Friday, May 22, 2009

Presbyterian Promoted


My best friend here in Iraq is a fellow Presbyterian who rejoined the Army at an advanced age as a Specialist. Yesterday, at just 49 years old, he was promoted to sergeant. Assuming he is not shipped off to another base, we may get a chance to be roommates.

We can't be roomies right away because my roommate is off on a temporary assignment. It would be impolite to change rooms on him while he was gone, and more importantly, while he is a good roommate normally, he is a great roommate now! I have the room to myself for 23 more days.

When we do end up roommates, I am sure some will hang a sign on saying "Library--BE QUIET!!" Two old guys who actually read books and don't play loud music should be quarantined so they don't disturb the other inmates.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

This Little Piggie. . .

In the Army, as in a bar, any casual conversation can turn suddenly to who is right, who is wrong and what does this or that rule really mean. Recently I was eating with several other sergeants at dinner. For a while the conversation was about promotions and the arcane rules that govern how National Guard soldiers get promoted. 

With that topic exhausted, one of the sergeants said she was going to get some food for a soldier who was in bed because he just had an ingrown toenail removed. The soldier in question is a genial guy in his early 40s who shops at the XXL rack. So a dispute began about what to get him to eat. "Get a salad and that kind of stuff," said one. Another said, "He needs more than that." 

After more speculation about his dietary needs, someone said the operation was on the soldier's Ring Toe. "You know, like the ring finger, fourth one, you count from the thumb." Another sergeant said there were no rules with toes. Someone called him an idiot. Then they started figuring out which "Piggie" had the hangnail removed. Which led the same group of sergeants to begin arguing about which Piggie was which. I was laughing so hard I thought I would lose my dinner. 

Then one of the female sergeants noted that the third piggie, corresponding to the middle finger and toe got the roast beef and could say F-you to all the rest of the piggies. Then she smacked the table and said, "Who comes up with this shit anyway. Who makes up a rhyme about Piggies." I don't remember what we talked about after that, nor do I remember what the soldier with the sore Piggie got for dinner. But they weren't serving roast beef that night.


Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Riding with the Oven Door Open

I try to ride at dawn when it is below 90 degrees or near dusk when the temperature drops below 100, but the last two days, I had to ride a few miles in the middle of the day. Today at 1pm it was 115, yesterday it was 117 degrees.

On a hot day in Pennsylvania (at least what I thought was hot last year--between 95 and 100 degrees) I could ride 17 to 20 mph on a flat road and cool down a little. Uphill I was going to drip sweat and downhill would be very cool. Here there are no hills at all, so the high speed breeze is the best I can hope for. It works in the morning or in the evening when the sun is low in the sky, but the last two days, riding at midday, the air felt like I was riding past an open oven.

A light headwind kicked up, no more than 10 mph, but that felt like I was riding behind a heater blower. The good thing was this evening's ride, when the temp dropped to 100, I was sweating on my 10-mile loop of the base, but the air felt like air, not oven blast.

There is no humidity to speak of here and I suppose the temp would feel worse if it was humid, but 115 degrees is hot--dry heat or not.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Marriage and Romance in the Army

For most soldiers "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" is the best we can do for romance in the Army. A large group of us are in some kind of committed relationship, another large group has no relationship and is not likely to discover true love among the other soldiers and civilians assigned to our base. And since we are not allowed off base, the potential candidates for Love seekers are all here on Tallil Ali Air Base. If my deployment to Germany in the 70s is any indication, the romances that flare to life among the soldiers here will burn out just as quickly.

So who does have romance on a deployment to Iraq? As it turns out the small minority of married couples (6 that I know of) among the 600 soldiers in our unit have relationships that at least allow for the possibility of real romance. They get to live together in one of the CHUs I described a few days ago. In fact, three of the couples live in the same CHU in three adjoining rooms. This is a great mercy to everyone involved. As I mentioned in several other ways, in this Socialist empire we inhabit, envy is the fastest way to corrode relationships. These couples are the dozen people among 600 of us who can have sex on a regular basis. For the rest of us, sex and alcohol can only be enjoyed during the 15 days we are on Rest and Recreation leave during this year.

