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