Of Pens and Swords

I wish I had two rockers under me right now, because I have a half a mind to walk into the 1SG’s office right now waving the biggest “What The Fuck” banner. Being still a lowly little buck, however, wouldn’t get me very far, no matter my experience.

Why am I pissed? Let me tell ya…
All the NCO’s get an email today from Top, saying that counseling needs to be done on the soldiers. Monthly counseling. That’s fine, that’s the standard in every other unit. Here’s the dilemma however. In this email, 1SG is telling the NCO’s how to do counseling. The email reads….
“Well another month has gone by and it is time to conduct monthly counseling’s on your junior soldiers. Be sure and reward them on their work performance if they are doing well, also talk to them about how they are performing as a soldier. If they need improvement in certain areas explain in depth what they need to improve on and assist in the improvement process. Talk about promotions and how can reach the next level.

These monthly counseling’s are a tool to lead these soldiers in the right direction and get to know your soldiers. When you sit down with these soldiers you will find out that most of them are eager to learn and want to know how they are doing or what they need improvement on.

While you are counseling your soldiers get to know them and show them that you care, that you are there for them and they can count on you.

“You take care of soldiers they will take care of you”.”

The tone for one is one that baby’s the NCO. “Be nice to your soldier, and they’ll be nice to you” attitude. The same attitude that reflects the “Taking care of soldiers” one they have here. The influence isn’t to train your soldiers to carry on with the mission after someone canoe’s your head with a well placed, or lucky, bullet. Nope, we take care of soldiers by babying them, wiping their nose, making their lives as stress free as possible. Why? Who knows, but obviously someone doesn’t realize that being shot at isn’t stress-free, the mission we could be doing. The basic mission of every soldier in the Army.
Why isn’t there a Professional Development class for the NCO’s for specifically counseling? Why does the tone have to be one of a loving, caring mom instead of a nail eating NCO? Ahh, tis because we’re REMF’s and not grunts. Because the shine of our boot is more important than the accuracy of our bullet. Because kissing ass and choking down a big stiffy gets you ahead instead of knowing your job and proving your leadership on the battlefield.

How about we counsel our soldiers saying that” Private Snuffy, you kissed my ass pretty well this month, so I give you brownie points. The one time I had to beg you to take our the trash for two days, you lose a brownie point each day, but you did bring me cake and fat free soda, so that negates the negative brownie points. Overall, you could try and not back talk me too much, and maybe kiss my ass a little bit before noon. If you can consistently kiss my ass, and maybe occasionally choke all 2.3 inches of me down, then I’ll give you the reach around while I’m dry fucking you in my attempts to get ahead, and recommend you for promotion too, and soon, after checking all the blocks as I have, looking great on paper but being proficient in no military task, you too can be in my position”

“You take care of soldiers they take care of you”. Yep, I believe this. You take care of your soldiers by training them to be killers when they need to be, use common sense, and mentor them in the ways of war is taking care of them. Lead by example, show them to have patience on the battlefield and make clear decisions without acting too quickly, and how to gain and maintain the initiative. Train them to do this because when you happen to lose your head due to a 15 inch piece of shrapnel, they will, without hesitation, strip your carcass of necessary gear and intel, take the MRE’s out of your ruck, and one of your tags from around your neck, and they will continue on with the mission. They will fight and win because they know the nature of the battlefield.
You don’t take care of soldiers by pampering them.

The second reason why I’m pissed about this email from 1SG (yes, I’m still talking about the email). She CC:’d all the damn officer’s in the unit on this email. Why am I pissed about this? Let me tell ya. Since I’ve been in, NCO’s have been fighting for their rights as NCO’s to train the soldier without having officer’s micro-manage them. In the Artillery community, it’s hard, because there is an officer for every 10 soldiers. Constantly we’re yelling, Sir, Move the fuck out, this is NCO business.
Here, we have the head NCO pretty much telling all the officer’s that it’s A-OK for them to step all into NCO business if they so wish. Go ahead and micro-manage sir, because if you don’t, our NCO’s may actually have to learn their job and be someone other than box-checking Strip wearer’s….
It goes completely against the NCO creed, in which all of us should know by heart. The 3rd paragraph starts with “Officers of my unit will have maximum time to accomplish their duties; they will not have to accomplish mine.” Here, we have the senior NCO completely shitting on this concept, and telling the officers that now, on top of doing their jobs, they’re required to do ours.

