And in the desert, wrestler-Mary gave birth to a paralyzed, screw-eyed Jesus, and thus in this bizarro world in which I live, all was right with the world.
Merry Christmas!
Dec 252011
Oct 312011
Halloween in the war
Happy Halloween from the geeks in Kuwait! (If you can’t read, the shirts say: “No! I can not give you access to YouTube!,” “DISTANT END’S FAULT,” “If @ first you don’t succeed, CTL-ALT-DEL,” “Jean-Luc Picard is my co-pilot,” and “JUST SHUT UP AND REBOOT”)
Oct 012011
Home of the secret squirrels
Believe it or not, I got hassled for taking the picture here. In case you’re wondering, it’s a photo of the secret squirrel headquarters food court; hardly considered to be a sensitive location under the most restrictive of circumstances, but apparently enough to draw a young sergeant’s attention. After I snapped the photo, he approached (both of us in civilian clothes) and introduced himself. He politely informed me that we weren’t allowed to take pictures anywhere, and so I shouldn’t make it so obvious that I was doing so. I equally politely informed him that the photography policy letter was posted right by the entrance to the DFAC, and that photos were explicitly allowed as long as they didn’t include any sensitive areas (like the perimeter, entry points, secure areas, etc.). He said that he was just repeating what he was told, and we went our separate ways.
It illustrated a classic problem in the Army: the idea of “adding to but not taking away from” policies, directives, and regulations. It works like this: some level of command issues a policy that says X. When viewed at that level, the policy seems entirely reasonable and appropriate, so it’s sent down the chain. The problem is that each successive layer of command, in an effort to meet the higher echelon’s intent, adds its own interpretations and restrictions to the policy, figuring that by narrowing the boundaries they can make sure everyone colors inside the lines. By the time some policy from on high reaches something like a platoon, the thing that started as X ends up looking like (((((X)+1)+Y)+2)+Z). Thus, a policy that limits photography to non-sensitive areas only becomes a policy that bans all photography (easier to enforce) and logically leads to making cameras contraband items and inspecting barracks to ferret out such devices. After all, you can’t be wrong that way, right? It sounds ridiculous but such is the mentality sometimes. It’s also an example of “second and third order effects” that everyone needs to be aware of when making decisions that will be carried out by people far away and not under your direct control.
***
Meanwhile, more and more people arrive at the camp; maybe new units, maybe some rotating out of Iraq already. The DFAC is a madhouse at lunch now, with lines stretching out into the hot sun from both doors for almost the whole lunch period. It’s a minor irritation, since the line moves quickly, but I can’t help but direct my silent ire at the wearers of each new unit patch that shows up, as if they’re each personally responsible for the delay.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen in Iraq (and even if I did, I couldn’t tell it here), but strangely our brigade’s job might not be much different in 2012 after our withdrawal is complete. Bases will still need to be guarded, convoys will still need escorts, camps will still need command and control; the end of this eight years of war might be a giant anticlimax for us who are still in it. For the other units, based in Iraq, the change will be drastic, but for us REMFs, life at Fort Hood East Campus will go on much the same as before.
Nov 152010
Saturday brought the first taste of winter, with a storm that was poo-poohed on the news Friday morning but ultimately dumped well over half a foot of snow on us. At first I was excited – I love the first snow – but later my excitement turned to rage when I managed to get the car stuck at the end of the block (just visible in the photo).
Luckily it was a quick job to get it out, and I was able to get the ol’ Human Transport Ark Eltreum back into the garage and venture out in the truck. Guess it’s time for new tires…
***
Last weekend was the Days of Ice and Fire event, hosted by Fantasy Flight Games – conveniently headquartered in Roseville. It was a three day event of geekery revolving around George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, including appearances each day by the author himself. It also was a showcase for the three games set in the world of the novels: a card game, a tactical war game, and a board game. Mrs. Melobi and I have been playing the card game and the war game, and to her great credit she came to the event with me. I’ve spent many hours in the geek world, hanging out at dimly-lit game stores with men of questionable hygiene and worse social skills, playing obscure games until all hours of the night, so the environment was familiar for me (and indeed, a bit of a homecoming as well – a topic for another post). But Melobi, while fairly well-versed in geek lore (being a huge fantasy and sci-fi
Signed by the man himself!
fan in her own right, combined with the education I’ve given her in anime and gaming), had never attended an event of this sortbefore. As it turned out, we both had a great time. We even got cards for the game of the author himself, and had them autographed. I’m not much for autographs, but when I saw the author card in the swag bag, getting that signed was too cool to pass up.
