Three Weeks of Remedial PT

Tonight marks the third week I have been leading Remedial PT. Each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evening at 7pm, I lead the fitness training for those who failed one or more of the three events of their last PT test. The test is pushups, sit ups and a two-mile run. Of the 20+ soldiers in my group, most failed the run or the run plus one or two other events. Only two soldiers failed just situps, and no one in my group just failed the pushups.

The good news for those who get back up to speed on the run is that fixing the run almost always leads to better performance on the other two. And I already have two graduates. Two soldiers who were too slow on the run on their last PT test, ran two miles under their required time and now they don't have to show up for my formation.

But for the others, three weeks is a big deal. Most of the soldiers in remedial do not have a habit of fitness training. Most organizing or exercising gurus say if you can keep a habit for three weeks, you can potentially keep it for a lifetime. On the negative side, that's probably the same threshold for smoking or other bad habits.

So the remedial PT soldiers are getting better and they are on the way to changing their habits. I was talking to one of the soldiers today and had a Dostoevsky moment. I told him I was here partly because of wanting to do good and never getting around to actually doing it. We agreed that pretty much everybody on this deployment wants to do good in some way and also wants to clean up some part of their lives: money, fitness, weight, whatever. Dostoevsky says there is a spark of God in all of us, but we need to fan it into a flame.

Sergeant Rock and Sergeant Rumpled

The military will never be the flat organization business gurus say is the future of management. We have rank, structure and a chain of command. And alongside the official chain of command (Tolstoy is great on this subject in War and Peace) is the unofficial hierarchy. We have a hierarchy in everything: the best marksman, the fastest runner, the best at drill and ceremonies, the strongest, the best sprinter, who can fart the loudest or belch the longest. Because we live so close together, everyone knows these hierarchies.


Just as we all know the best at everything, we all know the worst. Not only does everyone know who has the highest PT scores, they know who has the lowest. Some are great at one thing and bad at others. Some are good at several things. But there is always one who is the all-around best at everything and his direct opposite: Sgt Rock and Sgt Rumpled.

Our unit is the same. We have people who max the PT test, but are just OK on the range or marching troops, or leading a field exercise. We have expert marksmen who barely pass the fitness test. And people who are great at drill and ceremonies that can't shoot very well or run. But Sgt Rock can do everything, if not the best, in the top 10% in every category. Sgt Rumpled can do almost nothing except show up when he is supposed to. That's how he hangs on. He does what he is told, complains when he can get away with it and lingers on hoping to get to retirement. In fact, my first time around there was an acronym everyone used: LIFER (Lazy Inefficient F#$kup Expecting Retirement). I haven't heard the acronym here and don't want to be the one to bring it back, but it applies to Sgt Rumpled. He looks unwashed and ragged even when he puts on a new uniform. He can't lead or shoot and has the worst PT score in the company.

Not surprisingly, he also thinks himself nearly a sage as far as technical competence, but his supervisors will not give him any job they cannot check, because he is also a bad mechanic.

Rock and Rumpled are also opposites in personality. Rock makes self-deprecating jokes and is cheerful with almost everyone. Rumpled only makes jokes at another soldier's expense.

Every unit I have been in over the years has had both of these guys. I wish I knew if it was the nature of the Army or I have just been in units with the best and the worst the Army can put in one place.

Same Day Bike Repair Service

This morning I rode the chaplain's bike the half-mile to his office using the Fred Flintstone propulsion system--my left foot pushing the road like a kid on a scooter. He had the bike by 0900. He said he was going to check and see if he could get it fixed. At 3:30 in the afternoon he called to say I could pick the bike up TODAY. The shop rethreaded the pedal mountings and put on my racing pedals. I could not get the bike from him yesterday, but will pick it up at 0800 tomorrow before formation.

I Missed This Formation Last Week, But Not Very Much

Last week when I was learning how to do the paperwork for the drug test, I missed a formation in which our commander reminded everyone present that they must always take their weapon to the chow hall--unless they are on an assignment where weapons are not allowed. My class was one of the leave your weapon kind. So I did not join the other hundred or so men and women who did forty pushups in cadence (or as many as they could).

I have a photo someone emailed to me, but I cannot get Blogger to upload it. I'll ask someone who is better than I am with photos to see if they can fix it.

I hope they looked as happier than these guys.

Communion and the Lack Thereof

This morning in the Anthrax Chapel we had a communion service. It is the first Sunday in Lent and our first communion service in our mobilization training. One of the lieutenants plays the guitar at our services and the music was especially good this morning.

