first of the month

Pretty cool, I came into work today, they said we're going home tomorrow because the war is over.

April Fools!

tag: email, war

random ambiguity measure

I've started using the tag "disclaimer" on posts where I am deliberately altering information (OPSEC, gender anonymity). The trick to this is that while I may omit or alter information, the tag itself is an indicator. It's rather like pleading the 5th: while you can legally avoid incriminating yourself, you have shown the other side where to start investigating.

So it is much more powerful to use a certain element of random ambiguity. John Boyd loved to tell a story about a group of German troops who were retreating from Normandy. Seeking to confuse the Allies, they began reversing every road sign they came across. The Americans following in their path realized after a few such errors that all the signs were reversed and just began to do the opposite of what the signs said. The point of the story is that certain deception is no deception at all. It would have been much more effective, Boyd said, had the Germans only reversed a third or a quarter of the signs. Then the Americans would have had to double check every turn.

Poker offers an interesting analogy to this. What's a bluff in poker? When you play strong even though you think or know you don't have the cards. The trick is that over many hands, your opponents will eventually call many big bets or bold plays. If they call your bluff enough, they will know most of your big plays are bluffs. To introduce uncertainty then, you can't bluff that often, and most of your strong plays have to be based on real cards. Then your opponents will have to allow for the possibility that you are telling the truth.

There is also an element of this in random searches at airports. While you might think it possible to get something past the general inspections, there is always the chance that you will randomly get tagged for the more thorough searches.

I have often wondered at an application of this principle to the spokespeople for companies, organisations, movements, etc. If you always tell the truth, you may sooner or later have to tell an unpleasant truth. This may lead you to try to avoid a question. If this isn't artfully done, you may end up drawing more attention to the very thing you are trying to conceal. If you flat out say you aren't going to answer, you have the same problem as pleading the 5th. On the other hand, if you are willing to lie (as say, most big companies are willing to do), you will use a lie to cover an unpleasant truth. But when the truth comes out, as it often does (Enron anyone? Baseball steroids, Bear Stearns, Savings and Loan scandal, payola, quiz shows, etc.), your reputation for truthfulness is tarnished and now your opponents and concerned citizens will know if there's a suspected wrongdoing and you're reporting all is well, they will start to investigate. In other words, your lie has lost its power. (To return to the poker example, you have to tell the truth the majority of the time, or lying is not just ineffective, but counterproductive.)

In either case (trying to be truthful or willing to lie), the more powerful position is to not answer all questions, but to set aside a small percentage (1 in 10? 1 in 20?) and simply not answer them of the basis of creating ambiguity.

tags: opsec, disclaimer, history

Placeholder for Munich

Some thoughts on the movie Munich.

placeholder for gear

Writing an entry that I started today on the gear I wear.

minor changes

Not much to post today, trying to catch up on sleep and masters work on my short day, I did work on a couple of longer entries I'm not satisfied with yet.

In an effort to encourage comments, I have opened the blog up for anonymous comments. (I also turned on email notifications for comments, I will know when people post them, I've been bad on responding to a few of them.)

placeholder for go

original date of the entry on go

See the entry here.

Haircut

See my profile picture for my new haircut.

I used to grow the deployment stache, but I got tired of that so I came up with something else radical to do with my hair. (Our maintainers are all growing beards, but I can't do that obviously.)

Cyber cafe; free time

So I am here using the cyber cafe, and it is a busy day, so the time limits are shorter than usual so the TCN came around and booted me after only 30 mins. They are quite polite about it and not at all pushy, and they don't stand there and wait for you to log off, you just go turn in the card when you are done.

I was a little annoyed at this, because you can't get much done in only 30 mins due to the speed of the connection, but I dutifully logged off (actually we don't even have logins, it's generic, so I still have to go to work to get real email), returned the card to the front desk, and signed in for a computer again. (Anticipating delays at most base services, I brought a masters book, so the time wasn't wasted.) (Also, _Alive_ was on the TV...so I watched a few minutes of that, first I'd seen it.) After a few minutes, they called my name again and got my card, to find they were sending me back to the same computer. Ah, the inefficiencies of deployed life. At least my conscience is clear of stealing internet time from my fellow combatants. (I recently heard that a plan to provide wireless internet here has suffered an undetermined, long delay.)

What I am planning to do with my free time (today is my short work day (9 hours)): get a haircut and a Hepatitus B shot, woohoo. Maybe shop for a gold necklace, since gold prices have fallen well below $1000/oz these days.

free time

I am getting a little more time off lately (9 hour day every other day), so I am still doing some blogging, but I am working on some longer entries lately that I haven't published yet. More to come.

rando meal 2; 120 day counter

Today I had egg noodles, chicken strips, corn bread, a slice of easter cake, a chocolate glazed donut, and a banana. (The banana was ripe. So rare here and so delicious.) Also red gatorade and cranberry juice, and I picked up some yogurt, cocoa puffs and ruffles for later (I've been jonesing for the ridges lately).

