Saturday, March 13, 2010

Back with HBO--for 10 Weeks

My wife and I started watching the Sopranos in the 4th season of that amazing show. I refused to watch it at its debut, despite all of the acclaim it received. I thought a show about a gangster visiting a female therapist would be so unbelievable that it would be just silly. But one night I was in a hotel with nothing to watch on TV so I thought I would try an episode of the Sopranos. As soon as I got home, I rented the first season. My wife and I watched the first three seasons to catch up and subscribed to HBO to watch the fourth season once we were done with the first three.

This led me to watch another HBO phenomenon--"Band of Brothers." My wife was not interested in that one. But from 2002 on I have been an HBO subscriber when they have one of their amazing series on. We watched every episode of "The Wire." I watched "Deadwood." Today I resubscribed because tomorrow the new series "The Pacific" begins. It is produced by the same people who did "Band of Brothers." The preview comments say it is a very different series, but just as intense.

When HBO is good, it is the best thing on TV.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Lawyers, Car Mechanics, Bankers and Chemical Company Execs

We all suffer from stereotypes. Now that race and religion are out of bounds, at least in public, it is still perfectly OK to classify and dismiss people by their profession. In the past few days I have had delightful conversations with people in every one of the professions listed in today's title: Lawyers, Car Mechanics, Bankers and Chemical Company Execs.

I was going to write about something else today, but changed my mind this morning when I picked up my car at the Firestone Dealer on Orange Street in Lancaster where I get all my auto service work done. I dropped the car off early this morning because the brake pedal was feeling "soft." It was fine when I was driving back from New York on the highway, but in slow-moving traffic, the pedal would go almost to the floor. By the way, I drive a 2002 Chevy Malibu with 97,000 miles.

It turns out there was a little rust around the fitting in one of the front brake calipers. They cleaned the fitting, purged the air from the system and did not charge me. Since I had the car serviced in January when I cam back from Iraq, they thought they should have noticed this and said "No charge." Everyone knows the stereotype of auto mechanics. These guys are great.

At an event where I work earlier in the week, I talked with a group of Philadelphia trial attorneys about public speaking. We talked about practice, preparation, and listening to other speakers. Lawyers are easy to pick on, until you need one. And like the lawyers I ride with occasionally, these men and women were a lot of fun to talk with.

On Wednesday night I was at an award dinner in NYC for a chemical industry executive. Again, these guys get vilified by many people, but they make all the ingredients of the stuff we like and the stuff that keeps us alive. Without pure chemicals there would be little medicine, no clean water, and no computers.

After the dinner I talked to a trio of bankers from HSBC who introduced themselves as villains. They had arranged the sale of one of the companies I used to work for to a Saudi company. The result was a viable company instead of a bankruptcy, and many of my old friends who would have lost their jobs are still working because of these bankers.

Later today I am going to see a couple of the guys I deployed with. As a category and personally, I like soldiers too.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Riding in Central Park

I finally got a chance to ride in Central Park with Jim Dao. We did three laps of the 10k course this morning. It was in the low 40s. Jim rode 20 miles from New Jersey to get to Central Park, I rode two miles from Penn Station. Jim could talk on the way up the long hill in the northeast corner of the park, so he is a very fit guy. I liked riding in the park the previous afternoon, but riding with someone else is always better, and harder.

After we finished the three laps, Jim had to go to work. When he turned off at 7th Ave, I said I was going to take another lap. I got about halfway up the east side of the park. Instead of averaging 19 or 20mph as I was with Jim, I was struggling to go 13-15mph. I turned out of the park onto 5th Ave at 90th St. and headed back to the hotel. The traffic got me rolling with more speed, but as they say in NASCAR when one of the cars blows up, "You can stick a fork in [Gussman] cuz he's done."

On the way back from NYC to Philadelphia, I was thinking how many transitions I made the previous day. I'll write about that tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Real Crazies

One of the good things the Army took from us for deployment was cell phones. Not that they confiscated the cell phones, but we were not allowed to walk and talk on cell phones from the beginning of training in Oklahoma through out-processing at Fort Dix. The ban included the blue light blinking ear pieces that allow the user to talk on the phone without holding the phone.

For several years before deployment I would be surprised by seeing someone walking toward me talking in an animated way to no one. It usually turned out to be a guy arguing with someone wearing one of the blue light ear pieces. The blue light made the guy look like some kind of animated out-of-shape alien.

