not cool

Oh, and in some disconcerting news, I apparently can't dance and I'm not very cool...

-----Original Message-----
From: Compare People [mailto:apps+zdip=hf@facebookmail.com]
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 11:49 PM
To: David Witt
Subject: Social news for David Witt

Social News for February 29, 2008

Here is what your friends think about...
... your strengths:

most useful
most studious
toughest

... your weaknesses:

best dancer
coolest
-----------------------------

Other social news

Changes in your ranks:
4 places down, now #4 most useful
1 place down, now #5 most stu! dious
2 places up, now #5 toughest
1 place down, now #6 best dinner companion
1 place down, now #7 best companion on a desert island

How others compared you recently:
* "Who is funnier", you won 1 and lost 0 times.

Page generated by Chainn
The World's Gone Social

Prince Harry

Just a quick entry to say that I admire that Harry managed to get himself deployed after all. I've worked with JTACs from time to time, so it's interesting to know what he's been doing over there.

Why blog on the war?

Returning again to the why I have finally started writing about the war.
What follows is one of those emails you get from your fringe friends espousing some radical politcal viewpoint/near conspiracy theory. In the past I tended not to waste much time on reading them, much less replying to them. Of late, however, I have begun to realize that writings like this tend to be the whole reason some people will vote for or against a candidate or a whole politcal party, to the detriment of the country. So as ineffectual or useless as it may be, I have begun to write back. I unfortunately have had to watch the United States make some terrible decisions out of fear and ignorance over the last seven years; I have to try to do something to limit the damage of these actions, and try to reverse it. This is a duty, as much as any I have actually sworn to.