A thought on the deployment world: I live my life 120 days at a time. If I can't start and finish a project in 120 days, it usually never happens.

gang tatts; rando meals

You can often spot a first time deployer in short sleeves because they have the large bandaid on their upper arm covering their smallpox shot. That or some crusty veteran that is on his/her 10
anniversary.

(They often give this shot right before you deploy, so you have a festering wound as you are crossing several time zones and entering the combat zone. Pretty dumb, you can cause secondary infections from the sore.)

Due to the unpredictable nature of our job, you often find yourself eating pretty bizarre meals. Today for my first meal (which I picked up at about 3 AM local, but didn't eat until about 6 AM due to flying) I had eggs, bacon, sausage and a slice of pumpkin pie with red gatorade (my favorite!) and cranberry juice.

IDF; pilot advice

Just sitting here about to start writing when the Big Voice came on:

"This is the Command Post. There has been an indirect fire attack. All personnel are released. All personnel are to remain vigilant for UXOs. All clear, all clear, all clear. I say again, this is the Command Post...."

My cousin is in IFS in Colorado and has asked me a few questions on flying via Facebook. The letter is somewhat interesting, maybe even to non-pilots, and I don't have anything else to write about today, so here it is.

~~~
4:19pm Mar 19th

Good stuff, well tell the Major I said hey. Got to fly yesterday, went pretty well. We did some ground reference maneuvers (S Turns/ Turns around a Point). Going up again today in two hours for a lot of the same. Should be a good time. They tell us we're ten days behind schedule and that as soon as the super senior class gets out its game time. I believe the words my flight commander used were, "Get ready for the suck... its gonna hurt." Basically they're double turning us up the ass to try and make up for lost time. Yay... at least it means less time in the Dirty P.

Any advice on mastering trimming or pitch picture?

~~~
2:48pm Mar 20th

Ha...yes, welcome to the suck indeed. Every training training program you go through with the Air Force will be just as rushed.

First let me say that piloting advice is very individual. I might say something that works perfectly for you, or it might be totally useless - this was one of the hardest things for me learning to fly. Sometimes, for no obvious reason, a certain instructor just can't teach things to me very well.

Okay, trimming. The trick with trim for me was that it was hard enough for me just to know what normal control movements were. Adding another movement on top of that would suck my concentration. And then I would forget I had trim in and have to fight it in some other phase of flight. So, here's what I did, may or may not be good advice and or work for you: I would just fly by hand, and only when I noticed how much pressure I was holding would I trim. And I wouldn't use a ton, or try to fine tune it, just a couple of clicks. (Your trim button/switch does click, doesn't it?)

Or, one other thing you can do is just plan a few clicks here and there,
i.e., when rolling wings level in the pattern in the Tweet after initial climbout (as I recall), I knew three clicks of nosedown was about right, and then I didn't think about it again for awhile. So just find the points in the flight where you have a lot of control pressure (nose down on final, nose up on t/o, etc.) and come up with a preprogrammed trim movement
(i.e. one click, 3 clicks, etc.)

(This is a really funny conversation considering trim in the MQ-1, but I'll save that convo for another time...the MQ-1, of course, as in so many ways, is completely different from normal airplanes.)

As for pitch, I assume this is on final? Pitch was even harder than trim, in terms of seeing the same thing as the IP. In fact, I'm not even going to try to describe a pitch picture in text. Let me just give a technique for final that I didn't really start using religiously until after pilot training. I assume you won't be doing any instrument flying there, but that is where a first learned this. I would give myself a PAR, which is to say, I would call out everything I was looking at, something like, "I am on airspeed, high, on centerline, now hot - pulling some power, on altitude, on centerline, on airspeed, low - adding some power, slightly right of centerline - coming left..." etc., all the way to the flare. This has a couple of advantages: the first was that because I was verbalizing it, it improved the speed of my crosscheck which improved my flying, and second, because I was verbalizing it, the IP knew what I was looking at and his/her feedback was much more focused, i.e., "you caught the sink, but you got into the sink because you pulled power too early," etc.

Incidentally, who are the instructors of this program? Active AF? Civ?
Also, how long is your commitment for your wings?

~~~
5:03pm Mar 20th

Ok, here goes:

I consistently adjust pitch and trim before power... which is obviously wrong. I'm going up today and I'll try flying first (pitch/power) then trimming as you suggested. The trim button doesn't click but there's a series of lights on the instrument panel that shows the setting.

My pitch on final is horrendous. Part of my problem is on my base turns I was making 30-40 degree banks and rolling out way early and inside the runway. Then it becomes an aileron/rudder struggle. Throw a bit of wind in there and forget it... I'm doing a go around. Yesterday was a good correction day for that... we did 6 touch and goes so I think I've got a better idea of what to do. I'm still flaring a bit too early... those numbers just get so damn big... :)

I have been talking through things lately and it's help tremendously, especially on checklist items. The tendency is to rush and then forget a step and that's never good for business (or check rides). Talking has kept me "honest".

The IPs here are mostly civilian. The AF contracted the training out to Doss Aviation:

http://www.dossaviation.com/

But with that, there are a number of active duty officers here. They serve as our "Military Training Officers" and some of the upper staff. They'll fly with us on occasion but typically just on check rides. A lot of the civilian IPs are prior military... many retired 04s - 06s. Good instructors over all.

The commitment for pilots is the same as its been: 10 years after you pin your wings on. As you know, I'm getting paid as a 2 lou right now but it doesn't count towards that contract. A reality I know you faced coming out of the zoo. But hey, if I wanted fair I wouldn't have taken a commission... ;)
~~~

3:49 PM, 21 Mar 08

Yes, don't trim before you know what normal control pressures are at a given attitude.