The married couples here include a pair of pilots and a pair of aircraft maintenance sergeants (she outranks him in both cases) a pilot married to a crew chief and two clerks (he outranks her in these couples), plus two sergeants who I believe are mechanics and are the same rank. I asked three of the five couples (both members of the couple were present when I asked) how they felt about the other soldiers looking at them and wishing they had the same arrangement. The three women--an officer, a sergeant first class and a specialist--all answered as if from a script. They made sacrifices to be in the Army. It's not easy to be married to another soldier. If someone else wants the privilege, let them make the sacrifice. No wavering from the women.

The men were more varied. The warrant officer shrugged and smirked. He could deal with it. The young sergeant could see the problem, but was willing to take the hassle. The staff sergeant who had deployed before said he wished they ended up in tents (meaning no living together). He saw envy as a big problem--one he could deal with, but he could also give up the privilege without a big fight.

At Fort Sill and in Kuwait, the married couples were not allowed to live together. So except for the 4-day pass, the married couples were just like the rest of us for the first three months. Except that they could talk face to face. So they still got the kind of time together that most married couples say they never get enough of--time to just talk.

This whole situation is new to me. In the 1970s Army, there were no arrangements for couples to live together in combat barracks and very few soldiers married to each other. Couples in camouflage still look somewhat strange to me.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Linguistics Update

While I was thinking and talking about our CHUs, I noticed another Army pronoun I do not remember from the 70s: Bitch. I do not mean the act of complaining or a derogatory reference to a woman, those uses are no different than the civilian usage. But when I cataloqued the use of Shit as a pronoun, I did not notice there is an upper size limit on the use of that word.

When a soldier refers to a truck, or a building, or other very large object, he will often say "This bitch is ready to paint" referring to a recently repaired truck or "This bitch has a busted air conditioner" referring to a CHU without the most important creature comfort. So there is a line somewhere between a duffel bag and a Deuce-and-a-half truck where the item referred to is no longer "that shit" but "this bitch."

Home Sweet (Trailer) Home

My youngest daughter Lisa is graduating from Lancaster Country Day School in two weeks. Her older sister Lauren graduated two years ago. A few years ago, the school underwent renovations so my daughters and all their fellow students had some classes in temporary classrooms next to the buildings (trailers). But the students were not allowed to say trailers. These metal-sided buildings were "learning cottages."

Since moving to Iraq, we have had a huge upgrade from 70 roommates in a tent in Kuwait to 2-man rooms for sergeants and junior officers, three-man rooms for enlisted men, and one-man rooms for the senior officers. Here's the basic building:


The Army needs an acronym for everything, so these 30-foot long, eight-foot wide housing units that can be transported on a truck are not trailers, they are Containerized Housing Units (CHU), pronounced "Choo." Most everyone calls them CHUs. When dozens of CHUs are surrounded by 12-foot-high blast walls with latrine CHUs and Shower CHUs in the middle, the result is called a Living Area (LA). There are ten LAs on Tallil. Members of our unit live in most of these living areas numbered from LA1 to LA10. A few of us make jokes about living in trailer parks and putting cars up on cement blocks in the yard, but most people use the acronyms.

Here is an LA on another base. Ours is similar.

I'll try to get some photos from here soon.

Inside a CHU we each get a bed, an end table, and a wall locker. Some soldiers are already finding refrigerators and TVs. As of Saturday night, I have temporarily have the not-available-at-any-price luxury of my own room for one month. My roommate got temporarily reassigned to another base. He will not be gone long enough to take all his gear or reassign his bed, so I am alone for 30 days or so. When he left he said, "Enjoy the library while I'm gone." You can just sit in here and listen to nothing. Which is not exactly true. Since he is so careful to put on headphones to listen to Gangsta Rap or watch movies, I seldom listened to anything in the room. But with the room to myself, I can listen to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" the BBC World Service, several New Yorker podcasts and Distillations from my work. But mostly, it's quiet in my trailer, I mean CHU.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Flat Out of Luck

My bulletproof Gatorskin tires turned out to have a weak spot: the sidewall. I rolled between two blast barriers to stop at the Base Exchange in the Air Force area and hear the tell-tale hissing that meant I would be walking home. I have two tires and three tubes, so I could change the flat--except my tire tools are somewhere in Oklahoma as it turns out.

