Milbloggie Update

Currently I am in third place in the nominations with 10.  The top two blogs have 39 and 22 nominations.  Fourth place is right behind me with 9 nominations, fifth place  has six.  Only the top five move to the final voting round.  If you have not nominated my blog, please help me out in a very close race.

Need a Job? These Folks Want to Help

I got this email today and thought the info worth passing on.  I am definitely one of the lucky people who returned to a job, but not everyone does.  If you need a job, check them out:

I am a follower of your blog and am working with the Call of Duty 
Endowment (CODE) to raise awareness about employment issues for 
veterans.  CODE is a non-profit organization that helps solders 
transition to civilian careers after their military service. It 
focuses its resources on assisting organizations that provide job 
placement and training to veterans, as well as engaging the media and 
public forums to raise awareness of the issue.

I encourage you to take a look at this video and explore CODE's  website for information about finding good jobs for our vets after 
they finish their military service:

Additionally, here is an article that came out a few weeks ago with 
some scary statistics about the current state of employment for 
veterans:


Although unemployment among veterans is a major problem, it is not 
front and center in the public debate.  We would be grateful if you 
considered blogging on the issues or linking your blog to the CODE 
video or articles pertaining to the subject.  If you would like me to 
provide you with more information, I would be happy to do so.

Please help us bring this issue into public conversation.  I look 
forward to hearing from you, either personally or through the 
blogosphere.


Best,

Emily
http://www.callofdutyendowment.org/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Call-Of-Duty-Endowment/199346440490?ref=ts

MAKE ME FAMOUS

This post is a shameless plea for nominations for my blog in the military blog awards--The Milbloggies.  Nominations begin tonight and continue through April 3.  The blogs with the most nominations will be open for votes.  So if I am nominated, I will be posting again asking for votes.

To nominate my blog you have to register here.  The registration is just six lines and the nice people at milblogging.com promise you will not get SPAM from them.  Once you register, put my last name, Gussman, in the search bar on the upper left side of the page.  One search result will come up.  Click on the title of my blog, then when you get to the page, click the big green NOMINATE button.

If i get enough nominations, I am a finalist for a Milbloggie!!!

Nominations close Saturday.  Thanks in advance.

Real Life After Travel and Deployment

On Monday night I got back from San Antonio after midnight.  I started to unpack, did a load of laundry, took out the trash and watched TV before the buzz in my ears stopped and I could go to sleep around 230 am.  For eight days I stayed in hotels, ate in restaurants, went to banquets, rode a rental bike when I wasn't working and generally was either working or exercising from morning till late at night. 

I have not seen "The Hurt Locker" but I am told the hero of the film goes back to Iraq after being bored and bewildered by life back home.  It is different to ride in the back of a commuter plane next to someone nervous about a routine flight on a sunny day after riding behind the door gunner in a Black Hawk in a sand storm so thick that the helicopter we were flying with was all but invisible.

Business travel has some of the unreality of deployment, although different.  Business travelers escape the routine of daily life with long days, too much food and housekeeping done by hotel maids.  Soldiers don't have maids, but work long hours and are reasonably well fed.  My business travel is over for a while except day trips to DC and NYC and staying over in Philadelphia during events.  I think my transition to normal life is a little smoother because of the travel.  

Fox News Looking Like (At) Boobs

Stare at The Sun: breast bombs

A news source (Fox News) famed for its reliability, reprinting news from another news source (The Sun) famed for its reliability, applies this headline:

Terrorists Could Use Explosives in Breast Implants to Crash Planes, Experts Warn

The Sun accompanies its report with the image reproduced here.
Thus does vital knowledge get spread to the general public.
 ===

In the interest of full disclosure you can go direct to the source of this report at Improbable.com

I wonder if the Fox News commentator, in a patriotic fervor, said, "I can't wait to get my hands on these terrorists!"

Who Got Drafted for the Iraq War?

Several of the soldiers I served with could be considered draftees. At least, they were serving very much against their will and were surprised to receive a FEDEX package telling them to report for pre-deployment training within two weeks.  Most of the soldiers I knew who got called back adapted well after the initial shock.  One did not.

One of the Battle Captains in our aviation unit was Jay Hoffman.  He received a FEDEX telling him to report for duty in two weeks for deployment in Iraq.  His home is in London where he works for an oil exploration firm.  Jay was a Black Hawk pilot and had left the service several years ago, but did not resign his commission, so he got the FEDEX and went to Iraq with us.  A couple of days ago,
he wrote me from the Congo to ask me how things were going.  Jay applied for the MBA program at the London School of Economics while we were in Iraq and was accepted for the fall 2010 class so he will be changing his career again.  He also is completing all the courses he needs to be a reserve major so he can be in a reserve unit instead of getting a FEDEX with no warning next time.