Wow, no click in the trim button, that would mess with me.

Another technique for learning pitch/power/trim is to get the plane relatively stable and then relax your hands a lot. The airplane will show you what it's natural tendency is. This is what you trim out. When you get good, you can remove you hands entirely and the plane should most stay on airspeed/altitude/heading.

Obviously you can't do this in a critical phase of flight like short final, turn to final, etc.

Overcontrolling (e.g., 30-40 degs on turn to final) is my natural tendency, so it's something I had to fight against, or you become you own worst enemy (e.g., you turn late, so you bank a lot, but then you turn too fast and roll out inside final, have to turn back and dump the nose because now you're too high, etc...one large correction leading to another large correction, all the way around.) You will get over the worst of it early on in the flying.

The verbalizing trick became a lot more useful in a crew airplane, because it keeps your crew on the same page (literally, in the case of checklists). Your co-pilot would know you were addressing sink, your nav would know you were addressing heading/centerline, your engineer would know you were addressing the fact that the engines were NTSing, etc. One of the single best pieces of advice I ever got from an instructor was this: "Any time someone talks to you in the airplane, say something back." If you don't say something to acknowledge it, they don't know if you heard them, if there's another problem, if you were listening to a radio call, if you are asleep/dead, etc., especially if they can't see you, as for a loadmaster in the back.

