Monthly Archives: July 2007

Jarhead

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Know what the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is? A fairy tale begines ‘Once upon a time’. A sea story begins ‘Listen up cause this is no sh**’.

Jarhead is a lotta things. It’s a great bit of writing. It humps along at a good clip, it’s got some things to say and it says them in an entertaining way. It moves along quickly enough that it was not until I sailed clean past the end that I realized it’s most glaring fault.

Jarhead is a sea story. I don’t know how accurate it is; I was an 0311 who never served in the FMF. I didn’t go the Desert; I spent the war learning how to be an 4000 at 3D FSSG. It’s chock full of stories that ‘everyone’ knows; here are the Jarheads playing football in the Desert in full MOPP gear. Here is the famous cuckold video a wife sent to her husband in the Desert. All the stories we heard, the lingo of the Marines in the early 90s. Some of the details are off but it was written a decade after the fact – we may chalk this up to memory or wishful thinking.

The problem with Jarhead is that civilians will read a memoir by a Marine turned academic and take it s Gospel. This would be wrong, wrong wrong. It’s a story about a callow young man who went to war, saw some things and came home. That’s all that it is.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

First Day

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Mostly HR and Policy Briefings. Some things don’t differ from the military to Corporate America.

One of the things that does differ is the continuous harping on absentee-ism. Is it really that much of a problem on the civilian side of the street? I mean seriously, does the company really have to tell us every hour on the hour about how important it is to show up for work? How sad is that?

I’ll probably have to mention to my coach (trainer) that I’m not rolling my eyes because I don’t think it’s important, but because I’m having a hard time understanding why they have to keep harping on it.

The Gift That Just Keeps On Giving

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TNR’s “Shock Troops” diarist is just the gift that keeps on giving. After reading this, and shaking my head, I sent the following email to “editors@cjr.org” offering this feedback:

I read with interest and considerable amusement Mr. McLeary’s comment, as regards the wanna-be Hemmingway, Pvt. Beauchamp and the kurfuffle-du-jour over his “Shock Troops” article in TNR:

“How dare a college grad and engaged citizen volunteer to join the Army to fight for his country! (Which is something that most of the brave souls who inhabit the milblog community prefers to leave to others.) ”

I doubt that I am the first, and probably won’t be the last to write to inform Mr. LcLeary that the term “milblog” is a contraction of “military blogger” and in current usage means “members of the military, their families, or veterans who blog”.

Such veterans and currently serving military members took the lead in reviewing and debunking Pvt. Beauchamps’ extremely dubious stories, offering an expertise in military culture and current events in Iraq which seems to sadly lacking at TNR. And to judge by Mr. McLeary’s off-hand comment, it appears to be also lacking at the CJR.

BTW, all military officers are required to have a college degree, as a prerequisite for recieving a commission. These days, it is not uncommon for enlisted members to also have degrees, either before enlisting, or to work towards one while in service.

I myself came into the service with a college degree, but while I flatter myself that I am a much better writer than Pvt. Beauchamp,…so are most of the milbloggers out there. TNR would have been better-served with practically any of them.

Sgt. Mom, TSgt, USAF (Ret)
The Daily Brief

This tempest is far outgrowing it’s teapot; is anyone making more popcorn? If I get any reply, I’ll post it.

Note, as of 9:45 CST: recieved the following reply from Paul McLeary, at CJR:

“I’m getting slammed with emails about this, but I want to answer
every one, because I think that it’s important. Here’s the email
that I sent to the Mudville Gazette milblog, who posted part of it
Sunday afternoon.

————-
I really walked into this one.

I actually spend a lot of time on milblogs. I was careless in my
choice of wording when I wrote the piece. What I meant was the
whole community of blogs that have sprung up in the same universe
as milblogs — Hugh Hewitt, etc., who act tough about the war, but
have never served, and have never left the comforts of their
air-conditioned offices to see what might be going on in Iraq or
Afghanistan.

I’ve written a lot about milblogs, actually: Interviewed Matthew
Currier Burden for CJR, as well as a couple soldiers who were
blogging for the New York Times. I’ve also spoken to, and exchanged
emails with Yon and Bill Roggio and such, and I blogged the whole
time I was in Iraq back in ’06, which doesn’t make me a milblogger,
but hey, it’s something, I guess.