This morning in Philadelphia a guy was walking toward me on the subway platform talking to himself. I thought he was on the phone because some phones work in stations now. But as he passed by waving his arms I realized he was actually crazy and talking to himself. He wasn't on the phone. In the last couple of weeks I have been in Boston and NYC and also seen real crazies, not guys just looking like lunatics but talking on ear pieces.

It's always nice to see Old School hanging on.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Gossip

Our unit made the front page of today's Lancaster Intelligencer/New Era in a story about a chaplain who was supposed to deploy with us and who was accused of violating "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

For me, finding out Chaplain (Captain) Aris Fokas was deploying with us was great news. He was the assistant college chaplain at Franklin and Marshall College (where my wife teaches) in the 1990s. So I already knew him and knew he was a really good guy. We saw each other at the battalion Christmas party at the end of 2007 and I could not say which one of us was more surprised to see the other in uniform. Both of us were in the Army because of 9-11. Aris had deployed in 2005 in the bad days of the war with an infantry brigade. He ministered to wounded and dying soldiers under bad circumstances. He was the kind of chaplain I wanted to have if things got bad.

But Aris did not deploy with us. I did not know why until I read the article this morning. Whatever the facts of the accusation, the article makes clear that taking him off the deployment roster and now forcing him to resign is all based on one overheard phone call by one guy. Whatever is good or bad about the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, I did not know that a single accusation with no corroboration was enough to end someone's career.

Unless you are a completely sinless and virtuous person yourself, think how badly that would work out for you if the standard for prosecution was one uncorroborated witness.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Fellow Soldier on the Bridge

This afternoon I took "lunch" at 4pm. I didn't have a bike with me so I ran back and forth across the Ben Franklin Bridge. Did I ever mention I have this thing for bridges? Anyway, I was running down the Philadelphia side of the bridge feeling good just about a half mile from the end of the 4-mile run when I passed a couple running up the walkway toward the New Jersey side. Just after I passed them I heard, "Hey Guss. . . Sergeant Gussman?" Actually, he almost said Gus Gus.

I was wearing one of my Alaska MEDEVAC t-shirts. The guy I passed was a chase pilot from the 1/150th stationed in Basrah. He was assigned to the Alaska MEDEVAC unit during the summer as a chase bird pilot. The first Charlie MEDEVAC company assigned to us in Iraq was an Alaska-based active Army unit that flew mission protected by a 1/150th air assault Blackhawk. The pilot (I forgot his name) was good friends with Sgt. Mareile Livingston, the motor pool admin NCO in Echo Company. Mareile has been calling me Gus Gus ever since I got assigned to Echo Company in 2007. She is a big fan of the animated Cinderella which has a mouse named Gus Gus. Mareile introduced me to the pilot in the Coalition DFAC in Iraq as Gus Gus.

Since I served with a Pennsylvania unit, I suppose I will be meeting people from the deployment for years to come.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Life After Yellow Ribbon

I drove home from a full day of sitting on my butt in Philadelphia at the Yellow Ribbon Event. I stopped at the Morgantown Exit of the Turnpike, parked at flea market just off the highway and rode up and down a 1.5 mile hill three times then got back in the car and drove home. Not much, but I am so far behind my riding buddies that I am focusing on just one event for 2010 and hoping to get in shape for the 2011 racing season. The one event for this year is the PA Senior Games at the end of July. They are the qualifying races for the National Senior Games in 2011.

Today I got yet another indication of just how far behind I am compared with my riding buddies. Every Sunday in the off season there is a 40-mile ride for the "A" racers at 1030am and one for the "B" racers at 130pm. My 50+ friend Jan Felice has lately started "doing the double." He rides the 1030 ride AND the 130 ride. Yesterday he and a few other highly motivated riders did the double and climbed some hills during the hour break between the end of the morning ride and jumping into the afternoon ride.

I did the 130 ride. I took a shortcut near the beginning to avoid the worst hills and I still got dropped just before the halfway point on the ride. I watched Jan and the other riders disappear up a long shallow hill on Paradise Lane. I wheezed home. When I got home I ran three miles with my wife then walked with my daughter Lisa to workout at the gym. Business travel lately means I have also falling behind at the gym.

