Classic Moments in Soldiering: Specialist in Charge

Our detail on Thursday, the last day before the Presidents' Day four-day weekend, consisted of moving equipment from one maintenance bay in the motor pool to another, then reversing the process. Basically, the unit is moving to the identical bay next door, and moving everything from that shop into their old one. In the process, we separated out all the recyclable scrap we could find, and "acquired" anything useful for the new shop. There were also a a few classic moments in soldiering. See, the sergeant in charge was in and out all day, which led to the very dangerous situation of Specialists making judgment calls. This inevitably led to the sight of a dozen soldiers standing around a pallet crate, spending inordinate amounts of time in debate over the best way to lift it without letting the bottom open and spill unidentified parts all over the place. Because, of course, nobody knew where the keys for the forklift were to be found and a simple pallet jack would have just made everything far too easy. In the end, though, things got moved, floors got slept, relatively little was broken or stolen, and so we actually got thanked for our efforts by a famously ill-tempered Sergeant First Class.

I think this picture is probably the best summary of the day:

A dozen or so junior soldiers + no supervision + industrial cling-wrap = PRICELESS.

Homecoming

This weekend I had the pleasure of meeting up with some old family friends in the Charlotte area. I hate describing them merely as "family friends", though. These were some fellow missionary families from my childhood in Liberia, people I grew up calling Aunt and Uncle, so they're really much more like family. It was awesome getting the chance to reconnect after long years away, catching up and reminiscing. I know I'll be back again soon, and once I get settled back in this area after deployment, it'll be a real blessing to have a surrogate family nearby.

Rock Band

Image Credit: www.xkcd.com

In California, our barracks continually echoed with the clicking and repetitive music of soldiers addicted to Guitar Hero II. In response, I boycotted the game, and still haven't touched it, despite the assurances of pretty much everyone I know that it's amazing. I had for a time also extended my boycott to all similar games, just on principle. At home over Christmas, however, I played SingStar, a karaoke-type game, with my brother (the man-of-infinite-resource-and-sagacity) and sister-in-law. Turns out it's a lot of fun. Well, last night I relented on Rock Band, the grandaddy of them all. It's got a guitar and bass controller similar to Guitar Hero's, with a microphone for vocals a la SingStar, with the addition of a drum set. It's a whole lot of fun. I'd hazard to opine that it's probably one of the best family-fun video games out there. And while it's certainly not a traditional musical education, the evaluation of the karaoke is a pretty harsh lesson in ear-training, and the guitar and drum lines certainly provide excellent rhythm and coordination training. Of course, I'm just trying to justify having this much fun playing fake instruments in front of a TV, but still.

Britain Embraces the Future II

As all too usual, an exchange with Shane has challenged me to clarify, elaborate, and reexamine my thoughts on my previous post. This is why I keep you around, you keep me intellectually honest. So here we go.

Europe is not very accommodating of the Muslim religion, and it simply doesn't fit well with Europe's cultural (but nonreligious) values.

I would agree with this statement, but only as it relates to Europe's historical cultural values of tolerance, individual liberty, social justice, and rule of law. The danger I see is the recent ascendancy of tolerance to a preeminent position over and above the rest, reaching a point where much of Europe has seemed willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. This does seem to be changing for the better, however, with greater public awareness and rejection of culturally-tied abuses (honor killings, female genital mutilation, and the like) that until recently had been kept under wraps for fear of seeming to malign someone's culture. That, however, is all on the side of civil society. Europe's political establishment is, in general, still working very hard to be accommodating of Islam with publicly-funded Islamic schools and mosques, and endless consultation with Muslim cultural organizations and councils on Islamic relations and the like. This of course means walking an impossible line between natives and conservatives resentful of being forced to appease the impertinent demands of relative newcomers, and immigrants and liberals for whom no amount of money spent on mosques or time spent in discussion will disprove the assumed societal bigotry against Muslims. It makes one very thankful for the Establishment Clause. There are any number of factors and theories why Muslim immigrants to America are visibly better-integrated than those in Europe, but I think America's ingrained culture of public tolerance of religion -- due, in my opinion, to the generally successful separation of church and state -- has preemptively defused the sense of conflict for most American Muslims (CAIR notwithstanding).

