Veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan to Retire on September 11

 

Master Sgt.Pamela Bleuel (left) in Afghanistan

In July 2009 I was pushing my bike toward a gap in the blast wall on Camp Adder, Iraq.  I lived in a trailer on the other side of that wall. A soldier wearing a bandana over her nose and mouth walked toward me and asked why the hell anyone would ride a bike in wind like this.  

I don't remember my answer, but Pamela Bleuel and I started talking about being old soldiers who enlisted late and had three college-age daughters back home.  She was 43 at the time, I was 56.  

Now she's 56, a master sergeant, and retiring on Saturday, September 11.  She enlisted in the year 2000 at age 35 to pay off her student loans.  She is a math teacher.  She liked the army a lot more than she expected, became a drill sergeant and when I met her was training troops in convoy security on Camp Adder.  She wanted to be convoy security but the rules at the time did not let her. She stayed in Iraq for two tours, then was in Afghanistan five years later. 

I visited Pam in her home in Kentucky in 2010 and 2014 and was thinking I would be visiting again this year, but plans changed. Maybe next year. I wrote about Pam when I was in Iraq in 2009.  Here's the story:

"I'd rather be digging a damn ditch than sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned office pushing FRAGOs (Fragmentary Orders)." That was one of the first things Staff Sergeant Pamela Allen Bleuel said to me when I met her walking across on open area in a sandstorm. She is a cheerful, imposing, funny woman of 43 who joined the Army Reserves on a whim just before 9/11 and now has an intense love-hate relationship with life in camouflage.

Until last month SSG Bleuel was the sergeant in charge of the convoy training school here on Camp Adder. She taught troops how to drive and fight in convoys and how to best use the ungainly MRAP fighting vehicles that are now the standard troop carrier across Iraq. She loved convoy training and did not mind when her tour was extended. When she did the unit she went to decided her training as a military police officer would be best used processing FRAGOs--the daily changes to orders that bubble through the military system day and night.

Bleuel loves being outside, moving troops, and has no desire to sit in air conditioning, but she will do the job as well as she can until the end of her extended tour. 

She joined the reserves in 2000 at age 35 with no prior military experience at all, because she saw two soldiers hanging up a sign in the small town in Kentucky where she lives. The sign said the Army would repay student loans for reserve soldiers. She had three daughters between 8 and 13 years old at the time, taught math at the local high school and had $30,000 in student loans. She signed up. She went off to basic at the end of the school year, trying to fit basic and advanced training into the summer break. Training did not quite fit her school schedule and she was just about done with training when the 9-11 attacks hit.

At that point she just wanted to serve and was jealous of the regular Army soldiers who were whisked away to airborne schools and other assignments. She served as an MP until 2004 when she trained to be a drill sergeant. Every summer after that she would "push troops" through Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the 11-week summer break at her school district. Her experience as a drill sergeant and an MP lead her to convoy training here in Iraq.

 
Now she is ready to go back to being a drill sergeant part time and a full time teacher. "Each year it gets easier to go back to pushing troops and harder to teach school," she said. "It's not the kids. It's the damn parents." She then gave her version of the teacher's lament that parents call her, email her, come to school to say their little child is special. "In the Army you don't deal with that. Mom doesn't call basic training," she said.

 
She also likes the structure and clarity of Army life, at least in training. "We have a goal; get the trainees ready to be soldiers." She also likes the deference of soldiers when compared to civilians. "When I get back from Knox and I am in a crowd at Wal-Mart, I wish I could yell 'Make a hole' and have everybody get out of my way."

 
Bleuel's wall is covered with pictures of her three children. She is very proud of them--even the one who, "Is a liberal and wants to save the whole damn world. She voted for Obama. We don't talk about politics." Bleuel is somewhere to the right of Oliver North politically and hates everything about France, which is a double layer of irony given her name.

 At age 43 she has eight years of service and will have to decide soon whether she will make the Army a career or not. I'm guessing she will. The look she has in her eyes when she talks about basic training and convoy ops is not there when she talks about Algebra 2.

 

Fascists and Fundamentalists Don't Care if You (or your mother) Die

 

Anti-vaxx, anti-mask Republicans don't care who dies

Fascism has no ideology.  It is not a coherent system of beliefs.  Fascists:

--Love violence

--Love displays of strength, especially against weak victims

--Ally with nationalist religion

Fundamentalists of whatever nationalist religion, strive for theocracy, because when their god is in charge, they get to speak for god.  

Fascists and fundamentalists take different routes to domination, but their goal is the same: full control of a state remade in their image.  

In the case of Islamic extremists, Jihad is fascism and Sharia is fundamentalism.  The Islamic fundamentalists who want to form caliphates bring together political fascism and fundamentalism in a state that is maiming and murdering its own people.

I wrote in 2016 that Trump is neither Hitler nor Mussolini because those fascist dictators were men of considerable personal courage--that was their path to power.  Trump is whining bully who plays a strong man on TV.  

But Trump is a fascist. After he left the White House, the Republican Party has become more fascist than he is.  

Fascists and fundamentalists are united in not caring how many of their own people die. A fascist of course wants to kill "them," anyone who is not part of their country, party, etc. And every fundamentalist is quite sure their god only cares about those of their faith--the rest of the world is going to Hell.

Neither fundamentalist nor fascist cares if you die. They don't care if your parents die, your kids, your neighbor, your spouse as long as they are triumphant.

Trump worshippers deny he is a fascist, but 2020 made clear Trump's fascist credentials as golden as his toilet.  Trump would not do anything to stop the spread of COVID if he thought it would hurt his chances of re-election.  He turned people against masks, he made antivaxxers of his own people, he did not care about COVID initially because it was brown people and old people dying in blue states as the sad chart above shows.

But now, the sick and the dead are the anti-vaxx, anti-mask dimwits who are Trump's most loyal worshippers. Trump does not care.  Most Republican leaders don't care. The Republicans who do care are hounded and threatened.

Right now in Afghanistan, the Taliban will be forcing Sharia Law (their sick interpretation) on their country.  They will put their Islamic fundamentalist program in place by beating, maiming, raping, enslaving and murdering their own people.  And they will believe they are doing their god's will.

Right now in America, Republicans are pushing a Christian fundamentalist agenda in part because the biggest group that voted for in higher numbers for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 was Evangelical Christians.  

Sacrificing their own people is not a bug of fascism or fundamentalism, it's a feature.  

Nazis are a special case of fascists with an anti-Semitic ideology.  Italian fascists were not anti-Jew immediately, but they got around to it eventually.  French fascists are deeply anti-Jew. They are the source of the Great Replacement Theory that was behind Trump's invading caravans. French fascists like an intellectual veneer on their hateful ideology.  They despise Trump. 

 

"Make a Buddy" Shitter

 

The times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

I have a lot of good memories of my military service, but "Make a Buddy" Shitters is not one of them.