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.

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. . .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. . . "

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Chemical Warfare, Part 2

Sometimes the footnotes illuminate and enliven a rather dull passage. In a section on civil defense Brown says, "Since it has to be assumed that an enemy would use the most destructive mixture of weapons available, gas shelters had to be bomb- and fireproof as well as gasproof." Why is this true? Note 48 at the bottom of the page explains: "High explosives to penetrate collective shelters and homes, incendiaries to drive the population into the streets, gas to kill in the streets." Brown tends to the passive voice in the text but can be vivid in the notes.

While the combatants of World War I expected gas warfare in future conflicts, none of the combatants in World War II attacked each other with gas with the exception of limited use in China. The aversion to gas warfare stands in stark contrast to the other two weapons introduced in World War I: the tank and the bomber. When World War II began in September of 1939, the German tanks backed by bombers made short work of Poland. The following spring the same German juggernaut ripped through France, Belgium, and Holland and defeated every major allied combatant except the United Kingdom. In the Pacific, the Japanese showed how effective ship-based bombers could be, winning many victories against neighboring countries in the early years of the war and eventually bringing the U.S. into the war with the carrier-based bomber attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

The bomber and the tank became indispensable weapons for the major combatants of World War II, but gas warfare did not. Brown says the first reason was revulsion by military professionals. A small group of senior officers strove to make chemical warfare integral to the plans of the U.S. military, but most professional officers wanted no part of warfare they saw variously as inhumane, cowardly, and out of their control. Gas is also more complicated to use than conventional weapons. Gas warfare creates a logistics burden all its own: using gas means providing protective equipment for all friendly soldiers operating in the area affected by gas. Gas munitions displace conventional rounds. The more gas rounds fired, the fewer explosive rounds that can be fired by the same gun. In the fast-moving battles of World War II, persistent gas would slow the successful attacker, forcing his soldiers to operate in an area they contaminated. And in the case of naval use of gas, there is a potential disaster in any ship having a magazine loaded with gas rounds. Any leak of toxic gas inside a ship leaves the entire crew in a contaminated container with little prospect of escape.

Brown shows how politics pushed the warring nations further away from the use of gas. First use by one army meant retaliation by the other. Germany and England bombed each other throughout most of the war. Even when one country was clearly winning, the other was able to retaliate. If one side used gas, the other would be sending gas back across the Channel in short order. Neither of these particularly vulnerable countries wanted to provoke gas warfare, nor did they want any of their allies to add gas to the mix of weapons. Also, the men at the head of the largest armies in the war were for their own reasons strongly opposed to gas warfare. Hitler was gassed during World War I and Brown shows that the German leader did not seriously consider using gas until the final days of the war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was opposed to gas as a "barbarous and inhumane" weapon; he stated to the world in 1943 that the United States would not initiate gas warfare but would retaliate in kind if necessary.

Brown's main narrative closes at the end of World War II. He shows that gas was never seriously considered as an alternative to the use of the atomic bomb or invasion of the Japanese mainland. In his conclusion Brown judges that the circumstances which prevented the use of chemical warfare in World War II still obtained in 1968. The professional military was largely opposed to the use of chemical warfare, and the main antagonists of the postwar period—the United States and the Soviet Union— both had many allies who would not want gas or nuclear weapons used on their soil.

Quite rightly, Brown took a measure of comfort in reflecting that the restraints which existed in World War II continued in the Cold War era. Alas, this modest reassurance does not carry over to our own day. Terrorists are not soldiers. As their name suggests, their purpose is to inflict terror on the civilian population, while at the same time they can trust traditional Western reticence not to respond with indiscriminate murder in retaliation.

For readers who would like to see Brown's book come to life, at least in fiction, I recommend Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. This 20-year-old best seller describes a conventional war in Western Europe in the late 20th century in which neither side uses chemical or nuclear weapons. The reasons could have been lifted straight from Chemical Warfare. The soldiers on both sides of the conflict share the attitude toward gas and nuclear weapons that Brown describes. And in a prescient prologue, Clancy's World War III begins with Arab terrorists blowing up a Soviet refinery, causing a crippling fuel shortage.

