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. . . "