A new student beginning the public affairs course here will
get two immediate messages.
- We do not trust you.
- Any problems you have are your fault.
Before we had our first class, six members of the chain of
command here gave us separate briefings that said, on the one hand, you are
beginning one of the more difficult academic courses in the military so you
better pay attention and try your best.
But on the other hand, we at DINFOS have no responsibility
for the actions and policies of the detachment, so you must do everything the
detachment requires, everything that we require and it will be your fault if
the school and the detachment contradict each other.
Translation: Student
Problems are Not My Job.
The Army detachment decided arbitrarily earlier this year to
require all students, even combat veterans with fitness awards, to wake up at 4
a.m. and do fitness training five days a week with students out of basic
training.
For the entire course, the students standing up at their
desks by 9 a.m., the students repeating simple errors, and the students who were
accused of inattention were Army soldiers who were waking up at 4 a.m. while
their Air Force, Coast Guard slept till 6:30 every morning and even the Marines
got to sleep later a couple of mornings each week.
How can the school say that our classwork is the most
important thing we do, then say it is not their job to make sure we have the
best environment to learn? My wife is a
college professor. At her school, a
professor and a dean have offices in each of the dorms. It is called a House System. They do this so the college staff and the
professors have every opportunity to work together for the success of the
students.
Here, the detachment can arbitrarily decide to make soldier
skills take priority over class and the school does nothing.
Beyond the morning fitness training, the detachment added
Physical Readiness Training on Tuesday nights.
Why? According to the platoon
sergeants at the detachment, the Army will, sometime in the future, be changing
its fitness training system and we as NCOs will have to train our soldiers in
the new system.
Really?
More than 80% of the soldiers he was addressing were
National Guard and Reserve. When will a part-time
soldier in public affairs be leading PT?
An E-4 or E-5 in Public Affairs is the lowest ranking soldier in their
unit.
On Thursdays we had something arranged by the detachment
called mentorship training. In this
class we were supposed to learn about our future in Public Affairs in the
Army. Again, 80% of the students got
nothing from this class except another lost hour they could have used for
something that actually had some value to them.
The active duty soldiers said they could use some of the information.
Aside from one excellent
presentation on social media, the other eleven presentations were disorganized
PowerPoint presentations by people who ran overtime. One colonel who addressed the class said the
guard and reserve soldiers should go to sleep.
His information did not apply to them.
We could not, of course, sleep.
And he ran overtime just like nearly every other presenter.
Another small indication of Not
My Job, struck me the first time I ate in the dining facility. On the exit door near the main entrance is a
sign telling people in case of a fire they should move to their “respectful”
areas. I thought about correcting the
sign, but then I decided to see if it was a grammar test.
It wasn’t.
In 90 days, no one has corrected
that sign. Thousands of students and
instructors in “grammar
central” for the US military have walked by that
sign. And it remains uncorrected. A Sergeant Major came to my table to tell one
of the soldiers at our table he had a cargo pocket flap open. Was that same SGM not offended by the DINFOS
DFAC having an ungrammatical sign?