The following is reformatted to make it more readable, with the email I got first, then my response to it. Oh, and I am leaving the .pdf document attached, I don't know what Blogger will do with it.

~~~
Subject: Fw: MILITARY DEATHS FOR THE PAST 26 YEARS....UNBELIEVEABLE!!
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:32:35 -0800
Some very interesting figures here. Where has the press been on acknowleging, disputing, or advertising the facts concerning these figures????

Bet you didn't know the following! I surely did not..
These are some rather eye-opening facts: Since the start of the war on terror in Iraq and Afganistan, the sacrifice has been enormous. In the time period from the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 through now, we have lost over 3000 military personnel to enemy action and accidents. As tragic as the loss of any member of the US Armed forces is, consider the following statistics:

The annual fatalities of military members while actively serving in the armed forces from 1980 through 2006:

>>>1980 ......... 2,392
>>>1981 ......... 2,380
>>>1984 ......... 1,999
>>>1988 ......... 1,819
>>>1989 ......... 1,636
>>>1990 ......... 1,508
>>>1991 ......... 1,787
>>>1992 ......... 1,293---------------------------------------
>>>1993 ......... 1,213
>>>1994 ......... 1,075
>>>1995 ......... 2,465
>>>1996 ......... 2,318 8 Clinton years @13,417 deaths
>>>1997 ......... 817
>>>1998 ......... 2,252
>>>1999 ......... 1,984 ---------------------------------------
>>>2000 ......... 1,983
>>>2001 ......... 890
>>>2002 ......... 1,007 7 BUSH years @ 9,016 deaths
>>>2003 ......... 1,410
>>>2004 ......... 1,887
>>>2005 ......... 919
>>>2006.......... 920 ------------------------------------------

If you are confused when you look at these figures...so was I. Do these figures mean that the loss from the two latest conflicts in the Middle East are LESS than the loss of military personnel during Mr. Clinton 's presidency, when America wasn't even involved in a war? And, I was even more confused; when I read that in 1980, during the reign of President (Nobel Peace Prize) Jimmy Carter, there were 2,392 US military fatalities!

These figures indicate that many of our Media & Politicians will pick and choose. They present only those 'facts' which support their agenda-driven reporting. Why do so many of them march in lock-step to twist the truth. Where do so many of them get their marching-orders for their agenda?

Our Mainstream Print and TV media, and many Politicians like to slant, that these brave men and women, who are losing their lives in Iraq, are mostly minorities! Wrong AGAIN---just one more media lie! The latest census, of Americans, shows the following distribution of American citizens, by Race:

>>>European descent (White) .... 69.12%
>>>Hispanic ................................ 12.5%
>>>Black..................................... 12.3%
>>>Asian ...................................... 3.7%
>>>Native American .................. . 1.0%
>>>Other ...................................... 2.6%

Now... here are the fatalities by Race over the past three years in Iraqi Freedom:

>>>European descent (white) .... 74.31%
>>>Hispanic ........................... 10.74%
>>>Black ................................... 9.67%
>>>Asian .............................. . 1.81%
>>>Native American ................. 1.09%
>>>Other .................................... . 33%

These statistics are published by Congressional Research Service, and they may be confirmed by anyone at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf (Please look at this report site if you have the chance.)

Now ask yourself these two questions:

1. 'Why does the mainstream Print and TV Media never provide statistics like these?'
2. 'Why do the mainstream media hate the web as much as they do?'
You do the Math! These figures don't lie... but, Media-liars figure...and they sway public opinion!

----- Original Message -----
From: <davewitt@technologist.com>
To: X
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:23 AM
Subject: Re: MILITARY DEATHS FOR THE PAST 26 YEARS....UNBELIEVEABLE!!
Anyone who thinks that they can boil down something as complex as Iraq or Afghanistan to a half paragraph set of figures might be a bigger fool that the person who listens to him.

First of all, the last Americans to die because of our actions in our two(current) land wars in Asia haven't been killed yet, so any discussion of what this war has cost "us" is nonsensically incomplete. Further, "we" haven't paid dollar one of the financial costs yet either, we have simply pushed these costs on the next generation. If I live long enough to have kids, I do not look forward to the day when I have to explain to them that it took us 200 years to get our first trillion in debt, and only the length of my life (so far) increase that debt by nine times (so far), a debt they will have to pay off.

If you want to really to use figures to try and grasp this war, look for the answers to some of these questions: How long has the average servicemember been deployed in the last seven years? How many civilians (both American and other) have died in the course of the war? What is the current divorce rate in the DOD? Compared to ten years ago? What is our current retention rate among the new forces we recruit? Of our injured veterans, what percent are considered totally disabled by the VA? (For that matter, what percent consider themselves diasbled, as opposed to the VA number?) And BE ON YOUR GUARD when you use or read statistics. What exactly are they referring to? Something as simple as checking addition might reveal errors. I have attached the mentioned casualty list because I have uncovered disagreements between the numbers in the email and the numbers in the report and I can't figure out where the numbers in the email came from. For both 1995 and 2005 there are significant disagreements between the two.