But my luck got better almost immediately. I brought the bike to my room and walked to chow before it closed. At chow was another soldier who just got a bike from home but no pump. I have a floor pump. He used my pump and loaned me a spoon so we will both be on the road tomorrow.

My oldest daughter Lauren is home from college so I called her and asked her to send me spoons and another tire and tube, so I should be able to stay on the road even if the gravel here claims another tire.

Today, I installed printer drivers on four maintenance computers, but our commander and one of our platoon sergeants flew in last night. We may have a lot more to do next week.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Doing Nothing, 7 Days a Week

Those of you who read detective novels may have noticed a dog that isn't barking in my recent posts. It has been almost a month since I wrote about us doing anything. That is not because we are on a Top Secret mission. It is the opposite. As you know our assignment was changed just before we left and long after our bags and baggage had been sent on to Camp Cupcake. So instead of moving in where another unit was moving out and taking over their assignment, we are starting from scratch in a place that was not quite set up for us. So we are building a motor pool in a few unused buildings that are not exactly suited for what we do.

So we are painting, building shelves and tables, wiring buildings for telecom and computers, and generally cleaning out dust-filled unused spaces. Since we are in a war zone, we can't actually do nothing. We have to be ready for emergencies, so we are on duty seven days a week, rotating days off in shifts.

When a big unit like ours changes course, the support people like us have to wait for equipment to arrive and start needing maintenance before we have work. So we clean, paint, pull security duty, and try to get ready for when the rest of the unit needs us. Until then, we will be busy doing nothing, seven days a week.

Friday, May 15, 2009

What the PT Test Doesn't Measure

I will be starting remedial PT (Physical Training) again next week for the soldiers who failed the last PT Test and need to get ready for the next one. In Iraq, more than in Oklahoma, the gym is one of the few things to do so I am able to divide the group into two groups:
1. The self-motivated ones who know what they need to work on, have a workout partner and have committed to a plan to pass the test.
2. Those who need some level of push or they will stay as motionless as possible, usually in front of some sort of video entertainment.

For group one I already have five individual plans of action and will check in regularly. For group two, I will be taking over a SPIN class on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday of each week at 0530. The less motivated will join me in the SPIN class pedaling for an hour bright and early on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Our entire company does a 5k race each Wednesday morning and individual squads do PT Monday and Friday morning early.

THE PT TEST ISN'T EVERYTHING. . .
It is my job to help get these soldiers ready to pass the PT test, which I think is very important. But over the last three months I have noticed that the PT test does not necessarily predict who will be the best soldier, especially for tough, dirty jobs. There are certain jobs for which I ask for Group 1 soldiers who have failed or barely passed the PT test. When we load and unload and hundreds of duffel bags; when we have to carry dozens of machine guns, barrels and tripods; whenever there is a job that requires lots of muscle and little speed, I am looking for some of the big guys who struggle to reach their required time on the two-mile run or the required number of sit-ups, but can lift lots of weight easily and will work for hours.

The PT test is a good measure of fitness, but not such a good measure of brute strength or willingness to work long hours. And there are many times in this manual labor job where the race is neither to the swift nor to the agile but to the big guy who can barely run two miles in 17 minutes but can bench press 350 pounds.

