Never Bring a Pen to a Knife Fight

There's a long-standing oral tradition within the U.S. military that originates in Murphy's Law--the assumption that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." When dressed in military mufti, any list of Murphy-inspired rules usually starts off with "Murphy was a grunt," then steps off smartly toward truisms such as "'friendly fire' isn't" and "if your attack is going really well, it's an ambush."

Science-fiction writer and "Schlock Mercenary" creator Howard Tayler maintains a similar list and tradition with his slightly out-of-this-world "Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries." Two samples: "A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on" and "That which does not kill you has made a tactical error."

Tayler, by the way, gamely posed for a friend of the Red Bull Rising blog at this year's Gen Con in Indianapolis. I know I've identified myself as a fan before, but let me tell you, when I saw this photo in my in-box, I laughed, I cried, I squee'd. It was better than a tactical "Cats!"

Inspired by Murphy and Schlock--as well as some recent news items regarding military writing--I've culled my Afghan notebooks for some similar aphorisms. After the bullet points die off, you'll see what started all this amusing musing.

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SHERPA'S RULES ON MILITARY WRITING

• Writing can be therapeutic, but it ain't a therapy. The same goes for drinking and shooting stuff.

• Write what you know, but not if it's classified.

• "The first casualty of war is truth." A corollary? "The first truth of war is casualties."

• Any sociologist or soldier will tell you: The military is a tribe. It is best understood on its own terms, within its own cultural contexts, and by living among them.

• Food and hygiene are cultural contexts.

• In casual conversations and military briefings, "Inshallah" means either "God willing" or "if we feel like it." Either one can get you killed.

• The three most powerful words in the U.S. Army are neither "duty, honor, country," nor "this we'll defend." Rather, they are: "adapt, improvise, overcome."

• "Soldier" is also a verb.

• False motivation trumps no motivation.

• Words are like bullets. They can fragment, ricochet, mis-fire, hit the wrong targets. Remember to breathe, aim, and squeeze.

• Journalism is the first draft of history. People today think we don't need a draft.

• The fog of war never goes away—it fades into memory. Clarity is a moving target.

• If you don't know how to read a uniform, you are functionally illiterate in garrison.

• If you don't know how to read the terrain, you are functionally illiterate in the field.

• "Cover" stops bullets. "Concealment" shrouds your actions from observation. Know how to apply each concept, tactically and rhetorically.

• Those who failed history class are doomed to repeat it in practicum.

• History is often said to be "written by the victors." More likely, however, it will be written by the quiet guy in the corner. The one taking notes.

• All of us is smarter than some of us, but over-reliance on networked automation makes us stupid.

• The pen may be mightier than the sword, but never bring a pen to a knife fight.

• Not all veterans are crazy, but it helps. According to some, so does drinking and shooting stuff.

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: MISSOURI WARRIOR WRITERS PROGRAM

The Missouri Warrior Writers Program has issued a call for submissions (deadline: Dec. 30, 2011) for a national anthology of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction by veterans and service members about their wartime experiences regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the organization's website:

This experience includes deployments and those who have never been deployed. Transition back into civilian life is also a topic of interest for this anthology. The contest will award $250 each to the top entries in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. All entries will be considered for publication in the anthology. There is no entry fee.

Click here for guidelines.

Click here for a related Sept. 22, 2011 National Public Radio interview with author Mark Bowden, who will judge non-fiction submissions to the anthology.

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IOWA CITY WEEKEND WRITING WORKSHOP FOR VETERANS

A free 3-day writing workshop will be sponsored by the University of Iowa's Veterans Center Oct. 14-16, 2011. Location for the event is the UI Communications Center, 116 S. Madison St. (between Washington & Burlington), Iowa City, Iowa. The workshop is open to all current and former military personnel—whether they were in combat or not, and no writing experience is required.

To register for the event, click here. Enrollment is limited to 40 participants.

For more information regarding the workshop's content, staffing, and purpose, click here.

The Shambling Mound of Paperwork

More Annual Training notes from June 2010 ...

That "brain trust" of clear-headed thinkers who are regularly tasked with writing the elegant, intricate, no-detail-left-unturned instructions for the more than 3,000 soldiers and airmen of 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division (2-34 B.C.T.)? I hate to tell you this, but it's less like "rocket science" and more like "making sausage."

