Category Archives: Military

DADT

Posted on by
1

Moot point to me, actually – I retired from the Air Force in 1997, after DADT had been in place for about five years. The other female military NCOs and I actually rather welcomed it at the time as a solid compromise and a step up from the previous policy of discharging gay servicemen and women instanter. In actual practice this involved discharging the gay male service-member on an individual basis, but let a gay female service-member be discovered and all heck would break out – because all of her female co-workers, friends, roommates, associates and even casual acquaintances would also be suspected of being lesbians, and investigated so tirelessly and thoroughly by the CID/AFOSI/NCIS that many of them would indeed confess to being lesbians too, just to bring the inquisition to an end. This usually came as a great surprise to boyfriends and husbands.

Anyway, all it would take to kick off one of these witch-hunts would be a rumor or an accusation, no matter how unfounded . . . and there would go all of the women in some unit or base, kicked out of the service. It was as if there was something in the water. Really, it was healthier for your career to have a reputation as a slut. By the way, I didn’t think there were many lesbians among the military woman I knew in twenty years service in the Air Force; there are damn few secrets to be kept when living in a military dorm, and the object/intensity of sexual interest is one of them. I knew there were women who I thought might be lesbian; and ones that I found out afterwards were . . . but my semi-scientific wild-ass guess is maybe one or two in a hundred, or less. (That figure was probably much higher for career military women during the period from the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, once women were allowed to stay in service upon getting married and having children.) I actually am surprised that no one ever accused me of being one, being that I was unmarried, circumspect about my personal life and kept my hair cut very short. There were people who hated me enough to have done so. I suppose only my notorious lack of skill at and complete disinterest in women’s team sports saved me from a malicious accusation

Anyway, DADT was a ham-fisted and perhaps clumsy compromise; basically private life was off the table – as much as it could be, as long as long as the service-member kept his or her private live ..er .. private. Not much of a strain for the Air Force, actually – especially in peacetime – because of all of the services the chances for most AFSC’s (military code for ‘what do ya do for a living?’) to go on deployments for extensive periods of time and live in very, very close quarters were pretty small. And in my observation, the Air Force generally drew in more of a middle-class/skilled technician demographic anyway. The Navy does as well – but then they have sea duty; ships and submarines and all that, where a lack of personal privacy is epic. None the less, though – at the time that DADT was instituted, a lot of straight guys did have the heebie-jeebies about sharing close quarters with an un-straight guy. My female NCO friends all agreed, with a certain degree of gleeful humor that they were all apprehensive about being hit on, in the exact same way that a single unaccompanied woman would be hit on in the open NCO Club bar on ladies’ night . . . and that most guys were nervous about and lacked the skills to gracefully counter another guy pitching unwanted woo. Skills which we, as women had all acquired and polished since we were about 16 years old. Anyway, we were all universally relieved – no more witch-hunts.

But there is one element of dropping DADT which does worry me – because of the peculiar and authoritative nature of the military and the isolation that military members sometimes find themselves in – and that’s the matter of sexual predators. Generally, the rules about fraternization cover this: you may not socialize save in the most perfunctory way, with people in your chain of command. You certainly may not date them, drink with them, party with them, et cetera: enlisted, NCOs and officers must maintain a certain degree of separation. (In my own early career, some of this would be overlooked – I cheerfully dated officers – but outside my own assigned unit. The Air Force got much stricter about this in the 1990s and the Marines and Army always took a hard line about it.) One rationale for the rules about fraternization is that it’s unprofessional, leads to the perception of favoritism . . . and the unspoken other is because of the isolation, on deployment, in a remote location, or at sea, there has always been the potential for someone of a higher rank or in a command capacity to abuse that authority to gain access sexually to someone of a lower rank – and the rules about fraternization at least put some brakes on it. My take on the whole thing is that the military was just barely able to deal with the plain old-fashioned heterosexual predator – say, with a male officer or NCO using rank to force a sexual relationship with an unwilling lower-ranking female. Now . . . the military has potentially the other kind to deal with. Don’t tell me it won’t ever happen – it will, eventually if not sooner, and I hope the services are ready to enforce every jot and tittle of the fraternization statutes. Equally, I should add.

Korea Meditation, Revisited

Posted on by
4

In the early 1990s, I did a tour in Korea; a year at Yongsan Garrison, working at HQ-AFKN, barely a stone’s throw from where my father had spent a couple of weeks at Camp Coiner in 1953. Camp Coiner was where new troops were processed for assignments in-country, and it was still a self-contained miniature garrison with a dining hall, movie theater, club, PX and chapel. Processing new arrivals takes only a day or two these days. When I was there, Camp Coiner housed soldiers assigned to Yongsan in a series of Quonset huts that had been covered in such a thick layer of foam insulation that they looked like nothing so much as a row of enormous Twinkies.