So now it's 9pm (2100), we have to get up at 0450 for PT at 0520. It will be 21 degrees with a 10 mph wind. We got a new roommate so there are now four of us in the room. In the Army of the 1970s, we would all be trying to go to sleep and bitching about PT in the cold and asking why we have to get up so early and complaining in general. But our room is almost silent. I am typing. Another guy is taking to his family on a vid phone on his computer, but he has his headphones on so we only hear when he talks. The other two guys are surfing the net or doing something else that makes no more sound than a mouse click.

None of us is talking to each other. We are four individuals on laptops. But at 0500 we will be bitching together, then at 0520 we will be freezing together, so we do have more interaction than most people.

Tried Out the Chaplain's Bike and Broke It!

I rode the chaplain's bike today to try it out. I was going to change to my pedals--Shimano Dura Ace for those who wonder what kind--and noticed the pedals on the chaplain's Cannondale R400 were on crooked. He said his daughter rode the bike so I thought I should try to ride it as is. Bad decision. The pedals actually were stripped and on of them came off. So one week before the race my one-speed bike will be gone before the end of the week and my borrowed bike has one pedal.

I told some of my friends the position I was was in. There advice: (paraphrased) "Gussman you are [screwed]."

I called the chaplain and he couldn't have been nicer. Although I offered to pay for a new set of cranks, he said his son put the pedals on crooked and he will try to get the bike fixed for next Sunday. So despite the stripped pedals, I may still be able to race. I guess if the bike can't be fixed I can try to rent one from the one bike shop in Lawton. Otherwise, I can only ride the clown bike. And the shifter is broken on it, so I don't think I'll do very well on a one-speed clown bike.

Stay tuned.

Got My HEMMT License; Rode in Oklahoma Winds

Today I had a 20+ mile ride in a large Army vehicle in the morning and a one-speed bike in the afternoon. After safety videos, classes, written tests, hands-on tests and driving in the motor pool, I drove the HEMMT in traffic and out on the ranges on both tank trails and paved roads. So now I have a license to drive yet another vehicle that did not exist during my first enlistment.

Actually, the only vehicle the Army still uses from my first enlistment is the M35A2 2-1/2-ton "Deuce and a Half" truck. And that is used only by the National Guard. I understand that by the time we get back they will all be retired from active service and replaced by the LMTV (Light Medium Tactical Vehicle).

LMTV


Fort Sill
We had most of the afternoon off so I rode around next Sunday's Race course backward. The wind was 20-30 mph steady with a high of 50 degrees. The terrain here is almost all rolling hills. Never flat. I was riding all of 5mph up some of the hills. But it was great to be out on the bike. I might be riding tomorrow afternoon with one of the pilots.

Borrowed Bike for the Race

Just before Noon I went to the Post Chapel and picked up a Cannondale road bike from one of the post chaplains. He offered to loan me one of his bikes for the race next Sunday. He is not a racer, but an avid rider. How avid a rider you ask? When I was getting ready to take the bike outside he said he needed to pump up the rear tire. He pulled a floor pump with a pressure gauge from behind the door in his office. A guy who keeps a floor pump in his office is somebody who loves to ride.

I will be going out to ride on Saturday. I did not ride or do any PT on Friday. My shoulder is bothering me and my right foot still hurts from the plantar fasciitis that was bothering me from last October. Joe and Gretchen, the physical therapists who treated me before I left told me to listen to my shoulder. I am trying, but my shoulder never says anything I want to hear.

One More Race Before Deployment

On March 8 at 0930, Fort Sill is hosting a 17-mile bike race through the middle of one of the ranges. They won't be firing that day. I registered last night on Bikereg.com. It looks like a citizen race from the registration. I called and they have a 55+ age group, which will be my first race in that category. It is a great course, rolling with several long and short 4-6% climbs and one 40+mph descent. I rode the course on the one-speed today and am hoping to borrow a bike with gears from the post chaplain tomorrow--he's an avid rider.

Drugs in the Army--Then and Now

This drug testing class is not very much fun. Forty hours of how to fill out paperwork and supervise urinalysis drug tests. This program started in 1971 and continues with more and more emphasis for nearly 40 years.

From the perspective of someone who served at both ends of the program, the class never addresses the really important difference 38 years of drug testing has made in the military. For me, the primary difference is that people inclined to use drugs know they are going to be hassled for all of their career and, thankfully, they mostly decide to get out.

