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.
03 March 2008
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]
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]
02 March 2008
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.
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]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
~~~
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.
01 March 2008
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.
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.
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