In the Army there is always time to workout--it's part of the job description. Being a civilian is a lot more complicated.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Yellow Ribbon Event

We are all in civilian clothes. The shirts vary but the pants are jeans. Not all blue jeans, some of us are wearing black jeans, but worn, comfortable jeans are the uniform of the day for all of us who are not wearing uniforms. Our first presenters are five retired soldiers speaking in turn about the transition back to civilian life. They are all wearing jeans with black short-sleeve polo shirts.

The first presenter thanked us for serving and told us about the freedom we defended and should be enjoying now. The second guy told us to think about what we missed by being gone and those we missed. We had a short ceremony in which we dropped coins in a bowl to help preserve a memorial to deployed soldiers at the Valley Forge memorial.

The next presenter walked up to the stage with a Claymore sword. It was really shiny. He dropped the sword to get our attention then told us, "You are the weapon. You fly the planes. You go into battle. . . ."

Then we heard a long presentation from a guy who was homeless after his first enlistment in the 80s then went back in during the 90s. He talked about how bad his life got before he got injured in by an IED abd started the road back to being part of his family and society. We then watched a video about a Marine who lost both legs in an IED attack and how he was adapting to life back in the world.

We then watched a role playing exercise about what we missed on deployment and what our families back home took over. we were supposed to shout out what we missed. Sex and booze got most of the shouts. I was going to yell out "Libraries!" but decided not to alienate myself from the group before 10am. Then they asked what we were happy to leave behind. "KIDS!" got a big shout and a lot of knowing laughs. "BILLS!" was next.

The next presenter told us about being single and being deployed. Andrea Magee, one of my office mates at the end of the deployment, was sitting near me. She said, "Not another story" which got laughs from everyone around her. The presenter told us about a relationship that he got into after deployment and how it fell apart.

(Break for sentimental cliche watch: This guy began the presentation saying "Soldiers are the Army's greatest asset." He told us to "Come to terms" with our life. "Embrace all of who you are. . ." "I had to dream in a different way than before I left." "Invite your family to step into your journey." "Trust and embrace life or be out there by yourself."

Then we went on break.

The next presentation gave us all of our mental health options--local and national. Clearly, we are a big dysfunctional family.

The next presenter talked about medical and education benefits. This time he was in civilian clothes. Last time I heard him was in out processing in January. This is the master sergeant who, for the last month, has been my favorite example of how beliefs dictate how we see facts. In January he told us that there was no need for health care reform, then 10 minutes later told us that 42% of the Stryker Brigade soldiers (1,680 of 4,000) had no health benefits when they mobilized. His beliefs say nothing is wrong with health care (he, like most everyone else who sees no trouble with health care has guaranteed health care for life) and is responsible for making sure all of those uninsured soldiers get six months of free coverage after they get back from deployment.

After lunch, substance abuse. First we had a panel game with the presenters role playing as guests on a How Drunk are You? game show. Then they brought three volunteers up on stage and asked them about being angry. Then we saw professional video about a guy who was drunk, angry and ready to kill himself. Then we went to suicide.

The final presentation was a section of the HBO Series "Band of Brothers." The camera stopped on each member of Easy Company during a softball game in Germany and said what each man did after the war. [It was a great show and is having a sequel of sorts in a new HBO series called "The Pacific." It starts next Sunday night at 9pm.]

I suppose on of the things that Yellow Ribbon Events do is bring you together with soldiers you served with in a low-pressure setting. I talked at the breaks with Sgt. Brian Pauli and Spc. Andrea Magee, two of my best friends at Tallil. They both were doing great. Seeing them and making jokes about the Army and the presentations we were listening to was the best part of the day for me.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Tomorrow: Yellow Ribbon Day

Tomorrow is my scheduled Yellow Ribbon day of briefings. My briefing is at Lincoln High School in Northeast Philadelphia. I will see some members of my unit, but the soldiers who attend these are whoever happened to sign up. So there will be soldiers from any unit that returned from deployment within the last several months. The whole day is supposed to be about making sure we get all of our benefits. Since I have a job and medical benefits most of the info will not be for me. But it will be interesting to see just what they think will be important for us to know.

More tomorrow. . .

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Courtship on the Ben Franklin Bridge

Yesterday on the drive from the Harrisburg airport, I stopped at home and brought one of my bikes to Philadelphia. At sunset yesterday I rode over the the big, blue Ben Franklin Bridge, a 1.5-mile suspension bridge that rise 150 feet in a graceful arc crossing the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey.