more questions? Send 'em.
~~~

That's the end of the letters, here's the oddity of the MQ-1:

Most airplanes trim to an airspeed, i.e., you set the trim nose level and the airplane should mostly stay in level flight at the same airspeed, assuming you don't touch the power. If you pull power off, the plane will pitch nose lower (that is, descend) to maintain the same airspeed. If you add power, the plane will pitch up (climb), still trying to maintain airspeed. But in the MQ-1, because of the number of computers between you and the airplane, you trim to an attitude, i.e., you set five degrees nose up and the airplane will fly it. The nose up attitude will start a climb, but if you don't have enough power set, you will run out of airspeed. Opposite problem with nose down trim (too much airspeed if you've got the wrong power).

4th care package; xkcd?; local

4th care package from my friend Ashley: Lifesavers hard candy, chicken soup, chewy granola bars, Girl Scout Samoas (these were consumed within 30 minutes of me opening the package), Crystal Light instant ice tea (one serving packets), and magazines. Thanks Ashley!

Oh, and does anyone get the latest xkcd? I haven't quite figured out if there's a punchline yet.
http://xkcd.com/398/

Also, I think I may have met an Iraqi for the first time. I was over at self help signing out a drill and he ran the counter there. I am probably butchering the name, but it sounded something like "father hussein."

slept in

I slept through my alarm today. I actually had time to recover from this because it's set 90 mins ahead of my squadron show time, but it did mean no food, no shower, and I shaved and brushed my teeth on the way to work.

tags: email, deployment

5 years on; swearing; Buddha

In spite of my best intentions for being in bed at this hour, here I am. But this will be short.

So I guess today is five years in Iraq for the U.S....wish I had something deep to say but I don't. I was in Kuwait for the third anniversary. I hope I'm not here for the sixth thru ninth.

Being deployed is not helping my resolution to swear less. I'm stressed out, which is the biggest cause, but there is also the factor of being away from home and in a strange place with a bunch of other people in that same boat; everyone seems to swear a lot. (It reminds me of a camping trip.) I remember when we went home off my first rote, we had to remind each other to use "non-deployment voice." (A bunch of us accidentally swore in front of children the first few days.)

[edit 20 mar 08: I forgot to mention there was a pretty long controlled detonation as i wrote this.]

I rode a C-17 on a leg of my trip into here. There is a little rivalry between the C-130 and C-17 communities. The C-17 is the newest airlifter, so it tends to get a lot of praise from the top brass,
and there is also the fact that the C-17 was designed to do some of the same things the C-130 was (assault landings). Depending on who you ask, though (me for example), C-130 crews are more experienced at this mission and thus more reliable. It is also an objective fact that we cause less damage to the runways we land on. In spite of this, the C-17 still gets way more publicity, quite unfairly sometimes. For example, on my first rote, a C-17 crew got DFCs for flying into a field that C-130s fly into on a weekly basis, and all we would get was one counter towards an air medal (that is, you need to do 19 more combat missions to get a medal ranked (much) lower than the DFC.)

A lot of the C-17s were built in the late nineties or early oughts, so you tend to think of them as new planes. But when I went up on the flight deck of the C-17 I rode, I noticed the paint on the throttle handles was worn clean and the metal underneath was shiny (a common feature of Herc throttles as well), and it reminded me that the C-17s have been hard at work as well. Their TDY rate has been higher than the Hercs in many of the last several years (approaching 270 days a year), and they too have their moments of eclipse in the press: Lebanon in '06, they were instrumental in pulling out the bulk of the Americans there.

blog going midnight

Today was worse than yesterday. I am so tired by the end of the shift I am making pretty basic mistakes left and right and have to check everything twice.

Juggling work, sleep and blogging, I have yet to make serious forward progress on my remaining master's paper, so my blog rate will probably drop off quite a bit. I'm sorry, especially to everyone who's reading it on a regular basis, it's just taking up sleep time and I am getting too fried at work to keep going this way.

I will write via email as much as possible, and I do still like to hear from people, even if I don't respond.

a bad day

Work yesterday was not good.

I can't talk about most of it yet for opsec, maybe later. It actually started out okay, then all went to pot right at the end. Afterwards I went to finance to invest in the SDP, but they were closed until 1400L for some kind of luncheon. They're closed on Sundays too, at a deployed location! As the Japanese say, a bad day is bad to the end.

earplugs; gatorade cocktail

When I rolled back my covers to go to bed last night, I found a pair of earplugs I had to use two nights ago and forgotten about.

For the curious: yellow gatorade + orange gatorade = not bad.

It's no green beer though.

Greetings from Iraq 12 March 08 (zulu+3)(293 words)...

A pretty boring letter, but I put all of my energy into the blog and I just wanted to send it so people would know where I was...

*For those of you getting this for the first time, I try and send out a
*little update about once a month to keep in touch with folks. Please
feel *free to read it, skim it, or ignore it. If you would rather not
get it, let *me know. See x
*for more info.

Greetings from Iraq 12 March 08(zulu+3)(293 words)...

Hello everyone!

I have arrived safely in the combat zone! (oxymoron?) I have been hard at work and already gotten a lot better at the launch and recovery process from constant practice. The upside to UAV ops is that you can predict and schedule operations better, since missions that go longer don't prevent a crew from going home to crew rest, since the plane can be landed by someone else. The downside is, it means you can fly your crews 12 hours a day, every day, and we have been. The squadron here is pretty small here, since all the mission work is done from the states, so I am getting to know the folks here pretty well.

The location here isn't too bad. The chow hall is outstanding, tied for the best chow hall from my entire career. The flying is challenging and fun so far, and there's decent amount to do with our (scant) free time.

On my way over, I was able to briefly meet up with Amy x while stopping in Germany. I also got to hang out with Amanda x when stopping at the Deid, the 40th's rote was over and they are now safely at home. (Interesting note, I deployed the same time as the 39th...I can't get away!) So far here, I have tracked down Scott x, and run into Frank x and Jeff x, all still in the Herc world.