Back in the 70s, that was not the case.

When our unit got a new platoon sergeant in the 1970s, everybody hoped it was one of the young guys with only one tour in Viet Nam, or better yet, none. Because you never knew back then if the guy running the tank platoon was going to be an experienced NCO who knew tanks and soldiering really well, or a burnout who was just trying to get to 20. The great thing that continuous testing does it make it hard for addicts to stay in. Most soldiers who really want to do drugs end up getting out before they are in charge of anything.

Most, not all. The bind the Army is in is that they instill pride in us. But pride is a sword that cuts in two directions. Once you make a soldier proud in a positive sense, you have given that soldier everything he needs to believe he can do anything. So there will always be a few cases of the senior sergeants and officers who take the pride that got them the rank and let it convince them they are smarter than everybody else.

Wrong End of the Digestive System

All this week--Monday through Friday from 0830 to 1630--I am in a class with 40 other sergeants on how to monitor drug tests--specifically how to fill out al the paperwork necessary to properly conduct a drug test. All of us were assigned this job as an additional duty. There are people from the unit I am in, various units around Fort Sill, drill sergeants and recruiters. Unfortunately, this testing is necessary because no one wants to give soldier on drugs a loaded weapon.

But I really feel bad for three people in that class. One is a cook, the other two are the instructors. First the cook. For various reasons, the Army does not have cooks cook our food. When my friend the cook gets deployed, he will be filling out papers about food service, but will not be baking, roasting or frying. Although the Army won't officially let him put our buns in the oven, he will be putting his initials on bottles of urine. I would rather see my friend the cook be a cook. But he's a good soldier, so he will be working the Exit of the digestive system rather than the entrance.

Maybe a worse situation than the cook is the instructors. These two must face a class of 40 or so men and women who have taught many classes and present information that dull hardly begins to describe. Both of the instructors are good natured and resist the temptation to make any of the jokes that are being whispered in various corners of the room. And since they are experienced teachers in this subject, they have heard all of these jokes over and over.

Tobacco

If you have been reading my recent posts you know that we are banned from sex and alcohol (except on pass) for the duration of our deployment. But a few a indulgences remain within bounds. There are no limits on music so devotees of Death Metal, Gangsta Rap, Country and Gospel can be roommates. Also tobacco, both smoking and chewing, is allowed. The smokers have to go outside to designated smoking areas, but they are no more restricted than in public places in civilian life. The 20-year-olds can, for the most part, smoke and pass the PT test. The most fit 30-somethings can also smoke and run.

The weirder tobacco habit, at least for me is chewing tobacco. A lot of ex-smokers turn to chew because they can be more fit and still use tobacco. Since I worked for several years on the dock at Yellow Freight, it looks reasonably normal to me to see a half dozen men in the motor pool with their lower lip swelled out spitting into Gatorade bottles. Gatorade had a wider mouth than a soda bottle.

What will take a while for me to get used to is seeing young women chewing and spitting into those bottles. I know we are all soldiers, but seeing women the age of my daughters carrying spit bottles still looks wrong to me. Maybe after a year, I will be completely used to it. I hope not.

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.

All Day Cleaning

Today most of the company was in convoy training or sleeping in after midnight fueling training. The few of us that were left had little to do so we cleaned and reorganized the stuff we are using while we are here in Oklahoma. So I volunteered to clean the latrine. With one platoon training all night and other people out in the field, the latrine looked bad, so I decided to clean it rather than wait for something to happen.

The other soldiers were surprised I would volunteer for that, but they weren't running after me saying, "Can I clean the latrine too?" So I spent the morning cleaning the walls and floors and restocking the supplies. One of the officers paid for real cleaning supplies (Clorox and Clorox spray cleaners) because we only have Simple Green and with all those guys, I wanted to clean with real chlorine.

In the afternoon I saw one of the sergeants in the headquarters company picking up trash behind the barracks building, so I told her I had a few soldiers killing time and we would get the front. When I got back to the motor pool, the idle soldiers were cleaning Humvees and the shop. So I got a bag and spent an hour picking up trash, mostly cigarette butts.

At the end of the day, the motor sergeant said the tool van for deployment would not be leaving for another three weeks so I could take the fixed-gear bike out of the van and ride it till then. He didn't hare to say it twice. I rode 10 miles after final formation yesterday. Riding a bike here MUCH harder than in PA. More on that later.


We have partitions--but I have been in barracks that looked like this and may be again.