Welcome to the "Future Ops," folks, also known as "Plans." Watch your step, mind the ducts, and pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.

The Plans officers and NCOs get a little slap-happy sometimes. Sleep-deprivation and self-imposed isolation in their own "cooler" of a tent will do that. So will all the fumes from the midnight oil and those candles burning at both ends.

One night (or was it day? Working in well-lit windowless tents is like living in a casino) the guys figured out that the Plans team is authorized a Ghillie suit, a raggedy type of specialized camouflage more likely to be used by snipers or scouts. Wear a "Ghillie" or "Yowie" suit, and you look like part of the countryside, all leafy and earthy and stuff. It's like a Swamp Thing costume, if you're a fan of old comic books.

Needless to say, in the wee small hours of the afternoon (or was it beforenoon?), the Plans staff began work on the design for a Shambling Mound of Paperwork, a vaguely office-worker-shaped version of the mythological creatures I remember from my game-playing adolescence.

The proposed Staff Ghillie ("Staff Yowie"?) would be constructed of white vinyl, covered with coffee-stained spreadsheets and half-baked memoranda, and sprinkled with fragments of burned and useable CD-ROMs, sticky notes, and witty barbs. In addition to the basic load of darts routinely used for making complex decisions, soldiers wearing the suit would be issued a standard semi-automatic stapler for self-defense. And eye protection. And a reflective safety vest.

Can't show you pictures of it, of course, because it would just look like any other messy office. So I have substituted here a photo illustrating one of the other grave dangers faced daily by Plans staff.

To paraphrase pioneer, patriot, politician and honorary Planner (hey, remember the Alamo?) Davy Crockett:

"Sometimes you eat the Plans worm. Sometimes the Plans worm eats you."

Hand Navigation and the Human Terrain

The Army loves acronyms, and it loves coming up with (allegedly) easy ways to remember things. I was reminded of that again recently, while testing on individual land-navigation skills. A handful of mnemonic tricks came flooding back as a bunch of us middle-oldsters trudged around some Midwestern wetlands, looking for little numbered flags, counting our distances in paces, traveling along this and that compass direction.

"If things in Afghanistan ever find me leading troops across a flat wet plain armed with nothing more than a Boy Scout compass," says Trooper, "we will have bigger things to worry about than my land-navigation skills."

He's right. There probably aren't too many flat wet plains in Afghanistan. From what I can tell, the whole country is practically a Frank Gehryesque crumple of contour lines.

One of the navigation tricks we re-learned is always at your fingertips. Want to play along at home? Just make a fist, and you've got an instant model six of the eight terrain features: "hill," "ridge," "spur," "draw," "saddle," "cliff." Open your hand slightly, and you've got the other two: "valley" and "depression." Click here for definitions of each.

Of more practical application, perhaps, is the acronym "OCOKA," pronounced "oh-KOH-kah." (I've also heard it spelled "OACOK," and pronounced "O-A-Coke"). OCOKA is the way I first learned how to analyze terrain for military advantages and disadvantages. Whether you're looking at a map, or looking across a wet plain toward a far ridgeline, OCOKA reminds you how to describe the terrain:

• Obstacles: What features prohibit, slow, and channel movement across the area?
• Cover and Concealment: What will stop bullets from hitting you? What will hide you from view?
• (Fields of) Observation: From where can you can best view the area?
• Key Terrain: What features are critical to controlling the area?
• Avenues of Approach: What features offer high-speed travel into, out of, and across an area?

In a counterinsurgency (COIN) mission such as Afghanistan, however, OCOKA only gets you so far. After all, the COIN "fight" is less about shooting, moving, and communicating--although there's opportunity for all that, too--and more about winning friends and influencing people. At the very least, it's about not making any more enemies than what you've already got.