Chief Warrant Officer Suzy Danielson left the military in 1994 after serving as a Black Hawk pilot during the Gulf War and in Somalia.  She did not resign her warrant commission, and did not really give the Army a second thought from 1994 until 2008 when she got a FEDEX package telling her to report for duty.  She had not flown a Black Hawk since 1994, but worked as a flight instructor for fixed wing aircraft since she left the Army.  She had to brush up on the Black Hawk, but flight was very much second nature.  When I met her she was flying the chase bird on MEDEVAC mission--the Black Hawk with door guns that follows the MEDEVAC bird.

One of the stranger recalled soldiers was an extremely unhappy female sergeant major who was activated out of retirement to go to Iraq.  She had retired several years before and never expected to be at Tallil Ali Air Base, but the condition on the military retirement is "return to duty" when requested or forfeit all pay and benefits for the rest of your life.  The sergeant major did not want to lose her retirement so there she was running the chapel coffee shop called "God's Grounds."  She was assigned to a support battalion, but was unhappy enough that they sent her to the chapel.  I heard her explain her circumstances several times--losing no vehemence no matter how many times she repeated her story.

Riding in San Antonio

While temperatures dropped to near freezing in the northeastern US, I rode 65 miles in San Antonio today at a high temperature of 82 degrees.  My official work began late in the day with a dinner and ceremony lasting till late evening.  The dinner was a meeting of a group of petrochemical executives who have worked in the industry for 25 years or more.

I have ridden in San Antonio before, but did not realize that all of the several major highways that go through and around San Antonio have frontage roads.  Some pasts of these roads are as crowded as the frontage road on Route 30 in Lancaster, but others are empty, one-way, two-lane strips of asphalt or concrete that are excellent places to ride.

My route was due north out of the city to the outer ring route North Loop 1604.  I rode west then followed I-10 east back into the city.  I ate lunch at a local coffee shop on the ring route about 35 miles into the ride.  It seemed like the kind of place that would serve sandwiches with sprouts and have about 10 veggie sandwiches.  I ordered chicken salad and expected light fare.  I got about a half pound of chicken salad in a sandwich that could have been sold in a New York deli.  Instead of sprouts and leaf lettuce, I got iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and bacon.  I also ordered a side of cole slaw.  It also had bacon in it.  I knew I was in Texas.

A couple of miles before I stopped, I rode by a large very rectangular Church.  It actually looked more like a security firm, almost no windows, set back more than a 1/4 mile from the road.  Then I saw it was the church of Pastor John Hagee, the pastor John McCain had to disown during the 2008 Presidential campaign.  

At the end of the ride I went to the gym at Fort Sam Houston.  Military bases have much better gyms than hotels--at least better than Holiday Inns.

Saved a Little Too Much Money

There are several Holiday Inns within the downtown area of San Antonio.  I usually stay at Holiday Inns which are cheaper than the conference hotels at the meetings I go to.  On this trip the conference hotel is the new Grand Hyatt right next to the San Antonio River Walk.  I stayed just a half mile away for less than half the price.  But sometimes a short distance can make a huge difference.  From the Grand Hyatt to the Holiday Inn Express, you walk under a highway, past a few bars and a Ruth's Chris Steak House, then across the railroad tracks and into a warehouse area.  The hotel is just three blocks away.  But across the street from the very sad looking Magott's Grocery Store.

 

Actually, Magott's Grocery, was established by Theodore Maggot in 1881.

And the whole area around Magott's including my hotel, definitely looked like industrial decay.  Very different from the River Walk and the surrounding restaurants.

I walked over and bought a Vitamin Water.  The guys who work there were very friendly but that is one difficult name to put on top of a score advertising Fresh Meat.

Last Day in San Francisco

Today I flew out of San Francisco in the late afternoon.  I had an 4pm flight to LAX followed by a 715pm flight to San Antonio, arriving at 1159pm--actually 1205am, but very close.

In the morning I rode up to the top of the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  This picture is the view from the top looking back at the city.  Although the climb is less than two miles from the north side of the bridge to the top, it was enough for me.  Three climbs up Mt. Tamalpais in the four previous days left my legs like rubber.