I have a friend who's a surgeon and of late a debate on the ethics of the heroic measures on the part of the medical community has begun, because they are now saving people that wouldn't have survived their injuries even five years ago. They are often able to save lives while being totally unable to actually heal the injuries. This is not a topic you can simply quote statistics on, this a deep issue you must examine in detail and ask what horrific injuries to fellow Americans you are truly willing to accept in the cause of a given foreign policy.

Please do not construe any of my remarks as directed against any particular group. The debacle we are involved in is our collective responsibility; we are all complicit to some degree. Congress is most responsible for the runaway spending that has been going on the my entire life, because they weren't held accountable by THEIR boss, the American people.

As for myself, despite my first hand knowledge of this war, I have shied away from telling much of it. For me, this is mostly because to tell even small parts of this story accurately takes so long. Even to my parents, who have been watching my military career since 1996, it can take hours to explain the most basic aspects of military news. This is a downside to the all volunteer military: America at large has no idea how the military operates. For example, the surge, which in the mind of the public boiled down to the choice of "should we or shouldn't we," is really a much deeper balance of other factors. Consider: What did it cost the troops who were there when we so cavalierly extended them from 12 months to 15? I can assure you from personal experience that being extended while on rote is among the cruelest things you can go through, and my longest rote has only been 4 months. It might sound simple to just move up the deployment dates of the next set of troops, and make it longer, and extend those already there, but it isn't. Most people in the military have already been, and already have a date to go back. When the ratio of home time to desert time gets below 1, understand that this means the majority of US forces are spending the majority of their time in another country. I can tell you now there is generation of children who will remember this war as the reason their parents got divorced. In a larger sense, we have left ourselves no strategic reserve. Imagine any kind of serious conflict requiring military force beyond our current fights, and that is a conflict we don't have the troops to address. I am not saying the surge was worth it or not worth it, but these are some of the costs that went with it, and they were totally unmentioned by TV news, and beyond the thinking done by the average citizen.

So in regards to not talking about the war, I have tried to change policies. I am working on telling this story, or the parts of it I know. Anyone who votes needs better information than that on TV. There are few things I can emphasize more than this: Whatever you think you know about the war, you have only begun to scratch the surface. To understand this war, you need to STUDY. Hours of it, not just breezing through an email like this. I list a below a few of the most basic books on recent military history that I have found enlightening lately, as well as some web sources, like an independent war reporter who describes the details you will not find on the evening news.

The Generals' War, by Gordon and Trainor
Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, by John Nagl
Art of War, translated by Samuel Griffith
Scipio Africanus, by B.H. Liddell-Hart
Strategy, by B.H. Liddell-Hart
Masters of War, by Michael Handel
On Strategy, by Harry Summers

"Have a plan to kill everyone you meet"
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/01/a-plan-to-kill.php

Garry Trudeau has earned a lot of respect from me with the amount of time he has spent with injured veterans at Bethesda, and tried to tell their stories in his strip and letting them tell it themselves on his website.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/

Finally, in keeping with my new policy, I will try to blog a bit about the war myself at the address below. I depart for Iraq shortly.

http://iloaktree.blogspot.com/

respectfully submitted,
David Witt

<<2008-war casualties-RL32492.pdf>>

Wearing out your appetite

Posting via email seems to be working again.

On the subject of food. Food while deployed tends to be pretty decent. The chow halls here are the best I've eaten in while deployed. The quality is high, and there is also decent selection. They also have near beer, which is pretty cool. Overall, the food has always been pretty decent in my deployed experience. What I have experienced, however, is not that the food is bad, it just gets monotonous. My last rote, I was on nights for about 6 weeks once, and so the only two meals available were breakfast and dinner. I tended to choose breakfast, and then one day, I couldn't eat eggs any more. And I didn't eat eggs for about 8 months.