In a COIN scenario, then, the most important "terrain" is the human kind--the population. Obviously, OCOKA is pretty much limited to describing the physical environment--but leave it to the Army to come up with some more handy acronyms. One is "PMESII," which I've mostly heard pronounced "pim-EE-see." Here's how it breaks down:

• Political
• Military
• Social (Tribal)
• Economic
• Information
• Infrastructure

So, here's the proposal at hand: Name any sort of human activity, and it will fall under one of those six categories. And, if it does that, it can be named, labeled, measured, located, mapped, and analyzed. If it can be mapped and analyzed, it can be influenced and changed.

Remember Archimedes and the lever? "Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world." Remember land-navigation, circa 1988? "Give me a compass and two known points, and I will tell you my location." Both our military tools and purposes have since evolved, gotten more sophisticated. I no longer worry about taking that hill in a glorious cavalry charge. Instead, I worry about explaining and illustrating how the people who live on that hill can be influenced to buy into the concept of a national identity, a central government, and an interconnected world. Simple, right?

Layer the PMESII categories atop one another, and you may reveal connections and concentrations both physical and figurative. Identify the movers and shakers. Find out where people live, where they work, how they talk to each other. Follow the money. It sounds like flashpan magic and mafia drama, but it's really just roll-up-your-sleeves community policing and planning.

Give me data, in other words, and I will draw you a map. Then, we will move the world.

We can even shake hands on it.

Correction: MultiCam Camo, not UCP-D

In my revisiting the Ghosts of Army Camouflage Patterns Past earlier this week, I was apparently the partial victim of my own wishful thinking. While the Army is officially going to start issuing a new camouflage-pattern Army Combat Uniform (ACU) to soldiers deploying to Afghanistan, starting later in 2010, it's not going to be the four-color Universal Camouflage Pattern-Delta (UCP-D). Instead, it's going to be a less-"digital"-looking pattern called "MultiCam."

The "UCP-Delta" pattern option was a four-color version of the now-standard three-color Army camo pattern. I'd apparently been blinded by the idea that Uncle Sam was finally getting around to making me and my buddies look like were all part of the same organization. With so many different camo patterns floating around the past couple of years, we'd been looking like equal parts Mad Max and Garanimals on Crack. Nobody looked the same in the mix-and-match Army. We looked like "The Rat Patrol."

Old Sherpa had even gone so far as to purchase with his own lunch money a new tactical man-purse, one capable of carrying his computer and other stuff in the field. A full review of my new best luggage-friend will follow in a later post, but here's the teaser: I didn't want black, because I already have too many black bags. I didn't want UCP pattern, because I wanted to be able to use the bag in civilian-life, too. That left ACU-friendly "sage" gray-green, and a more Leatherneck-friendly "coyote" brown.

I went with the sage.

A couple of days later, the Army announces that soldiers like me might get MultiCam uniforms downrange.

Sigh. Uncle Sam makes it so hard to accessorize sometimes ...

Achieving and Maintaining Uniform-ity

Since I entered Army in 1988, I've worn approximately 4 different uniforms for my country. According to news reports this weekend, I might be issued yet one more version before I retire.

For my version of basic training, I was issued the nearly out-of-service "utility" uniform: plain olive-drab polyester and black boots. The undershirt was brown, the blouse was tucked into the trouser, the trouser was tucked into the top of the black boot. The "ballcap" was no longer available for issue, however, and we were given woodland-camouflage patrol caps--the same as would be worn with the Battle Dress Uniform.

The Battle Dress Uniform (B.D.U.) was woodland camouflage pattern. The front of the blouse featured four square-bottomed pockets, the bottom two of which were never used. (In the field, your Load Carrying Equipment, which included a wide nylon-mesh pistol belt--wouldn't have allowed bottom-pocket access anyway.) The top left pocket had a hold in it, allegedly for placing one pen or pencil--provided the pen could not be seen.

The sleeves of the BDU could be worn rolled up during warm months. When you fell into the first formation of the day, you needed to be the same as the first sergeant--sleeves-up or sleeves-down. Army soldiers rolled their sleeves so that the woodland pattern covered the rolled portion of the sleeve. The Marines rolled their sleeves so the solid-colored underside of the fabric showed was exposed. That, and the special cut of the Marine patrol cap, were the two major differences between the Army and Marine duty uniform.