Camp Coiner to my father was a bunch of canvas tents in a field of mud, surrounded by deep rings of barbed wire and a deeper ring of hungry refugees, watching them intently. It quite took away one’s appetite, said my father, to have people watching you eat every bite of your C-rations; and it’s not as if C-rations were a gourmet treat to start with. The soldiers were forbidden to give away their food, but my father said a lot of them did anyway, tossing cans stealthily over the wire. Seoul was a wrecked place fifty years ago. While I was there at AKFN that year, I edited an interview which the late Col. David Hackworth had done for AFKN, where he described how he himself had first visited the place, retreating across the only bridge over the Han River. Nothing but rubble, and rats nibbling at corpses in the gutters, the only live people being his squad and the Chinese snipers shooting at them. What Colonel Hackworth and veterans like my father saw in the 1950ies and what they see when they visit Seoul now leaves them rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

I had the incredible good fortune to be put in the way of doing a lot of voice-over narration jobs while I was at Yongsan, as well as a regular part-time job copy-editing the English language simulcast of the regular Korea Broadcasting System evening TV newscast. Most evenings or Saturdays after I finished my day job, I was taking the subway or a bus to a production studio somewhere (a taxi if I was feeling extravagant), and reading an English-language script on practically anything that someone felt would go over really well if they did a version in English.Amonger other things, I did a script about the manufacture of soju (which put me off ever drinking the stuff), an assortment of company puff-pieces, some fiendishly complicated English lesson tapes, a kid’s storybook, unless they have re-done the whole thing since, I am the English-language version of the recorded information for Kimpo Airport. I was a skilled and experienced production technician, working with other skilled audio technicians, away from the post. I developed friendships with the people I worked with in the KBS newsroom, who laughed at me because I had never gone to any of the tourist things in Seoul. I had, I explained, gone close to them, or had seen them from the outside on my way to a job; just like a native does.

Modern Seoul is a sprawling city of high-rise buildings, eight-lane highways, a splendid subway system, a golden glass tower 63 stories tall close by one of the fifteen or twenty bridges spanning the Han, and the Namsan tower glittering like a Christmas tree topper on a green hilly island in the middle of the city. In the evening, coming back from KBS on the bus, I could smell the bakery smell of vanilla cake from a commercial bakery close by. Sometimes at KBS we talked about the North, wondering if the discipline of an invading army of North Koreans would last past the first big grocery store, or electronics shop. When the old Supreme Leader died, I sat in the newsroom and watched half an hour of newscast cobbled out of the same fifteen minutes of stock video of the North, plus new footage of the bereft Northerners mourning ostentatiously. It seemed to me the KBS technicians were horrified and embarrassed by the elaborate demonstration of grief; I and they could only wonder what sort of coercion could force such undignified displays from people.

I liked working in Seoul, I liked what Koreans have built in fifty years, these tough jolly people on the south side of the DMZ. Cosmopolitan and professional, possibly as a nation the sharpest-dressed people on the face of the earth, every salaryman or woman turned out fit to be on the cover of GQ; as different from their cousins and second cousins north of the DMZ and still be on the same planet.

OSer Don Rich poined out in a post yesterday that the North Koreans regularly perform what he called the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken – every six months to two years, there is some kind of saber-rattling game, a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that they are there and bellicose. The old-time Korea hands that I knew over there, as well as my Korean friends were relatively blase about it all, for several reasons. One of them was that – well, mostly it was a bit of theater; it would die down in a week or so. Another being that for all the sprockets and medals hung on Nork generals – they really haven’t fought a serious war, balls-to-the-wall-and-all-guns-blazing war since 1953. There’s been a lot of evolution since then. But – lest the South Koreans get too over-confident about calling the North Korean bluff; the city of Seoul is well within range of Nork artillery, and quite a lot of it, too. Which is a very good reason to keep a cool head. And the other great argument for the status quo being maintained – is that if the DMZ magically evaporated and the Koreas were united once again, the South would be carrying the burden of the North … pitiful, starving, traumatised and hermetically isolated for sixty years, a country-sized concentration camp with all the brutality and horror that implies. The North has been in such bad shape for so long that teenage refugees from there are actually physically stunted, in comparison to their Southern cousins. So – while everyone gives lip service to reunification, in actuality, not so much.

But this week the Norks opened fire, shelling civilian areas on Yeonpyeong Island – an action which will be a little harder to brush off on the part of the South, Japan, and the United States. That ratchets up the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken to a whole new level. So – who acts first? At this point, any guess is as good as any other.

McChrystal McMysteries

Posted on by
7

So, as expected General McChrystal resigned last week; a terribly drastic way to get an instant face to face attitude adjustment session with the boss, I must say. I skimmed the original Rolling Stone story, and I have to also observe that I am still mystified as to how and why a freelance reporter with no particular track record of being a friend of the military even got let through the door – or even was allowed by the General’s Public Affairs officer/advisor to ingratiate himself so thoroughly that they seem to have forgotten that said reporter was there. I mean, there are reporters and there are reporters . . . and as a public affairs professional, I completely internalized certain things; like being always aware that the outside media was present, and anything he or she saw had the potential to be on the record. In fact, most likely would be on the record, so a certain degree of circumspection was required. I would have thought that anyone savvy enough to have made any rank north of light colonel would also have absorbed that kind of situational awareness. Officers who have been promoted to general rank most always are pretty sharp. The military is a ruthless meritocracy, perhaps the most so of any of our various establishments. Even the political generals, promoted on account of who, rather than what they know – usually possess a high degree of low cunning. Was General McChrystal just arrogant enough to think that he, as Obama’s chosen general for Afghanistan, could treat with a supposedly sympathetic media outlet and get away with it. Arrogance I could buy – but not stupidity.