When this happens, I have to find things that I do like at the chow hall to motivate myself to go. For the second half of one rote at Al Udeid, I became addicted to salads (with a ton of ranch dressing). Another time, it was root beer. For most of my last rote in Kuwait, I had at least one ice cream sandwich, after every meal.

test 29 Feb

Testing email posts from work again

MUDCON, heavily armed radio

[Originally sent 25 Feb]

When it rains here, any unpaved surface immediately becomes very muddy. It slows us down getting to work, because we actually have to wash the cars off before entering the flightline to prevent too many rocks getting out there where they can damage the airplane. The secondary annoyance of this is when the mud that has tracked all over the place (and into every living structure) dries and becomes dust that fills the air endlessly.

Something that gave me a laugh the other day, the tagline of a radio station we get here: "100.1 Ali Base, the most heavily armed radio station in the world!"

Old friends

1Not a long entry today, really doing this while I wait for Facebook to load so I can check messages and play Risk. Interesting note on writing...I can't remember the author of this quote, but it was a writer who was talking about what makes a writer. He had had a mentor tell him once that you are a writer when you are actually writing, so don't worry about whether it's perfect, or the right topic exactly. If you are writing everyday, that makes you a writer.
(Of course, *good* writing is another topic entirely.)

I finally managed to meet up with an old buddy of mine today. Ruger is working in the C-130 squadron, which is fairly close to where I currently work, but he was on days I wasn't so this is the first time I was able to get over there to see him. We went and grabbed some breakfast and talked things over. Scott is a nav and we used to be in the 39th together. We have deployed together a number of times, and have an ongoing series of photos, one a year. The first was in 2003 in Kandahar, '04 was also in Kandahar, '05 was in Little Rock because we were both upgrading, '06 was Las Vegas for a weapon school graduation, '07 was Little Rock again. So this will be the sixth (six years of war!)

Also, one of our other pilots (Steve) is heading home soon. Partly as a result of this, I have moved to "nights," which is midnight to noon.

[Edit 7 Mar 08, OPSEC]

Whiplash; Why blog? What's a pilot?

If anyone out there has actually been reading all of these, you may have noticed that I tend to switch topics without warning between paragraphs. If I had more time, I would make each topic it's own entry, but I don't, and I apologize for the whiplash.

[Interesting note, a two ship of helos just flew over the building.]

So why blog? A topic I will continue to return too, but here's another example of the reason: Anne Frank has been in the news lately again, since a photo of the boy she loved has recently surfaced. There is hardly a better example of someone who has changed world in spite of a short life (and they're all too short) through writing. I'm hardly putting myself on par with Anne Frank, but her resolve is good motivation. Ironically, I haven't read her book, but I plan too; I have a copy that bought in Amsterdam last summer.

What's a pilot? The question comes up because some people might wonder if what I do (flying planes from the ground) still counts. It's a relevant question, and one the AF is still wrestling with. There are concepts in play here that are totally new and thus deserve a great deal of examination. For example, if one pilot is controlling two planes from the ground at the same time for an hour, should he/she log two hours of flight time? So, far the AF says yes. When I am in the ground station operating a plane, is that "flying?" That's what we call it so far, I personally think of it as operating. As to whether or not I am a pilot, I don't really care. I know what I do is important, and that's enough for me. Regardless of the new usage, the skills used as a pilot are the closest possible match to what I do now, so until we come up with a new word, it'll have to do.

[edit 3 mar 08: corrected spelling of "note" in helo line]

the long walk to shower; gym

I recently sent a post by email and it isn't showing up here...hmm, have to figure that one out.

The rooms here are prefab trailers with six rooms each. I have a roommate. The showers are in separate dedicated buildings, as are the toilets (toilets and showers are in separate buildings). Back in the day, they used to call stand alone toilet buildings "cadillacs," but I haven't heard anyone use that terminology here so far.

The real pain of having the running water in another building is that it means everything takes that much longer. When I get up in the morning, I have to dress, walk to the shower, shower, walk back, and change again. Add a 10 hour work day and there's not much leftover. I miss the dorms in Kuwait, where I could just walk down the hall...

Normally deployments are a good time to get in shape, but I really don't think I'll have the time this rote...I still have a masters paper to finish and I wouldn't mind studying some flying too.

Humor

I've noticed that one's sense of humor seems to get sharpened while deployed. One good source of laughs for me so far this rote is XKCD.com. Very funny, and actually educational as well. And incidentally, f*ck coconuts.

On the topic of web-based humor, see also Homestarrunner.com, which I became addicted to on my first rote.

