Done!!! 3 May 2016

Today I was talking to a guy who asked if I could be recalled if (when) there was another war.  I smiled and said, "I am so done!"

And really, I am about five miles past all done.

I am not retiring because I do not have 20 years of service.  I have 19 years of service and 17 for retirement because it is counted differently, so I cannot be recalled as a retiree.

Even if I was a retiree, I am three years past the recall age for enlisted retirees.

In fact, I am now too old to be recalled as an officer.  The upper limit for them is 63 years old.

In addition I served during the Viet Nam War.  I served in the Iraq War.

So they would be recalling 59 year-old veterans from the Gulf War before they get to me.

I am so done.

Volunteering to Enforce the Rules--So Much Fun!

No Coffee in this Theater!

Even if You Just Paid Seven Dollars for That Latte!

With less than three weeks to go in my final enlistment, I had a chance to be the sergeant at the door at the final plenary session of the engineering conference I am attending.

A young woman on the event staff was posted at the door of the 1000-seat theater and told to keep people from from bringing food and drinks in the auditorium.  

It was the only meeting in the the three-day event that barred food and drink, but the theater at the Houston Convention Center has a horrendous cleaning fee, so the rule was absolute.  And the bright, positive young woman assigned to keep drinks out did not want to tell people to throw away their drinks.

I was happy to help.  If sergeants do nothing else, they enforce the rules.  If the rules are arbitrary, so what, it's the rules.  About 100 people walked to the meeting with drinks.  Most tossed their cups and cans.  Two groups of people who wanted to finish their drinks formed on either side of the door. The young woman stuck with enforcing the rules backed away and let me take over.  

Only one guy started to walk past me.  He said, "I can stand in the doorway." I said, "After you finish your drink."  We had an eye-to-eye moment and he threw his drink away.

By the way, Lattes really were $7.  The Starbucks in the conference hotel charged almost $2 more per drink than other Starbucks.

Comparing MREs with Russian Army Field Rations IRPs Индивидуальный рацион питания (ИРП)

After I returned from Iraq, I made a video comparing 1970s C-Rations with the current Meal Ready to Eat or MRE.  The video currently has about 75,000 views and  continues to get steady stream of comments.  Here it is:

Next month I am planning to make a new video of the current Russian Field Ration, the Individual Food Ration (IRP) or Индивидуальный рацион питания (ИРП).  Wikipedia has a site with field rations of many nations including Russia.

The Russian ration is a 24-hour emergency pack which is only for use when there are no field kitchens. The instructions say soldiers should not eat these rations for more than six days in a row.

I was planning show eat the IRP then compare them with the MRE.  I am open to suggestions about what you would like to see in the video.

Let me know in the comments, or on facebook or by email:  ngussman@yahoo.com

OJ Simpson on a Russian Train: Book 9b of 2016, "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy

If OJ Simpson fled the scene of murdering his wife and her (possible) lover on a train instead of in a white Ford Bronco, then told the story to a fellow passenger, the story would be "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy.  The jealous Russian husband, like the football player, was acquitted of murder, but guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.

Whether the wife and the suspected lover were actually lovers is in doubt in both stories.  The murder weapon in both cases is a knife.  But in the Russian story, the lover gets away.  The jealous husband in the Russian story is not a former NFL running back, so he only stabs his wife.

The story opens with a half-dozen passengers discussing love and marriage in a compartment on a slow-moving train.  The argument, like so many arguments everywhere and through all of time, is based on misunderstanding the subject they are arguing about.  In this case, Love.  A very modern (in the 1890s) woman and her friend say marriage should only be based on Love, by which they mean Romantic Love--mutual attraction between the man and the woman.

An old man in the compartment asserts that marriage can only be based on a strong man controlling a weak woman and keeping her from following her natural inclination to sleep with every man in the village.  He says a marriage based on Romantic Love is doomed and that Love in marriage is "learned."  Tolstoy makes very clear the old man thinks it is perfectly fine for men to sleep with other women, just not the reverse.  When confronted about his double standard, the old man goes quiet.

Into this lively argument steps the Podnischeff, the recently acquitted murderer of his wife.  He asserts "with glowing eyes" that Romantic Love leads to tragedy, and says why he knows this.  Most of the other passengers, finding out they are riding on a slow train with a murderer, leave at the first opportunity, but the narrator sticks around to hear the story of the murder.

In the Podnischeff's story of the murder, Tolstoy makes clear the problems with basing a marriage on Romantic Love.  But Tolstoy also questions marriage itself.  However they get together, can two selfish people spend years and decades together and still love?  Tolstoy's own marriage answered that question with an emphatic No!

By the time he wrote this story, Tolstoy was 61 years old and becoming more of a radical both in his politics and his religion.

There is no military angle to this story, but it is clearly a story written by a soldier.  Love, death, passion and tragedy are intertwined in a way that I find in many authors I love who were soldiers.  

Book 9a of 2016: "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy

Why is a story about the life and death of a middle-aged, middle class, mid-career, mid-19th Century Russian bureaucrat on a 21st Century American Military Blog?  I'll tell you.