Like I said, I really stepped in it because I didn’t take the time
to clearly define what I was talking about.”

OK, so honor is served. Says something that he is replying to emails on a Sunday evening, and admitting to not paying proper attention to detail. On that account, I’ll give him a pass from being the milblogosphere’s chew-toy du-jour. Go ye therefore and sin no more, but what any other milblogger does is up to them, of course.

Pause Between Dances

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This weekend is a pause in the mad waltz of the writers’ life marathon; between the kerfuffle-du-jour of Pvt. Beauchamp, the milblogs’ rebel without a clue, and me spending a couple of days at an assortment part-time jobs… and next week when proofs of The Book will be finalized, and I have to start marketing it. Yes!!! It’s nearly here, “To Truckee’s Trail”! Any day now… please buy a copy, when I post the link to Booklocker’s catalogue! I need to buy the software to update my literary website, a decent new printer to generate my own marketing material and letters, and to buy the advertising on websites where they just can’t afford to give it to me out of the goodness of their own hearts and appreciation for my talents as a fairly OK genre fiction writer!

My friend, Dave the Computer Genius has referred me to a handful of his clients who have need of admin-secretarial help a couple of times a week. They are most often small entrepreneurs and hobbyists, who maybe have taught themselves a little with the computer that they bought from Dave to use for their home business, don’t quite understand how to generate what they need and want out of it, and are willing to pay me to come and do it. Or for me to show them how to cut and paste in pictures, pretty up excel spread-sheets, enter useful contact data in their personal scheduling software, and to perform heavy-lifting… like do Google searches. Eh… it’s part-time, pays enough to make going to their workplaces (usually a home office) and leaves me the afternoons to write.

Yeah, writing… still have time to do that. By my calculations, I’m about halfway through “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. That is the epic about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Right now, I am plunging into rather interesting territory, with an account of the storms of the Civil War, as they were weathered in Gillespie County. When I talked to my parents on Friday, I was reminded of how interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese saying, that completing this volume is likely to become. One of their circle who they let read all my manuscripts as they are written, is a retired professor of English. She’s a very experienced teacher and editor, and I particularly value her critical feedback. Mom let me know that she has just finished reading the first volume, and has made many, many notes… but that one was a long critique about settler-Indian relations, as I had written about them.

Which… since I am trying to write as accurately as I can about the Texas frontier, circa 1845-1885 means that the opinions and beliefs of the characters that I am writing about are not particularly socially correct by today’s lights. I will not commit the literary sin of “presentism”; that is, putting the attitudes and opinions of a late 20th century person into a 19th century character and either imputing that this person is very brave and non-conformist to be so advanced, or implying that 19th century people were just like us but dressed up in funny costumes and with horses instead of automobiles. Most 19th century Texans hated and feared the Indians; it’s an anachronism to pretend otherwise. There were curious exceptions to this, and all sorts of interesting shadings. Sam Houston and Robert Neighbors were distinguished in their lifetimes for their friendships among various tribes, and for their effective consideration of Indian interests. Members of the Lipan Apache and Tonkawa bands fought alongside Jack Hays’ Ranger companies, and the German settlements negotiated and kept to a peace agreement with the Southern Comanches that was never broken, even though other Indian tribes eventually began raiding at will in the Hill Country. It’s all a great deal more nuanced than someone looking backwards from the late 20th century might give credit for… and I haven’t even gotten to slavery and racial relations, yet. About all I can promise to do is to clean up some of the intemperate language. Which puts me up to the same challenge as Robert Lewis Stephenson, of writing about obscenity-spouting people… without actually using obscenities.

That’s going to be fun, since I am running into all kinds of interesting people and situations, in my first quick pass through Civil War period memoirs and histories. Texas was on the far fringe of the Confederate South. According to one of my notes, the biggest slave owner in the state on the eve of the Civil War owned 300 slaves. The second and third biggest owned far fewer than that… which meant … Off on another track here, which will be reserved for another post.

Bottom line, I am having fun with this. Especially since I have always hated Gone With the Wind, and that romantic lost cause and noble Confederate cavalier crap.

Fallout

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Well, it took about a day longer than I estimated for the Beauchamp-TNR kerfuffle-du-jour to expand to the size of the Hindenburg, metaphorically speaking, and then explode like a couple of wads of dubble-bubble chewing gum once the upper expansion limits had been reached.