I'd like to think that Islam has no chance of substantially changing western values, and that as the Middle East modernizes they will moderate their own views.

So would I, my friend. It's one of those things that's hard to read. The idealogical resilience of a culture is very difficult to pin down, and it could well be that Europe's commitment to Western values is far stronger than it appears on the surface. There are some hopeful signs of a "backlash" of sorts, as I've mentioned above. I think the most hopeful sign is the reaction from those Muslims in Europe and America who've embraced Western political values and come to their own accommodation between those values and Islam, and are increasingly willing to openly defend their embrace of those values. In the end, this conflict may turn out to be intra-Islam rather than between Islam and the wider society. It is telling, and perhaps encouraging, that the strongest counterpoint to Dr. Williams has come from Muslim political and religious leaders who oppose the cultural balkanization these sorts of policies would engender. The response from Britain's Muslim communities, as far as anyone can read these things, seems to be bemusement more than anything.

As far as the modernization of the Middle East goes, I am actually somewhat hopeful, at least for select countries in the region. Several polls (which I will irresponsibly cite without reference) have shown public opinion in the Middle East to be more moderate than that of European Muslims on certain issues. The "wiring" of the Middle East and their enthusiasm for contact with the rest of the world can only be a good thing in the big picture. While the internet does also provide a medium for extremists to spread their agenda, I suspect and hope that the liberal axis of moderate Muslims in the West with reformists in the Middle East will prove stronger and more influential in the long run. Additionally, as Middle Eastern countries move tentatively forward on their political reforms, a return migration of wealthy, educated, and globalized expatriates could provide a massive stimulus for political and economic development, as it has in India and other places.

So, yesterday caught me in a pessimistic light, and Shane's challenge has forced me to acknowledge that there is as well considerable space for guarded optimism in this, as in many things.

Britain Embraces the Future

Well, of the institutions that might have been hoped to resist England's slide toward Londonistan, the Church of England can now definitively be counted out. Today the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has revealed in an interview his feeling that the adoption of sharia law in the UK is "unavoidable". His justification is that there are now large segments of British society (i.e. unassimilating Pakistanis, primarily) who "do not relate" to the British legal system. Of course, there's another segment of society that doesn't "relate" to the legal system. They're called criminals. And one could make a pretty solid argument, particularly in British society (see Theodore Dalrymple) that much criminality is the result of the culture in which criminals are raised. Should society work to "accommodate" this different culture with their own courts as well?

His point that sharia is misunderstood and shouldn't be solely identified with systems like Saudi Arabia's is valid, but misleading. The term sharia is about as specific as "Western jurisprudence", and in practice just as variable. There is no one system of sharia, or even, for that matter, one interpretation of what sharia ought to embody. Pretty much every majority-Muslim country in the world at least pays lip service to the principles of sharia in their legal system, but these systems vary widely between essentially Western systems veneered with Islamic language to the sort of Hammurabic tribal justice code most people call to mind when they think of sharia. Exactly which interpretation of sharia does Dr. Williams imagine coexisting with British law, then? And how long will the more radical elements of British Muslim society be content with coexistence?

This sort of thing would be less disturbing if it weren't exactly in line with the strategies proposed by some of the subtler of the Muslim world's radical leaders. I refer here to the "conquest of the womb", first elaborated by the Algerian president Houari Moumedienne in 1974, through which the Muslim world will complete its long-stalled conquest of Europe, not through military but demographic strength. This strategy, clearly outlined by Oriana Fallaci, hinges not on confronting liberal democracy, but on exploiting Europe's liberal principles to fatally undermine liberal democracy itself. The special protections afforded Islam under European anti-defamation laws (under which Fallaci was facing criminal prosecution at the time of her death) are already celebrated by radical clerics as an example of their resounding success in this arena. The establishment of government-approved sharia courts, regardless of of how watered-down and Westernized at the outset, is a huge step forward for those who seek to finish a crusade they don't see as having ever stopped.