I read some comments and posts on OS and elsewhere, where the degree of pearl-clutching shock and horror over the disrespect reflected towards the civilian element in the chain of command by those comments from General McChrystal’s staff – as quoted in the story got to be rather poisonously amusing. If a military officer lets fall a derisive comment in private about VP Biden – and no reporter is there to hear it, does it make a sound? See; there is a difference between the private sphere and the official, duty sphere, the one where you follow the legitimate orders given by your superior – even if you privately disagree. Granted, sometimes the border between the two is blurry – especially at the levels where historians and reporters might be expected to take an interest, but it does exist. Official is when you put on the uniform, when you go on shift or deployment, when you release statements or make speeches in your official capacity as a member of the forces. Everyone in service has had it pounded into them repeatedly, about not bringing discredit on the service in your public actions; so did McChystal openly disobey any such orders given to him in securing Afghanistan? Or does failure to closely police the private comments of your close subordinates and staff in the manner of a grade school teacher with a classroom of fractious third-graders constitute an offense against the UCMJ? Apparently, under this current administration it does, although I suspect under the previous one, the parties in question might have been lauded for their courage in speaking “troof to power, man!”

Frankly, this is not the first administration in my lifetime to be held in something less than complete affection and respect among the military, even as they followed orders and kept a stoical public silence about their personal opinions. Jimmy Carter’s inaction following the Iranian takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran had many of us grinding our teeth, and Bill Clinton’s games with interns excited considerable contempt – especially since any military officer or NCO proven guilty of playing hide-the-salami with a subordinate and lying about it would have been disciplined and discharged. One standard for me, and another for thee, y’see.

It has been suggested by a milblogger or two, and a neighbor of mine with a background in Special Forces – that General McChrystal spend a lot of his military career in sort of a Special Forces cocoon, doing – and developing the habit of speaking bluntly – rather than having to deal much with those on the outside. I could tentatively accept something of that hypothesis, save that Special Forces is a ruthless meritocracy on steroids. Certain milboggers are speculating along the lines of General McChrystal deliberately setting off the explosive bolts on his career. What if he was going spare with frustration at the constraints and his civilian counterparts in Afghanistan are operating under, with zilch support from the current administration. What if he could already see the writing on the wall – or the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American Embassy and came to the conclusion that the military was going to take the blame for ‘losing’ Afghanistan?

To this day that ‘other America of defense’ as written about by Arthur Hadley – is haunted by Vietnam. There was the losing of it by failure of the political machine to support South Vietnam logistically after the withdrawal of American troops, and also by the fact that there were generations (in military terms) of able and creative officers who served there, knowing very well what needed to be done, but felt their efforts were stymied at the very highest levels, to include the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. I began my own service when the services were still thick with NCOs and officers who remembered Vietnam vividly, but fairly quietly – and to a man (they were just about all men, then) they despised McNamara with a passion that fairly made them incoherent. McNamara had a toweringly high estimation of his own and his ‘wiz kids’ abilities when it came to overseeing the war in Vietnam, and relative contempt for the uniformed military; a contempt returned in spades. Now and again it was bruited about that it might have been better all around – that McNamara be brought to see the light about the true effect of his policies with regard to Vietnam, if the generals on the Joint Chiefs of staff, and those others who disagreed with him had resigned their commissions in protest. Interestingly, one of those officers who did spectacularly criticize the war – on Sixty Minutes, no less – was an army colonel named David Hackworth. Almost 25 years later, I edited an interview that he gave to AFKN-TV, where he cheerfully acknowledged that yes, he had indeed thrown himself on his own sword, over policy and accepted the consequences more or less gracefully. He finished up as a best-selling author, and military journalist for a major national magazine, along with the awed respect of the next generation of military, so it all ended rather happily for him.
Is the McChrystal McMystery a repeat of this? Same song, slightly different verse. Discuss.

One Of Those Moments

Posted on by
1

You know, this morning when I read about the Gaza-Blockade-Runners’ shoot-out – I kept thinking that this may be Israel’s “Let it all be done” moment … and thinking of the moment in the 1998 movie “Elizabeth” when Elizabeth I said exactly that. It’s at about 8:00 in the clip…

Was this Israel’s -nothing to loose, so might as well act and let the stuff fall where it does – decision? Discuss in comments.

Another, Really?!! Moment

Posted on by
4

With all the other things going on:  President Obama’s running away from Washington to Chicago; This administration making post-Hurricane Katrina look successful; The Obama Presidency throwing former President Clinton under the bus in the Sestak sleaze-fest.  You may have missed this bit of news yesterday.

I received this from the HQ NORAD/NORTHCOM GROUP on Facebook and…and…I had to laugh.  Yesterday the White House released their National Security Strategy.  On the White House Blog, the title of the post that announces the release of the strategy is, and I couldn’t make this up myself if I wanted to:

“A BLUEPRINT FOR PURSUING THE WORLD THAT WE SEEK.”

What amazes me is that we all know that there were meetings about this.  There was brain-storming.  If nothing else, this administration knows the value of a well-turned phrase so they WORK at it.  THIS is what they came up with.  It’s the best they could do.  So basically, they’re not even doing the image thing very well anymore.

A Place Apart – Last Thoughts on the Milblog Convention

Posted on by
Reply

So, three weeks later, and I am finally getting around to writing up the last of the Milblog Conference; real life intervened, had to go back to work a great number of hours for a regular client, and find a permanent home for the poopies, and do some work for the Tiny Publishing Bidness . . . and my problem is that I can get easily distracted . . .