Wow, look at all that sticky pink stuff all over the place… some of that is stuck in places and on people who will probably never be able to peel it off of themselves and go about their business as usual. Having written and published the “Shock Troops” pieces is a richly deserved embarrassment, but I don’t think the two most responsible parties will ever acknowledge that their own actions had a part in bringing on the landslide-quantities of fall-out. I imagine they will find some handy other party to blame it all on.

But I can almost bring myself to feel kind of sorry for young Pvt. Beauchamp, and Franklin Foer; it’s all a jolly good game, until someone gets hurt. And no one ever starts out intending to put themselves under the million-eyed, coldly analytical publicly-wielded CAT-scan that is the blogosphere. The inexperienced editor of stalwart and once-respected legacy media magazine probably had no idea of the firestorm that would erupt, once milbloggers and veterans began looking carefully into “Scott Thomas’s” curious accounts of vehicular canine-icide, trash-talking in the dining facility, and games with dead things.

If all one knows of the military life is the movies… especially Vietnam-War movies, such an account must have seemed quite credible. Sad to know that of all the staff at a mag like TNR, there was no one on hand with any sort of experience in the military in the last twenty years or so, who could take a look and say, “Look, there’s something not quite right about this.” Or even to do as Cpl. Blondie did, when she read about running over dogs with a Bradley. Which was to fall about laughing, and then to say, “Whatta pile of bull-s**t!”

And as for Private Beauchamp; I don’t think even the most relentless narcissist really would enjoy having their Myspace page fisked down to the sub-atomic level, and their own person, and every shred of their writings relentlessly and coldly analyzed by thousands of strangers. But then again… he put it all out there, on Myspace and in the TNR. . Made no real secret of wanting to be the next Wilfred Owen/Ernest Hemmingway, but comes off as a haphazardly educated, very bright, self-centered young idiot with an elevated sense of his own talent and not a shred of sense. He is still young enough to grow out of it; honestly a lot of people his age are idiots, but most of them improve over time, and exposure to real world of consequences.

And he sucks as a writer, too, which is even sadder. He doesn’t have that certain gift; that way of “seeing” that a writer has to have. Oh, you can have the vocabulary, you can sling together the sentences, and it all will parse on the page, but unless you can “see into” other people, and sense how they think, and deal with their foibles and take on their voices, your words all fall rather flat. Intuition, empathy, whatever you call it; if you have it, you can create people on a page, you can write about a place or an event and make it so other people can see and feel it also. Good writers, good story-tellers have that, but narcissists can only fake it for a little bit, about as far as Pvt. Beauchamp did. What a waste of time and tuition, and TNR’s reputation, just to mince up and re-hash outtakes from “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon”, for the titillation of the readers. And what a waste for the magazine. Of all the milbloggers on active-duty tours in Iraq, Mr. Foer had to select this unconvincing, unobservant fabulist, and throw his magazine’s authority behind him… because his wife/significant other worked there. How lame. What a smack in the face to the hundreds or even the thousands of better writers among currently serving milbloggers.

Fortune and Mens Eyes

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It is a curious coincidence that just as the milblogosphere is reveling in the righteous joys of thumping another credulous editor of a formerly-pretty-reputable legacy media venue… here we are dished up another heaping helping of military bashing from a couple of personalities that I have never heard of. Allegedly, this doofus is claimed to be a regular on Saturday Night Live. The hell you say… is that show still on? Wow.

Whatever A Whitney Brown’s problem is, I’ll bet it’s damned hard to pronounce. And this guy at least had a few remaining shreds of decency left to him… enough that he pulled his post about how the modern military was creating mass murderers and serial killers…

Ops, scuse me, while I go outside, and flag down that idiot with the car speakers which go whoop-whoomp-whoomp at such a deafening level that his car actually sounds like it’s farting. I’m going to chop up his inconsiderate ass into quarters with a chain-saw and Fed-Ex each quarter and his head to five different places…

No, just kidding. But not about the car stereo… it really does sound like the car is farting.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes… military = killers. Got it. Kind of the point actually, in an official, just-doing-our-job, ma’am sense. Yes, we kill those who have been designated as our enemies; neatly, efficiently, and without particular prejudice. Unsanctioned, off the books free-lancing is still frowned upon, however. Just so we’re all on the same page, here.