If I found the hopeful note in Brown's conclusion tied closely to the circumstances of the Cold War, I found some practical hope in Tucker's book. His long descriptions of the problems encountered by Saddam's chemists in the Iran-Iraq war—along with the troubles encountered by the cult that attacked the Tokyo subway—show how difficult it is to make nerve gas. The ingredients are corrosive and dangerous. The equipment required to make it is specialized and difficult to obtain. Even the most talented chemists and chemical engineers Tucker introduces in the book faced huge difficulties producing nerve gas—and in many cases failed partially or completely. Even for those with millions and millions of dollars to spend, nerve gas synthesis is very, very difficult. Luckily for us, no weapon in the real world is as easy to use or works quite as well as its fictional counterpart.

Neil Gussman writes a column on the history of chemistry for Chemical Engineering Progress magazine.

1. "Weaponized" means put in a bomb, artillery shell, mine, or other system for use. In 24, the nerve agent was loaded into pressurized cylinders that were intended for release in ventilation systems. Why the U.S. government would weaponize nerve gas in a form most useful for theft and use by terrorists rather than for the battlefield is a question only the show's writers can answer.

Chemical Warfare, Part 1

Just a few months before I decided to go back in the Army, I wrote about chemical warfare and spoke about it at my day job at Chemical Heritage Foundation.

So I had chemical weapons on my mind (luckily not in my lungs) even before I went back in the Army. The following was published in Books and Culture magazine in January 2007:


Nerve gas is becoming the weapon of choice for tv doomsday scenarios. In last year's season of 24, for example, Russian terrorists steal twenty canisters of a made-for-tv nerve gas and threaten to kill tens of thousands of people. They do manage to kill about 100 people, despite the best efforts of series hero Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland).

Watching season five of 24 makes it clear why we should be afraid of gas, particularly nerve gas, although this terrifying weapon was cleaned up and tamed for tv. The "Weaponized Centox" featured on 24 kills its victims with the lethal efficiency of real-world nerve gas—vx, Tabun, Sarin, and so on—but unlike other actual nerve gases, Centox then conveniently disappears.1 Real nerve gas poses a huge decontamination problem. It sticks to walls and wings, cars and computers, and it is just as deadly on the skin as in the air. When the tv nerve gas Centox is released within CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) headquarters in Los Angeles, the gas quickly kills nearly half of the staff, but those who make it to sealed rooms and survive simply return to their workstations and resume the high-tech fight against determined terrorists inside and outside the government.

Personally, I would not want to be tapping on a keyboard and drinking coffee in a room that had held a lethal dose of nerve gas just a few minutes before. But if TV gets the details wrong, it gets the terror right. Closed, crowded places make tempting targets for terrorists. The 24 terrorists attack a mall, offices, and attempt to attack thousands of homes through the natural gas system.

If you are interested in the history of the most deadly class of chemicals used in warfare, War of Nerves by Jonathan B. Tucker recounts many tales of developing, producing, and deploying chemical weapons, with a particular focus—as the title suggests—on nerve gas. The author of previous books on smallpox and leukemia and editor of a volume on chemical and biological warfare, Tucker takes the reader from the German laboratory where the first nerve agent was developed right up to the present.

So absorbing is Tucker's chronicle that you may lose track of time while learning how an errant U.S. Army test of vx nerve gas killed thousands of sheep in Utah in the 1960s. Lest you think this is exaggeration, I asked my then 15-year-old daughter, Lisa, to read chapter 16 while we were on a rather long drive to a mall. When we arrived, she had two pages left and wanted to finish the chapter rather than run straight in to Abercrombie & Fitch. Chapter 16 describes the life of the man responsible for the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack that left twelve dead and hundreds injured. Most histories of chemical warfare would not slow a teenager on the way to a clothes store.

In his dramatic style, Tucker occasionally reaches beyond knowable facts to get inside the mind of his subjects. He says that Dr. Gerhard Schrader, in his lab at I.G. Farben, "[a]s always, felt a pleasant tingle of anticipation as a new substance emerged from the synthetic process." At the time, December 23, 1936, Dr. Schrader was working in a lab decorated with "a large framed photograph of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in heroic profile." A man in these circumstances could have experienced a tingle for any number of reasons: chemistry, Christmas, or Hitler's portrait. But Tucker doesn't hesitate to read minds.

Aside from this quibble, the stories Tucker finds of ordinary people are both delightful and chilling. Delightful because they are well told and give the reader some insight into the kind of person who would develop or mass-produce weapons of mass destruction. Chilling because his subjects focus on the problem at hand—making thousands of tons of nerve gas, for example—with no apparent qualm. It's the job. They do it.