Hey, was that a chicken? I could swear that was a chicken, outside in my yard . . . I wonder if it escaped from the neighbors’ yard. I found a ferret in my back yard, once. Really – cute little fellow. He came along quietly and rested in the cat-carrier until we could locate the owner . . . and where was I?

Oh – meditating on how the world of the military – the Other America of Defense as Arthur T. Hadley described it. He made note of how rarely the world of the military, their families and veterans intersected with that of the various elites – the political, social, intellectual and media elite. His book came out in the late eighties, and confirmed pretty much what I had sensed about the military generally. Which was, unless members of the military had been killed either grotesquely and/or in significant numbers, the existence of the contemporary military pretty much skated by the notice of the great and the good, with the exception of a fleeting up-tick in general interest during the Gulf war. Not much notice taken, otherwise – hardly any movies, maybe once or twice an abortive TV series, or a character who was a veteran of the non-messed up and fairly well-adjusted kind. There wouldn’t have even been much in popular fiction either, if it weren’t for WEB Griffen and others, writing in the military/adventure genre – and that is not everyone’s cup of tea, not even mine.

Arthur Hadley thought this kind of cultural/societal disconnect did not bode very well for the country as a whole – and so I thought I might do my very best to enlighten the general web-readership about the wonderful wacky world of that “Other America.” So I began contributing to the earlier iteration of this blog, at the crack-of-dawn, blogging-time. (August 2002, for those who keep count.) I have to say, the whole civilian-military cultural divide is not quite the yawning chasm it was twenty years ago. I have no idea of what to account for this feeling – probably something to do with 9-11, and the internet generally. Even so, I don’t think we’ll ever replicate the kind of national situation in which a citizen-scholar-soldier like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain could move from being a professor of rhetoric and languages at Bowdoin College, to a combat command in the Civil War. In one shining, desperate moment on a hill at Gettysburg, the balance of that battle and by extension possibly the whole war – hung on his command for a bayonet charge. No, I don’t much think we’ll see that crossover involvement of that kind and to the degree that we did when there was a draft on, but now and again I am a little more hopeful about the likelihood of such a thing happening again than Arthur Hadley was, twenty years ago.

For at the Milblog Conference, one of the establishments or personalities making an appearance (aside from the others I have written about previously) was a representative and some students from Hillsdale College – a tiny and very traditional co-ed liberal arts college, buried in the wilds of southern Michigan. To read about Hillsdale’s history is to read the history of higher educational establishments on the American frontier. If Joshua Chamberlain hadn’t emerged from Bowdoin, he would have likely come from a school like Hillsdale. According to their website, a higher percentage of Hillsdale students enlisted for service in the Civil War than any other western college. Hillsdale’s other claim to prominence is a devotion to independence so fierce that it refuses all federal and state subsidies – student aid monies, as well as the GI Bill. Liberal when they were founded in 1844, although in stubbornly sticking to their founding principles when the world around has changed so much, they have indisputably slid all the way to the conservative side of the spectrum, through no other action than being . . . er stubborn. And dedicated to high standards.

Nonetheless, the college makes it possible through scholarships and donations for veterans to attend. I did meet one student, 2Lt Jack Shannon, who is now on active duty in the Marine Corps and stationed at Virginia Beach going through intelligence officer school . There will also be nearly a dozen other Hillsdale recruits attending the Marine’s Officer Candidate School this summer- which out of a student body of around 1,300 is not too shabby at all. Two of the other Hillsdale students I spoke to were veterans – when my daughter looked at a picture of the three, she could tell which two by the look of their faces.

James Markman served as a medic in the 82nd Airborne – in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which he was awarded a Purple Heart. Now he is intending to pursue a medical career, modeling himself after an Army doctor who impressed him no end, when he was serving.

Jon Lewis served three overseas tours as a Marine – a rifleman (although every Marine is a rifleman) section leader. Two of his tours were in Iraq. He intends to go into the ministry. I had the same feeling from all three of them that I have from my daughter – of a sense of focus and maturity in them that one usually doesn’t get from the ordinary college student in their early twenties. James and Jon preferred to attend Hillsdale on scholarships rather than any other school, where they could use their GI Bill educational benefits. In a way – through Hillsdale and other schools where these new veterans are going to classes – we may be replicating what happened just after World War II, when veterans flocked into higher education. There is a new cadre of citizen-leaders being developed – which will make it interesting when they run up against the old cadre.

And so that was it, for this year – the conference wrapped up with a banquet of no more than usual rowdiness – milbloggers being rather more exuberantly extrovert than would be expected of the stereotypical blogging sisteren and bretheren – and an awards ceremony for various categories of mil-blogs. There was a raffle (some gift bags featuring Ranger Up tee-shirts – very popular among military circles) to benefit Homes for Our Troops – another military-oriented charitable effort, that like Soldiers’ Angels, hardly anyone in the larger world might have heard of. They retrofit or build homes for veterans seriously disabled in service since 2001. All in all, a very interesting weekend – possibly the first time I have gone farther and stayed longer away from home in about fifteen years.