Yesterday I did three back and forth laps on the 10-foot-wide walkway that is up to 20 feet above the roadway and directly over the New Jersey Transit tracks on the outside of the span. Today I planned to ride five laps, but ended at 4 1/2. As I was riding back and forth across the bridge, a couple ambled across walking as if they both had north pole magnets in their hips. They would sway together then sway apart when they got too close.

For bikes and runners and pedestrians to share the walkway, everybody has to stay right and straight. Every time I approached this couple I had to yell "On Your Left" or "On Your Right" and every time they were surprised. They were so enthralled with each other I passed a half-dozen times before it occurred to them I would be going by every six or seven minutes.

The fifth time I started up the 3/4 mile climb to the center of the bridge I decided I would turn around wherever I met the couple and not go down the other side. Near the peak of the bridge, the lovers were laughing, saw me and moved right. I turned around anyway so I would not have to pass them again. The bridge is a great workout, but I usually only ride on it when it is dark and cold. Good weather brings out crowds and the descents feel like riding in a pinball machine.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

War Metaphor

With our nation in two wars and with conflicts of various kinds simmering or breaking out at various points around the world it is no surprise that war is the metaphor we use for sports, bad relationships, and even conflicts on cooking shows. This week's science section in the New York Times used a war metaphor favored by science geeks and senior military leaders to describe the current conflict over climate change:

"The battle is asymmetric, in the sense that scientists feel compelled to support their findings with careful observation and replicable analysis, while their critics are free to make sweeping statements condemning their work as fraudulent."

Asymmetric can be good or bad depending on which side of the asymmetry you happen to be on. I wrote about my riding buddy Lt. Col. David Callahan of 4th Bde, 1st Armored. He was a tank platoon leader in the Gulf War and was on the good side of assymetry. Iraqi T-62s attacked his platoon. His tanks engaged the Iraqi tanks and took them out with first-round hits at 1,980 and 2,340 meters. The Iraqis could not fire effectively at that range. Asymmetric is good when you have the M1 Abrams with the stabilized gun and computerized sights and the other guy is fighting from Soviet surplus armor.

But we are on the bad side of asymmetric warfare when the bad guys fire at us from mosques and hospitals and we can't fire back.

I am flying home from a gathering of 15,000-plus people who design, build, buy and sell the kind of analytical instruments that the real CSI people use and every lab relies on. Walking around an event like that, listening to presentations on the latest in bomb sniffing devices, water and food quality testing, and all the rest of the instrumentation at that show, it seems just incredible that anyone could be getting their science information from Talk Radio shows, Larry King Live guests, or TV preachers.

In the same article, one scientist said the answer was just to stick to his work, that "Good science is the best revenge." I wish it were true, but it is not because you do not have to believe in science to use it. People who believe the universe is less than 10,000 years old use computers to promote their belief. But all computers are based on 20th century physics which grew out of Einstein's work at the beginning of the century. If Einstein is right, computers exist and the universe is about 12 billion years old. If Einstein is wrong, computers would not exist in their current form. Nothing prevents someone who rejects science from using the results of good science to promote their own lunacy.

Good science extends and enhances the lives of people who reject it. In this way, science arms its own enemies. It is on the wrong side of a very asymmetric war.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Jack is Back

My Uncle Jack's response to my blog post on military rating systems:

I believe you captured perfectly the essence of the rating systems for enlisted and officer members of the military. The goals of the troops in the trenches are tacitly accepted but seldom stated. Unfortunately, all the parties involved have different opinions of what the goals really are. The ratings are therefore essentially based on "feelings," the supervisor's perceived needs, personal bias, etc, etc and isolated events, good or bad. I think this applies from the President- Joint Chiefs level on down.

Civilian organizations, at least the ones I've been in, don't usually have such clear-cut systems for rating performance but involve high-minded processes that require a development of "goals," which one commits to. This is followed by events and direction from above that ignore the agreed-upon goals and substitute instead the urgent problems at hand. This is also known as fighting fires. The flaw is that the agreed goals are usually crisply defined, while fire-fighting accomplishments are amorphous and hard to define or measure. The rated party is supposedly empowered to invoke his goals statement as a defense against fire fighting but this doesn't usually work and may even be dangerous to one's tenure. At the end of the rating period the system breaks down into the same personal bias as the military system.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Scorn in the USA

Once I left the relative safety of riding in Iraq, I knew it was just a matter of time before someone would swear at me, swerve at me or otherwise threaten me while I was riding a bike. It happened today in Orlando. I was riding on the shoulder of a 4-lane road and the passenger in a beat-up black Ford Focus called me a "Faggot M-F" or something like that. I am sure of the faggot part.