. . .BUT IT IS IMPORTANT
One more note on the Group 2 soldiers who bitch about PT, many of whom need to eat less in addition to working out more: These same guys watch a lot of war movies and really don't seem to see the connection between fitness and being a soldier. In fact, when 70 of us lived in one tent and there were no secrets anywhere, I started to notice that the guys who hated PT were the ones who tried to look "bad" in the group photos. Young soldiers are perpetually taking photos of each other, like all of their generation. I noticed the same guys who shirk every dirty job and grumble about PT were the ones who had their weapons prominent in the photos they were in. They like the look and idea of being a soldier. Maybe they somehow believe that if the worst happens they will have a Hollywood transformation into movie-hero fighting machines.

My guess is they will just be out of breath.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Achmed the Dead Terrorist

Every place soldiers gather, whether official or unofficial meetings, if there is a video screen and few minutes, Achmed the Dead Terrorist is likely to be on that screen. If you have not seen this character by puppeteer/comedian Jeff Dunham, enjoy. If the link does not work, just go to You Tube and search for Achmed the Dead Terrorist.

Bike Line to the Rescue from 6000 Miles Away


Some avid bicyclists really love bicycles. The love them as machines, love their design and engineering, love them as objects.
Not me.
In fact when I started racing Joan Jett's song "I Hate Myself for Loving You" was still a hit. I started listening to that song to get psyched for those first races. I like going fast, I like competing, but I see the bike as the necessary and occasionally as an instrument of torture. The song seemed perfect for my relationship with my bike.
So while I can do some work on a bike, I don't work on my bikes if Bike Line of Lancaster is open. They know what they are doing and the bike gets fixed properly.
But there is no Bike Line of Tallil, Iraq, so three days ago when I bent a spoke and knocked my wheel out of true, I called up Bike Line to tell me how best to fix the bike taking no chances on breaking the spoke--which would take ten days to get here in the mail.
Jeremiah from Bike Line told me which spokes to adjust and by how much and what to look for to keep from breaking the wheel or the spokes. It worked. The wheel is nearly straight and I rode on the bumpy roads and gravel here without incident.
It is clear that the road bike I brought for Camp Cupcake is not the right bike for the rock-strewn sand pile I am in now.
Since the only bikes I can buy here are $150 beaters, Bill and Jeremiah found me a single-speed mountain bike at a reasonable price which I should have in a couple of weeks. It has 29-inch wheels and wide knobby tires which should be much better for riding on sand and gravel.
The bike is a GT PEACE 9R. I'm sure it will be pretty strange riding around a combat air base with a weapon on my back and a bike that says Peace on the seat tube.

By the way--I bent the spoke because I jumped on the bike to run a quick errand just slung the rifle on my back with wrapping another strap around it. A pedestrin jumped in front of me. I stopped short and the barrel swung into the front wheel.
Barrel 1
Spoke 0

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Updates and a Clarification

LEAVE: I won't be coming home on leave for my mother-in-law's memorial service. I asked several members of my unit if I could go on emergency leave and still go on my scheduled Rest & Recreation leave in mid-June. I got various answers from emphatic Yes to maybe.

Then I talked to the sergeant who actually handles leaves. She said if I take the leave now, I cannot take an R&R leave until every other soldier in my entire unit has taken a leave or turned it down. My wife said she would rather have me home at the time we agreed on than now, so I won't be coming home until June.

One of the sergeants in my unit who was deployed previously in 2005 said, "Guss, you did it backwards. I went home on R&R then my Dad died a month later. They have to give you both leaves that way." Army jokes are seldom delicate.

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RIGHT FOOT: The good effects of the cortisone shot in my heel lasted exactly one day. I have a bone spur. My foot hurts every time I step down. I am currently on a 2-week ban from running, but since the DFAC is 3/4 mile from my living quarters and the bathroom is 200 meters away, I have to walk on rocks several times a day even if I have the day off. What I should do is get the bone spur removed. But the Army is nothing if not the home of socialized medicine, so I will be getting new shoe inserts, new anti-inflammatory medicine and more cortisone shots before the Army doctors will be able to justify operating on my foot. The only variable in the process is how much I complain--which I will be doing often.