Time and Memory

Posted on by
11

I was momentarily distracted last week by a comment thread at The Belmont Club, when one of the participants made mention of historian Jacques Barzun, who is something like 102 this year. The commenter noted that Mr. Barzun not only remembers Paris during World War I, when the German Army came perilously close to bombarding the place – but how he also remembers conversing with his own then-very-elderly grandmother, whose memories went back to the 1830s. Imagine, being just a step or two removed from such memories. It reminded me also of a conversation with another writer I know, who teaches languages and music, down in Beeville, Texas.

Imagine, he said – someone of our age (we are both in the fifty to sixty spectrum) talking to the oldest person we know – who would be in their nineties. So, their own childhood memories would go back to the early twentieth century – like Mr. Barzun’s. I did have this experience once, when I was just about 18, and because 18-year olds had just then been given the right to vote and it was an election year, I thought I ought to take some interest in politics. Which I did, but it proved to be very fleeting – the interest really didn’t kick in at full-strength until the last year or so. The mild interest of that year took the form of an afternoon at the Republican Party HQ in my home-town, doing what-I-can’t-quite-remember . . . but the other person minding the office that day was an elderly gentleman who said he was ninety-something, had grown up on a ranch in Montana and had been sent to school (a one-room schoolhouse, of course) every day on a horse; a very tall horse, so his father had to lift him up into the saddle, the horse took him to school, and the teacher lifted him down at the other end, and tied up the horse. In the afternoon, the teacher put him up into the saddle – and the operation proceeded in reverse. This would have put those schooldays of his in the late 1880s, at least – but he had some other fascinating yarns, of joining the Army and being a cavalryman in the days before World War I when the cavalry still meant horses. He had been on Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa, and had deployed to the Western Front as a very new 2nd Lieutenant. I so wish I had written much of this down at the time, or even remembered his name – it was much more fascinating than stuffing envelopes and answering the phone.

But, said my writer friend – now imagine that the oldest person you know, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew. So, a child of ten or eleven in about 1920 had talked to a ninety-year old person . . . and that person’s memories – since they would have been born in the 1840s – might encompass the Gold Rush, and at the very least, the Civil War. A roll of typescript among some of my Granny Jessie’s papers paralleled that kind of memory-span. In about 1910, two of her aunts were learning to use that newfangled gadget, the typewriter, and as a typing exercise they had interviewed the oldest man in Lionville, Chester County PA. Alas, I do not recall his name either, and the roll of typescript is also long gone (a wildfire which burned my parents’ house pretty well cleaned out all the family memorabilia in 2003) but his first-hand recollections dated from the early 1800s. He told the great-aunts of long-horned wild cattle being brought in from the west, and of working as a carpenter. One of the curious notations was that coffins that were built then were constructed with a peaked lid, a puzzle which had just then been considerable of a mystery to the archeologist excavating Wolstonhome Town, near Jamestown. That design turned out to be the last of an archaic custom, which the archeologist went to a great deal of trouble to unravel – but there it was, testament for the use of an ancient and disused custom, preserved in an old typescript.

Now, let’s get really adventurous – and suppose that that oldest person who talked to the oldest person that you knew, who was born in the 1840s, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew, who at eighty or ninety years of age in the 1850’s meant they had been born about 1760 – so that their memories would encompass the Revolution. Depending on where they lived, they might have seen George Washington, or his little army of Rebels on the march, heard Paul Revere or William Dawes riding by their house, shouting an alarm, or heard the church-bells ringing to celebrate their victory.

Yes, it is two hundred and change years ago – but to think of it in terms of memories, transmitted across the generations, we are only three steps removed. It isn’t really that long ago at all. History isn’t past – as another historical commentator remarked in another context, certain memories lie at the bottom of our minds, like lees at the bottom of a cup of wine, only waiting to be stirred up again.

Continuing Interesting Stuff at the Milblogger Conference

Posted on by
1

Yes, it was a week ago last weekend, but I have several jobs, four books to market, two more to write . . . oh, and a tax bill to pay. So, forgive me for dishing out the good bloggy ice cream in small dishes, ‘kay?

One of the unexpected highlights of the conference was a late addition to the morning panel lineup; this man was almost a proto-blogger: Major Norman Hatch, who as a young NCO and combat cameraman in the Pacific during World War II oversaw the filming of the battle for Tarawa. Greyhawk provided a short version of this video, with the audio turned down, and Major Hatch gave us a live commentary – a sort of directors’ cut.

Anyway, as I have pointed out many times, the military is its whole ‘nother world. I swear, I’ve been convinced for years that most civilians get their ideas about it – not from a genu-wine military person, but from some (usually self-appointed) expert, anointed by the cultural powers that be. Which usually makes those of us who have long been domiciled in the military world just roll our eyes and laugh behind our hands. Or throw something heavy at the television – it all depends. BTW, really perversely-humored military members often amuse themselves by feeding tall tales to said self-appointed experts, just to see if they are going to bite on the tall tale, hook line and sinker. I know they do this – I’ve always called it the Wister Effect.*
Trying to put across something of what the military experience is really like to the average normal civilian is what got me started in mil-blogging, back in the Dark Ages of blogging. And sham-wow! Did Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief suddenly have a lot of readers! On one notable occasion just about the time that the drive into Kuwait began, CNN linked to our home page – and the resulting traffic crashed the server. We were included in a short list of mil-blogs listed in a short (is there any other sort?) article in Time Magazine, and Yours Truly was interviewed a couple of times by reporters for national newspapers, who were putting together a story about the Great E-Mail/Milblogging Adventure, and how it was possible for the deployed military to be in such very close contact with their families and friends. All very heady and amusing stuff, this was – but I kept thinking how odd it was that the official military Public Affairs offices seemed to be completely clueless.