I have been blogging quite a bit, please see the address below. I also included a link to my SIPR blog, for those with the means. I'm out of time for this letter, so I'll send this and write more later.

If you would like a postcard, please send me an address!

fair winds,
d

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Handcrafted emails by:
Witt, David-USAF
xxx
xxx
david.witt@xxxxxxxxx.af.mil
DSN 443-6454
blog:
http://iloaktree.blogspot.com
SIPR blog:
http://www.intelink.sgov.gov/blogs/david_witt
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
---,--/O\--,---

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Florida couple, both well into their 80s, go to a sex therapist's office.

The doctor asks, 'What can I do for you?'

The man says, 'Will you watch us have sexual intercourse?'

The doctor raises both eyebrows, but he is so amazed that such an elderly couple is asking for sexual advice that he agrees. When the couple finishes, the doctor says, 'There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way you have intercourse.' He thanks them for coming, he wishes them
good luck, he charges them $50 and he says good bye.

The next week, the couple returns and asks the sex therapist to watch again. The sex therapist is a bit puzzled, but agrees. This happens several weeks in a row. The couple makes an appointment, has intercourse with no problems, pays the doctor, then leave.

Finally, after 3 months of this routine, the doctor says, 'I'm sorry, but I have to ask. Just what are you trying to find out?' The man says, 'We're not trying to find out anything. She's married and we can't go to her house. I'm married and we can't go to my house. The Holiday Inn
charges $98. The Hilton charges $139. We do it here for $50, and I get $43 back from Medicare.

--message ends--

tags: email, deployment, humor, opsec, history

numbers

A recent article in Stars and Stripes (stripes.com) noted that the percentage of Americans who know what the number of American military deaths in Iraq is has fallen steadily for the last two years, now at about 28%. Let's address that, shall we?

The number of military casualties (also reported by stripes) is 3974 last I checked. I note military, because no one seems to report on civilian contractor casualties (1001, link). We also don't keep track and no one reports on Iraqi casualties either; the lowest estimate I have seen of late is more than 82,000 (iraqbodycount.org), and the highest is more than a million (link). The lower number seems more rigorous, because it is based on corroborated reporting of actual events. The higher numbers are based on statistical models. What else...oh, refugees. 2 million internally, another 2 million externally (link). And finally, the dollar cost: the U.S. is spending something like $275,000 a minute in Iraq (link), depending on the estimate you go with, and whether or not you count in future costs.

Pass it on.

[edit 18 mar 08: the listed number of contractor deaths is for all known contractors working for the US per the Dept of Labor, not just Americans.]

naughty peep show

as promised...

tags: pics, humor, email <<naughty peep show.jpg>>

3rd and 4th care packages; blog; dust

3rd care package: some new notebooks (Moleskine 8"X5" graph paper, fits in my flightsuit pocket perfectly) and books from Amazon (ordered them myself).

4th care package, from the parents: home made beef jerky, chocolate, jelly beans, Peeps, and a book from my mom, blanking on the title right now and I don't have it with me. Will update. Oh and a bunch of mail. Coincidentally, one of our sensors (Angus) got a very funny pic of some Peeps, which I again don't have with me. Will post soon.

Just a thought as I was walking back from the cyber cafe a couple days ago: What I am doing is basically a journal or diary. I used to keep a pretty regular journal (due to a high school english teacher that I can't thank enough), but fell out of the habit over the last few years. I was hard pressed for time, but another reason was lack of motivation. It took time, and I didn't feel like it was progressing at all, just a daily record of events or thoughts, and despite my desire to record history, I fell out of the habit. So why is blogging better? So far, because it seems people are reading it. I guess I haven't said this before so, if you are reading this, it is great for me to hear about it! Please leave me a comment.

Oh, and we're having dust storm right now. I got a nice face mask from maintenance to wear around to try to avoid increasing the cough I still have from two storms back. Pic of this eventually.

flight suit zipper; towel; gender anonymity

I was going to the bathroom today and I was zipping up my flightsuit afterwards and I suddenly realized that it was the first time I had worn that flightsuit. The zippers on new flightsuits often catch, because they are made of metal and the edges haven't been worn in, like a new key. You have to run the zipper a couple of times to make it run smoothly. This is a little embarrassing the first time if you are wearing it, because you have to stand there struggling to get the zipper down, looking like you don't know how to control your own pants. (Fortunately, I was alone in the cadillac.) (Also, for those of you wondering why I would struggle to get a zipper down, the flightsuit has a full length zipper running from crotch to neck that opens at both ends, so when you go to pee, you pull the bottom zipper up to open your fly and down to close it again.)

I got some new desert flightsuits from my old squadron two years ago after my last deployment. The desert ones can be hard to come by, so I grabbed a few when our resource advisor had some cash to spare. I felt a little guilty about it at the time, since I was planning on that being my last deployment. The Air Force, of course, had other plans for me (or maybe it was karma for getting some gear I didn't think I would need). So despite having it for two years, today was the first time I had worn this particular flightsuit.

In other embarrassing bathroom stories (and this one is literally bare ass), I recently forgot to bring my towel with me to the shower in the morning (2200L for me). I didn't realize this until I was already done with my shower, of course, so I had to dry off with the only dry piece of cloth with me, the scrub pants I sleep in. The rest of my PT gear would be useless for this purpose, being made completely of nylon.

On gender anonymity. Given the ratio of women to men in the Air Force (~1:6), I will occasionally use a male pronoun falsely when telling a story about female friend if I am trying to hide her identity, because to even say "she" puts her in such a sparse demographic that it would be easy to figure out who she is.

Okay enough for me today, can barely keep my eyes open. Can't wait to find the spelling and grammar errors I've probably missed in this entry.

cyber cafe down

Not quite sure what my last post looks like, I was posting it when the
internet cafe went down. I'll edit it next chance I get.

tags: email, blogger

what I miss; quotes

