My soldiers cannot afford to train for war

Tags

Army, Army National Guard, training, war on terror, warfare

The theory behind the National Guard and the whole “one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer” thing is that you maintain a baseline level of readiness and training such that when invited by Uncle Sam to join The War, you can rapidly train up to the level you need for effective support to the collective effort.

So with only 39 training days per year, you focus on the universal tasks that everyone needs (shoot, move, communicate, don’t sexually harass anyone) and as many of the specialty tasks for your particular job as you can make time for, with the expectation that once Big Army calls, your unit will suddenly have additional money to pay for training days and schools and whatnot.  Once that happens, you will now be balancing your regular job or school, training for your Army deployment, and spending time with your family/friends/dog prior to being absent for some duration of time between nine months and eternity.

This can be somewhat stressful. On the one hand, your job wants you to wrap up some projects before you go and isn’t happy about you being gone for nine months, let alone additional weeks or months beforehand.  Your kids want to spend time with you.  Your spouse wants to spend time with you.  Your dog wants to spend time with you.

On the other hand, you need the training.  It might be in stuff you haven’t done in the decade(s) since your initial entry training.  It might be in something you’ve never done, either because it’s specific to your mission this time, or because it’s new since last you had training, or perhaps because you could never get into the school before (because people deploying have priority).  You may not (probably don’t) know exactly what you will be doing downrange, but you want all of the training you can possibly get before you go, to increase your odds of success when friendly lives may be riding on your competence.

On the gripping hand, you simply may not be able to afford it.

The only way you leave Bravo Company

Tags

Army National Guard, death, veterans, Vietnam

It’s a Navy town. When kids at church contemplate enlisting into the dirtside branch, their parents occasionally ask my input. In describing the components of the Army, I usually describe the National Guard as being more like a family. Whereas Big Army might rotate you somewhere new every 3-4 years, you could easily work with the same people in the same Guard unit for a decade or more. Holding a less common MOS, I could have easily retired from the Guard with 20 years without ever leaving my platoon–the only one in the state in which I am fully duty MOS qualified.  You get to really know and work with people over the years, sometimes deploy with them, and have very tight bonds that can last.

The punchline is that like a family, the Guard also has those batshit crazy people that you can’t really do anything about and you pretty much just have to wait for them to die off.

But sooner or later, everybody goes, not just the crazy ones.

Should have handled that differently: a tale of fail

Tags

Afghanistan, Army National Guard, I hate telephones, mistakes, office politics, workplace

Preface: I hate the phone

I don’t do phones very well. I spent two years as the Readiness NCO for my National Guard company in 2009-2011, running things the other 28 days per month, and I like to think I did a fairly decent job of it, but I came to loathe the telephone (and a lot of other things and people not germane to today’s discussion).  In my current job, my cell stays in the car and the office has only two phones for about thirty people.  In short, I don’t talk on the phone for days or even weeks at a time.  My cell plan is a cheap prepaid one, with unlimited data and unlimited texting, but only 100 minutes per month; I have only used all of those twice in three years.

So believe it or not, I am literally out of practice in using the phone, such that a phone interview is not exactly playing to my strengths.  I had one a few weeks ago, and though I thought it went fairly well, there was one question in particular that has been bugging me.  I didn’t answer it terribly, but I could have done it better.

Which was the theme.  The gentleman on the other end asked me (paraphrasing a bit) to describe an occasion where I wish I’d handled something differently, and what I had learned from that.

What I said

I gave a perfectly legitimate but not very interesting example from Afghanistan.  It was your standard low-level drama of two people who loathed each other, forced to live in extremely close proximity under unpleasant (combat) conditions for 11 months.  Kind of like a sitcom when you describe it that way, except that there wasn’t much funny about it.  Fun fact: a significant portion of my journal was devoted to plots to murder my assistant team leader and dispose of the evidence.

I talked about how in retrospect I would have tried to be a great deal more patient and meet him more than halfway; getting the mission accomplished without fratricide was more important than what was fair.  It was clear we were never going to be friends, but I could have swallowed my pride a bit more and worked with him better despite it.  I’ve learned a great deal since 2006 about “managing” people placed over me, and I think I could do it a lot better now.  (I also have thought quite a bit since then about hiding bodies in a desert environment.)

The problem is that this anecdote is necessarily vague (not wanting to put anyone to sleep by providing the full context) and eight years (!) old now.  OEF VII has an immediacy for me that is hard to convey to a stranger over the phone; it still seems super relevant to my life, but probably not to someone who wasn’t with us.  It’s bugged me since then, because I have other examples which are much more recent and don’t even require talking around OPSEC considerations.

What I should have said

In retrospect, I should have used a much more recent example from my current work environment, albeit undoubtedly not in this much nauseating detail.