I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire (or ASOIAF, as it’s known on the internet) a few months ago, and it’s fantastic. It builds momentum like a freight train – slow to get started, because of the massive weight of the numerous characters and the Byzantine plotting, but becomes an unstoppable force by the end of the first book. It’s not mind-expanding, galaxy-encompassing stuff like Frank Herbert’s Dune series; nor is it a sardonic, contemporary destruction of fantasy tropes like Glen Cook’s Black Company books. Rather, it’s gritty, brutal, and amoral, a world where almost no one (even the children) is good (even the kids are killers and are brutally killed in turn). It’s packed with mind-blowing twists and bizarre gut-punches – ASOIAF is one of the very few book series that has made me put down the book and say “whoa” after reading a doozy of a passage. If you have any interest in fantasy (or just brutal shit in general), you owe it to yourself to read it – but don’t fall in love with any character, because they might end up dead or worse.
The card game is awesome too, but that’s another post.
Aug 042010
Lock it up!
As seen in the basement of the RTI building yesterday.
For those of you on 1and1 hosting and running WordPress, you’ve probably run into a few problems with PHP version 5. 1and1 isn’t running PHP5 by default yet, so to get it to work, you need to create an .htaccess file with “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php” in it, to force php files to be processed as version 5 instead of 4. This fixed the problem I suddenly developed when uploading pictures to posts.
Jul 222010
On the sidebar to the right, one can view my so-called “tweets” (under the helpful heading of Murond Tweet City, another painfully obscure Final Fantasy Tactics reference). I’ll be tweeting from annual training this year (can do it from my phone, which is easier since internet access is limited up there), so stay tuned for 160-character snippets of absurdity from the front lines of the War on Reason!
Jul 212010
For some reason, I’m often gripped with a sort of paralysis regarding my writing here. One might chalk it up to writer’s block, but I think it’s more existential than that. I’ve written about the echo chamber effect of blogging (or Narcissistic Blogger Syndrome); this is an offshoot. It’s a sense of shouting into the void, a screaming against the blackness in the vastness of the internet. Scale out further, though, and the mind reels; just as I’m one tiny voice among billions, so is our world a mere speck in the unfathomable universe, all of our joys and struggles ultimately amounting to nothing in the cosmic calculus.
Thus is born religion, a search for meaning as the mind’s eye zooms out to encompass the universe and finds reason lacking. Not being of the religious sort, though, I risk falling into the classic atheist’s trap: of placing supreme faith in the flawed entity of man. For if there is no supreme being, no higher force, then what else is there but man’s reason, intellect, emotion? But to have faith in man means continual disappointment. Our flaws make us unsuitable as objects of worship, or even as dependable actors; for if nothing else, every man disappoints in the final act of dying. And so, we find ourselves back at religion again. But, as Han Solo said, “Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything.”
I wrote about this denial of a universal “plan” here, at a soldier’s funeral.
The only part of his sermon that I remember was the usual part that chaplains and pastors and such like to give at a funeral of a young man or woman. There’s always a bit about “God’s plan,” which I inevitably find absurd and offensive. The same thought shot through my head as he spoke the words: God’s plan? It’s in God’s plan that this young soldier – not even twenty-one years old – is dead now, while so many others, unworthy of living, still walk? If that’s God’s plan, well…
After all this pontificating, though, I come to the meat of this post: all of the preceding words seem terribly trite and unoriginal. Men were debating these very issues before the birth of Christ, and here I am, two thousand+ years later, typing the same stuff. Everything’s been said already! By an accident of birth, I’m a latecomer to civilization – it’s all downhill from here!
Maybe my real problem is that my thinking is too large-scale and I should concentrate on contributing to Cute Overload.
May 232010
I think there's something missing here
What you see at left is not an accident but rather the culmination of JoKur’s 5-year quest to install a computer in his car. He first had the idea when we were in Iraq, and began the epic mission when he purchased this car after our return. I have fielded countless tech support calls about this damn project, and listened to his endless descriptions of his various crazy schemes.
He was so close to completion – he finally had the right hardware, and the right software, and everything was installed and working – but that only lasted for about five days. Then he got the idea to remake his dash with Bondo.
