic, velcro, and ballistic nylon, and your loved ones, wishing well, at your back, waiting for your return.

Typical government contractors are rather hairy

Last week I made my first trip to the National Guard’s Professional Education Center (naturally abbreviated to PEC), in Little Rock. It was a gathering of the several states to discuss the ongoing Active Directory consolidation project that’s sweeping the nation, leaving a trail of angry sysadmins and frustrated users in its wake.

I arrived in Little Rock after dark and stepped outside the airport terminal to find the alleged shuttle bus that would take me to PEC. I saw a white-painted school bus that was labeled for the Guard’s GED Plus program (two attendees of such I sat next to on the plane, incidentally), but that clearly wasn’t what I wanted, so I waited. Before long, a woman waddled forth from the bus, with a troll-like face (complete with wart) and blonde hair trailing most of the way down her back – but cut above her ears in the most astonishing mullet I’ve ever seen. To top it off, she wore an Army PT jacket that must’ve been XXL, falling around her like a robe.

“You goin’ to PEC?,” she croaked as she walked by. “Yes ma’am,” I responded. “You can get on my bus. I’ll drop you off.”

I hopped on with the couple of other passengers and breathed in the weird combination of baby powder and stinking vinyl seats as the PT-clad troll lady steered the bus away from the terminal. She flogged that Blue Bird for all it was worth along I-30 and two billboards stood out along the way: one was just all-caps text: “GOING TO JAIL?,” with a phone number; the other was, “Hit by a Big Rig?,” and another number. Lots of people getting rear-ended by semis on their way to county, apparently.

The next day I made my way across the street to the classroom where I convened with the representatives from other states. About 30 states were in attendance – giving us quorum, as the lieutenant colonel from Guard Bureau reminded us – ranging from specialists to lieutenant colonels and everything in between. I of course managed to sit next to an evolution of That Guy, hailing from New York, who of course knew everything and was disdainful of the whole thing. At one point (in response to what, I don’t remember) he whipped out his Benchmade folder and said, grinning, “I’d rather just shank ‘em instead!” I laughed and replied, “way to live up to the New Yorker stereotype.” He took that as a compliment, elaborating that, “airport security only cares about guns…!” I left that one hanging and returned to my web surfing.

This captures the general mood pretty well

The day started placidly enough, but before long, the states were virtually in full revolt, as the NGB guys told us how our admin rights were going to be taken away (or at least, restricted). I just sat back and enjoyed the furor, since the die was cast already and my role was just to collect information and provide minor input. After all, as one of the Haradrim in service to the Dark Lord, the affairs of other tribes concern me little…

After the session on the second day, which included a strange poker-chip-bidding exercise and a rancorous discussion about how to name computers on the domain, I bailed for the airport. Naturally, black clouds loomed on the horizon and the radio blared tornado warnings for the Little Rock area. Luckily, I arrived at the airport with a few hours to spare – or so I thought, as just when I sat down to tuck in to some serious Tactics Ogre on the PSP, they announced that the terminal was being evacuated. We were herded into the basement, crammed almost shoulder-to-shoulder, which wouldn’t ordinarily bother me except that I was surrounded by smartphones, which appeared in everyone’s hands to announce to the world our impending deaths. I’ll probably get brain cancer as a result of that trip to the basement, because the radio frequency density in there must’ve been out of this world.

I was prepared for a good, long, sweaty stay in the crowded stairwell, but the thing blew over in about five minutes – just long enough to inconvenience everyone. What proved more inconvenient, though, was that the basement was outside the secured area, so every person in the terminal had to be re-screened by security. Needless to say, this caused me to be scheduled to leave too late to catch my connecting flight in Dallas. Luckily, the nice lady hooked me up with an alternate flight to Chicago and thence home, which was better than spending the night somewhere. Still, the trip (from arrival at the airport to getting home) took over eight hours, which isn’t much faster than driving.

The flight from Little Rock to Chicago was understandably quite bumpy, though not severely so – or so I thought. About twenty in the minutes into the flight, the little Asian woman behind me started barfing – and in reaction, I had to stifle hysterical laughter. I’m not sure why it was so funny – I felt bad for her – but maybe it was the stock sound effect that she was making, like “blarghghgwarghghgwarghghgh,” seemed so over-the-top as to be fake. Meanwhile, the guy next to me hastily grabbed his Bose noise-canceling headphones at the first sound of chunks being blown, while also frantically grabbing at his arm rest every time the plane hit a bump. The poor woman threw up at least six more times (including once after landing), and the flight attendants wouldn’t get up during flight because of the turbulence, so I guess she sat there with a pile of full barf bags the whole time.

In three short months, I’ll begin another mobilization. We’ve known about this one for a long time, and its approach has cast a long shadow across almost everything I’ve done for the last year. Most notable has been its effect on my purchases – most everything has been run through the deployment filter, sorted into categories of “don’t buy this, won’t need it next year” or “better buy this, will need it in the war” or “doesn’t matter either way.”

As an example, I bought a Kindle recently, which will eliminate the vast piles of books I had to deal with last time around. On the other hand, I haven’t bought anything for my drum set lately, since that falls firmly in the “won’t need it next year” bin. Hell, there are video games that I’m holding off on playing, saving them up to make sure I have a meaty backlog when the boredom of the desert comes into full effect.