Yesterday I rode through one of the temperature shifts that happen between San Francisco and the top of Mt. Tam in Marin.  three years ago I left a fog-shrouded city of San Francisco on a morning ride.  The Golden Gate was also fog covered.  And the for persisted all the way to the 2000-foot line on Mt. Tam, then it was brilliant sun all the way to the top of East Peak.  I could see back to SF, but the only thing I could see was the cloud of fog that blanketed the entire city except for the peaks of the Golden Gate tower support piers and the antennas on top of Mt. Bruno inside the city. 

Yesterday it was clear and cool all the way from the city through Marin up almost 2300 feet then a cloud covered the very top of the mountain.  I rode the last half mile to the crest in increasingly thick fog.  At the top I could not see a thing.  the wisps of fog were so thick they seemed like they would hurt if they hit me.  I went back down into the cloud, but a half-mile later , below and away from the cloud, the sun was shining again. 

The Elitists in My Life: My Wife

I am going to start this series at home with my wife. Annalisa Crannell is the oldest daughter of two physicists. Her mother, who passed away last year while I was in Iraq, was a solar physicist as NASA Goddard Space Center. Her father is a recently retired particle physicist from Catholic University. Her parents studied the same subject at vastly different scales.

Annalisa went to Bryn Mawr College to major in Spanish and English, but graduated in three years in math with good enough grades to be accepted as a graduate student at Harvard. She left Harvard after the first year and got a PhD in math from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduation she was hired by Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster where she is now a full professor and Don of a Bonchek House. F&M has a system that puts a professor’s office in each dorm to bring academic life into the residence halls.

She is liberal in her politics and, though we both attend a theologically conservative Presbyterian Church, her beliefs are best reflected in the Quaker Church. In 1997 when we married Annalisa was a single mom of one daughter. She became the step-mother of my two daughters. In 2000 we adopted Nigel. Now we are in the process of adopting Jacari, who is in the same grade as Nigel.

A leader in her field in math, dynamical systems, she spends many hours on campus beyond the class day with student events and meetings. In her spare time Annalisa served for several years as a hospice volunteer and in 2002 was a live kidney donor, undergoing major surgery to help a woman she did not know.

She makes all this look easy. I just hope some of it rubs off on me.

Who We Fight For--Everybody

Everyone who deploys to Iraq and Afghanistan, or fights pirates off the coast of Somalia, or goes to any of the outposts of the War on Terror fights for all Americans. Even though I am a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, I am a soldier in the Army of all America.

Sometimes, I admit, I wish it were otherwise. When I travel I pay more attention to the news than when I am home and the news during the last week has been sad for me. White people yelling the N-word at a congressman who fought for civil rights in the 60s, bricks thrown through windows of Democratic Party offices, a gas line cut at what was believed (mistakenly) to be a US Congressman’s home that could have killed kids, and on April 19 there will be a gun rights march on the anniversary of Timothy McVeigh killing kids in a Day Care Center and more than 150 other innocent victims. I don't want to defend those people.

But "those people" are Americans, so the American military stands for all of us whatever we believe. And I really do believe that America is all of us, not us and them. In many previous posts I wrote about soldiers I served with in Iraq under the collective title "Who Fights This War?" I will continue those stories when I go back to drilling and catch up with what my fellow soldiers are doing now.

In future posts I decided to also write about some of the people in my life that TEA Party activists, militia members, and right-wing talk show hosts call the enemy. They are people like me. People with graduate degrees who live and work in major cities, who read dead poets, who do all of the research that preserves our past and defines our future, and are dismissed by Conservative leaders as elitists as if six to twelve years of education after high school was a curse. Many of their listeners don’t know anyone with a PhD.

It is clear from email and comments I received in the last year, that some of the people who read my blog don’t know many soldiers. Since I have one foot in each world—the Army and the Academy—I will occasionally write about people in my everyday civilian life.

Just as with the soldiers I wrote about, the profiles are simply my view of people who have chosen to live the life of the mind whether in research or teaching or preserving history in the form of books, documents, art, and artifacts. I like to talk with people who excel. To me, an excellent marksmen, pilot, racer, point guard, goalkeeper, or runner has a kinship with the most inspiring teachers, brilliant writers, innovators and researchers.

I’ve mentioned before that all US military personnel taken together, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Active, Reserve, and National Guard add up to about two million men and women or about 2/3 of one percent of the population of America. Two million is also the number of people in America who have PhD degrees. Two of the most influential groups in America have very separate worlds. But in my experience, the best soldiers and the best researchers share a devotion and passion that people who just bitch and whine will never know. I admire people in both groups. I hope you will too.