Because I could not do the weekly 5k race this morning, the first sergeant put me on what he was told was a furniture moving detail. He said I would just have to supervise the soldiers who would be moving the furniture. As it turned out, I was on a security detail with a 30-round magazine in my weapon. I spent most of the day standing on or walking on rocks--almost everything here is paved with gravel. My foot would have been better off if I ran the 5k.

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CLARIFICATION: A reader of my blog from NYC asked where I carry 30 POUNDS of ammo on my bike. It's actually 30 ROUNDS of ammo which weighs just over one pound.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Riding In Iraq

Here's some photos of me riding with a rifle. We keep 30 rounds of ammo in a magazine with us. Mine is in the green pouch on the butt stock. Slinging it over my back is easier than the pack, but strapping the rifle on the pack keeps it in place better.







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Monday, May 11, 2009

Sad Mother's Day in Iraq

In a sad coincidence of time zones, I was in Church in late morning yesterday listening to a Mothers Day sermon at about the same hour in which my mother-in-law Carol Jo Crannell passed away in her sleep in a hospice in Maryland. She had been ill for a long time, suffering from rapidly advancing Alzheimer's and some related complications. My wife had written me the day before about her care, but no one knew she was so close to the end of her life.

And that life was very impressive. My wife Annalisa is the oldest of three daughters of Carol Jo who, like their mom, have advanced degrees in science and math. Carol was a solar physicist at NASA Goddard, so I could truthfully say my mother-in-law is a rocket scientist. Her devoted husband Hall Crannell is an emeritus professor of physics at Catholic University. His field was particle physics, so between their two parents, the Crannell girls grew up meeting people who studied the largest and smallest spheres in the universe.

My son Nigel was just three when my mother passed away so Nana was the only grandmother he knew well. Carol doted on Nigel when they were together. In one of the happy side effects of the disease Carol suffered with, her loss of short-term memory meant she could happily watch Nigel play with his trains or repeat a story again and again. Carol was never bored with the repetitions of little children.

I may or may not be able to go home for emergency leave because in-laws are not quite immediate family, but my unit is doing their best to make it possible. Annalisa in her always practical way said if coming home for Carol's memorial service would cause me to miss my scheduled leave, I should stay here. That is the best plan.

I will let you know how things go.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Riding in Tallil

Today I rode the perimeter of Tallil Air Base, a total distance 13 miles. Not very far and I stopped for an hour at the aid station to get a Cortisone shot in my right heel.
Aaaahhhh!!!

Felt better five minutes after the shot. Tomorrow we are running at 0600 so I will take my ankle for a test drive. It turns out I have a "rather large" bone spur according to the doc. Fifteen years ago, I got three cortisone shots then an operation on my heel. The operation would be my preference, but it may have to wait until I am a civilian again.

Back to ride. My single-speed bike arrived Friday afternoon. I have ridden several places already, but I must take my weapon everywhere--an M16A4 rifle. For short trips I sling it on my back. For longer trips, like today, I strap it to a backpack. I was thinking while I rode along the backside of the base how different the Bike Line Sunday rides would be if everyone on the ride had an M16 or M4 carbine or M249 SAW machine gun strapped over their backs. We carry a 30-round magazine for rifles and a 200-round drum for SAWs as a minimum. My guess is that pickup truck drivers who occasionally hassle us would be less inclined to do swear or swerve at a dozen riders with automatic weapons.

I will try to get a picture of me on the bike for a later post.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

2nd Anniversary of Breaking My Neck

I keep many anniversaries, both silly and serious. Beyond the obvious ones, like my wedding anniversary and family birthdays, I always celebrate the anniversary of my driver's license. It was easily one of the best days of my life. I wanted to drive ever since I could remember and knew by heart the driveline and engine specifications of every Detroit Muscle Car available in the 60s. In fact, this coming December 19th I will celebrate the 40th anniversary of my driver's license in Iraq. Maybe I'll get two pieces of cake in the DFAC here on that day.

