One More Medal Reminds Me of Stuff That Doesn't Get Awards

On Sunday, September 11th, I received what is very likely the last medal I will get from the military. My unit gave me the Pennsylvania Meritorious Service Medal.  The citation talks about all the things I did for the unit.  It was about writing stories, taking pictures and re-enlisting after a quarter century as a civilian.

In other words, it talks about the kinds of things I did which got praise at the time I did them.  So the 200 words of praise in Army prose was about the stuff I did right and made someone higher in the chain of command happy.

The things I did in the military that were the most difficult and that I was most proud of were not the kind of things that people get medals for.

In 1973 when I got blinded in a missile explosion, I got no award.  Since the explosion happened on a test range in Utah, it was not a combat injury.  I recovered my sight and the use of two fingers that were bent and broken in the blast.  I will always be thankful for the surgeons who got the wire and other bits of shrapnel out of my eyes, but they had to operate six times to get all the metal out.  Facing he next surgery and that feeling of a wire being pulled from my eye was one of the more difficult moments of my life.  As was the night after the blast when I overheard a nurse say I would be permanently blind.

There was a moment in Iraq when I got aboard a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq in a brownout sandstorm so bad we could only occasionally see the other Blackhawk we were flying with.  At that moment, I thought about the big turbine engines on the roof of the Blackhawk just above the passenger area and about the big gear box between the engines that drive the big rotor blades.  In the crash I imagined, my guts were squeezed like toothpaste out of my Kevlar vest when all that machinery on top of the helicopter crushed everyone inside.  The flight was fine.  The weather cleared on the way back, and I got the pictures the commander wanted.

I am grateful for the award, but every award reminds of the actual best and worst moments I had in the military, not the ones for which I got the medal.

15th Anniversary of September 11, 2001

Fifteen years ago, I saw this image on the computers of the dot-com where I was working at the time.  I knew a dozen people who worked within blocks of the World Trade Center.  I called them.  I know that when you are inside a disaster, you can lose the larger perspective. I wanted to be just a bit of  perspective from outside New York City for Joe Chang, Helga Tilton, Esther D'Amico, Rob Westervelt, Rick Mullin and Andrew Wood among many others.  Those I was able to reach reacted like the New York journalists they are, calm and ridiculously confident that all would be well.

In 2009, in Iraq, I spoke about September 11, 2001, and my long road to Iraq from the day Islamic Terrorists attacked America.  In Iraq, I spoke about Helga Tilton.  She walked home from south of Ground Zero to the northern end of Manhattan in heels.  She was born in Germany in 1943 in Frankfurt, one of the most heavily bombed of the Germany cities.  Helga grew up in rubble, and now in 2001, at nearly 60 years old in her adopted country of America, she walked through that rubble to go home.  Helga died in November of 2007, not long after I re-enlisted. I still wonder if the dust of her birthplace and the dust of Ground Zero contributed to her death.

Combat Medics and MEDEVAC: Soldiers who save other soldier's lives

MEDEVAC Blackhawk helicopter landing at Al Kut, Iraq.

From the time I deployed to Iraq until now, I have written many posts about MEDEVAC and the medics, pilots and doctors who deliver Army medicine in the field.

Here are some of them:

Pamela Leggore, flight medic.

Sara Christensen, pilot.

David Doud, flight surgeon.

Kevin Scott, flight surgeon.

Jeff Kwiecien, flight medic.

All-Female MEDEVAC Crew in Iraq.

Cynthia Dalton, flight medic.

Quincy Northern, flight medic.

Dunker Training for MEDEVAC flight crews.

MEDEVAC Response time almost cut in half, Peter Huggins, pilot.

Anthony Meador, pilot.

Matt Stevenson, pilot.

Suzy Danielson, pilot.

MEDEVAC Chase Bird Crew.

MEDEVAC Pictures from Iraq.

Quincy Northern, flight medic.

All-Female MEDEVAC Crew

Retirement, or Not, Update

Senator Pat Toomey, Pa.

Earlier this week I spoke to two staffers in the offices of Senator Pat Toomey in Allentown and Philadelphia. Both of the men I spoke to were enthusiastic and helpful. They asked questions about my status and said they hoped they could help.  

If enthusiasm can get me back in the Army to serve my last year and retire, the guys I spoke to in Toomey's office will make it happen.

Today I got a letter from a staffer of President Barack Obama.  She said the White House referred my case to National Guard Bureau in Washington, which referred the matter to the Pennsylvania National Guard in Harrisburg.  They already said No, so I am not looking good there.

Rep. Joe Pitts, Pa. 4

My first appeal letter was to my Congressman, Joe Pitts.  His staff sent my case to National Guard Bureau in Washington, which referred the matter to the Pennsylvania National Guard in Harrisburg.  They said No. Case closed with the Congressman.

Of the three, I have no hope with Pitts, little hope with Obama and some hope with Toomey.

That's my Labor Day Weekend Update.

After 1,500 Posts the Top Ten Topics? Not Helicopters!

Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard Christopher Kepner

Today marks 1,500 posts on this blog since August of 2007 when I re-enlisted after 23 years as a civilian.  Last night I wrote to the soldiers who are the subjects of the most popular and the 11th most popular posts on my blog: Christopher Kepner and Pamela Leggore.  In between my stories about the current Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard and a flight medic who just returned from her second tour in Iraq, are stories Army life, but not about helicopters.

Pamela Leggore, Flight Medic

After Kepner, the most popular story I wrote was about CHUs, our homes on base in Iraq.  These sun-baked metal boxes were Home Sweet Trailer Home for most deployed soldiers and a lot of people wanted to know how we lived. 

                                            A Containerized Housing Unit in Iraq

After the CHU comes a post comparing Soviet and American Armor in the 1973 Arab-Israel War.  The tenth most popular post is also about tanks--a drunk German driver crashing into one of the tanks in my unit near the East-West German border:  Spoiler alert, the tank was undamaged.

Also popular was about about firing machine guns, about barracks liars in the Facebook Army, about "Military Privilege," a Tough Mudder competition, and one about the use of war language outside of war called War Metaphor.  

I posted a lot of helicopter pictures, but those posts were never as popular as the posts about soldiers' life and about soldiers, which makes perfect sense.  

My favorite post to write was "Shit as a Pronoun."  

Thanks for reading.  And thanks for sharing my 1,500th anniversary!!

Tanks of the World Spreadsheet

Here is the link to a Google Doc spreadsheet with my list of all the tanks in service in the world according to Wikipedia.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Caxsnp4CxlKwGFMLGldUsGaYMg_HA1RBZrzoeBbE9rc/edit?usp=sharing

I just found a source that said France has just 200 LeClerc main battle tanks and 206 in storage as of 2015.

If anyone has sources and is interested in helping to update the spreadsheet, the link should be open to updates.  Once I have the best current info, I will update the Wikipedia page.

Contact me if you have questions:  ngussman@yahoo.com

My Love-Hate Relationship with Russia and Ukraine

A Map of the Former Soviet Union. 

Ukraine is the yellow country on the far west.

The kind of person we are inside shows itself both in what we do and how we react.  I had a soul-revealing moment when I heard the news in 2014 of Russia invading Eastern Ukraine and taking Crimea. The summary of the thought that raced through my mind:  “You Go Vladimir (Putin)!”

Cheering for Russia in a military dispute with Ukraine is like cheering for the New York Yankees against a high school team.  Nevertheless I had a vivid moment, not of loving Russia, but hating Ukraine.

The face that came into my mind was my grandmother.  She and my grandfather escaped Ukraine, then part of Russia, at the turn of the 20th century when more than a million Jews were slaughtered in Ukraine in a series of attacks called pogroms. My grandparents had the double good fortune of making it all the way to America.  Many other Russian Jews fled to Eastern Europe.  Those who fled to Eastern Europe and their children were killed by the Nazis 40 years later.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

My grandparents would have described themselves as Russian Jews, not Ukrainian Jews.  For the last thousand years Ukraine has been Russia a lot more than it has been an independent country.  Mark Schauss covers the sad history of Ukraine and Russia in The Russian Rulers History Podcast, available on iTunes. 

While Russia, Poland and much of Eastern Europe has a long history of hating Jews, Ukraine is the most anti-semitic country in a very nasty region. 

Next August, when I ride across what my grandparents called Russia, my trip will begin in Odessa, Ukraine. I won’t be in Ukraine long, but I expect to have the same experience arriving in Odessa that I had when I first set foot in Germany:  “Can this beautiful place really be home to those who slaughtered so many of my people?”

I am re-reading Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” a haunting book that is “War and Peace” set in World War II, particularly in Stalingrad.  Currently I am reading the letter a Jewish mother in Ukraine is writing to her son in the Russian Army.  The Germans just took over her town.  The Jews are being rounded up, robbed and will soon be killed.  Most of the neighbors are happy and cheer the Germans on, taking the possessions and houses of the Jews.  The mother writing the letter describes women who were friendly for 50 years suddenly turning on her with venom. The neighbor thinks the Jews are getting what they deserve. 

My love-hate relationship with Ukraine and Russia extends through my whole life.  My first military job was live-fire testing of the US Air Force missile inventory, everything from the Sidewinder wing rocket to the Minuteman multi-stage nuclear missile, the main weapon delivery system in the US Cold War arsenal.  Then I was a tank commander on the East-West German Border waiting for World War III to start. 

When I went to college after the Army, the literature of Russia and the literature of Florence, Italy, became lifelong passions.  Chekov, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and later Solzhenitsyn wrote the books I loved most, along with C.S. Lewis, Dante and Machiavelli.  Now I am studying the Russian language so I can read the authors I love most in their language.  Russia is currently home to many brilliant authors, but who knows when they will be forced underground. 

From my grandparents persecution, to my Cold War childhood and military life, through finding the beauty of Russian literature in college, to my current plans to travel across Russia and neighboring countries, I continue to intensify my love-hate relationship with Russia and all of its sad and brilliant history.  At this age, my love-hate relationship with Russia and Ukraine is a permanent part of my life.