After this, I’m going back to grunt-land. Fuck all of this. It makes me sick to my stomach to think our Corps is being given over willingly by the NCO and the poor leadership. It makes me sick to think that in another 10 years, our army will look like the old Soviet army and will not be able to operate if one key person is taken out. It makes me sick to think that we will lose thousands of lives on the battlefield because our leaders aren’t trained as leaders.

I’m pissed, and I’m done writing.

I think I solved the problem of the day though. It seems two servers were having replication problems for the past three weeks. I didn’t really know to what extent this was, because my supervisor was working on the project.

The story is, I got counceled last night for what I’m going to be evaluated on for the next year. It was a bit of contention for me, because Im being evaluated on my ability to show up on time (which, finally, after almost two months, I have been given hours to work…whew), doing PT, and just being smart. Crap, that last one is in comparison to what? How do you define smart? Who is defining it? anyways. I sort of bitched him out for that, saying that is something that should be on a developmental counseling, not on my annual counseling checklist. I should be evaluated on my specific tasks that I have that authorizes me to be in this shop. He argued that that part is on the actual Evaluation report. I said, uh huh, and the two should sort of mirror each other. Plus, I pointed out, that the evaluation counseling instructions were, in fact, printed on the same page as the initial counseling…and it says to counsel the NCO about job description, standards, and the such. I guess I was spelling out too much common sense for a day, and just gave up. I digress. The point to this mid-point rant was that I also complained about how he says that I know sooo much more than him, yet I sit in the office all day long without a damn thing to do but answer the fuckin’ phone. I hate, as much as I do my ex, that goddamn phone…or more the people and really silly questions that call in on that phone. He said he had a few projects that he’d been working on for a few weeks, asked me which one I wanted. One, a server replication error, or two, helping in designing a webpage. I really don’t like web design, so I took the replication problem.

Back to that. My supervisor gave me a folder with which he’d been working on the server issue with for the past 3 weeks. I opened it today, to see if there was actually anything in there. Nope, it was a folder with about ten pages of SQL Server terms. That’s it. Well, not knowing much about SQL Server, I decided to do a little research. First, I knew that it worked 3 weeks ago. Second, I know that they deleted profiles off the machine right before the replication stopped working. The problem seemed to be that the user they deleted, then re-added, didn’t have the permissions to send out the replication requests…It would seem it’s fixed. We’ll see.

Now, I think I’m going to be bored again. I do, however, get a lot of time to study. That’s always good. Uber Geek-batize me baby.

Enough for tonight. I’m tired.

Hasta.

I’ve been on a movie burning tirade the past week, which will keep me occupied quite a bit. Too bad I’m spending all my time burning them and no time watching them hehe. Oh well.

I’m going to set up another laptop to run a Linux distro in the hootch, so that I don’t get rusty on that either. It’s hard to be an advocate for Open Source and not know how to use it. I’m seriously thinking of making my primary business plan revolve around the low cost solutions by using proven open source technologies. The lower TCO (total cost of ownership) should be a nice selling point to some clients, especially the one I’m considering to open with. A penny pinching guy who is a high school dropout but owns 3 companies that bring in roughly 200 million a year in profits, combined. His companies all interact with each other, but he has no information backbone with the exception of his corporate headquarters, which doesn’t even have much but a few servers to host email and a very antiquated webpage that probably brings more discredit than customers to him. But, that I can leave to the marketeers…

I have yet another movie I haven’t seen to copy….The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s a comic book type movie, so I’m sure to like it.

Today has been super boring….only 2 salutes all day, no stupid questions about self explanitory issues. Well, somewhat of one. We have a new Super problem user. He thinks that the computer should answer his beck and call, and calls us constantly when it doesn’t. I understand that the crusty ole bastard still thinks of computers like the Entiac, but my god man, leave us alone….His new request, to have another computer (the two he has already are way too much) so that he can run a Terminal Services client on just that one, so he can check his email also….The problem lies with the VPN client, when he activates it for terminal services, it takes his computer off the local domain, adds him to another domain, and his addressing comes from that domain. Well, with TS up, he can’t check his email, can’t print locally, so forth….But he only needs to bring up the TS once a day. His argument is that He is the “only” one in theatre able to do this stuff…..I think not, if they trust him, anybody is ‘able’ to do it, it just needs to be deligated down….which can’t happen, because then old crusty wouldn’t have a job…ahh, he should just go out and play golf like god intended CSM’s and CW4’s to do…or walk around and Harumph at everybody….hell, even yet, teach the old dog a new trick, and make him enroll in the basics of computing class held here…damn, what an idea…but, it’s a Led Zepplin, and won’t fly.