There are widely varying opinions as to the threat radical Islamism poses to Western civilization. I'm of the opinion, which I hope to elaborate better in future posts, that the characterization of 'Islamofascist' terrorism as an existential threat to our way of life is vastly overblown. The very idea that a few thousand cave-dwellers could directly threaten the strongest civilization the world has ever seen is laughable. The real threat, as Mark Steyn has put so very well, is far more insidious: a lack of "cultural confidence" in that very civilization, which allows radicals to exploit our own values to promote theirs.

Approaching Lent

Coming from a liturgical church background, and only lately coming more and more to appreciate the power and beauty of the liturgical structure, I sometimes find myself at odds to explain this structure to my decidedly non-liturgical Christian friends. The liturgical seasons and the church year in general are particularly mystifying to them.

Thanks, then, to Cheryl of A Round Unvarnish'd Tale, for her beautiful explanation of the Lenten season and her church's tradition of "burying the Alleluias".

I can't but quote a stanza of the hymn her church uses for this rite:

Alleluia cannot always be our song while here below;
Alleluia our transgressions make us for a while forgo;
For the Lententide is coming, when our penitence is renewed.

Amen.

Open Mike Night

My only internet access these days is at coffeeshops. Sadly, unlike in more civilized parts where free Wifi floats on the breeze thick as dandelion seeds on a summer's day, coffeeshops here in Fayettenam all charge for their internet access. Barnes and Noble has by far the nicest atmosphere, but their AT&T Wireless access is pretty slow, and costs $4 for two hours. The price really isn't unreasonable, but I hate having a time limit. I makes me feel rushed to get stuff done, and obligated to "get my money's worth" even if I've only really got 20 minutes of internetting to get done. Recently I've found a local coffeeshop with a more reasonable price for nightly access, so that's where I am right now. Unfortunately, said coffeeshop hosts Open Mike Nights on variously unpredictable nights of the week. So now I'm getting sung at by random talentless amateurs. And I do mean talentless. If your best gig is singing Tears for Fears covers at a characterless strip-mall coffeeshop in Fayetteville, NC, you are most assuredly talentless. And then they berate me for not "responding" to the performer. Shut up. Please. I paid decent money for this internet access. Sorry I didn't realize I was contractually obligated to assuage the egos of Fayetteville's amateur music community. Rant concluded.

Classic Moments in Soldiering: The Barracks Are Never Clean

For the last two weeks here in the Rear Detachment (i.e. the skeleton crew holding down the fort for the units that are deployed), one of our main tasks as we wait to deploy ourselves has been cleaning the barracks rooms for the soldiers who will shortly be returning from Iraq. Granted, there's some satisfaction in that, because those guys certainly deserve to come home to a clean barracks room. But there's a little rule of Army life that comes into play. A barracks is never clean. Ever. There's definitely no such thing as "clean enough". So we've been taking scouring pads to each and every tile in these rooms, polishing them to an unnatural pearly white that's probably several shades lighter than the manufacturer's intended color. On top of that, we're also completely scouring off whatever nonporous finish once protected these tiles, leaving them clean and white, but positively begging to absorb the first dirt that comes along, ensuring that they will in short order be far dirtier than if we had never undertaken this job in the first place. Leave it to the Army, as usual, to make things about six times more difficult than necessary.

Like I said, this is still a noble, if unglamorous undertaking, to clean rooms for returning soldiers. But these are soldiers. How clean do they really want their rooms? Sure, give them a spotless bathroom and a clean refrigerator, but I would bet good money not a single one of them is going to note the glowing whiteness of their tile. I am, on the whole, far cleaner by instinct than my average colleague, and I can assure you the tile floor would be my last concern.

If I had more time, equipment, and ambition, I'd love to make a parody recruitment ad. "There's clean... and then there's ARMY CLEAN."

Here's a few YouTube videos along similar themes:



There's sleepy. And then there's Army Sleepy.