So I've been here almost a month and I am settling into routine. On the upside, this is good because I can anticipate my schedule a bit and know the fastest ways to get things done (get food, shower, go to the bathroom, etc.) On the downside, it means I am becoming used to my environment and I've stopped noticing as many of the little details that you pick up when you are new to a place.

I was talking with my sensor on the way home from work today and he mentioned how things like helicopters flying by, controlled detonations going off, fighters streaking over, general aircraft noise and of course the occasional mortar attack were no longer waking him up or even keeping him up at night. (Of course, being exhausted also helps.) One thing I definitely miss is peace and quiet. Beyond the things mentioned above, there is always significant background noise here...the humming air conditioner, one or more generators, or just the chatter of voices in the chow hall.

On the topic of things I miss...besides the obvious (family, my own room, freedom, etc.), sometimes it's the small things that are the most vexing: Normal commercials (Most of them replaced with crappy AFN spots). A lack of dust on any given horizontal surface. Metal silverware. Diversity in the people here: There are, of course, no old people, no children, and not many women here. I'm writing a much longer entry on women, more on that later.

A lot of our services here (laundry, housing) are provided by KBR. A lot of the folks in the chow hall wear name tags that say they work for Tamimi Global.

Humorous quote from a few days ago: I was getting ready to go to work, and at the time my roommate and I were on shifts only an hour apart, so we would be getting up at about the same time. I was walking out the door and JP said, "See you at work, have fun storming the castle." Well timed movie quotes are a constant source of entertainment while on rote. (For the youngsters out there reading this, the castle quote come from The Princess Bride.)

ash

We were driving home from work yesterday (I'm currently on a midnight to noon-ish shift, so this was midday), and the winds were just right to carry the ash of what looked like paper from one of the local burn pits. On the downwind side of the hangers the ash was eddying and swirling on the ground. Makes me wonder what else they burn there.

short

Short entry today, mostly I just did some editing and tagging. I forgot my notebook and my thumbdrive at work, so I don't have my normal notes to work off of, and to boot they are kicking us off to clean. But there's this: yesterday almost sucked.

Oh, and I've decided that tags don't count as later edits.

Ender

For those familiar with the book, I had an Ender moment recently. I was walking around in the building we work in, which used to belong to the Iraqis. There was a large sign painted on the wall, in Arabic script. It reminded me of Ender's realization that he is "living in the house of his enemy." (Forgive errors in my memory.)

For those unfamiliar, I highly recommend Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.

[edit 10 mar 08: added a bit about the building belonging to the Iraqi's, added "Ender" in place of a pronoun in the last sentence.]

2nd care package

From mom:

Peanut brittle, candied walnuts, breath mints and two bars of Lindt dark chocolate (70% cocoa, which is about as strong as I like it), and a tiny note.

The tide turns...

So at Wittering air base in the UK, commanders has told British troops not to wear their uniforms into a nearby town due to verbal abuse from opponents of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in the US, someone bombed a recruiting station in Times Square of all places, and proudly claimed it to Congress. I realize we are nowhere near Vietnam levels of discontent, but these events have to be somewhat similar. Don't know where it goes from here.

These stories in the 8 Mar 08 Mideast edition of Stars and Stripes available for free at www.stripes.com (though they only keep whole papers out there for 7 days).

tags: email, war, links

[edit 10 Mar 08: minor wording change to increase readability.]

coping mechanisms; alarm clock; dwell ratio

Some tricks I have picked up over the years for maintaining control of my emotions while deployed.

#1: get enough sleep. This is one is relatively personal to me, but if I can get at least 8 hours of sleep a day, my ability to be emotionally positive, mentally proactive and put up with stress is much increased. I read about a study not that long ago that advanced the idea that sleep deprivation causes an emotionally younger or child-like state (i.e., more prone to tantrums, less reasonable, etc.)

#2: goosefraube. I stole this from the movie Anger Management. This I just use when I catch myself getting spun up over a situation. I say "goosefraube" and try to just focus on the task at hand. (In think it is intended to sound German...which was the language I took in school, but that was a long time ago.) That or I use the line from Wedding Crashers: "I don't want to talk about last night, because it's just going to make me mad."

#3: trout. This I stole and modified from another source (A.I.), but I don't want to take the time to go into it here. This one is most effective in groups, and to understand how it works, you need a little background on a all too common problem: the stupid policy. For example, let's say your organization sends out a summary email on a certain topic every day. And this email goes to several different people or addresses. As virtually everyone who knows how to use email can tell you, it doesn't matter if you put an address in the To: line or the CC: line, the email will still arrive. Despite this, one of the listed orgs calls you angrily and demands that from now on, they be put in the To: line. The email still got to them, but they were on the wrong line. And all of the folks involved are sitting in the combat zone, and this is what they needed to pick up the phone and take 15 minutes of your time to talk to you about.

Trout comes in when your friend tells you this story in a room full of other people, all in the same squadron. Everyone in the room knows this is a stupid policy/act, and everyone agrees. And yet someone always plays the devil's advocate and speaks up (usually in jest) to defend the policy. When this happens, this person now becomes the proxy authority figure, and the victim of said policy unleashes all of their (righteous) anger on this flesh and blood effigy. The point is, it just pisses everyone off to have the conversation after describing the stupid policy. So when someone asks the leading question, such as, "Doesn't the email get to them either way?" The proper response to just say "Trout," and drop the whole conversation right there. I have found this tactic both extremely useful and extremely entertaining since my last rote, and spread it to new organizations I join so I can use it.

[Controlled detonation occurring outside the building right now as I type.]