My favorite of Tucker's tales is the story of Boris Libman, a native of Latvia who could have walked straight out of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Born in 1922, Libman was just 18 when the invading Russians confiscated his family's land and property and drafted him into the Soviet Army. He was seriously wounded early in the war, returned to duty after a long recovery, and was again badly wounded, the second time left for dead. He survived the war and applied to study at the Moscow Institute for Chemistry tuition-free as an honorably discharged disabled veteran. Libman was turned down because he was officially dead. He managed to prove he was alive, attended university, and became quite a talented chemical engineer. He supervised production of thousands of tons of nerve gas on impossible schedules for many years. In trying to do his best for the Soviet Union, he made an error with a containment pond for toxic wastes. A storm caused a flood, the pond burst its dike, and tons of toxic waste poured into the Volga River. Months later the delayed effects of the spill killed millions of fish for 50 miles downriver. Libman was blamed and sent to a labor camp to appease an outraged public. But as it turned out, no one else could run the nerve gas plant, and Libman was quietly released and returned to work after one year.

Fear of toxic gas and wild exaggeration of its dangers have their American roots in the debate over chemical warfare after World War I. In Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (first published by Princeton University Press in 1968 and now reissued by Transaction with a new introduction by Jeanne Guillemin), Frederic J. Brown recalls the terror of gas during the years between the world wars. "Propagandists were totally irresponsible in their exaggerations of new weapons developments," Brown writes. He quotes H. G. Wells on the aftermath of a fictional chemical attack by aircraft using the Centox of the 1930s, what Wells called "Permanent Death Gas":

[the area attacked] was found to be littered with the remains not only of the human beings, cattle and dogs that strayed into it, but with the skeletons and scraps of skin and feathers of millions of mice, rats, birds and such like small creatures. In some places they lay nearly a metre deep.

Not quite "blood as deep as horses' bridles," but still a vision to warm the heart of apocalypse addicts.

Brown—Lieutenant General, retired, U.S. Army; he was a junior officer when he wrote the book—carefully recounts the military history of the use and, more significantly, the non-use of chemicals as weapons in both world wars and the period in between. Thorough and well documented, his book also captures the policy decisions and leaders' attitudes that kept chemical weapons, for the most part, off World War II battlefields.

Brown's book has the fat footnotes that have long been out of style even in scholarly publishing, but these footnotes are a delight for the reader who wants details. On page 18 is a three-paragraph, nearly full-page, small-type footnote describing President Woodrow Wilson's attitude toward gas warfare, with references to his biography and a meeting with the French commander at the battle of Ypres.

----More tomorrow-----

Books reviewed:
War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda
by Jonathan B. Tucker
Pantheon, 2005
479 pp., $30

Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints
by Frederic J. Brown
Transaction, [1968] 2005
388 pp., $29.95, paper

Medal Inflation, Part 3

Now it's time to say how I fall squarely on both sides of the Medal Inflation issue. I wrote earlier this week about Sgt. Oblivious. When he was swirling in the drain and failing as leader, he was also neglecting most other tasks that are part of managing a maintenance squad.

Most of the soldiers who served in our brigade got some medal for serving during the deployment. Enlisted men and junior NCOs got Army Commendation Medals, senior NCOs and junior officers got Meritorious Service Medals. The next medal up the ladder of importance is the Bronze Star, which I have written about in previous posts.

I got an Army Commendation Medal in 1979. I was very proud of this medal and kept it displayed on the wall wherever I lived since then. Very few soldiers in our battalion got ARCOMs back then. It was not just a participation award. But when nearly everyone gets a given medal, the medal becomes a participation award, like the very nice medal I got for participating in the Air Force Half Marathon on Tallil Ali Air Base last year. EVERYBODY who finished got one of these medals. I was happy with myself for finishing at all, but I was far enough behind the leaders that the best of them could have done a full marathon in the same time. Kids refer to participation medals as "you suck" awards. In my case, finishing on the far side of three hours, they are right.

I did not like the idea that the ARCOM I was so proud of became a participation award. But I ended up writing award citations for many of the soldiers in the squad of Sgt. Oblivious because his soldiers deserved the promotion points you get with an ARCOM just as much as the soldiers who had functioning squad leaders.

So while I thought medal inflation was wrong, I thought it was more wrong to let eight soldiers not get medals simply by neglect.

Teachers and professors are in the same position with their students. Do they grade fairly and then keep a good student from going to graduate school because her grades look low? Or do they grade like everyone else, help the student, and become part of the "everyone is above average" thinking? Tough decisions.

