An Orgy of One

I didn't think I'd see an ice cream truck in the middle of the desert, but this one truck went everywhere we did trying to get us to buy their stupid ice cream. They made so much money on my fellow soldiers it wasn't even funny. There was a taco truck, too, but that didn't seem as bad to me. It's one thing seeing a bunch of soldiers buying burritos, and another thing entirely to have an annoying pop-goes-the-weasel tune blaring 16 hours a day trying to get us to buy poorly formed popsicles.

Anyway, this picture I took of the ice cream truck didn't help me much when I was trying to convince my family how miserable NTC is.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

The National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, CA is where a lot of units go to train and prepare for Iraq. The climate and terrain is supposed to help us acclimate to fighting in the desert.

Average temperatures while we were there was probably around 110 during the day. It sucked. Also, the sheer amount of time wasted there was astounding to me. I've never spent that much time sitting around doing nothing.

So my commander decides to call a formation during our first full day there, and we show up and stand there while he attempts to motivate us. At one point in time, he asks "who here doesn't want to be here and would rather be home?" A lot of people raised their hands, so he had us do around 40 pushups. He asked again, and a handful of people still raised their hands. We did around 20 pushups after that. Meanwhile, I'm wondering - what the hell? Who doesn't want to be at home right now with their families? Making us do pushups in the desert sand for wanting to go home simply doesn't make us suddenly enjoy the desert. In fact, I'd venture to say that it makes us want to go home even more. Far be it from me to critique my leadership, but I think morale counts for something, and this doesn't help it.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

We use a lot of concertina wire in the Army. We soldiers also tend to own decent pocketknives and multitools (Leatherman and Gerber, mostly) that we carry around. So I recently discovered that the Leatherman Skeletool, while a pretty nifty device, is not quite sturdy enough to cut through concertina wire with its dinky little wire cutter.

For probably about a full minute, I stood speechless holding a broken Leatherman in my hand, wondering why my idiot coworker would be stupid enough to try it, or why I was stupid enough to lend him my Leatherman without asking him what he was trying to do.

Good thing REI has an awesome return policy.

Photo by Flickr user jonpayne and used under a Creative Commons license.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments

In the army, there's a pretty solid gap between the single term soldiers who serve 3-5 years and get out, and then the guys who serve 20+ years and retire on their Army pension. This means you'll have guys who started serving in the mid 80's when the Soviets were still around who get nostalgic about the good old days. I don't know what that means, but they really prefer the less efficient methods. They prefer the paper AR's and FM's over the searchable PDFs you can find on Army websites. Hell, some of them even rave about how much easier it was to take a typewriter and fill out a form with that, instead of using a fillable PDF and printing it directly off the computer. They still insist on doing things the cold war days. They emphasize stupid stuff like our NBC (nuclear biological chemical) masks and suits, as if we're still likely to go to war with an enemy with weaponized anthrax or sarin.

The worst is when they bitch and moan about how soft our current generation is compared to theirs. And this baffles the hell out of me - we knowingly joined the service in the midst of the 2 deadliest wars the U.S. has been involved in in decades (including the entire freaking time these senile cold war dudes been in the service), and they tell us that all we do is complain about stupid stuff. Apparently back when these guys were junior enlisted, the winters were colder, the summers were hotter, their gear was heavier, and they complained less. Which I think is a load of BS anyway - I know for a fact they didn't deploy for 15 months every other year, and that 13 combat deaths in a month didn't make the "least violent month for the military in the last 4 years."

They get angry with us younger guys when we complain about inefficiency, because to them we're just lazy. Um, no, I just don't like seeing tax dollars and man-hours wasted because I think it unnecessarily weakens the military of the country I love.

Labels: people

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

You know you're on a military installation when you start thinking it's normal to see some pregnant chick who looks like she's barely out of high school, and the 24 year old woman with 3 kids doesn't even really seem out of place.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

On base, a nonprofit called AAFES runs a bunch of retail establishments. They own Burger King, Subway, and Popeye's franchises, among other restaurants, as well as running liquor stores, internet cafes, laundromats, grocery store, and a Wal-Mart-like big box retail store. They also run the military clothing sales, dry cleaner's, alterations place, etc.