I also started playing with labels, which are useful for sorting various entries into neat categories, such as the geekiness of playing with labels, as in this entry.

Okay, enough for today, I need to sleep.

other blogs

Added a few links to the blogs of friends, Erin, Emily, Rachel.

Revisionism

I do like the ease of that Bloggers gives to creating a user friendly, easily readable blog, and quickly. However, there is one aspect that bothers me thus far. If I go back and edit a post, the post text changes, but there is no notation of this. Thus, I could come back to these entries a year from now and insert things that I didn't really write, think, or experience at the time.

So far, I have made some changes to a few entries, some minor, such as spellings or typos, some major, like re-writing whole paragraphs. These changes have been made not long after the original writing, often when I still had the same topic fresh in my mind, so I don't think it's inaccurate to do this. At some point, however, I am not going to let myself got back and edit, simply as a matter of historical preservation.

I may no doubt learn how to resolve this as I continue to explore Blogger.

I was walking back from the parking lot this morning after work with my sensor operator, Emily. We were talking a bit, and as is normal for this time of day, a few people were up and walking out of the housing complex for work, wearing various combinations of uniforms and armor. A few days ago I had mentioned to Emily that we would probably start to recognize people since we were always walking back at about the same time, and today it happened, a airman walked by that I recognized from the combination of DCU colored armor with blue reflective belt over ABUs with the ABU cap.

Stryker vehicles...

...Look very weird at night.  They're huge, they have a wide wheel base, and they only have two headlights that are set about where the side mirrors on a big rig would be.  I passed a couple the other night driving back to work from the chow hall and I couldn't tell what they were until we passed each other.

technical details / nerding out...

Oh, and I just figured out how to update my time zone, so dates and time will now be accurate for Iraqi local time.

And I added a web call button using Grand Central, but of course I won't receive calls here. But if you call and leave a voicemail, I will be able to listen to it.

And I figured out how to put the Facebook link on the right hand menu instead of in a post.

Got to run now, i am late to take a shower before I go to work.

Corduroy, OPSEC, haircut

I hate the AF PT gear. The t-shirt is okay, but the jacket and pants are 100% nylon, which makes them loud as hell when I get up and am trying to get out of my room without waking up my roommate. It's like swinging big plastic bags around the room and zips like corduroy as you walk, too. Also, being nylon, should I get shot or hit with shrapnel, or be in a fire, they would burn and melt to my skin. Not a fan of that. Interesting note, our new utility/camoflage uniform (the airman battle uniform/ABU) has a 100% polyester undershirt that does the same thing. The white in the ABU also tends to glow in white light if washed with detergent containing optical brighteners. Likewise, not a fan.

Until I put my PT gear on at Al Udeid, I didn't really feel like I was deploying.

Clarifying OPSEC: It stands for operational security, and the idea behind it is that it is impossible to classify and control all the information we would want to classify to confound the enemy and still do our jobs, but you still want to limit the spread of that information. So, for example, the day I flew out of Nevada to deploy wasn't classified, but it was OPSEC, since it was a troop movement. Some of the old posters from WWII (e.g., "Loose lips sink ships,") capture the idea.

I have disagreements with certain instances of how this concept is used, but overall, I agree with idea. I certainly wouldn't want anyone out there to get hurt because of me. I bring this up at this time, because some people would object to me even writing this blog, and posting a picture of myself in uniform. So I screen what I write and post pretty carefully...I won't post many pictures, and probably won't use any with anyone else in them unless they okay it. But I do think it is important to put this information out there.

I'll go more in depth on this a some point, but when I watch the news on TV about the war, it's incredibly frustrating how inaccurate it is. I am not even referring to distinct factual errors (which do occur, but rarely). What is more often the problem as I see it is that the news media is reporting on something they know little about themselves (the military and warfare) to people who know even less (the public). While there might not be errors in reporting, it's information in a vacuum that lends itself to misinterpretation. For example, I was when we killed Zarquowi (sp?) in 2006. For three days, there was nothing but coverage of this on the news. Again, there were no factual errors that I saw (bearing in mind that I had no first hand knowledge of the operation myself). But to watch the coverage, you would think that an operation like this (airplane working with ground troops) was a rare event. It isn't. Operations like the one that got Zarquowi happen every day in Iraq. The only thing that was out of the ordinary about that op was the target.