Maintaining standards in or out of the military is a constant battle. Everyone, especially those who admire a given standard, wants to be an exception or make an exception for someone they care about. That's how an Army combat unit, full of self-professed conservatives, can be as liberal as an East Coast art college when it comes to maintaining traditional standards on medals.

Adapting in a New York Minute

Yesterday and this morning, I was in New York City on business. Between appointments I had a chance to ride in Central Park. I was supposed to meet a friend who is an avid rider--he commutes into NYC from New Jersey. But the snow on Monday-Tuesday made the NJ roads slushy enough that Jim took the train.

At 5pm, yesterday, I left my hotel at 26th Street and 6th Ave. One of the entrances of Central Park is on 6th Ave, so I turned north on 6th and got in the 5 o'clock traffic in midtown.

When I first started riding again in Lancaster, I was a little bit tentative riding in groups. I had been riding alone for most of the year and I did not want to mess up in a pack so I would follow three or four feet behind other riders instead of right up on their wheel (where I should be).

But turning on to 6th Ave, I had none of that hesitation at all. I got into the bike lane on the left side of the avenue, shifted to the big ring and started riding as fast as I could toward the park. As I approached the odd-numbered streets I would be scanning for turn signals and making sure I kept my speed up and get right by the front wheel of taxis so they could see me.

When I got near Herald Square I could see people waving for taxis in the bike lane. They were all women. Then I remembered it was Fashion week. I kept my speed and stayed in my lane. The people standing in the bike lane were facing me and decided the best plan was to get out of the lane when I got close. Around 40th the bike lane ended so I moved into one of the center lanes. I got caught at three lights in the 34 block trip. As I rolled into the park I realized I had no hesitation at all riding with the limos and taxis and splitting lanes. I have always liked riding in traffic since I was a kid in Boston.

Riding in NYC traffic made riding feel completely normal again. Today I rode a few miles with the daily training ride. I rode right on the wheel of the rider in front of me. Whatever was wrong in my head, riding up 6th and down 7th Ave cleared that up.

Home from Iraq--"What was it like over there?"

Foreign students entering American culture are usually surprised then dismayed by the question "How are you?"

The foreign students, at least the ones who have never been to America before, try to answer the question and say how they are. They soon find that is a mistake. No answer is expected.

In America, "How are you?" is followed immediately without a pause by "I'm fine." Then by a monologue such as, "I got this totally awesome new Coach purse just by friending the Coach page on Facebook, like free. So did I tell you my roommate just went totally whole foods. Grrrrross!! . . ."

The fifty-year-old-white-guy riff on this I have been hearing lately is, "What was it like over there?" After that question there is a pause and a wide-eyed look that says 'Please don't say anything awful.'

My usual answer is, "Hot."

After that answer, the person I am talking to exhales audibly, smiles, then says, "I am so busy. We just got this new contract. My oldest is going to college next year. I don't know where we are going to get the money. . . ."

I am back to work and back to commuting on the train from Lancaster to Philadelphia. I sat with a guy on the train who asked "What was it like over there?" Without waiting for an answer he said, "It must be weird to be back where people care about nothing but themselves." Then he talked for the next 15 minutes about how tough it is for his business in this economy, how he is sacrificing for the business, etc.

I have two very good friends who both recently used the same expression while we were talking. One friend is from Iraq, one is from my service in Germany in the 70s. They each said, "There is no one like you in my world." They are both blue collar, from blue collar families, with blue collar friends--except me. Even though I had not gone to college when I was in Germany, I was reading a lot and learning to be a writer. I was leaving the blue collar world I grew up in during the late 70s, even before I went to college. And by returning to the Army as a sergeant, I was re-entering the blue collar world as an outsider.

I am glad to be back in my world. But it's really clear that the two worlds are not better or worse, just different. People who never read books can be endlessly interesting and funny. People who are very smart can be duller than butter knives.

Medal Inflation (Background): Specialist Sunshine and Sergeant Oblivious

When everyone dress alike personality almost jumps out of the camouflage clothes. Two guys who served together from the beginning of our deployment, wore the same uniform, but are a stark contrast in their personalities are Specialist Sunshine and Sergeant Oblivious. On the outside, they are both over forty, both need to spend more time at the salad bar than at the main course line, both initially struggled to pass the fitness test, and both are the kind of soldiers who cause pre-emptive groans when they open their mouths to speak at a formation.

Twins?

Not even close. Specialist Sunshine never seemed to get dragged down by circumstances. At every mission change, he just kept working. As his squad leader Sergeant Oblivious deteriorated throughout our deployment, Sunshine was one of the few people who did not make fun of him behind his back. Sunshine makes jokes, keeps to himself, works hard, and ran as much as ten miles in a day to get ready for the PT test after living a very sedentary lifestyle. Sergeant Oblivious barely passed the PT test then ordered a three-foot pizza to celebrate, because he could now forget about the PT test for several months.

Sergeant Oblivious failed as a squad leader almost as soon as we mobilized. But he had friends who, like him, were on the deployment because it was the only way they could keep their jobs as Army National Guard technicians back in America. Finally, after two months in Iraq, Oblivious was so bad he was relieved of duty as a squad leader. A week later, he was watching the sergeant who replaced him struggle with some of the paperwork involved in the job (which Oblivious so bad at as to be legendary). But it had been a week since Oblivious was relieved of duty for incompetence so, in his usual way, all of the actual events had been erased in his mind and he had replaced them with a new history of his own creation. Oblivious looked at his replacement and said, "That job's not hard."

Luckily, I was not drinking coffee when I heard this. Otherwise I might have spit it across the room. Next Oblivious was assigned a security job a pay grade lower than his own. He failed within a day. Which caused a junior NCO to be stuck on five weeks of guard duty with about 2 hours notice. And, of course, none of it is the fault of Sergeant Oblivious.

Like Sergeant Rumpled, Sergeant Oblivious is also convinced that he is quite attractive to women, despite being bald, unkempt, missing a lot of teeth, and being in known across the battalion as lax on personal hygiene. Oblivious believes many conspiracies both of the global variety (he does not know WHO caused the World Trade Center Towers to fall, but someone. . .) and knows people at every level of the military are out to get him. He keeps records. He takes notes. They are in a secret code. He cannot write an English sentence.

CS Lewis, comparing military service with a term in prison, said the military can put you under the arbitrary authority of a very stupid man. That is much less true today than during than 100 years ago, but it is still possible. Sunshine had good-naturedly worked for Oblivious for almost six months. I am glad for him that Oblivious is headed for some sort of oblivion and is out of any position of authority.

But even that is a cause of some anger and envy among his peers. Because he is prone to outbursts and incompetent, Oblivious was relieved of the duties of a squad leader, but he is still getting paid as one. And he may end up in an MWR tent signing people in and out of the public access computers. He gets an all-day air-conditioned job because he is under too much stress to work outside with everyone else.

When the military rewards failure, it ties a camouflage bow on the package.

And as the believers may already have guessed, Oblivious goes to Church and will start arguments about faith. Sunshine does not believe.

Adapting to New Environments

Nigel (left) and Jacari


I rode 31 miles yesterday. After being off the bike for a week because of the snow, I rode 12 miles Saturday and had a long ride yesterday with five other Lancaster racers who braved the wet roads.

I did not ride with them long. In fact, I got dropped on a hill no more than 300 feet long on the 3-mile ride to the meeting point at the official beginning of the ride. After the meeting point, I lasted another two miles, then turned off at the top of the first long hill. I did not want the rest of the group slowing down and waiting for me on every hill and that's what would have happened if I stayed. So I rode south to a 2.5 mile hill in the Village of Buck, rode to the top and rode home in a headwind.

After the ride, my wife said that the thing that might take me the longest in getting back to life in Lancaster is being able to keep up with my bike buddies. I think she is right. It will take months before I will be able to do the training rides. But I am still finding myself staring at landscapes that I would not have noticed before. I am still unpacking books and sorting papers from the year I was gone. I packed everything up because of all the construction in our house while I was gone. It's not big things, but I was clearly immersed in Iraq and after three weeks as a civilian, it still seems strange to have all the choices America offers.

Which lead me to think about Jacari. He will start spending weekends at our home by the end of the month and in the summer, we will begin the process of adopting him. Jacari is 11. He has been in foster care for almost four years with a really great family. He wants to be adopted, but even so, he will have so many things to adapt to with his new life.

I once took a stress test in a magazine. I was surprised to find that both good and bad events raise the stress level. The birth of a child and death of a parent had an equal score. Losing your home had a higher score than buying a home, but not a lot higher. So even if Jacari is completely happy with his new family, his new school, his new room, house, etc. he will be under some stress.

With yet another snow storm on the way, I miss Iraqi weather--at least Iraqi winter weather.