Having worked in an airbase PA office, I knew very well that part of the PA staff’s duties was to scan print media for any mention of the service, the particular base, or the military in general. I didn’t think it likely, in other words, that the official military could NOT know about mil-blogs in 2003 – especially since I made a special effort to visit a local PA office and offer to blog about any particular needs the local command had, with regard to deployed troops from that post, or for any casualties they might be caring for. I talked to a civilian in the office – who seemed quite keen, and left my name, email addy and URL for his commander, and never heard another word. Eh – no skin off mine, as the saying goes. But at the first afternoon panel of the Milblog Conference, we had a full brace of commanders – including Admiral J.C. Harvey, Commander U.S. Fleet Forces Command, who is an enthusiastic blogger, and Col. Gregory Breazile, who blogs for the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan.

Obviously, the official blog has arrived; the technology has been embraced by the higher levels. I did get up and asked, precisely when and what event precipitated this interest, when we early bloggers were treated as if we smelled bad, early on. Eh – the answer seemed to be that the very high ranks realized the value of social media fairly early on. One does not achieve the high command rank in the military by being an idiot, by the way. I’ve met some colonels who were dumber than a box of hammers, but every general I ever met personally seemed to be pretty sharp. At the other end of the scale, the very sharpest of the junior ranks had embraced social media, blogging, twittering and youtube almost at once. It was just the intermediate level, or so the Admiral explained, who weren’t quite sure what to do with or about it. This tracked pretty well with my experience, being as the Daily Brief’s founding blogger was a smart-ass Air Force enlisted mechanic who loved to spend his nights on the intertubules. (He also got bored easily, which is why he recruited other writers for his blog after a year.) I have to admit, there is a decidedly different feel to a blog which is there because it’s essential to communicating about the mission, and one that’s a volunteer effort and done for sheer enthusiasm.

Final wrap up tomorrow – stay tuned, sportsfans.

* The Wister Effect: so called after Owen Wister, the writer of The Virginian, who related a story about some cowboys in a small Western town. When some traveling Easterners came to town on the train, and began hyperventilating about the violence and danger in the Wild West, the cowboys obligingly staged a mock-lynching for their edification. Wear your expections too openly – and very likely someone with a perverse sense of humor will make a special effort and arrange to deliver what you were expecting.

Still More of What I Saw @ The Milblogger’s Conference

Posted on by
Reply

There were four panel discussions during Saturday, the one full day of the 5th Annual Milblogger’s Conference – some with panelists present front and center, and a few with either taped, or teleconferenced interviews. All of the panelists and the moderator, Greta Parry (who originated a blog called Kiss my Gumbo) touched upon the use of social media – that is, networking, blogging, tweeting and other uses of the internet in the service of various military enterprises. The first panel discussed the use of social media with regard to various military oriented charities, only one of which had been in existence longer than the last decade or so; the US Navy Memorial in Washington, DC. The VP for Marketing Communications confessed resignedly that she must still print out blogposts and email messages for many of the senior managers to peruse, since they are not exactly comfortable with this internet-thingy. The other organizations, such as Soldier’s Angels grew organically in response to various needs upon being publicized through mil-blogs and email appeals for items to be sent to deployed, hospitalized or disabled military members, or to assist their families. Soldier’s Angels started with family members sending ‘care packages’ to individuals – and then it just sort of snowballed.

Just to illustrate how these things grow: my daughter’s Marine unit deployed to Kuwait very early in 2003, and of course my parents and friends began sending her useful things – snack food and sanitary-wipes, drink mixes and big spray, books and magazines. She wrote to me about a kid in her unit who’s family had his APO address all mixed up, with the result that he was over there for almost two months and hadn’t gotten a letter or a care package from anyone. I wrote about this on my own blog, with the result that LCpl. Varnum was immediately adopted by about forty different people, and got so many boxes of goodies that there was no room for him to sleep in his little pup-tent shelter. My daughter’s unit was the recipient of boxes of books collected by another blogger, and a case of moon-pies from a lady in Virginia . . . eventually they had so much in the way of home comforts that I began referring people who emailed me asking to adopt-a-troop to Soldier’s Angels, which was formally organized and launched by this time. The milblogs have been supporting Soldier’s Angels every since. One of their big projects was to provide voice-activated laptop computers for the seriously injured – and another project I clearly recall was to collect clothing; underwear and sweats, and tee-shirts, for injured troops who had been medivacked from the field on a stretcher to hospitals in Germany to recover – and separated from all of their friends and possessions, had nothing but hospital PJs and robes to stand up in. Kind of hard, walking across the post to the PX in your slippers to buy more clothes; I suppose this problem must have come up now and again before, but in this case, Soldier’s Angels had an immediate solution.