Here's one about cleaning, along the lines of the old "Army Of One" ads I joined under.

Krakatoa

So I've been reading an excellent book about Krakatoa, the volcanic island between Java and Sumatra that obliterated itself and about 40,000 people in a phenomenal explosion on August 27, 1883. It's a great example of one of my favorite sorts of non-fiction: a book that focuses on one event, resource, invention, or movement, but uses it as a focus for discussion of a much broader range of topics. In this particular case, the author uses the topic of Krakatoa to weave together the history and economics of Portuguese, English, and Dutch colonialism and the Dutch East India Company; the development of global geologic theory and the sciences of plate tectonics, vulcanology, and meteorology; the media revolution spurred by the then-cutting-edge transoceanic telegraph; and the still-burning fires of modern politicized Islam, one of the earliest outbreaks of which occurred in Java in the aftermath of the eruption.

The explosion of Krakatoa produced by far the loudest sound heard on earth at any point in recorded history, heard clearly up to 3,000 miles away on the Indian Ocean island of Rodriguez, for example. Most of those who heard the sound assumed it was the rumbling of a faraway naval bombardment, or a ship firing its guns as a distress call. The reason I share that particular fact is that for the last three days, as I hear the thundering reports of the artillery ranges rolling across Fort Bragg, I like to imagine myself in a different time and place, an unwitting witness to the unimaginable forces that roil beneath all our feet. Yeah, I really am that geeky.

Good News

More good news from Iraq, courtesy of Michael Yon.

Prediction

There's a lot of impulse these days to cast futurism as a hopeless exercise and mock self-styled futurists as pie-in-the-sky dreamers. This is invariably accompanied by sardonic references to flying cars, atomic kitchens and robot maids. Thing is, a lot of mid-century futurists weren't that far off, as the Paleo-Future blog regularly notes. And a few of them were almost reassuringly accurate. Consider this piece from 1950 predicting the year 2000, posted on Paleo-Future's sister blog Older Than Me. A few excerpts:

A new world unifying power - the United States - will have taken its place in the center of international affairs: forging a new "empire," different from Britain's, different from Rome's, indeed not an empire at all in the old sense, but a new core, a new catalytic force.

Rather prescient, no?

By the year 2000 some sort of world federation idea should have taken real form, with the United States, because of its commercial interest in the development of other lands, because of the blood it will have shed in their behalf, holding a lot of votes.

Or, as it happens, holding exactly as many as every tin-pot kleptocracy and failed state. Sigh.

The first man-made star will be circling around the earth by the year 2000.

Amazing that they failed to foresee that Sputnik was only 7 years away!

The nation's industrial and agricultural plant will be able to support 300 million persons 50 years from now - twice the present population.

U.S. population according to the 2000 Census? 281,421,906. Not bad.

Medicine by the year 2000 will have advanced the length of life of women to an expectation of nearly 80 and of men to over 75.

Some movie theaters of A.D. 2000 may be dome-shaped, with ceiling and walls arching together like the sky. These surfaces would be the “screen.”

I could keep quoting this forever. It's a pretty long article, and most of it is quotable. Read the whole thing, if you're into that sort of thing.

This sort of thing really feeds my internal struggle between my affinity for this sort of mid-century optimism about mankind's ability to craft a better future and my Dark Lutheran conviction that we must not put our hope in this world doomed to the flames. Not to mention my deep-seated distrust of any sort of optimism that approaches utopianism, realizing that no force has unleashed more horrors on humanity than the vain conceit that man can build a perfect world. So where should I find a middle ground? As terrible of a film as it was on so many levels, one line from The Day After Tomorrow sums up my understanding of a Christian's proper orientation to the future of this world: "save as many as you can". Our mission is not to "save the world", or endeavor for any grand solution to society's ills, political or otherwise, but rather to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, and comfort the dying, never forgetting that this. world. will. burn.

Uggh

Identity politics at its ugly worst, courtesy of CNN.

Hat tip Shane.