Today is the 2nd Anniversary of the day I broke my neck, and a lot of other stuff: I cracked the first two vertebra in my neck, smashed the 7th, broke four ribs and my collarbone and shoulder blade on the right side and my nose. It all happened in about a second when I flipped and crashed in a downhill race at 50mph on Turkey Hill in Lancaster County PA.

I don't remember the accident or more than two minutes of the following two days, but that accident almost kept me from being here in Tallil, Iraq, writing this post. Of course, you might wonder in the other direction "How did they let him in the Army?" since I re-enlisted (after being a civilian for 23 years) three months later on August 16, 2007. The short answer is: I hang around with academics enough to know that I should always answer the question I am being asked--and nothing more.

The Thursday before Easter 2007, in late March, I called a recruiter and started the enlistment process. By late April I had passed the physical and other tests and was just waiting for an age waiver--I was one year too old to enlist even with 11 years of prior service. As it turned out, I did not get that waiver until July 13. So on April 28, I was set to enlist and just waiting for paperwork. On May 9th I was being MedEvaced from the crash site to Lancaster General Hospital where Dr. William T. Monacci happened to be the neurosurgeon on duty in the trauma center.

Dr. Monacci had just come to Lancaster. He is also a colonel in the Army Reserve. His last practice was in Baghdad, so he had a lot of recent, relevant experience. The next day he and his team replaced my smashed 7th vertebra with a bone from a cadaver then bolted it to the vertebra on either side with a titanium plate. I could have been a paraplegic or worse. As it was, I was up and walking in a neck and chest brace five days later and out of the hospital in eight days.

Of course, I was worried this was the end of joining the Army. But I passed the physical and I did not yet have the waiver. The recruiter said there was nothing to do but wait, so I did. I walked at least three miles per day (to the Starbucks at Stonemill Plaza in Lancaster among other places) and started doing zero-weight exercises at the gym to keep loose.

In July the waiver came through. I was supposed to get the neck brace off during the first two weeks in August, so I told him I would enlist on August 16. I did. I felt fine. No one asked me if I had broken my neck recently, so I had no question to answer.

The following spring, May 2008, we were getting prepared to go to Iraq. I listened to the medical briefing as carefully as I would listen to a prize drawing. At one point the earnest young private giving the briefing said, "If you have enlisted in the last year and there have been no changes in your health SINCE YOUR ENLISTMENT write NONE on the block at the bottom of the form." So I did. Nothing had changed since I enlisted in August 2007.

Then a doctor interviewed us. My health records looked great, tests all good. At the end of the exam the doctor asked, "Is there anything else you would like to tell me?" There was not a thing I wanted to tell him. So I said "No."

So here I am. In an ironic medical twist, I had surgery on my right shoulder on October 30, 2008, to repair a torn rotator cuff and three other ligaments. The likely cause of the ligament damage was hitting the road with my helmet and shoulder the year before, but that was not part of the diagnosis. Because that surgery caused me to miss Army training November, I was classified non-deployable until 2 days before we went to Oklahoma. But I passed the medical test and got on the plane with several hundred of my closest friends.

So that is how I got here despite breaking my neck.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Bitching at Breakfast

After Wednesday's 5k race, a few of us who ran in the event met for breakfast. There happened to be an empty seat opposite me. Before I had two bites of my French Toast, an angry sergeant from our unit sat down in that empty seat and asked, "Why the f$#k do I have run a 5k race every Wednesday?" The question was rhetorical. He did stop talking so I kept eating. "I hate running. . .We only have to run 2 miles for the PT test so why should run 3 miles. . ."

In Kuwait our base had a 5k race every Wednesday and our base in Iraq decided to do the same. The officer in charge of our physical training program decided it would be a good thing to get the whole company together once a week for this event, so I talked to the organizer after the race. He was delighted to have more people running. The organizer and I talked at 0645. I showered and got to chow by 0730. Word had spread through most of the company by then even though some of us live as far as a mile from each other.

I should point out that the sergeant who was so upset scores well on the PT test, volunteers for tough duty and is a natural leader. But he has decided that running 5k once per week is an unfair imposition on him.