I cut a certain “Doonesbury” strip out of the local newspaper the day it appeared, and it’s been on the front of my refrigerator ever since; the final panel of the strip contained the punchline. “Is it true that only 13% of American kids can find Iraq on a map?” And the reply from a cynical reporter character, “Yeah, but all 13% are Marines.”
During the first session, someone pointed out Garry Trudeau, among the conferees . . . yeah, that Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury guy, who was not the very last person I would have expected to find at a military blogger’s conference – I’d say he’s have been among a list of a hundred or so. But it seems that he does a lot of quiet good for veterans, as well as providing a mil-blog venue. And yes, I did go up to him in the interval and tell him about the “13%” comic strip, still bravely magneted to my refrigerator door. Told him that he could have made another mint or so, selling the original art, or even prints of that strip. Just about every mother of a Marine would want one. Alas, he donated all the originals, all at once. (Yeah, I talked a little about my own books – do I look like an idiot! It’s all about the marketing, baby!)

The mild thrill from the second session came in a conference call from Afghanistan, from Michael Yon, who as of last weekend was lurking in the vicinity of Kandahar. Michael has been operating as a freelance journalist, covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for a good few years, now. He is supported through donations from his readers; all the milbloggers know of Mike Yon – the top story on his blog today is about one of those efforts to collect donations for a unit, or a place or a purpose . . . and how they expand. He thinks there is a ‘surge’ beginning to build up a head of steam in that part of Afghanistan; we’ll know by Christmas what kind of effect will be had by it. His next project is a means of introducing little biogas fuel generators to Afghanistan, in the hopes of replacing scarce wood as a fuel for cooking: off to Nepal to research on how they do it there. Apparently biogas generated from waste material is being widely used in Nepal . . . the technology is fairly simple, and straightforward. It would save the trees and save the time spent searching for a few little sticks of dry wood. I can see the sense in this – one of my books about the far west mentions that it was the constant quest by settlers for wood for fuel and for building that alienated the Plains Indians, at least as much as the ravages of buffalo hunters . . .

Seriously off-topic – more to follow, about the conference. Most amusingly – and I am kicking myself for not taking a picture of some of them doing so – about a third of them were tweeting and blogging each session as it happened. I did not have the advantage of a Blackberry, or i-Phone, laptop or notebook computer that many of the other conferees had, so I have to catch up days later.

More of What I Saw at the Milblogger Conference

Posted on by
6

Milblogging – alas, I have had to explain that concept to a number of my purely civilian contacts over the last few weeks. Just a plain old military blogger. A blogger on active duty, a veteran, a family member or someone just interested in aspects of the military life, all of whom are blogging about their experiences and life in the military, around the military, or as the military touches on their life. To mainstream America, since the end of the draft, this is terra incognita. If all one knows about the life military is what can be gleaned from current movies, television and popular culture, then there might just as well be dragons out there over the edge in DOD land. Another language, of slang and shorthand, of instantly understood references, certain subtle habits of manners and bearing, the quiet display of badges, rings, patches, souvenir coins or tattoos – all of which serve as tells to other residents (or past residents) of DOD land. Most pure civilians usually miss the ‘tells’ – which is why fake veterans will fool them practically all the time.

So, I have been a milblogger since 16 August, 2002, which is the Dark Ages of blogging, practically. I was invited to join this blog when it was still called Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, at a time when there was a sudden and increased national interest in the military experience during the ramp-up to the Iraq War. SSDB was one of only a handful of milblogs carried on the Instapundit blog-roll. I had just barely discovered this newfangled internet thingy, I had a background in public affairs, wanted an outlet for my own writing . . . and my daughter was a Marine, heading towards a deployment in Kuwait and eventually, Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003. Comparing notes at the Milblog Conference, I discovered that the date of my first blog-post predated everyone elses’ by at least six months.

That entry is included, for your benefit, as a historical document –

Sgt. Mom’s Ancient Tech Story:

So the new colonel commanding was getting a tour of the AFRTS station, from the Station Manager. The colonel looks through the soundproofed glass window into the radio studio, and there is the on-duty DJ, stripped to his underwear, sitting cross-legged on the turntable*, going round and round and round. The colonel, slightly-bug-eyed, turns to the Station Manager and demands
“What the %#@&&& is he doing?
The Station Manager shrugs and says,
“Thirty-three and a third.” **

(footnotes appended for those under the age of 30ish)
* Probably a heavy, 16″ Gates turntable. They were used to play “records” also called ETs, or Electrical Transcriptions, which in the days when the only body parts being pierced were ears, were 16 or 14 inches across.
** Revolutions per minute. 16-inch records were played at 78 RPMs, 14-inch records (which replaced them) at 33 1/3

Yeah, I’ve gone a long way since then, although the audience laughed their hummm-hums off, when I re-told it at the conference. A good few didn’t even need the footnotes – but don’t let that lead you to assume that all attending were old fogies . . . I met a trio of earnest young college students, two veterans and one heading military-wards. A bit of an interview to follow about them, over the next two days. (Look, am I a public utility? I produce good bloggy ice-cream when I can!) There was also this young lady present, who is not only extraordinarily pleasant and patriotic, but possesses a charmingly retro aesthetic sense – as well as a sense of duty. (No, I never minded girlie pinups – as long as I could admire the equivalent and aesthetically pleasing male form . . .)

But enough of the wander down blogging-memory lane, more observations of the 5th Annual Milblogger Conference. It is the very first one which I have attended, which made for a curious experience. I have ‘known’ some of the other bloggers nearly as long as I’ve blogged and consider them as friends and fellow veterans, but this was the first time I ever met them face to face. I tend to think of them first as they named themselves with their original nom du blog – Greyhawk, Blackfive, Baldilocks – rather than their given names. Most of the early milbloggers chose to do so, not wanting to put absolutely everything out there.