All-American

Well, the day has come. After over two years in training, I've finally inprocessed my first real unit. And not just any unit, I'm now part of the 82nd Airborne, the All-Americans, America's Guard of Honor, and our nation's Quick-Reaction Force. Oh yeah, I'm already drinking the Kool-Aid. I know full well that every unit in the Army probably talks itself up, tells their new soldiers how they are so much better than every other unit out there. But here, I actually believe it, though with obvious qualifications. I'm sure that there are units out there that are better at their particular missions than the 82nd would be, just by dint of specialization, but as far as traditional big-Army conventional-warfare operations go, I think we're probably right to brag that nobody can match the 82nd.

I think I'm going to be very happy with my time here. In one afternoon of inprocessing my brigade, I've already had the chance to be impressed by the leadership of the rear detachment. Which is telling, because it's not not exactly the cream of the crop who generally get left behind to hold down the fort while the unit is deployed. Also, it's very refreshing to get a sense of how much difference there is in the atmosphere in the real Army, versus in a training environment, particularly regarding political correctness. I couldn't count the number of times someone briefing us said something along the lines of "and if anything I've said today has offended you in any way, well, you can kiss my ass". Ahh, it's like a breath of fresh air.

A few choice quotes from our in-briefings:

• "Other units deploy their troops to places; to Iraq, to Afghanistan. We send our troops to War" (capitalization inferred).
  
• "We don't go to Iraq, we don't go to Afghanistan. Wherever we are, we're in Braggistan."
• (Responding to a new soldier's troubles obtaining on-post housing). "No, you're not going on a waiting list. We're the 82nd Airborne, our needs are simple. All we demand is special treatment."

Nice. As I said, I think I'm going to like it here.

In Army Limbo

It's a terrible reality of life in the Army that the units that govern transitions from one station to another (and as such present the first impressions of any new unit or duty station) are invariably dreadful, mind-numbing places staffed by the dregs of the Army, the proverbial "cream of the crap". From the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) where initial enlistment processing is completed, to Reception battalion where soldiers are in-processed to Basic Training, to the Replacement Detachment where I'm currently awaiting my in-processing into the 82nd Airborne, this limbo status presents one of the least attractive faces of the Army. In conversations on what I love about the Army, I've often mentioned the fact that the Army is far better than civilian society at pigeonholing incompetent people into dead-end positions where they can do little damage. Unfortunately, one of those pigeonholes seems to be the cadre positions in these sorts of processing units. And there is certainly damage to be done, not least to the careers of far too many young soldiers who, knowing nothing of the Army and unaccustomed to looking beyond the next day or three, end up going AWOL because they can't see what Army life is beyond Limbo. Now, if it sounds like all the cadre in Repo are total dirtbags, let me assure you, this isn't the case; several of our platoon sergeants seem like excellent NCOs. Good soldiers can certainly end up as cadre in Limbo as well, apparently just through terrible luck. The problem is that good leadership works more slowly than bad; a good NCO simply cannot make the sort of impression in a week that a bad one can. The reverse is true as well: since hundreds of soldiers process through every week, the only soldiers who will ever become personally known to the cadre are the trouble-makers and dirtbags, leading them to treat all in-processing soldiers as trouble-makers and dirtbags.

All in all, this seems to be really sticky systemic problem. Fellow soldiers have had similar experiences at MEPSs, reception battalions, and replacement detachments all across the Army, which leads me to think it's a fairly intractable problem as well; if there were an easy solution, the Army would have implemented it by now. The one upshot is that life in regular units always seems brighter after going through Limbo. That's a pretty crappy upshot.

Snow

My romantic side cannot help but feel that the snow that fell in Baghdad yesterday is a sign of hope. I mean, I don't know why it should be, but it's important not to underestimate the symbolic power of something like this, either. In any case, the thought makes me happy.

Back In Army-Land

It's a bit of a shock, after nearly a month of leave, to be brought back to the (sur-)reality of my life by a sign like this one:



Awesome, huh? The acronym, by the way, is shortened a bit, and pronounced "swick". Why not "swicks"? Who knows. The same reason BNCOC is pronounced "bee-knock", probably.