You’ll notice that not only is the radio missing, but also the heating & air conditioning controls. This means that he needs to fiddle with various cables under that mess (if you look closely, you can see the little blue cable on the left of the dash…hole, which, when pulled, apparently does something).
It's under here somewhere
Here you can see him reaching for something, which didn’t help and we had to drive with all four windows down so we didn’t roast. I just hope that he wraps this up before winter comes again…
Apr 252010
Several depressing reports out of Afghanistan lately (see Captain’s Journal, Michael Yon, and Free Range International) reveal something that I’ve considered for some time: that history might show that Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the “good war.” Despite the continual drumbeat of the antiwar left about Iraq being a distraction from the “true war on terror,” I propose that Afghanistan is the true strategic backwater of the two wars, much more akin to the “quagmire” that Iraq was supposed to be. There are (at least) four reasons for this; or, more specifically, differences in four key areas that make Iraq a more important theater of war than Afghanistan. They are: strategic position, resources, human and societal capital, and the presence of a definable and achievable end state. These thoughts are a little unpolished – I just banged this out but lord knows, you could write a book or two on this topic so I have to put something up, even if it’s scatterbrained.
Strategic position
Iraq anchors the Arabian Peninsula, and is a crucial hinge for the Middle East. From the American perspective, it is easily accessible by land, sea, and air, by way of two major U.S. allies (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). By shattering Saddam Hussein’s regime, the U.S. drove a wedge into the region, separating Ba’athist Syria from its main ally as well as buffering the Shi’a bizzaro-state of Iran.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a rugged, landlocked country, sandwiched between Iran, Pakistan, and several of the former Soviet republics. It is inaccessible by sea, and land routes are difficult and dangerous, primarily coming through our nominal ally of Pakistan. This leaves air transport as the primary means of supply and troop movement, and even this is largely dependent on the goodwill of shaky allies like Kyrgyzstan. Holding Afghanistan gives almost no advantage, geographically speaking, since it is the definition of “middle of nowhere.”
Resources
Iraq has water. Iraq has farmland. Iraq, of course, has oil. People say Iraq was a “war for oil” like it’s a bad thing, but face it: without oil, there is no modern civilization. In time, oil will be replaced with something better, but for now, it’s what we’ve got. I don’t buy the war-for-oil theory (didn’t work out too well if it was), but insofar as you can actually call OIF a “war for oil,” it wasn’t some Bush-Cheney-Halliburton axis of greed plot, but rather, a fight to keep one of the most valuable substances in the world out of the hands of terrorist dictatorships.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, has very little, except opium (being the leading exporter in the world).
Human & societal capital
Iraq has a history of civilization dating back for millenia, and has in modern times developed a highly educated and relatively prosperous society (prior to the rise of the Ba’ath Party). Even under Saddam Hussein, Iraq had the trappings of a modern civilization: electricity, roads, central and local government, etc. This means that Iraq has a foundation on which to build functional, free (or free-er) society.
Afghanistan has virtually nothing. Despite having been self-governed since 1919, Afghanistan doesn’t seem to have developed a tradition of structured government. (The Soviet invasion in 1979 certainly didn’t help.) The vast majority of the population is illiterate, poor, and dies at a young age (life expectancy is about 44 years, according to the CIA World Fact Book). Farmers and villagers in the remote mountains of the country don’t know or care about a central government; some are so isolated that American soldiers are being mistaken for Soviet ones (per Marcus Luttrell in Lone Survivor).
Definable and achievable end state
The war in Iraq is already over. The end state was: establishment of a democratic government, capable of managing the security of the nation, with sectarian and terrorist violence at an acceptably low level that would permit the withdrawal of U.S. forces. While the outcome was certainly in doubt, it was always possible to at least imagine this end state actually happening (largely because of the aforementioned factors).
Afghanistan shares the same declared end state, but in reality, I think it’s an impossible goal. How do you declare that a government is in control of the country when such a thing has virtually never happened in its history? How do you repeat the “Anbar Awakening” in a country where many people don’t care who’s in charge, as long as they’re able to live the same simple way as they have for hundreds of years? Furthermore, the nation is just too vast and wild to be pacified – our heavily armed and armored infantrymen can’t root out every cave, every hiding spot in the hills and mountains. We could send a million men there and it still probably wouldn’t be enough.
Images & blather