Another curiosity – I’d guess that a little under a half of the conference attendees were women: fair number of veterans, or DOD civilian employees, some from various military-oriented charitable organizations, or military spouses. There were present, though, a fair number of active-duty men with the high-and tight haircut – that which makes them look as if they had shaved their heads entirely, and then parked a small, short-furred rodent on top. On the first panel of the conference – a selection of early bloggers, three of us were Air Force or AF veterans (Baldi, me, and Greyhawk – all NCOs), one Army veteran – Blackfive, and one Marine officer – “Taco”. (His last name is Bell.) This distribution drew some comment from the audience: I have no explanation for this. Another very early blogger was a Reserve Navy officer, Lt. Smash. My purely amateur and scientific wild-ass guess about this distribution is something along the lines of the Air Force and the Navy being more technically oriented, and drawing in a more middle-class and educated recruit. Another curiosity is that four of us have written or edited books, and “Taco” is planning to write one as soon as he retires and can uncork his best stories. Eh – one of my best-received one-liners: blogging is a gateway drug. (Did I mention that I do have a mad compulsion to entertain and inform? Laugher from an audience – manna to the starving!) More to follow, including how I had the neck ask a blunt question of a 4-star and to tell Garry Trudeau about the newspaper clipping that has been on the front of my refrigerator for almost eight years now – I promise. Real life and bills to pay will interfere. Really.

What I Saw at the Milblogger Convention

Posted on by
4

Let’s see – I experienced air travel at the end of the first decade of this century. I can report that practically every shred of comfort, convenience, and excitement has been removed from the travel experience itself with almost surgical precision – although the ability to check in from your home computer and print up your boarding pass is a welcome development, and the lavish proliferation of food courts at the major hubs is similarly welcome. Especially as it seems that a tiny bag of peanuts, or a cookie and some juice or a soft-drink of choice is about the only thing served to coach passengers on short haul flights. I expect that the next step in the progression will be that the cabin staff will no longer actually hand them out from the narrow metal cart hauled up and down the aisles. Within a short time, I think they will probably hand them out after they swipe your boarding pass at the departure gate, and save the cabin staff considerable trouble. (It’s still better than MAC flights, though. Not much, but still better.)

The Atlanta airport is presently so big that it could possibly secede from Atlanta proper, and set up as its own municipality.

The area around the mid-Atlantic coast is green, green, green. Even from the air, you can make out vivid blobs of pink from the cherry trees in bloom. The dogwood trees are in bloom, too, and all along the parkway between Baltimore and Washington DC, there were tangles of purple wisteria. It’s very nice, to have belts of trees, along the parkways and highways, separating the housing tracts, warehouses and whatever from the highway. Looking at the ass-end of a strip-mall as you drive along is not aesthetically appealing. Sad lack of ground-growing wildflowers, though. I looked at the verges, which had grass and dandelions in plenty, but not much else, and thought, “Dandelions! Dandelions!!!That’s all you got, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia! Pah!”

I have seen the Washington Monument at a distance and close-up and from many angles, as I suspect the shuttle-bus driver actually circled through downtown DC several times. I have also seen the Capitol Building, and the White House, inspected the façade of the Department of Commerce building, and the quaint brick sidewalks and cobbled streets of Georgetown. We were stuck in traffic, so I had plenty of time to contemplate all of these structures. Teensy brick three and four-story townhouses in Georgetown about the width of a small yawn apparently sell for $500,000 when they come on the market.

This is a beautiful time to visit that part of the country; I am told that only the autumn foliage equals spring for sheer natural spectacle.

The Westin Arlington Gateway is a very pleasant place to stay, as hotels go, although slightly on the pricy side. The rooms are mega-comfortable, being designed around a tasteful luxury-spa theme, with lots of pale green, sage and white. The beds are piled with pillows and a thick comforter – all in pristine white. They have their own very special brand of scented white-tea-aloe soap and toiletries – and have them for sale in regular sizes for those who just can’t take away enough of the little individual bottles.

Contra the usual expectation of bloggers being socially inept loners and introverts, who cannot relate face to face to others of their species – the military version appear to be exuberant extroverts . . . even without having had much alcohol to drink.

No one that I talked to at the conference had been mil-blogging longer than I had. I started in August, 2002 – the Dark Ages of mil-blogging – and am still at it, although I have drifted into wider circles than a strictly military/veteran focus. Which makes me rather famous in those circles, although no one asked for my autograph.

To Be Continued – Garry Trudeau, a blogging 4-star admiral, the most gullible troop in all the world, three young men from Hillsdale, and other observations from the 5th Annual Milblogging Conference.

Road Trip!

Posted on by
8

I’ve been invited to be on one of the panels at the 5th Annual MilBlog Conference, in Arlington, Virginia, April 9th and 10th – and Blondie and I are intending to drive, since she will be on spring break! (Route tentatively planned as Dallas-Memphis-Knoxville-Harrisonburg)

Any other milbloggers from the San Antonio or Ft. Hood area also going to the Milblog Conference? Anyone in Arkansas, Tennessee or Virgina want us to stop and visit along the way? Recommend some good eats, or something interesting to see?