Of Pens and Swords

I explained that whole thing to a few friends before, my girlfriend. How a patrol may seem to an outsider to be a group of bubba’s and bitches walking through the woods with weapons.

It annoys Jessica to no end that I break out my Flamer lisp at times, flit around briefly, over-exaggerate my hand movements…I think it’s funny. I’ve known more grunts that have the perfect gay lisp than flaming-gay men…anyways, I digress.

I think I worried a few old friends of mine a few times, getting drunk and slipping into my gay gruntenese. It’s funny to watch their reactions. I guess it’s a grunt thing. I know it makes people uncomfortable as hell here in remf land, that is fer sher.

I guess living with a bunch of guys for 9+ years in various worldwide locations can warp one’s sense of reality. Or, the actual perception of having no woman within the brigade area, ever, unless she’s lost, will do that. Maybe we just realize that after a while, using communal showers and non partitioned shitters, most of us actually decide that we’re not gay, so make light of it. I wonder if guys 150 years ago pretended to be gay and do little flits while on patrol…probably not. It would be funny to see that in a civil war reinactment though….

Let’s see if I can describe my walk to work everyday. First, I walk out of my tent, notice how bright it is compared to the deep in the belly of the world darkness that the tent provides. (I opened my little window area, so that I could tell day from night inside…) I put on my sunglasses, look right, turn right, then walk. The first thing I notice is the smell of dirt. Not really dirt so to speak, but dirt none the less. There’s a different smell than in the Mojave, which is what I call in my mind the smell of the desert.
Approximately 30 paces later, the next thing I smell is the odd mix of ass from the shitter and shampoo from the shower next to it. Mixed with a dirt smell. I speed up slightly. I come to the road, look right to make sure I’m not going to earn today’s Darwin Award, look left to make sure that everyone is obeying the One Way street rule, then cross. This route puts me between two very large buildings that are used for housing transients. The smells between these buildings is usually a mix of cigarettes, black and milds, occasionally a cigar, and butt cans. Sometimes a new group comes in from up north, and their uniforms have that ‘field’ smell, the one that will never wash out. If you are a grunt, or ever have been, you know the smell. A smell that permanently stains the uniform, Oxyclean doesn’t even work it’s wonder against it. That and the stains on the collar and sleeve cuffs, that never go away.
Towards the end of the buildings, the smell of diesel exhaust from the huge generators hits you first. Then it’s mixed with a girl’s shower smell…Shampoos, conditioners, ton’s of other smells that only a woman could identify. It’s just a woman’s shower smell to me…well beyond the Irish Spring and PertPlus smell of the guys. Another street to cross, look both ways again on this one, since it’s only a one way, but a lot less people observe it on this road. Cross the street. The smell of the largest chowhall in the entire world hits you, and smells of the carnival. The carnival is what I call the little shopping area we have, due to it’s layout and how many people mill around in there aimlessly, like at a carnival. Subway, Burger King, hot dogs, pizza, chinese food…all the smells hit you.
About another 100 feet or so down the path, on top of the chowhall and carnival smells, it’s mixed with diesel exhaust smells again, with spoiled milk, trash, and the porta-potty smell.
The porta-potty smell. It’s as disinctive as a diaper smell, something that you’ll never forget. It’s a combination of old piss, crap, and that porta-potty blue liquid that is supposed to curtail those smells. Yum…

Then, it’s the Salute zone. Technically, this whole post is a salute area, but this particular area, between the chow hall and my office, is riddled with officers. Ever see a line of ants going across the porch? Yep, that’s it, and that’s no exaggeration. I salute about every 3 steps for the next half-mile. God forbid you miss one, some self important LTC will stop you in your tracks and ream you for not fulfilling his wishes. The excuse, sorry sir, I’ve saluted 29 LTC’s in the past 2 minutes, I thought I got you already, doesn’t work. This strip of territory is the sole reason that nobody is allowed to use their right arm for anything but saluting. This is great, because now I get twice the exercise due to the fact that I have to make two 3/4 mile trips instead of one. That’s 3/4 mile one way…by the way. Oh, don’t get caught carrying anything, even a 100pd piece of equipment, with both arms. It is a proven guarantee that at least one officer will make you put that stuff down and salute his self-righteous ass.

Well, after usually 75 salutes, I get into my office. I smell the burnt coffee smell that my Super has mastered. Him putting 2.5 times more coffee into the filter. It used to take me 30 hours to get the same smell from coffee that he gets in 12 minutes of brewing time. Nummy…

I have a friend who asked me a favor. It kept me busy this morning. Seems his wife has been getting harrassing emails from someone lately. It’s worded like it was from someone here. Even the timestamps on the email address header are set to our local time. Ahh, but that was the end of their intelligence.