Meeting One of My Favorite Authors

In the exhibit area of the the conference I am attending, many publishers have booths set up to sell their books. Their top goal is to sell textbooks to the many chemistry professors that attend the national meetings of the American Chemical Society.

As I was walking past the WH Freeman booth I noticed one of my favorite authors standing in the booth. Peter Atkins, a professor at Oxford, is the author of five textbooks and seven popular science books. He had four revised editions of his textbooks published in the past year and one of his popular books published in 2007 Four Laws That Drive the Universe will be published in a new edition as part of the Oxford series "A Very Short Introduction" series of small books about a single topic. So far more than a hundred books on everything from Aristotle to Quakers to Quantum Mechanics to Vikings are part of the series. Atkins will be 70 this year and said he is retired now, which gives him more time to write.

One of the articles I am currently working on is a column about Peter Atkins popular science books. So it was a very pleasant surprise to meet him. I bought the latest edition of his textbook Physical Chemistry and now own an autographed copy.

                                                      Dr. Peter Atkins

It was not entirely Geek day. In the afternoon I rode up Mt. Tam to the first crest where you can turn left for the West Peak and right for the East Peak. On the way down I passed a pair of Toyota Tundras between turns. That was fun. On the way to the mountain I just crested the hill between Golden Gate Park and Marin. A powder blue scooter went past me as we started down the other side. I drafted and passed him before we got into the town below. It's great to be back on big hills.

San Francisco

This morning at 340am I woke up, dressed and headed for Harrisburg International Airport for a 541am flight to Philadelphia. From there I took a 735am direct flight to San Francisco. I live a lot closer to Harrisburg International--32 miles--than Philadelphia International--88miles--and you might wonder if I am paying a premium to fly from the airport with no wait in the security line instead of driving to Philadelphia. But the opposite is true. I tried booking the same US Air flight from Philadelphia and it was $100 more from Philadelphia. And I didn't have to drive in Philadelphia.

Anyway, after six hours of reading and sleeping (I don't watch movies on planes either in case you were wondering) we landed in San Francisco at 1030am local time. By 11am I had my bags and was on the way to the city on the BART train. Taxis are $40, from SFO. Shuttles are $20. BART is $8 and I was in the lobby of my hotel in 40 minutes. Cities like Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago among others that have train service are much nicer to fly to than the cities that just offer cabs and vans. At least for me.

By 1pm I had registered for the conference I am here to attend and was on the way to Blazing Saddles bike shop to rent a Marin Stelvio carbon road bike. I did not have enough time to ride back to the hotel and drop my backpack and still make the three events I had scheduled for Sunday evening, so I went straight from the shop, across the Golden Gate Bridge and up Mount Tamalpais. It is steeper than I remember (and I am older) so I only got to the first crest before the turn for east peak before I had to turn back. The road is a series of switchbacks with occasional straight sections and grades from 4 to 8 percent. Most of the way down I was riding between 30 and 40 mph tapping the brakes less after each set of switchbacks.

I should be back on the mountain between the morning and evening meetings tomorrow. Too much to do on Tuesday.

Flush with Possibilities

My wife and I take Nigel—on the weekend’s Nigel and Jacari—to the Franklin & Marshall gym with us. The boys play basketball at one of the courts while we run on the upper level track. The track is just over 1/7th mile so we do 20 laps for a 3-mile run and see the kids shooting baskets at the south end of every lap.

Two weeks ago I was running with my wife in the college gym. At lap 10 I told Annalisa I would be turning off at the bathroom on the next lap. I said it in an apologetic way, just because I was slowing us down. She smiled and said, “I’m not disappointed in you but Scott would be.” She was referring to Scott Perry, our battalion commander, who trained himself to use the room with porcelain furniture just three times a day.

If I could ever meet that standard, it has not been in the last 30 years. It made me think about how competitive the smallest details of life in the military can be and how much I thought about trips to the latrine whenever I was in field training or going on a flight.

So I would get up and go to breakfast at least an hour or two before I really needed to get up, because I did not want to be the guy who was praying for the Black Hawk to land or the Humvee to stop because all his bathroom business was not done before the flight. Because every plan needs a contingency plan, I always had an empty 20oz Gatorade bottle with me on flights or convoy training. I never actually used it, but I felt better knowing it was in my right cargo pocket or in my backpack if I needed it.

Military Blogging Conference

On April 9 I will be in Arlington VA for a Military Blogging Conference. Like most conference they will have expert panels. It begins Friday evening with a panel and a cash bar and runs through the entire day of Saturday, April 10. I am mostly interested in the social hour Friday night. I want to meet fellow bloggers and this should be a great place to do it.

and compared to a business conference, registration for the whole thing is $50!

