Then and Now: Contractors and Training

One of the big differences between the end-of-Viet Nam Army and today is Contractors. In the early 70s, soldiers scooped creamed chip beef on toast in the the Chow Hall serving line. That same soldier got up every day at 2 am to start cooking our high-calorie breakfast. Soldiers drove buses, dug field latrines, hauled ammo and did most other tasks, important and menial, in our every day lives.

Now contractors do many of these jobs. The intent, I suppose, is to allow the soldiers to concentrate on training, and to have more soldiers be warriors and fewer be cooks, clerks and drivers.

Which sounds good, but as someone who has been both a consultant and a corporate manager, I can tell you the world is a different place when you are paid by the hour (contractor)and when you are on salary (soldier). Soldier time is a fixed cost. If we wait three hours, the budget does not change. Contractors get paid overtime if things run late. Everyone in every part of government is worried about costs, so soldiers now know that training begins and ends when depending on the bus schedule.

In the 70s Army if we went to a training area and screwed up something, the soldiers who drove the buses waited till we were done re-running the course for a couple of hours. On our recent convoy training the big former infantryman who conducted our training said if we did not complete the exercise to his satisfaction we would do it again till we got it right. We (and he) all knew he was full of crap. No matter how badly we did, the buses were scheduled to arrive at 2pm on the last day of training. (Actually, we did very well so he got to leave early.) And his shift ended at noon that day. So the contractor was not paid past noon and the civilian drivers would have to be paid extra if they waited for us (NOT vice versa). So he could bluster, but at noon on the last day, he was gone. The buses arrived at 4pm, which was OK because a few hundred soldiers waiting out in the desert is OK--no additional cost when soldiers wait for the bus.

Fighting the War on Terror, One Latte at a Time

OUR STARBUCKS LOOKS LIKE THIS ONE--EXCEPT FOR THE SAND WALLS IN FRONT OF IT AND BLAST BARRIERS ON THE SIDES AND REAR

Now that we are back on base, at least for now, I am back at my favorite place in this sand-covered, blast-wall enclosed corner of the Kuwait desert: Starbucks!! Yes, there is a Starbucks here. More importantly, it is within site of our tent and it is one of the designated Hot Spots that dot the base. We buy Internet service for $12 per week from a local guy who also sells cell phones. But the access card is no gaurantee of service, so the wireless nomads like me move around the base looking for a good signal. Starbucks is one of the best and therefore very crowded nearly 24/7. I get up at 4am to come here and call home on Skype when there is enough bandwidth. At 4am, the place is at least half full. By 6am the 70-odd chairs are full and the good floor spots near the power outlets are filling up.

It really looks like Starbucks too, pine furniture, proper color scheme, snacks next to the register. The drink menu is in English and Arabic which is different than my local Starbucks. The prices are 20% higher than US Starbucks so a Venti latte is $5.

The other difference from the Starbucks at Stone Mill Plaza in Lancaster PA is that all the patrons carry automatic weapons. Whether we are wearing ACU camouflage or PT uniform, we bring our weapons everywhere so almost every table and chair has a rifle or machine gun underneath it. After a couple of days, I got used to M4s and M16s. One day a group of SAW gunners came in to use the internet. I don't know why, but it seemed slightly stranger to see M249 machine guns under tables and chairs than the usual automatic rifles.

Also, Starbucks in Lancaster operates without 6-foot thick sand walls in front and 5-foot high concrete barriers in the back.

A VERY POPULAR FASHION ACCESORY AT OUR STARBUCKS

So for the time being I am fighting the War on Terror, One Latte at a time.

Then and Now: Finding My Limits

In 1982 my sister got married on the 4th Saturday in October. That was also an Army Reserve weekend for me. My sister's wedding was near Boston, Mass. I helped set up a range on Friday, got Saturday off, then had to fire the .45 cal. pistol and submachine gun at 0800 on Sunday. (By the way, Happy 54th birthday Jean!)

I went to my sister's wedding and reception then drove all night to central Pennsylvania. In 1981 I fired expert with the .45 cal. pistol. In 1982 I fired marksman by just one round. Marksman is the lowest category. Afterwards our commander said, "Don't worry Sergeant Gussman, we now how well you can shoot."

I thanked him, but ever since I have known that morning is how I really shoot. I was in a tank unit. If I was going to fire a .45 pistol in combat, that means I am off my tank. So I would be tired, scared, maybe injured. How I shoot after driving all night was a better guage of how I would shoot when things were less than perfect. If the worst happened, I was going to wait till the bad guys got close if I only had a pistol.

On the desert convoy training we just completed, we arrived at 4 in the afternoon and got started with classes and orientation briefings. At 530pm my convoy commander sent me to find out where we would fire at 5am the next morning. I also drove with one of the lead instructors to a compound three miles away where they service our machine guns. Because I knew where the armorer shop was across the desert, I took the weapons over to get maintenance before we fired. I thought I would be staying up late. For a variety of reasons I stayed up all night except for an hour of lying down for an hour at 2am and swatting flies in the back of our 5-ton truck

So at 5am, I drove the weapon-filled truck to the range and got the 30 automatic weapons into the tents where range training started. I stayed with the weapons till 10 am then went to classes on convoy tactics till mid-afternoon. Then we went out and practiced convoy movement. We kept training till just after 9pm, then we could get some sleep. I started to unroll my bag in an open spot on the floor. I was beyond tired. One of the enlisted men, a guy who has a comment about everything, said that the spot of floor where I was unrolling my bag was where some other enlisted man was sleeping last night.

I exploded. I let him know how much I cared about reserved floor space in a tent in the middle of the desert. One of his buddies took him outside. The next day after we were done with training one of the sergeants from the fuelers said, "Sgt. G, I heard you really went off last night. Nobody was bustin' on you, they were just surprised." My roommates from Fort Sill heard about it. One said, "Damn! And I had to miss it. That must have been the shit." (See post on shit as a pronoun.)

Just as I cannot take the heat like a 25-year-old, missing a whole night's sleep is really my limit. I did sleep very well that second night and the training went well on our third day. I suppose it's good I have a reputation for not blowing up. But now I have less of a reputation than before.

Back from the Desert

We just returned from three days of convoy training. We learn to identify, avoid and react to IEDs, hostile fire and the other hazards of driving on Iraqi roads. We had a full week of the same training in Oklahoma and some of our guys had more convoy training in Pennsylvania before we left.

So the training itself was not new, but in the U.S. we had to pretend to be in the desert. Here the biggest training aid was miles of sand in every direction that occasionally blew up into a a sideways sandstorm, not to mention the clear, blue sky and the sun that here travels east to west near vertical. At noon here (actually 1pm because of Daylight Savings Time) my shadow is so small the fatter sand beetles can't get shade unless they crawl right next to my boot. With a mid-afternoon high temperature just over 100 and wearing full battle rattle we are hot. We wear a a 35-pound body armor vest, 4-pound helmet, uniform with long sleeves, heavy boots, a 9-pound rifle, and 15 pounds of ammo, knives, and other stuff. Plus a pound or two of scum from not showering. Nothing in the states prepares us for the sun and wind of open desert.

Another plus of training here is we our drivers get realistic practice for the first time. In the states going off road means wrecking some local habitat so we pretend to go off road to set up Medevac sites or avoid hostile fire. Here we drive on sand tracks and when we need to we jump the berms and head off road. We also had real up-armored Humvees to train in instead of the light models we trained on in the states. The armor changes the handling. My driver had us bouncing through ditches and sliding sideways. They told us to keep it real and he was only too happy to oblige.

Another realistic element of training that never happens in the states (at least in my experience) is the all the vehicle crews in each group sleep in the same tent. After waking up before 5am we all sleep on the floor of the tent at around 10 at night. There are no special facilities for the female soldiers out on the road, so we all have to deal with that.

We had one hot meal in three days, the rest was MREs. On the bus on the way back the first 50 jokes were about constipation remedies we would need from three days of eating no fiber and lots of greasy meat and crackers from vinyl bags. But I have said quite enough on this subject already.

Back to the Latrine

A few days ago, I wrote about how happy my Battle Buddy is that he found the luxury latrine 1/4-mile from our tent. Yesterday before we left of three days of training I decided to use the indoor plumbing. I have been slowing reading an old high school edition of Les Trois Mousquetaires in French. So when I went to the facility I was an ethnically Jewish American guy in a latrine maintained by a local Arab contractor reading a French book.

Is Dry Heat More Comfortable?

I got a comment asking if dry heat was any more comfortable than heat with humidity. I suppose it is, but I can't tell the difference. In 1976 I trained for two months in the southwest US desert before deploying to Germany. I had one shower during that two months--July and August--and it was hot. It was a dry heat, but I felt very hot in a 56-ton metal container (an M60A1 tank) and after two months, I smelled like I had been hot for two months.

Yes, it is dry heat here, but two days ago when it was 108 degrees on the range (a temp update from range control) I was HOT. I suppose it makes some difference that we are in dry heat, but it does not seem to matter much with 50 pounds of gear on. It's just hot. With summer coming I am expecting a lot more dry heat in my future. I will be just plain hot.

My computer doesn't like dry heat either. It has been shutting off after an hour or less when I am outside trying to get some bandwidth near the signal towers. It turns out it can't cool itself with dry 100-degree air. So my Mac and I think alike.

Hydration, Hydration, Hydration

Everywhere we go we hear "Hydrate!" "Hydration is Critical!" This follows the government/military penchant to use a multi-syllable Latin-derived word to show that a given task must be done. "Drink!" would not work because it would lead to the smartass retort "Drink What?" then "Drink Beer!" So we hydrate. But not always.

Because when one hydrates, one will sooner rather than later need to un-hydrate. Which is more of a problem than you would think. If we listen to closely to the all the calls to hydrate then get on a bus, no one is going to stop the bus. The hydrated soldier might have a couple of hours of serious discomfort before being allowed the natural consequences of following his orders.

And since we travel in groups, we line up for everything. That means the poor soldier in the back of the bus does the un-hydration dance in a long lane waiting for one of six portajohns with lines of 50 at each one. Like every other health pronouncement, one size never fits all and some people hydrate to the point of pissing away necessary salts. So they end up full of water and with dehydration effects.

I would hydrate more if I knew I could take a leak when I needed to. But it is quite clear the opposite is true. If I hydrate I will be sitting in a bus or Humvee think that nothing could be more beautiful than a brown plastic Kamal Al-Sultan (the local contractor) Portajohn. So I drinking slowly and often, same as when I am racing, and pay attention for signs that I need more water. And since much of our hydration is by individual half-liter plastic bottles, I always make sure I keep at least one empty with me in case we are confined and my personal emergency becomes dire.