When he calmed down enough to start eating I asked, "So what about the rocket attack. Did that bother you?"

"F#$k no. We're in a combat zone. I expect that. It was a few rockets. They didn't hit shit anyway.' He paused for breath.

"But why do we have to get up at 5 in the morning just to go run, I mean what the f. . ." and he was off again.

For most of my friends back home, a 5k morning run would be a pleasant or at least neutral experience, especially since it could even be a 5k walk. On the other hand, a few ill-aimed rockets that fell anywhere in the immediate area would still be the occasion of very strenuous complaints to every level of government not to mention "must sell" real estate prices.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Gossip!

My roommate goes off in the evenings to spend time with two guys from his home town. The three of them deployed together before almost five years ago, but can happily spend an evening talking about things that have nothing to do with the Army or the current deployment.

He says the alternative to talking with each other is talking about each other. The main topics of conversation on deployment are home, complaints and gossip. And gossip quickly takes center stage. When people see each other as much as we do, we know each others foibles and weaknesses to a degree that is only possible in families in civilian life.

At this point, it's clear that simply mentioning some soldier's name will lead a group at dinner to groan, laugh or shake their heads depending on the person. And because it is such a close group, the comments circulate quickly. One one field exercise, I told my vehicle crew that I would not allow anyone to talk on cell phones inside the vehicle when we were waiting for instructions. It was raining off and on that day. The rest of the crew knew I made up the rule for only one soldier in the vehicle who would complain to his mother/girlfriend/(dog) at every halt if allowed. I heard comments with sly smile for a week after from soldiers who heard the rule I had made and were delighted that particular soldier was not allowed to drone on and make the rest of the crew suffer.

For those who would think gossip is optional, being part of the gossip also identifies one as part of an informal group. A group that when gossip when you are present considers you an outsider. If you hear "She's a f#$king idiot" when you are eating with five other soldiers, they are letting you in on their group opinion. To be outside the gossip is to be outside every informal network.

For those who would like to read the definitive essay on this subject cliques and who is on and out, the essay "The Inner Ring" in CS Lewis' book "The Weight of Glory" is wonderful on this subject.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

My First Medal in Iraq. . .is for a 5K Race

Each Wednesday, beginning just last Wednesday, The House of Pain gym (no kidding) on our base sponsors a 5K with medals and prizes. This morning a half-dozen soldiers from Echo Company signed up for the race. The prizes were given out by random drawing before the race, the medals were awarded by age group--but only finishers are allowed to collect prizes so the pizza and t-shirt winners did not get their prizes until the race was over. I got medal for being first place in what the announcer called the "51 to Infinity group." Full disclosure rules (that I just made up) require me to say at this point that I was the only entrant in the 51 to Infinity group, but they awarded me the medal anyway.

Even with a time of 26:13, I was ahead of some younger people. Although I was so far behind the race winner, I had almost a mile to go when he finished. First place was a lieutenant who finished in 17 minutes and 40 seconds. There was also a 45-year-old sergeant who came in at 19:33 to win his age group.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Speaking of Snail Mail

I have an address at my new home:

Sgt. Neil Gussman
Co. E 2/104 GSAB
COB Adder T-1
APO.AE.09331

Just so you understand all the Acronyms and numbers, here is the address without abbreviations:

Line 1: Sergeant Neil Gussman

Line 2: Echo Company, 2nd Battalion / 104th General Services Aviation Brigade

Line 3: Combat Operating Base Adder T-1

Line 4: Army Post Office.Armed[Forces]Europe.[Zip Code]

If you would like to send something I would be happy to get snail mail. If you can't think of anything to write, one of the Chaplains wants me to start a CS Lewis reading group on post so if you have extra copies of Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, God in the Dock, Till We Have Faces and The Weight of Glory, please send them. Or you can send them direct through Amazon.com.

Thanks.

Not So Supreme: A Conference about the Constitution, the Courts and Justice

Hannah Arendt At the end of the first week in March, I went to a conference at Bard College titled: Between Power and Authority: Arendt on t...