In an irony I am sure was lost on mid-20s losers in the car, there was nothing about their pasty faces that said military, so while they were accusing me of being some sort of sissy for wearing spandex, I was in Iraq last year and they were in their mom's basement trying to figure out who where they could get money for gas and beer.

Riding here also reminded me of Iraq. I rode for miles yesterday and today against a 15 to 20 mph steady wind and a completely flat road. The scenery was better than Iraq but the drivers are much worse. Even so, I prefer Orlando to Iraq because I can leave Orlando.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Breakfast with Jack

This morning I had breakfast with my Uncle Jack. He retired from active duty with the Air Force in 1978 and is currently living in the Orlando area. I am attending an analytical instrument conference in Orlando, so we could get together for a visit.

At a small table in Einstein's Bagel Shop we talked about the military from various angles. One subject I have not written about that was on both of our minds is how the military evaluates soldiers and airmen and how one bad evaluation can end a career. Jack told me about a colonel he worked for who looked like a future general. this otherwise rising star made a high official in the Ford administration angry and his career ended there. He talked about other people he knew who got the one bad evaluation and Poof! career blows away.

And the technique is simple. All evaluations are terribly skewed so that the actual "average" score for any given rank is far above the middle of the scale. When I was on active duty in the 1970s, Army enlisted evaluations were on a 125 point scale. The "average" score was 117 for Sgt. E-5s. For a 1st Sgt. it was 122. Back then, a good evaluation had each block completely filled superlatives if you wanted to say that a given NCO was really great. Lots of people got 125-point scores, it took more to say that someone was truly outstanding.

On the other hand, if you wanted to screw someone, all you had to do was put an honest score in the boxes and less than gushing prose in the comment boxes. The sergeant with a score of 110 or less and half-filled comment blocks was a shit bag. Everybody reading the form knew this for the rest of that soldier's career.

Some of the best people in my unit got screwed in exactly this way. More on that later.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Meeting in the Airport

In the security line this morning at Harrisburg Intl. Airport, I saw Spc. Jared Arthur, one of the Echo Company fuelers I served with in Iraq. He is still officially on leave. He had accumulated a lot of leave by working full time in the Guard before we left. He said he and Sgt. Matt Kauffman might be getting fueling jobs full time at Fort Indiantown Gap. It was good to see somebody I served with and better to hear that two more returning soldiers have jobs.

Another soldier who went right back to work is the commander of Task Force Diablo, Lt. Col. Scott Perry. He is the representative for the 92nd District in the Pennsylvania Legislature. He is already on a state government reform panel. He went back to work February 1.

I am in Orlando for a conference on analytical instrumentation. We hand out an award at the event. But the really important part of the event for me is riding in warm weather and my Uncle Jack lives nearby, so we will have coffee tomorrow before my work starts. When I told one of my co-workers here I was going to meet my Uncle who occasional wrote for the blog, she assumed he was not really my uncle--or that I made him up. For anyone else who thinks that, Uncle Jack is a real live retired major who flew F-4s and mid-air refueling missions and had three tours in Viet Nam in a 20-year career.

So we will be telling war stories tomorrow. In case you were wondering about the difference between a war story and a fairy tale, a fairy tale begins: "Once Upon a Time. . . " A war story starts: "This is no shit. . . "

Friday, February 26, 2010

Social Media Rule Change--Better for Bloggers?

Today the military opened up the rules on social media--Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and the others will be authorized unless temporarily blocked by local commanders. But the authority of local commanders, especially in a war zone, is hard for a civilian to imagine. In November last year, I was accused of an OPSEC violation on my blog.

I wrote a post a week after a missile attack on the base. I did not write about the attack itself, but about one of the dumbest soldiers in our unit. A missile hit the 800 horsepower (huge) generator outside his Living Area compound. It wrecked the generator but did not explode. The idiot in question took out his camera and climbed up on the smoking wreck of a generator to get a picture of the unexploded missile.

After seven days it was OK to post about the attack, but not to give a battle-damage assessment. I was giving away where one missile hit, that it wrecked a generator, and was a dud. Within hours I was in the office of the battalion intelligence officer. His wife was a daily reader of my blog. She found out about the attack through my blog. She was angry that she found out about the attack only through my blog, but I was OK talking about the attack. I just had to take down the battle damage. So I did.