Still, to note all this is to wonder… why all this perfectly rotten press now? And without the obligatory “Of course we support the troops!” in this round of being pissed-on… guess they’ve noticed we’re not buying the claims of the stuff just being rain.

I do wonder what has brought the usual suspects to a fine frothing boil; I haven’t seen such hysterical insistence on the brutality and licentiousness of the soldiery since the putrid days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Makes a bit of a change from painting them as poor widdle disadvantaged and victimized cheeeldren who had no other way to get ahead than to listen to the siren allure of the recruiter, which is the alternate method of denigration to date At least the “brutal and licentious” bit will give the troops credit for being grownups. Sort of.

But no credit for anything else, and credibility is where this whole thing is going… oh, not by any deep-laid strategic plan. More like some kind of subconscious hive-instinct, an irrational passionate urge to make the Iraq war and the whole WOT thingy just go away. And to go away without any blame attaching to the usual suspects, win or loose. Loose is always in the cards, of course. The middle east has been a veritable snake-pit for decades. If it reverts to type… no skin off ours, as long as we’re safely out of the middle, and a repeat of Saigon, 1975 can all be safely blamed on the Bush cabal. With appropriate tisk-tiskings, of course.

But…. What if the “surge” is working? What if the Iraqis are stepping up to the plate, and taking real control of their lives and their country? What if all those nice hardworking reservists and those high school graduates from Nowheresville, and those Marines from flyover country have managed to pull of a shaky miracle, and in another fifteen or twenty years, Iraq looks like South Korea, only with palm trees and more sand?

Wow, wouldn’t that be a facer for people like Senators Kerry and Murtha, for the Kos Kidz and the staff of the Guardian, among a long list of others… like A. Whitney Brown? Their advice has been spurned, and they are in peril of being shown up by the people that they secretly, or in some cases, not so secretly, hold in contempt. Makes it kind of hard to maintain that effortless air of superiority over lesser mortals, so of course, something must be done!

When old-time autocrats didn’t like the message, proverbially, they shot the messenger. The new autocrats in the legacy media, the nutroots, or in the higher ivory-towers wouldn’t be so crude. They’d rather denigrate the messenger; the troops and the leaders alike. Taint them by association; paint them as sociopath degenerates, brutal and vengeful and incompetent. Shame them into silence, make them shrink back into the little Nowheresvilles they crawled out of, put away their uniforms and their medals, and hide their associations away in the corners.

Really, it makes it so much easier to betray allies and friends, when these pathetic little people and their stupid “duty, honor and country” just forget all of that and do as their betters like A. Whitney Brown tell them.

And that’s what I think is going on here. Your mileage may vary, of course

Ginormous

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I had a good interview with the ginormous telecom today and they’ve offered me a position in their customer service center. Two months of training and then I may be the guy you talk to if/when your cell phone isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.

That’s assuming the background check and references pan out. Strangely (Top Secret Clearance and wonderful references.) I’m not all that concerned about that not working out.

Question(s) of the Day (070721)

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Why do I know so much about the Atlanta Falcons? Don’t they suck? Would we care so much about the dog fighting thing if it wasn’t an overpaid NFL “gangstah” being indicted?

Did we really need to know the President was getting a colonoscopy?

A friend of mine insists that I need to see “Sicko.” I said sure, if you promise to watch a couple of night’s worth of Glenn Beck with me. Any guess on how that went?

Back to inappropriate coverage of political body parts…Why in God’s name is the press paying attention to Hillary’s cleavage?

Job Search Update

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Have three interviews next week.

One with a ginormous telecom, starting in their call center but my growth potential is very nice. Short term needs being stomped down by long term goals.

One with a temp agency that does 50% of the tech jobs here in the valley. Possibility of moving into another ginormous tech company’s pool, but I’d be a subcontractor to the temp.

One with a small company who needs an IT guy. Doubtful that I’d get close to the money I need.

Other leads are coming in daily and Beautiful Wife is also starting her job search because frankly, we simply can’t make it without her.

Say what you want about the AF, but I was making a lot more that I’m apparently worth on the outside.

I’m also not in Afghanistan for six months like the guy who took my place.

UPDATE: Beautiful Wife got a job with her old friends at the home-made jam and jelly place. Yeah!