In other news, turns out I reported early for no reason. Today we had a formation to turn in medical and personnel records to start the process, but they called out 20-some names to the side. Turns out they just took the last people to have checked in, and we won't be inprocessing until next week. So this week we'll just be sitting around doing casual details and such. Which is pretty frustrating. I had been consoling myself with the fact that I'd only be stuck in the replacements company for a few more days, but apparently that is not to the be the case. On top of that, we don't have any wall lockers in our barracks room, because the barracks is so full with all the people inprocessing. So I'll basically be living out of my car for the next two weeks. Awesome. Welcome back to the Army.

Body Armor

Michael Yon puts in what I hope will be the last words on the body armor "controversy". In this Army, in this war, our top leadership in the field has faced the same sort of danger as every other grunt out there. If they don't want Dragonskin for themselves or their own sons, then I don't want it either. Simple as that, right? I'm really tired of hearing my leaders slandered as evil scheming corporate puppets willing to trade my safety for a lucrative contract. And should it surprise anyone that this slander is being led by the manufacturer of the rejected armor design? Really, is this all that difficult to see through?

Thoughts From The Road

Here are a few observations I've made on the trip to North Carolina, as well as a few from other recent long solo trips:

• Ruby Tuesday's salad bar is by far the healthiest and tastiest quick meal to be found reliably along interstates throughout the South.

• Washer fluid is probably your second-most important fluid after gasoline for winter driving.

• AM radio gets progressively worse as you approach the Appalachians. I didn't even bother trying the FM dial.

• The Appalachians are beautiful, however, even the parts visible from the interstate. I can only assume they're even better elsewhere.

• Ron Paul has apparently cornered the "people willing to wave signs from overpasses" demographic.

• When a car's roof is covered in ice, eventually it will warm up to the point that it all lets go at once, flying off in a huge ice explosion on the freeway and making it look like a surgical strike with some sort of ice missile. This is totally awesome.

• North Carolina stoplights have the longest wait for a left-turn arrow that I have ever experienced. This is not awesome. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.

• Our nation boasts an incredible selection of strange, intriguing, and potentially hilarious tourist traps and dubiously-named "attractions" along her highways. I've been to Wall Drug and the SPAM Museum, and neither disappointed. Some day I will take a trip and stop at every one I see.

• If the young women working at the burrito place where I had dinner tonight are anywhere close to a representative sample, I like North Carolina already.

That is all.

Heading Out

These weeks have leave have flown by, and now I can't quite believe that I've heading out today on the road to North Carolina, and I probably won't be back to Wisconsin for most of the year. Strange, too, to think that much of the meantime will be spent in Iraq. Well, I ought to be packing rather than blogging. There will probably be some more thoughts from the road later this week.

Gingerbread Fortress

At some point in the middle of December, a friend of mine casually mentioned that she was planning to build a gingerbread fortress and invited me to help out. Well, it never worked out for me to help her out with her fortress, but I sat down a few days before Christmas to build one myself. About an hour and a half into cutting out templates, I began to suspect that my job in the Army probably isn't using quite making use enough of my creative energies. Once I get settled into a schedule, I'm really going to have to take up a hobby or three. In any case, I spent most of a day designing, mixing, cutting and baking the gingerbread pieces, then enlisted the help of the Elephant's Child in assembly and decoration. Between the two of us, well, you can see the results.

I present, Gingerbread Fortress 2007:

This is in my parents' church's kitchen. My mom doesn't have orange countertops.

The attackers seem to have the upper hand. That battering ram is serious business, and nobody expected the siege towers.


Or the grappling hooks.

It's been a long, tough siege, and the infirmary is full. Grandma thought it was the firing squad. If it were the firing squad, they'd have frosting blindfolds, not frosting bandages. Don't think I didn't think about it.


Perhaps a thorough interrogation of the captives ("Not my gumdrop buttons!") may reveal a way out of this mess.


The situation is getting desperate. Will the walls hold?