I am using my mobile phone from home as my alarm clock. (I was somewhat hopeful it might find a network here to use (it's quadband GSM and unlocked with an international SIM), but no dice.) You have to use a battery powered alarm clock here because for some reason (some say converted 220V power), wired clocks gain a few minutes every day. Since I was already bringing my mobile phone, it saved space and weight in packing.

Military term of the day: dwell time/ dwell ratio. Dwell time is the amount of time you spend at home between deployments. Dwell ratio is the ratio of home time to deployed time. A dwell ratio of 2:1 would mean that for every month you spend deployed, you spend two at home. A lot of army troops are roughly at a 1:1 right now. All the stateside C-130 squadrons have been at 1:1 since OEF started in 2001.

first care package, first BX purchase

Got my first care package recently (which I sent to myself). Office supplies and several bars of soap. Not very exciting, but it's good stuff to have around. My first BX purchase was a towel (I brought one, but I like to rotate them through the laundry), and some soap. I mailed the package to myself because I didn't know if they'd have Lever 2000, but they did.

My athlete's foot is back. Got it on my first rote and I still haven't killed it. I wear boots too much.

The day that's going to suck...

...the day I lock myself out of my room.

tags: email, deployment

Small things to be happy about

Okay, this is getting bizarre. For some reason, Blogger takes a dislike to certain posts sent via email, such as the one below, and continually rejects them. I've sent this post three times, sometimes rewriting it and putting into a fresh email, but it always gets rejected. The last one I sent immediately after the digital history entry and that worked fine. Oh well...the series of tubes that is the internets works in mysterious ways.

[Originally sent a couple of days ago]

One key to happiness while dpeloyed for me is to find small things, each day, to be entertained or cheered by. Page a day calendars are great. Today, I am grateful for the fact that hot water is available the moment you turn on a tap or shower here.

How to make a deployer's day

I got an email the other day from a friend, and it reminded me again of something I always try to tell people about deployments when they ask what to send in the desert. The answer is mail, or email. I suppose this is different for different people, but for me, absolutely nothing compares to a message from home, no matter how short. One overriding characteristic of deployments for me is monotony. Every day, doing the same thing, in the same place, with the same people. News from home, no matter how mundane it seems to you, is riveting for me. A short message, or a good joke, can make the difference between a good day and a miserable one.

In the Herc, there were a few things that I never minded flying for, no matter how effed up the mission was: soldiers*, food*, ammo*, human blood (for transfusions), HR (human remains), and mail. I would do a helluva long flight with nothing but a small bag of mail and never complain because I know what it's like to get something from home when in BFE.

(*Soldiers (in the generic sense of anyone on the ground), if they are going directly into a fight or coming directly out. Never did this very often. *Food (and water too) when it is life sustaining for troops on the ground. I once flew ten hours to carry 3 pallets of potato chips; needless to say, I was pretty pissed about that. I never flew any HOA missions, but I had a buddy who actually flew a mission carrying water to some Marines out in the boonies somewhere. *Ammo if it was necessary for guys in a firefight. I've never carried much ammo period, and what I have carried was never that time sensitive.)

[edit same day: corrected punctuation in title]

digital history

I have a couple of buddies here who are really into World of Warcraft. It is an interesting development that so much human energy these days is directed into cyberspace, into a non-physical medium. The IRS is starting to talk about taxing activities performed for money in
cyberspace on sites/services like WoW and Second Life.

The part of all this that I find fascinating is the capacity we now have for living in a cyber world, where our environment is completely under our control and the normal limitations of space and logistics, in terms of interacting with people and what we can save for posterity, do not exist. Within reason, there is no real limit to the things we can save for future generations in the digital world. Unlike in the real world, there is no limited land, no worry of flooding, no fires or earthquakes. When something is created in the digital world, it lasts forever unless someone chooses to delete it, or the real world is so rude as to intrude by destroying a physical component to the system with one of the aforementioned disasters.

I believe that there are few things we do of lasting importance in life. A large part of most people's energy, every day, is spent just staying fed and warm (if they're lucky). These are practical pursuits, but in the end, they are just subsistence. What truly makes us unique among all the life in this world (if anything)? To me, it is the things we contribute that last beyond us. The accomplishments we complete, the children we have. Before now, even the greatest of accomplishments became anonymous after a long enough time. The cyberworld allows us, for the first time, however, to save a personal record on virtually everyone who wishes to do so.

One of the most interesting (and often necessary) things to do when joining a new organization is to sit down and start going through all the random directories and drives I have access to to find out how they do business. It is interesting the things you find. In my last squadron (the 39th), I was cleaning out all my old files and work and started doing some digging. I found a bunch of old documents in the pilot flight directory. I found a bunch of documents from July, August and early September 2001, dealing with things like airshows, stateside missions, quarterly awards. Then there was nothing until mid-October, when all I could find were deployment crew lists. The squadron was still on that deployment when I joined them in Manas in June of 2003.

Future historians will need to become adept at looking a digital documents, just as current historians examine physical documents. I doubt that anyone yet teaches a class on digital history, but I am trying to become one myself. It has become a hobby of mine to find ways to organize and save files on virtually everything I can find. It is an interesting challenge; the sheer amount of information out there is the greatest obstacle (this is the other side to the two-edged sword of the ease of document creation and retention we now enjoy).

An interesting manifestation of this shift to the digital realm is my automatic document feed scanner, which basically works like a printer in reverse. Now, a document isn't really secure until you have a digital copy.

tags: history, email, geek

[edit same day: carriage returns]

test

test 3 mar 08

Guest blog

The following is an entry from the blog of a friend of mine, an army officer heading overseas for her second 12 month.