Then a few hours later, I got a call saying I had to report to the commander's office on the other side of the base for an unspecified reason. This is part of the drama when any enlisted man gets accused. I was left to wonder what I did wrong. I thought it was the post, but since I did not always obey traffic laws on my bike--and I was rather easy to identify--I wondered if that was it.

So I rode around the base to report to the commander. When I arrived, the acting first sergeant, who was also the motor sergeant and still angry that I left the motor pool, told me I had to report formally to the commander. I did. Then the commander told me I had violated OPSEC by writing about the attack. He told me that I could be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The executive officer had already written a counseling statement.

I was doing my best not to smile while I was being accused, but I know I had "that look" on my face. It turns out the source of the accusation was a captain's wife. The captain was in another battalion on post. His wife also followed my blog. She was pissed at her husband for lying about the missile attack. The captain thought I should be busted for an OPSEC violation.

Along with moral lectures, we got many lectures on rumors. "Do not listen to hearsay," we heard. "Do not listen to rumors," they said. And here I was being accused at third hand. It turns out NONE of the men accusing me had looked at my blog before writing the counseling statement and threatening me with an Article 15 or worse. They had not spoken to the intell officer either.

When I got a chance to speak, I told them that I had spoken to the intell officer that morning and, in fact, the post was fine as long as I removed the battle damage assessment. By this time in the deployment, I had written more than 500 posts without being accused of an OPSEC violation. But these three guys are in charge, so each in turn gave me a five-minute lecture on blogging--even though none of them blog nor had any of them looked at my blog.

I have to think that if I had been a 20-something blogger that this incident would have convinced me to shut down the blog. Since I am 50-something writer on a one-year adventure, I'll admit that the threat got me excited. Immediately, I imagined how much fun it would be to be falsely accused and to become a cause celeb milblogger. I was channeling Clint Eastwood thinking "Go ahead. Make my day."

That's what local commander's discretion can mean. A soldier can get accused in the absence of facts and has little room to appeal. I'll be very interested to see how the new rules shake out on the milblogs.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Rain in Boston

It rained all day and night in Boston on Wednesday and, alas, I did not get to see my sister or old friends because I was there just 36 hours and had several meetings. At dinner last night a colleague and I ate in Brookline at Vietnamese restaurant. The rain was steady and I had to stop our conversation about a conference we will be attending. We were seated by the window. I was watching the rain fall in the halo around the streetlight. Rain in Iraq is either sprinkles or a downpour--straight down or almost sideways in a howling wind. This rain was falling at a 30-degree angle pushed by a steady wind from the ocean to the East. The yellow arc of light showed the rain swirling and dancing. It has been a long time since I saw that kind of rain.

Then I looked below the streetlight and saw a Thai takeout place which was a Jewish deli when I was a kid. I then remembered all the tailor shops and butchers and little Kosher markets that were in this Coolidge Corner neighborhood 50 years ago.

Memory brings back embarrassing moments with some of the highest clarity we ever experience. Fifty years ago my Dad and I stopped at that deli after visiting my grandmother. We visited "Ma" every month. At every visit she complained that we did not visit enough and said she "was not going to be around much longer" for us to visit. Although we can't be certain because no one has a birth certificate and she would not tell any her age, she lived another three decades to possibly 100 years old.

Anyway, Dad and I went to the deli. Several of the patrons and the owner knew my Dad. My father was Jewish, my mother was Protestant, but neither were religious. So I knew very little of Jewish life. I certainly did not know that Kosher Jews don't eat meat and milk together. So we went to the little Kosher deli. I ordered a pastrami sandwich. While were eating my Dad got up from the table and walked to the counter to get some more pickles. While he was at the counter 20 feet away, I said "Dad, Can I have a glass of milk." He walked back to the table with all those old friends looking at him. He whispered that he would get me a Coke. In the car he explained why everyone looked so funny when I asked the question.

I had been on the street many times before and after that day. But my memory went straight to that day.