First, Leo Tolstoy was a soldier.  He served on the front lines in the brutal Crimean War near Sevastopol in some of the heaviest fighting.

Second, I am a soldier.  So I react to stories as a soldier.  And what I read is what at least one soldier reads.

Third, this time is my fifth reading of this wonderful story since I first read it in 1983.  It gave me a vivid picture of how suffering can be good and a haunting picture of what death can mean.

Soldiers face suffering and death as part of their job, but this story is not just an acknowledgement of that fact, it is a meditation on both.

Now to the story.

"The Death of Ivan Ilych" opens at Ivan's funeral.  In a scene only a career soldier or other government bureaucrat could appreciate, we first meet Ivan's best friend.  He is scheming about how to leave the funeral as quickly as possible and get to a card game.  At the card game, the discussion is about the vacancy left by Ivan's death.  Who gets Ivan's job?  And what of the vacancy left when someone moves into Ivan's position?

At the funeral Ivan's grieving widow begins wheedling and scheming to be sure she gets as many benefits as possible now that her husband is dead.

In the military, the best plan for advancement is to volunteer for leadership in the most dangerous jobs.  Lots of vacancies open up.  And the ambitious soldiers will speak quite matter-of-factly about who gets the next rung up the ladder of success when a vacancy opens.

After this tragic-comic opening of the story. We get a brief biography of Ivan.  He is ambitious, moderately successful, and strives to be correct in everything.  Just as he achieves a big promotion and prominent success, he falls ill and his life unravels.  In the final days of his suffering, he is cared for a selfless servant named Gerasim.  The care Gerasim gives him and the wrenching suffering push Ivan to question whether he lived as he should, and at the end, reject the life he lead.

Many fans of Tolstoy and scholars think "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is the best of Tolstoy's huge body of work.  I have read "Anna Karenina," "War and Peace," and many of Tolstoy's short stories and remain convinced that "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is his best work.

For those who know of my love for Dante's Divine Comedy, you know I can tell you the relative merits of each of the seven translations I have read.  The same is true of Bible translations.  Richmond Lattimore's New Testament is the best translation available in English.

Not so much with Ivan Ilych.  I like the translation I just read by Pevear and Volokhonsky, but I was not bothered by other translations.  So get a cheap copy on Amazon and read the best of a very great writer.

Russians Introduce New Tank, Armata T-14, While We Mothball Armor

Last year, the Russian Army showed the world a brand new tank at the parade celebrating the Russian victory in World War 2.

The new tank, the Armata T-14, represents a real advance in tank technology.  Russia plans to build more than 2,000 of these new tanks for its Army over the next five years.  

Designing and building new tanks means Russia plans to make tanks central to its battle plans in the future, differing sharply from U.S. and other western armies which are slowly removing armor from their war plans.

From 1976 to 1979 when I served as a tank commander in the U.S. Army in Europe, we trained to fight an overwhelming invasion by Soviet forces who vastly outnumbered us.  The war never happened, but we believed it would.  And we prepared for a desperate fight.  If you want to know what that war might have looked like, read Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy.

Our tanks were better, but they had a lot more tanks.  Almost everything we knew about our tanks and the Soviet tanks in battle we learned from reports of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War or Yom Kippur War.

One of those reports gave a breakdown of casualties by position in the tank:

• Tank Commander 60%, mostly hideous face and neck wounds.
• Gunner 20%, the gunner was the aiming point both sides used when they fired armor piercing rounds at enemy tanks.
• Loader 15%
• Driver 5%

Another way to break down those figures:  95% in the turret, 5% in the hull.

The T-14 has a fully remote-controlled turret and sighting system.  The three crewmen are in the hull of the tank.  Enemy tanks will, of course, aim for the hull, but it is easier to protect the hull than the turret.  Also, tanks seek places where they can hide the hull behind earth and walls and just expose the turret to fire.  These hull defilade positions as we called them will protect the crew while allowing the guns to fire.

The two main uses for tanks in modern warfare are to:

1. Fight other tanks.
2. Break though enemy lines and attack their supply lines.

By upgrading their tank force, the Russians are signaling they expect to be fighting an armored war, or they plan to use armor to punch a hole in enemy defenses and send an armored force to wreak havoc with supply lines.

Either way, they are expecting to fight in a place where they can transport large numbers of tanks easily.  That means along their own borders or in neighboring countries.  Sending tanks across oceans is slow and expensive, even for America.  The Russians clearly expect to fight in a place where trucks and trains can carry their tanks close to the battle.

In the next post, I will talk more about the specifications of the Armata T-14 and compare it to the U.S. Army's M-1 Abrams tank.

Great Story About How the Cold War Did Not Become a Hot War

The sub in the picture is a current Russian nuke boat.

In a story by Robert Krulwich on Nat Geo, we get the story of Russian nuclear submarines and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The story is here.

For those of us who served during the Cold War, the vivid thing in this story is the layers of restraint in the Soviet system.  During the Cold War, America faced a civilized enemy.  Our civilizations differed, but each side wanted to be the superior civilization.

Our current enemy, Islamic Terrorists, have no civilization and are the enemies of all civilization.

I very much miss having a uniformed enemy with a 1000-year-old culture.