~~~
28 Feb 08

I'm to the point where I'm just wondering if I am the one is the crowd who can be completely unnoticed where ever I go. I'm almost sure that I could walk into a full room of people wearing a chicken suit and no one would even notice. I grew to enjoy my solitude after being deployed and constantly around other people. But now, 4 years later, I'm seeing it more like a curse than anything else. Im not upset that I'm single, for I can deal with that. Im upset that I'm going away for another year and will be alone most of the time, due to gender and rank, so translation= another year of solitude. I'm getting tired of it, and just wish that I meant something to some people. I don't even feel like I have any friends who would genuinely miss me while I'm gone...

http://blog.myspace.com/noseriouslyforreal

reflective belt

When they were setting up the Deid early in the war, a couple of people were killed there by moving vehicles who didn't see them. Since then, reflective belts have always been required in various ways. A couple of rotes back, I got into the habit of wearing my ID holder on my reflective belt. I have one of the elastic ones, which is nice because you can stretch it and move it up over a jacket or armor without taking it off. This rote, though, it seems to be a much lower emphasis item. The army enforces on their own people, but I haven't heard it foot stomped much on the AF side. At the Deid they used to be nazis about it.

Ladder 49; only a few more months.

There are several things I like about the movie; it had subtlety, finesse and depth. Aspects of the way they talk about the job remind me of the military. Mostly these days I empathize with the conversation that Travolta had with Joaquin in the bar, where he says (and pardon the vagaries of my memory), "You still love the job, but you don't love it the way you used to."

I've discussed aspects of this with some folks over the past few months. I was talking with one of my airmen on his first deployment, and he's having fun so far (he even volunteered to extend here). And I said this, "There's a lot I like about deployments. You learn a lot. You get to travel, to see new places and meet new people. You make good friends. The first one is like summer camp. But the thing is, while you are deployed, the rest of your life back in the states is on hold; everything you were working on pauses." But the people you know, the things you were a part of, don't. So you get a little disconnected from them. And the more times you deploy, the more you disconnect. And eventually you begin to realize that this process doesn't end. You will deploy again, and again, and again. And after enough of this you realize that this is your life now. And it's wrong, it's not right, and it's not fair, but that's life. Some people go on honeymoon to Thailand and some people spend their life in the desert and you happen to be in the second category. And so life becomes this for me: typing away into a computer with a slow internet connection in a prefab building in the middle of nowhere, writing about the things I would rather be doing, or trying to explain what this is like to whoever reads this blog, or just record for history what this was like for one military member in the middle of all this craziness.

I was talking with a good friend before this rote. She's the wife of a friend and new to dealing with the military, and she was trying to cheer me up and said, "Well, it's only a few months, you can handle that, can't you?" And truth of it is, yes, it is only a few months; and yes, I can handle it. But you see, I have been telling myself this for five years now. Live your life a few months at at a time and that's all you get. Life is short, time is luck, make the most of it because it doesn't last.

This is bit of a digression; it was not my intention to air my rants about the injustices of the universe. The point, to get back to where I started, is this: It isn't that the little sacrifices, or even the medium sacrifices that get to me. But when you add them all up, they total more than the enjoyment I get from my job. And that's while I'll probably quit as soon as I can (five years from now). And most of the other people I know my age are thinking the same way. That's the point, not whether or not I'm happy with my life, but rather, that the job is driving people out of the service, and at a time when we (as a nation) can't afford it. (And in the midst of this madness, the Air Force is firing people (with a RIF board) and actually *paying pilots to quit* with the VSP program. As you can imagine, this is bad for morale, to know at the end of the day that your organization cares more about the dollars you cost then the service you provide. It also destroys the faith you might still have in your leadership.) I was talking with another friend who's been in about the same length as me. We hadn't spoken in awhile, and when we got out of earshot of his squadmates (It is an interesting unspoken credo in the military that when saying something negative, or even only less than enthusiastic, you keep it quiet, and try to keep it out of your unit), he dropped the trivialities and got to the real stuff. He said, "They always told me, when the job stops being fun, time to get out. Well, the job stopped being fun."

The lesson I heard from a number of generals and colonels over and over and at SOS was, "If you get to the top and your family isn't with you, it wasn't worth it." Well, of course, I have no family of my own to speak of, so getting to the top with or without them isn't even a choice yet. I understand the lesson though: One day, the Air Force will have gotten everything it can from me and it will cut me loose, and when that day comes, I better have more to go home to than what I have now. Despite some decent efforts on my part, I haven't been able to start a family. And I know that's important to me, so the choice for me is between being in the Air Force and living like a monk to do the job, or getting out so I can try to live the normal life I hear about from other people. Well, that choice is no choice at all.

I wish I was as motivated today as I was ten years ago, because in the next decade the Air Force and the government are going to need people to fix all the things that are being broken down right now, and there will be a lot of opportunities to create change. But I'm tired of it all, I can't keep doing this. It isn't worth it to me any more. The Air Force is a terrible organization; there is deception at every level. We spend valuable time on completely useless priorities: New uniforms for everyone! At a time when we are supposed to be cutting costs, we spend the money and time to develop a new uniform to replace one that was working fine "to develop a distinctive look." The new ABU, incidentally, fluoreses under white light and catches on fire when it gets shot, and the shirt is 100% polyester and melts to your skin. What a waste of our energy.

I'm sorry this is so negative. It isn't my desire for this blog to be a rant, or a whine. But this thing, this dissatisfaction, is a big part of the force these days, and trying to tell the story of the military or of deploying without going into it would be a lie. I have been trying to not be a bitterheart over my lot in life, and I think I am getting there. I would hope that this comes off more as righteous anger over some very bad things that are being done...that's my intention, anyway. I will try to make my next entry less of a downer.