Civilian Time

I opened an email this morning and went from placid to pissed off in a millisecond. The email asked me about starting a book group. It wasn't that he wanted to start one right away or at any definite time in the future, he just thought it would be a good idea. His life is swamped right now and he wants to wait until the timing is right.

I have known this guy for years. the timing will never be right. Or if he does get involved he will be less involved over time, because he is the sort of person who life happens to, he does not make life happen. But now when I hear something like this, a voice in my head says, "Make a f-ing decision."

It will be quite a while before I get adjusted to this kind of civilian time: the kind of time that is like Jello, no hard edges, collapses under pressure, and even when it stays in one place, it jiggles.

More than my reaction, I get worried about the different feeling I have about things like this. In the Army everyone is healthy, no one is old--or at least not older than me--and if someone is very sick or badly injured they are MEDEVACed away. It is an unreal world which suits me very well, but the Army is hardly my life and in three years they will toss me out. So I really will be working to adjust to the world I live in where people with money and resources take care of the poor and people who can make an f-ing decision help those who can't.

Otherwise I will be just another rebel who wants to the world that suits his own taste and wants to get rid of everyone he doesn't like. There are enough of those already.

Nice Butt!

Bike racers seen from a car window.

To a car driving toward a bicyclist from behind (yes, I meant to say that) all male bicycle racers look alike.  They are thin, folded like a paper clip and wearing spandex.  Today, for the first time in almost two years, a  car with several college-age girls drove by me and the blond in the passenger seat yelled "Nice Butt!" as she went by.

Since the road was flat--West River Drive in Philadelphia--and my head was down, it is possible that none of the young women in the car knew they were yelling at a member of AARP.  I have to say no one yelled anything like that as I rode around Tallil Air Base.

Video from Iraq

The first half of this video and a few of the shots at the end are pictures I took in Iraq.  My photos go from the beginning to where you see a video cameraman in a red shirt.

Entered in Tough Mudder Race on my 57th Birthday

\

Photo from Rappel Tower Confidence Course, Fort Sill, OK, 2009

On May 2nd when I turn 57 I will be competing in the Tough Mudder race at Bear Creek Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. The organizers call it:

The Toughest one day event on the planet. This is not your average mud run or boring, spirit-crushing road race. Our 7 mile obstacle courses are designed by British Special Forces to test all around toughness, strength, stamina, fitness, camaraderie, and mental grit. Forget about your race time. Simply completing the event is a badge of honor. Not everyone will finish, but those who do make it to our post-race party will have truly earned the right to call themselves a Tough Mudder. All Tough Mudder sponsorship proceeds go to our exclusive charity partner, The Wounded Warrior Project. DogFish Head Brewery has generously agreed to provide FREE Post-Race Beer.

From the Web site it looks like an obstacle course on steroids. Check it out. I am planning on being very sore May 3.

Once a Warrior Always a Warrior

Last week I got a book in the mail that I thought was just for real warriors. After all, most of my service was inside the wire on a very big, well-protected air base and when I went outside the wire it was in a Blackhawk or Chinook helicopter, not in a convoy.

Then I started reading the book and it reminded me of something a medic told me near the end of my tour. He knew how I got in the Army by very carefully answering questions about the accident I had between my enlistment physical and actual enlistment. I thought it would have been the injuries that disqualified me from service, especially from deployment. But the medic said, "It was the concussion. You lost three days man. You got your bell rung like it was in a Church steeple. They would have sent your ass home if they knew."

The title of the book is "Once a Warrior Always a Warrior" by Charles W. Hoge, MD, Col. USA ret. The subtitle is: Navigating the Transition from Combat to Home Including Combat Stress, PTSD, and mTBI.

The last item, mTBI, is the one that affected me before deployment. Since we only had an occasional missile attack, mostly when we first arrived, Combat Stress and PTSD were not part of my life. But the chapter on mTBI made sense out of some stuff that bothers me still, almost three years after the accident. It was also interesting to me that he mentioned combatives training. I wrote about hanging on in my match when I got paired up with a 21-year-old body builder in a combatives match. Twice during that training I was "out" for a moment.

But since the accident I have not been able to retain my ability to read Greek or French as well as before. I gave up on Greek in Iraq and struggled with simple French. But memory is one of the problems with mTBI. It could be I am just getting old, but next month I get a physical from my civilian doctor and I will ask him about both the accident and the combatives and if I should be doing anything with my memory problems.

From the chapters I have read so far, I can say the book is well written and informative. It really made me think about the subject in a new way.