The differences between this deployment and the last will be a continuing theme, and truthfully I’m sick of the comparisons already. I embarked on the last trip with a sort of wide-eyed innocence and full receptivity to any experience that came at me. Now, I’m more or less a crusty old NCO, much more experienced and capable, but also more crotchety and jaded. Instead of a grand, potentially tragic adventure at the dawn of the war in Iraq, now I’m faced with returning to the same war at its end, faced largely with drudgery and boredom. (Of course, last time was also full of drudgery and boredom, but I didn’t know that’s what awaited us – I (like most others) assumed it would be the fight of our lives.) I must improve my attitude before we go, though, because otherwise I’ll be largely miserable. The only thing that kept me going during the last trip was my willingness to roll with the punches and to just experience the damn thing, to the extent possible. I must seek to recreate that mindset.

And yet, it’ll still be a year-long disruption, a sandy time capsule into which I’ll be placed, to emerge a year later, hopefully with sanity mostly intact. Life will still go on at home, as I while away the days, hours, minutes in the desert, plotting for my inevitable return and the resumption of life in “the world.”

Ice Truckers: Army edition

Some people think this is what Minnesota looks like all year long. They’re wrong, of course; it only looks like this for six months out of the year.

Truly, it is a Bastion of the North at our fine camp, with sub-zero temperatures and packed-snow roads that all but guarantee hilarity for soldiers shod in desert boots. The rubber used in our soles is useless below freezing, being optimized for the 160-degree heat of Iraq, as it hardens and is akin to walking on snow with plastic lunch trays attached to your feet.

Luckily, the Signal Corps trains indoors, so my ten-day stay here will be mostly warm. Not so luckily, the first day was wasted, since CECOM forgot to send an instructor for the training.

A bunch of our equipment got refurbished and sent back to us, so that naturally means retraining – it’s about a six-week process to re-field the gear and retrain all the operators. The piece I’m here to learn about – which I’m not convinced is even relevant to me or the rest of Team S6, but that’s another story – is network operations & management. All the other pieces seem to have their instructors on the ground, but not ours – despite a month’s worth of prodding by our project coordinator here. Whoops! So, CECOM is rushing a guy out here as I type (or may have already arrived, with an anal cavity freshly inspected, courtesy of TSA), along with a bunch of crap via FedEx overnight (at massive expense to the taxpayer, I’m sure).

Speaking of Team S6, I think we’re going to need a name. I’ve named third squad “Hellraisers,” and I’ve said that if I become the platoon sergeant we’ll be the “Mud Bugs,” but in the brigade headquarters, squads and platoons don’t mean anything. It’s all about the sections – so what would fit? Greased Lightning? Electric Bulls? Hell’s Bloody Welcomers? Team RCGF? (Right-Click, Get Fucked!)

Waiting for a ride

The company was waiting for flights out to training areas scattered across the back forty of Camp Ripley, a cluster of about a hundred of us with a full load of gear (less ammo). We had been there for hours, standing in the autumn breeze and cold spitting rain, complaining about the weather and wolfing down MREs in preparation for the long day ahead. A pair of Black Hawks sat on the tarmac in front of us, the rain darkening their green-brown hulls, their rotors drooping low like the wings of a hawk mantling its downed prey.

Finally, the first group loaded the birds and their engines started with a slow ascending whine. The whine grew to a roar as the rotors spun up, but instead of leaping into the air, they began to roll slowly across the asphalt. I had never seen a Black Hawk taxi like an airplane before, but that’s exactly what they were doing on a dreary Friday morning. How do they do it? A fixed-wing aircraft generates thrust parallel to the ground and so can drive around, but I didn’t think helicopters had that capability. Obviously I was wrong. Apparently they did this to avoid blowing debris in our faces as we waited our turn to ride (how considerate), and unlike in Iraq, they lifted off gently once they cleared our waiting area, floating above the trees almost dreamily instead of clawing skywards at full torque.

And the trees! Just before it was our turn to fly (I was in the last flight, naturally), the rain miraculously stopped and the clouds blew away, revealing a beautiful fall day. The camp is covered with trees and they were in full fall color, a riotous quilt of reds and golds and greens. I had the best seat in the house – the front left – as we skimmed the treetops and banked over the yellow grasslands at a smooth 120 knots. There is no better way to see fall colors than from a speeding helicopter.

Too soon, though, the ride was over – the pilots deposited us in a picturesque landing zone and we went prone in the knee-high grass as they roared away overhead, leaving us each with our fifty pounds of gear and a day of walking.

A walk in the park

The rest of the weekend was largely uneventful – just long hours of walking under a heavy load. The weather was perfect, and various problems with the training meant that walking became the main training event. By the end, my shoulders were sore from the body armor and slung rifle and pack and combat lifesaver bag, but my feet were fine and I kept thinking that other people have to pay to walk around in a place like this, and I’m getting paid to do it. I saw a whole kettle of bald eagles circling overhead (eight in all), and deer and turkey and hawks and warblers, and for one stretch along the western border of camp our tracks were preceded by wolf prints, huge and improbable, following the same road we were.