Best Day in OK

Today we had nearly the entire day off. We had one formation at 1300 hours followed by a briefing from the commander than off the rest of the day. I went to chapel at 0830 then rode for more than an hour. After the the meeting and formation I rode again. altogether I rode 38 miles, the most I have ridden in one day this year. Usually riding in Oklahoma means fighting a steady 25mph wind. Today the wind was only 15 mph. It seemed like still air after the usual wind here. The temp hit 55 degrees, also better than the last few days.

Besides the bike riding, the Mob Cafe served real turkey with cornbread dressing for lunch and dinner. It was really good.

Tomorrow we are up before 5 for morning PT. But one day of sleeping in until 0730 was really nice.

Anthrax Chapel for Church

I returned to the Anthrax Chapel this morning for Church. The last time I was in it, I was part of a gas mask training exercise that ended with a test of how fast we could put on our mask. This morning there were no gas masks, but many of us had weapons.


Church looks different when 40 or so men and women in camouflage with weapons are singing hymns. The sermon was about the difficulty of hearing God's voice. The chaplain is a man who readily tells jokes and had one on himself on this topic. He opened the sermon by saying that if we traveled back in time a hundred years or more the thing we would notice most was the silence. (Since I was seated in the Amen corner, I shouted Amen at this point. I was alone.) Then he pointed to his shirt pockets saying he had two cell phones, and when he is home he lives alone, leaves the TV on and listens to the radio/CD the whole time he is in the car. His advice was to hear God's voice by seeing needs and meeting them.

But for many soldiers, they can have more silence in a barracks than in many places back in the real world. Soldiers are serious about sleep and lights out rules mean the metal music and slasher movie fans have to put on headphones at lights out.

We don't have formation today until 1300 (1pm) and the whole barracks is quiet because most everybody is sleeping in. Many of these soldiers live in homes with TVs and other media on constantly.

Going to war may be the best chance they have for a few months of real quiet.

Then and Now--My Team

Early in 1976, when I made sergeant for the second time and I was a new tank commander, I was in charge of three men, my crew. We trained together at Fort Carson, Colorado, for several months with the specific goal of qualifying at annual tank gunnery. As an ex-Air Force soldier, I really wanted to qualify distinguished (expert in tank weapons), since the Army considers service in the Air Force somewhere below the Cub Scouts on a difficulty scale. The three men on my crew were 19, 19 and 21 years old. One of the 19-year-olds was married with one child and one on the way. He was my loader. The other was married with no kids; he was my driver. The 21-year-old was single and my gunner. I was among the oldest 25% of the unit at 23-years-old.

We did fire distinguished in August of that year. Partly because I drilled my crew more than most of the other tank commanders and partly because my gunner was mostly a rumpled, grumbling lousy soldier, but he was an awesome gunner. The targets on the final test, the moving range, were pop-up panels the size of tanks in the open and tank turrets behind berms. We mostly fired armor piercing, a round with a flat trajectory at distances below 1000 meters. But the final shot that got us the top category was a truck-sized target at 2350 meters. We had to fire a high explosive shell at that target. HE is low velocity with an arc of 50 meters above the gun at 2350 meters distance. My gunner punched a hole in the center of that target with the second shot.


Tank Commander is wearing the beret, loader is wearing the helmet. The driver sits in the middle, front, just visible underneath the gun. The gunner is inside the turret just ahead of the tank commander.

My team now is simply three members of the maintenance team who tell me when and where they are when they are not in the barracks or at work. In the 1970s, I would have described the typical soldier as a 19-year-old from either the inner city or the rural south, married with one child and one on the way. His wife was 17. He enlisted because he needed a job with health benefits.

My team now are a 20-year-old welder, a 21-year-old dispatch clerk, and a 47-year-old mechanic. I see them at formations and get text messages from them when they go to the PX or the gym. I do work with the mechanic at times, but for the most part, everyone has different training specific to their jobs. Very different from the training combat units go through.

Anthrax Chapel on Improbable.com

Marc Abrahams, editor of "The Annals of Improbable Research" (Subscribe Today!) and the Web site www.improbable.com, posted The Anthrax Chapel on his site, complete with my camera phone picture, properly oriented. This may be the first connection between the Ig Nobel Prize and training barracks at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.


Marc at AIR staff meeting

"What Exactly is a Processing a Person?"

Today I was the escort for a soldier who is going home and not deploying with us. I told a friend who is a chemical engineer that I was getting this soldier processed.

"Processed," he said. "What Exactly is a Processing a Person?" He said his mind went straight from chemical processing to food processing to processing a chicken. I laughed at the image then told explained that processing in the Army means filling out all the papers necessary to get someone in, out or to a new duty assignment.


I could have posted some really disgusting chicken processing photos, but the cut-in-pieces image seemed appropriate.

I will try to be careful to explain the acronyms and Army-specific terms I use, but every day I am being "processed" further into the abyss of Army language. I am re-reading Strunk and White (The Elements of Style) now so I keep standard English in my mind while the acronyms pile up.




By the way (BTW), my friend knows by now that any three-letter military acronym with the letter 'F' in the middle is always the same participle used as an adjective. So a BFR (Big F#&king Rock) is a large stone and if a soldier uses it, BFF may or may not mean Best Friends Forever.

Specialist Dust Pan

One of the enlisted men in our unit lost his room key three times in a week causing him to be late for formation. His squad leader decided to make it harder for the young man to lose his room key, so his key ring is now connected to a black, metal dust pan. At every formation and when we are not training in the field, he has to carry his keys on a dust pan. 

If you haven't ever carried an M-16 rifle and a dust pan, I don't recommend it. By Saturday he should be able to turn in his dust pan and just carry a key ring. I, on the other hand, may become Mr. Clean. This morning I took a half-dozen soldiers form the motor pool back to the barracks to sweep and mop stairwells and hallways. Then two of us paste waxed a hallway floor in the afternoon. They tell us soon we will be training hard. Tomorrow I get driver training in a HMMTT fueler.

Anthrax Chapel

One of my co-workers back in PA asked for a photo of The Anthrax Chapel. It's not much more than a name painted on the wall above the door of a rectangular room in a military barracks. I guess about 20 by 50 feet. As noted before, this classroom also serves as the chapel for our unit. And according to one of our intelligence sergeants, the same room is where soldiers here got shots for anthrax immunization during the anthrax alert following September 11, 2001. So someone had the bright idea of calling the place The Anthrax Chapel.

This is a camera phone shot and I could not save it rotated 90 degrees. So turn your computer to the right if you want to see the photo correctly.