When dinner was over, I took the "T" to Copley Place and Newbury street. There is cafe/bookstore I wanted to visit. I browsed the hundreds of maginzes they have, then went back to Brookline to Booksmith, an independent bookstore. They sell new and used books. I ended up buying a copy of Paris Review because the main article was on memoir. It looks like memoir will be an important part of my life in the next year or two.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Another Moral Lecture

OK. I know I keep coming back to this topic, but today I was coaching one of the historians where I work about a public presentation she is giving in a couple of weeks. I used the following talk as an example of why it is so important to know your audience.

So in Oklahoma the married people got an extra moral lecture on adultery after we already had several general lectures on no sex, no drugs, no booze. The lecturer was a 25-year-old lieutenant who was not married himself, but did have a steady girlfriend. He let us know he was loyal to his girlfriend and planned to continue to be loyal throughout the upcoming deployment. He was not engaged. He had made no public commitment we knew of and was free to end this relationship at a whim if he chose.

He was an officer. His audience was married enlisted men and women. Among his audience were at least a half-dozen soldiers with very strong, orthodox religious beliefs. This lecture got loud and included threats of what the officer would do if any of us were caught having an adulterous relationship. He even threatened at one point to call our spouses.

Now if I had been asked to coach this guy, I would have suggested that early on he should acknowledge that several members of his audience hold very high personal standards on sex and marriage. In fact, to those soldiers, the lecturer was a fornicator whether he happened to be committed to his girlfriend at that moment or not.

But the LT continued with no mention that his own situation was one that several members of his audience thought immoral.

As far as I know, none of the soldiers he lectured ever violated the rules, but by the end of the deployment, the LT himself was known as one of the bigger flirts in the DFACs.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Hours are the Same, but the Clothes are WAY Better

I got up at 6am today to catch the train from Lancaster to Philadelphia. My first of four meetings today was with our communications group. Six of us were in the meeting, when the seven and last person sat down at the table I could clearly see the 20-man tent I stayed in when we were in Kuwait waiting to fly to America. I also caught a quick vision of the 77-man tent we stayed in during half of April.

The reason: my six co-workers were all pretty, fashionably dressed young women. Like the Army, their average age was less than half my age. Looking at them reminded me what how different the world looks in a Center City Philadelphia office building compared with a tent in Kuwait.

But the hours are the same. I worked in the office till five, missed lunch, then took the subway to the train station. I am now on the last train to Boston which will arrive 15 minutes after midnight if it is on time. It will be after 1 am when I get to my hotel and I have meetings tomorrow till after 10 at night. I'll be home Thursday night of Friday morning depending on whether I can catch the last train to Lancaster.

It's good I can use all that workaholic training I had in Iraq now that I am back.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Rank from the Outside

Three officers were in charge of the company I served in. They were all First Lieutenants differing only in date of rank. So the senior 1st Lt. of the three was the commander, next was the executive officer, next was a platoon leader.
I got promoted to sergeant the same day as another soldier in our company who is 30 years younger than I am. Since we can't decide who is in charge on date of rank, we would use time in service if one of us had to be in charge.

Inside the Army, the rank on our chests is very significant. Outside--not so much. A few nights ago, my wife took our son to movie night at Wharton Elementary School. One of the other parents is full time in the Army National Guard. I had not met him until movie night. My wife introduced us saying, "This is Sergeant ________ that I told you so much about." He looked at me, smiled, shook my hand and said, "Captain ________ . . ." He was nice about it, but he definitely wanted me to know my wife had his rank wrong.

I have mentioned before that most of the people I work with in civilian life have not been in the military and have no immediate family members who are soldiers. For my wife and most of my coworkers sergeants, captains, colonels, and generals are all soldiers who are in charge of somebody. My coworkers know in a vague way that there is a rank structure, but it is much too arcane to bother with. And it would be completely useless to try explain the difference among the various ranks from sergeant through sergeant major or what the heck a warrant officer is--and why are they almost all chiefs?

I am in the same situation as a bicycle racer. In a good year I am a mid-pack racer for whom a top ten is a great day. But I am a racer which makes me different from a non-racer. So people who know as much about bike racing as I know about figure skating ask me if I am racing in the Tour de France or other professional bike racing events they have heard about. So for those who know nothing about racing, I could be Lance Armstrong's teammate. For those who know nothing abut the Army, General David Petraeus and I are the same age and both were in Iraq last year, so how much difference could there be?

Canvassing Shows Just How Multicultural South Central Pennsylvania Neighborhoods Are

  In suburban York, Lancaster, Harrisburg and Philadelphia, I have canvassed in neighborhoods with multi-unit new homes like the one in the ...