I planned on getting a haircut before coming to the cyber cafe to write this. I deliberately let my hair get long before I deployed so I would be a little less conspicuous flying commercial and then on the rotator. (I was wearing civvies.) But when I got to the barbershop, there were about 25 guys there and 2 barbers, and I hadn't brought a book, so I skipped it for today. Maybe tomorrow.

[edit 6 mar 08] I may or may not note omissions for OPSEC with a label

Posting by email

Testing out posting by email. After I wrote the entry where I mentioned I'd like to post by email, I started to think about how it was possible to post from my mobile phone via Jott, and I figured the good people at Blogger would be smart enough to include an email post function, so I went searching and it was there. Apparently I can post photos too, may have to play with that.

Working things by email is the best option while deployed, since email is about the only electronic resource we have that isn't heavily restricted (either for security or due to limited resources, and even that varies: often large attachments are automatically stripped off).

Photo is me next to the plane with a service star. The picture was
taken in the states, not here. Deployed photos coming soon.

<<deployment photo.JPG>>

Showers

Last post was a test of posting via email, more on this later.

Standard deployed rules apply to the showers here: water is non-potable, so don't let it get in your mouth. 3 minutes per shower. This is better than it was: just before I got here, the water line for the whole base went down. There were no showers at all for something like 3 days, and then it was a shower every other day for about a week.

The schedule here is going to take some getting used to as well. In the C-130, the deployment schedule was basically one day on, one off, because you needed crew rest for the next day. Since we have the flexibility to swap out crews inflight with Pred, you can predict our hours much more reliably and schedule them much more accurately. The downside is, it means we can work 10-12 hours a day, no days off.

test

Dust storm; the math

There was a dust storm here on day 2, I think that is was gave me the cold and fever
I have now. I always seem to start out deployments like this.

So I brought a small digital voice recorder with me on the trip, I have already been using it to record diary entries. If I record 5 minutes a day, for 120 days, that's 10 hours of recording, probably more than anyone would want to hear about this trip.

Oh, and I'll be posting an email here I wrote on the way over, it helps explain my new motivation for blogging/recording history.

I can only access blogger through the morale center computers, so I have to make a stop on my way to or from work. I wish I could just email entries in and have them post automatically. I am working swing shift, although this name is misleading...I work about 1900L to 0600L. I think this shift is called swings (instead of nights) because the times shifted at some point from a real swing (~1600-0200) and they never bothered to change the name. The "day" shift is midnight to noon, and the "night" shift is noon to midnight.

My good buddy Scott from the Herc world is here, but he works days, so I haven't yet seen him face to face. He's a WIC grad and is working tactics for the herc squadron here.

We are currently operating out of a HAS down on the flightline, but will be moving shortly.

Iraq = Z+3

Time zone here is zulu plus 3 hours, putting me 11 hours ahead of Vegas. Not sure how Blogger tells what time it is.

Trying to make it easy to link to FB...

Share on Facebook

Circadian rhythms

Interesting note about changing time zones that I learned on my last deployment: it takes only a few days to adjust your sleep schedule, but 2-3 weeks to change your bladder schedule. When you combine this with an desert environment where you need to drink a lot more water, and a camp environment where the pisser is about 100 yards away, you find yourself getting up sometime in the middle of the your sleep cycle to get dressed and walk-run to the bathroom. Quite annoying.

Arrived in Iraq...

updated 19 feb 08: I have to get in the habit of not hitting enter, since blogger scrolls the lines for you. I normally write my monthly email in a basic text editor, where you have to insert
carriage returns to make the paragraph look right. So anyway, removed all those here...

So I'm at my final location in Iraq, been here a couple days. Already flown a couple times, this is the first time I've had time to check out the cyber cafe (which is also a DOD system and subject to monitoring).

We flew here in a C-17 from Al Udeid, which is where the rotator stopped after leaving from the east coast of CONUS and a few stops in Europe.

I hadn't been to the Deid in almost two years, and I haven't been deployed there in three, and yet it was all too familiar. I realized as they bussed us to our rooms and I was pointing out some of the basics to a first timer with me that I have spent more time at Al Udeid in the last 5 years than I have anywhere else but Abilene, TX.

Some notes for future entries: for opsec reasons I may omit or deliberately distort certain facts.
I may or may not note this when I do it.

An Iraq fact that gets overlooked even by DOD personnel: The U.S. has more contractors in Iraq than it does soldiers. No one tracks casualty counts on them.

They're booting us to clean the place, so I have to go.