The thing with the liquor store is that the selection of beer and wine sucks. They mostly stock their shelves with awful cheap beer and wine that I would really only consider if I were under 21 and wanted to play beer pong. At first I thought that they just didn't stock high end stuff at all, since there probably isn't much of a market for soldiers who want to buy $8 6-packs and $20+ wine bottles. But every time I start thinking that, I see that stupid glass case where they stock the Johnnie Walker Blue Label and the Dom Perignon. Who are these soldiers who would spend that much on liquor but not $10 for a good microbrew 6 pack?

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments

So when I was in Hawaii I went to a lot of different military installations to visit friends I know and stuff. And the gate guards at the Air Force and Navy bases were always confused to see a soldier presenting ID. I'd get weird questions like "Oh man, Army...You ever get deployed to Iraq?" Which at first made me confused - because in all the Army bases I'd ever been to, the gate guards don't ask stupid questions like that.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

Unlike ordinary jobs, where one is promoted based on their job performance and their perceived ability to perform in the higher tier position, the Army has the most ridiculously bureaucratic process for promotion from Specialist to Sergeant. No matter what your job in the Army is, you have to appear in front of a board of senior enlisted personnel and answer a series of ridiculous questions. If you're a medic, don't expect any medical questions that would actually reveal your competence at your job - expect questions like "Which Army Regulation deals with the Army Weight Control Program?" or "What is the effective range of an M4 Carbine?" The especially ridiculous ones will ask what year the Army standardized NCO training schools Armywide, or which President established the Code of Conduct. Seriously, go to armystudyguide.com to see the study topics and sample questions that every specialist may be asked at their promotion board. Remember that these questions are asked of all soldiers, whether lab technician, infantry, finance clerk, or mechanic. So basically your inability to spew random Army regulation or Field Manual numbers (a skill completely useless in the age of Google) Also, it's not enough to answer the questions correctly - you must have a certain confidence and professionalism to your manner of answering these questions. They'll also make you do drill and ceremony facing movements, and occasionally will play games with you. I'm told by several NCO's that it's pretty common to ask a ridiculous question like "How many steps are on the stairwell in this building?" or "How many tiles are in your platoon sergeant's office?" The idea is for the person trying to get promoted to answer with some bullshit answer, full of confidence. Uh, I'm not an expert on human resources management, but it seems to me that this really isn't a skill worth emphasizing in the promotion process.

The best part of all this, is that to even go to the board you have to get the approval of your platoon sergeant and your commander. And then there are the whole time in service/time in grade requirements. Finally, just because you pass all these requirements doesn't mean you have enough promotion points to get promoted. Promotion points vary from job to job, so some people don't have trouble with this last hoop. But there are 5 hoops you have to jump through, and any of these hoops have veto power over your promotion. This leads to wildly inconsistent standards on who makes promotion from unit to unit (every board is different, and different platoon sergeants and commanders have different standards) and job to job (promotion points).

Photo by Flickr user ob1left and used under a Creative Commons License.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments

Recently my platoon went on TDY to Hawaii for 6 weeks. That in itself is pretty awesome, but the day before we headed out our commander called us together for a quick meeting. He then proceeded to give us an order to abstain from all alcoholic beverages on weekdays our entire time there. I am the 3rd youngest member of my platoon, at 25. Every single one of us is over 21. Over half of us have college degrees. I think we're adults and can handle ourselves, but the life of the junior enlisted soldier is to assume that we can't be trusted with the slightest responsibility. This is why every Friday we have to listen to our commander or first sergeant telling us not to drink and drive, beat our wives, cheat on our taxes, have sex with high schoolers, solicit prostitutes, or stuff like that. I don't really think I need the reminder every 7 days that these things are bad ideas.

Posted by Joe Dirtbag at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments