Catholic Palm Sunday Service at Aviation Armory

The 2-104th Chaplain is Capt. Raymond LaVoie, a Catholic Chaplain.

Learning to Drive an Army Truck

Here are some shots from my last drill weekend of soldiers learning to drive the LMTV--the Army utility truck that replaced the legendary Deuce and a Half.

Drones as Anti-Terror Weapons

At dusk as I circled Ali Air Base, Iraq, on my bicycle I would first hear the model-airplane buzz and then see a Predator drone wobbling its spindly wings and landing gear as it descended slowly to the airfield.  Predators are completely unimpressive aircraft on an airstrip taking off and landing C-17 and C-130 cargo ships and every helicopter in the Army.

Buzzing slowly at take-off and landing they do not look like the best anti-terror weapon, but they are.

Cruising at 84mph with a top speed of 135mph they barely seem to move as they hover over a target area, scanning with cameras and waiting to launch a HellFire missile.  It is just that slow moving scan and precise targeting that makes Predator attacks the opposite of terror strikes.

Terrorists choose a target that will get attention, not caring who is killed.  American terrorist Timothy McVeigh killed babies in a nursery in order to strike back in his demented way against the government.  Arab terrorists wipe out markets full of women and children--Arab women and children.

Against this indiscriminate horror, the Predator waits to find and identify the cowards who send kids to blow themselves up.  The leaders of Al-Qaeda and other terror groups get targeted where they live.  When the terrorist gets into a car the Predator is cruising in the air, the pilot (far away on the ground) waiting for his target to move away from other people to give him a clear shot.

When the target is clear of other people, the pilot launches a HellFire missile.  The HellFire travels at Mach 1.3, faster than the speed of sound.  The target never hears the missile as it flies into his Toyota Land Cruiser at nearly 1000mph.  Everyone for miles around the target heard the missile break the sound barrier as it flew on its one-way mission.  The terrorist and his entourage are dead.  Everyone in the area knows who got killed and why.

The man who killed randomly is killed precisely.  The man willing to kill innocent people and hide among other innocent people is killed precisely and instantly.  I have heard ill-informed drone critics say HellFire missiles "Rain down" on a target.  They don't.  The missiles don't rain down, they strike like Zeus hurling a thunderbolt--precise and deadly.


Our government is responsible for where and when drones are used and I trust our government to use them wisely.  And when I hear that one of our enemies is killed by a drone, I think immediately of how many American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen could have risked their lives to do the same job.

You Go Drones!!!!

Making a New Friend in a Locker Room

When I got home last night I said exactly that to my wife:  "I made a new friend in the YMCA locker room tonight."

After many years of listening to my jokes, she was waiting for a punch line.  But it was not a joke.

And she thought I made this friend in a "Very Neil" way.

I stopped at the YMCA to swim after driving back from Philadelphia.  The pool is not very crowded after 9 pm, so I swam my exhausting 300 yards--my next post will be how hard it is to learn how to swim at 60 years old.

After swimming I went to the locker room to change.  There was no one in my section of the locker room, but across the row of lockers another guy was changing and playing Rap music on his iPhone.  In three months of going to the Y I never heard anyone play music in the locker room.  I didn't want to hear his music and I had my iPhone, so I started listening to my current audiobook:  The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  It is read by a guy with a British accent.

A couple of minutes later, another swimmer opened a locker near mine to get changed.  I shut off the audiobook.  He asked "Was that a British recording?"  I told him what it was.  He said he went to high school with a girl who married Solzhenitsyn's son.  I asked if it was the son who plays the piano.  He said yes and as we got dressed to leave we started talking about Russian lit, Medieval lit. and science education.

We kept talking outside.  It was a lot of fun to meet a guy half my age who has read Tolstoy and wants to read Dante.

It was a great way to end an evening--thanks in part to Rap music.

Not Going to Afghanistan

As some of you know, I had some hope of deploying one more time with the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

That will not be happening.

As you may have heard in the State of the Union message, the number of troops in Afghanistan is being cut more rapidly than the original plan.  The unit I was going to go with is not going.  And at my very advanced age even the most hawkish in Congress could not start a war fast enough for me to deploy again--at least let's all hope so.

But it is not like I will be bored. Yesterday I heard from Xavier on Facebook. Xavier is the 14-year-old from Haiti we hope to adopt. The paperwork on the adoption is stuck in the bottomless morass of Haitian government bureaucracy. Haiti combines Carribean urgency with French bureaucratic efficiency. He can only get on facebook occasionally, but it was nice to chat with him.

If you pray, please pray for Xavier and his orphanage.

Sergeant Major Moves Up

Today Command Sergeant Major Dell Christine took over responsibility as top NCO of the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade.  He takes over from CSM Christopher Kepner who is now the top NCO in the 28th Infantry Division.

CSM Christine takes the sword of NCO Leadership from COL David Wood, 28th CAB Commander.  Looking on are CSM Kepner (left) and CSM Dowling.

Command Sergeant Majors are, for the most part, men with big personalities who take care of the smallest details.  CSM Christine runs the state aviation safety office as his day job.  CSM Kepner is the operations manager for Schneider National, a long-haul trucking company.  Both men spend their working life making sure that their soldiers/workers track the details that keep trucks safe on the road, aircraft safe in the flight, and soldiers safe while they train for war.  

I guess we all admire people who skills we will never have.  I have never played golf, but love to watch a golfer loft a little white ball 300 yards toward a little flag and see that ball drop, roll and stop just feet from the hole.  Or gymnasts on a balance beam!!!  

Maintaining Army standards for thousands of American soldiers--all of who want to do their own thing--that is a job I can admire from a distance, but know it is as far from my abilities as rodeo riding!

NCO Induction Ceremony

At the end of today's drill, I went to the auditorium in the training center at Fort Indiantown Gap (Building 8-80) to watch an NCO Induction Ceremony.  Command Sergeant Major Worley of the 628th Aviation Maintenance Battalion decided he would have a formal ceremony after NCO Development Training for 11 new sergeants.

The eleven new sergeants stood in front of the the rest of the battalion's NCOs (about 150 of 256 were able to attend the ceremony) and recited the NCO creed.

One of the best parts of the Public Affairs job is that people ask me to go to the things they are proud of.  CSM Worley wants to make this ceremony part of the quarterly training for the NCOs in the battalion.  It reminded me how serious I was about making sergeant--before any of the sergeants in the photo above were born.