Using a few tools at a few sites, I traced the emails down to a dialup account in Toronto, Ontario. One of them came from Montreal, however. It was still the same ISP and still a dialup account. I don’t know my geography quite that well, so the two cities may be, or probably are, relatively close to each other. That is as far as I dug, however. I’ll let him email the ISP and get the logs of the times those emails were sent with those specific IP addresses. I’m just a geek, and don’t have juristidiction. Plus, it will most likely give him and his wife more fulfillment in doing the last step, finding the person.

My assumption on this is that it’s a late 20’s to mid 30’s woman. Why do I say this? Because the emails sent to his wife attack her in a way that most women attack themselves when they’re depressed, PMSing, or just having a daily tragedy. Words like stupid, fat, lazy being used against her. Supposedly this is what my friend is saying about his wife. It is my opinion, as well as my observations, that women feel this way about themselves, because they think that’s what other people think about them. But women also know to us this against other women.Also, supposedly the emails are coming from a friend of his here. Key words that automatically lead me to believe that it wasn’t from someone here, like ‘troops’ and mentioning how this friend has seen him going into and coming out of ‘building’ with different women. The news calls us ‘troops’, we don’t call ourselves that. The only buildings we have here are the ones we work out of. We live in tents. One other thing is that it seems that the person writing the emails is either from around there, or the UP michigan, with the dialect and slang written into the emails.
It could also be a bix hoax. It is possible to do all of this, make it look like something that it’s not, via the internet. It’s pretty easy too…Well, I think it’s pretty easy. I think a triple boot from FreeBSD, Windows 2003 Server and SuSE Linux is pretty easy…

Anyways…
Last week I went through the big You’re going, You’re not, You are now, maybe, but maybe not routine with a few people. It dealt with me going up to Iraq to deploy a new computer program. The big deal is that it wasn’t nearly as important for me to get up there asap, and that I did have someone else who could handle the job quite fine. The deal was only big because a few select individuals had a complete focus on getting ‘me’ up there, without looking at alternatives, different courses of action, or current projects I was working on at the time. So my super start freaking out about ‘You Have To Get Up There NOW! Harumph Harumph’, and I said, dude, no I don’t, they can wait. The project doesn’t even start for another week. So my super, given a very small partial block in his path, starts going nuts, as usual.(I am waiting for his head to explode one day from him going nuts, it’s kind of funny) I said, hey, we do have two alternatives. One, send up my counterpart, or two, wait til Friday night and send me up there. Simple. Not rocket science, just a little management is needed here.
So he makes the call to Lt. Col so and so. Seems that problem is solved, so I exit stage right. Problem solved, and I have a pizza to eat.
That night, at about 11pm our time, I come back to the office to grab something. My counterpart is here, and he says that about a half hour before hand, he was told to get ready, he leaves in the morning. Hmm, I asked who made the call on that one. A certain LTC made that call.
The next morning, I get a call from another LTC in a different department saying that I have to drop my current project now, and return to work. Um, why didn’t this come from my department? My chain of command? I go to work to find out.
Seems that LTC #1 called COL #1, complaining that the misison was going to be a failure if someone didn’t get up there asap. Why my name kept coming up, who knows. My guess is tunnel vision blinded them from alternative solutions. COL #1 then makes the call, tells LTC #1 to get my counterpart ready to move out in a couple of hours. Well, it would have been nice if they’d of notified our section bosses first. They had not a clue that any of this was happening. During this time, LTC #2 calls and says that I have to report back to my office asap for really no reason. Why, who knows. Neither LTC#1 or #2 have any say in operations of our office.

My assessment. People here in positions of authority take themselves entirely too seriously, while the people in which serve under them do as well. The general rule of thumb here is “don’t rock the boat’ and ‘don’t ask, just do’. A lot of it comes from a very deep ass-kissing culture here, which one doesn’t want to rock the boat, or even make decisions for that matter, because they might not get promoted. So they follow blindly, even when they know that what they’re doing is counterproductive, and causing more harm than good.
This is just the opposite in a lot of line units. People who follow blindly are the same ones that get waxed. They know a bad decision when they see it, and have an obligation to say something in order to save lives. Here, it’s all about getting recognition from the chain of command. Here, it’s about blindly following. It’s about self importance. It’s about using common sense as a resource so one can identify what should be ignored. It’s about a boss who doens’t have the foggiest idea what their subordinates are doing, even though they’re the ones who is supposedly in charge of making sure what they are doing gets done. It’s all about position and rank here. That’s it.

It’s damn annoying is what it is.

Oh well, I can still rock the boat. What are they gonna do, send me to Kuwait for a year? Stamp ‘No Dessert’ on my mealcard? It’s fun when you don’t have anything to lose :)