In 1989-1990, my father's Air Force Reserve unit was called up for Operation Desert Shield. He was flying on a C-130, the same type of aircraft he rode around Vietnam. During this duty, he was issued a couple of Desert Battle Dress Uniform (D.B.D.U.)--the same "chocolate-chip cookie dough" camouflage pattern then used by the U.S. Army.

While I still one of Papa Sherpa's DBDUs, I was never issued them. Instead, when I deployed for the first time in 2003, my buddies and I were issued the "coffee stain" camouflage of the Desert Combat Uniform (D.C.U.). (The unit we were relieving, however, told us a bunch of hooey about laundry services downrange being substandard, and that we'd better request uniforms one or two sizes larger than usual, because they'd either shrink or be shrunk for us. That, however, is another war story ...) We were also issued the buff-colored no-polish-required (!) desert boots.

When we returned from our deployment, we turned in all but one of our DCUs, and went back to wearing woodland camouflage pattern BDUs and black boots.

The Army decided to transition to the Army Combat Uniform (A.C.U.) effective March, I think, of 2009. The ACU is a much lighter material than the winter-weight BDU, DBDU, and DCU. (Sometimes, there were "summer" or "tropical" weight uniforms available in those patterns, but they typically didn't wear as long, and weren't worth the effort.) Someone once read somewhere that the Army figures a set of ACU is only supposed to last about 6 months before wearing out. The Velcro (that's a trademark, I realize--the generic term would be "hook-and-loop fastener") certainly will wear out in that time.

There are lots of pockets in all the right places on the ACU, particularly if you're wearing body armor--which, face it, you should be, if you're downrange. The pockets are kept closed with more of that hook-and-loop tape--much easier to get in and out of than the button-flap BDU-style pockets. Instead of sewn-on rank, name tape, and patches, all the "who am I" stuff is also affixed to the ACU with hook-and-loop tape. I joke that, when the Army switched from BDU to ACU, you should've sold your stock in black boot polish (no longer used in the age of the buff-colored desert boot), and bought stock in the makers of hook-and-loop.

Oh, and, with the ACU, soldiers are no longer allowed to iron, press, or starch the duty uniform--rough and unpressed is part of the camouflage. And--get this--one must take extreme care to launder the ACU with non-brightening detergents. Otherwise, one can compromise the camouflage characteristics of the fabric. I kid you not, I have to take more care washing my uniforms than any other category of the family's laundry.

For all of its usual stress upon uniformity, however--that everyone should be dressed and equipped in the same way--the Army has been forced into a more casual attitude during the transition to ACU. Depending on their mission, their unit, and what was in stock at the time, guys and gals going downrange would be issued a mix of woodland camouflage, olive drab, desert tan, and ACU "sage green" or "digi-cam" pattern (the camouflage looks "digital," like the squarish pixels on a computer screen). No one looked uniform, because their were simply too many uniforms. In fact, at one point in the supply chain, wearing desert boots with the BDU was authorized, because one couldn't order black boots in the system any longer. While functional, it did NOT look cool.

Besides if you mix camouflage patterns, you probably aren't camouflaged any more. Any hunters out there can probably back me up on this.

That's all recently changed, of course, With my unit's preparations for deployment, we're getting a lot of "new" equipment and clothing. Most everything for which I've signed (more than $3,000 worth) and now stored in my wall locker at the unit armory (other than the basic uniform, soldiers aren't supposed to take their equipment home with them), is now the new camouflage pattern. I might still have a woodland helmet cover, but I expect to get a new digi-cam cover when I am issued a new-style helmet.

The official name for the ACU camouflage pattern, by the way, is "Universal Camouflage Pattern," or "U.C.P." Occasionally, you'll also hear it referred to as "ARPAT," for "Army Pattern." If you hear it called this, you'll also likely hear a conversation or argument about who went to "digi-cam" first, the Marines or the Army. The Marines and Army no longer share woodland camouflage pattern as a common thread. Instead, the Marines have "MARPAT" (for "Marine Pattern"), available in woodland, desert, and urban color schemes. If any Marine wants to dust up about who-had-it-first, have them tell it to the Canadians. (Our neighbors to the U.S. north had "Canadian Disruptive Pattern"--"CADPAT"--years before the Marines. I first encountered CADPAT when indirectly working for a Canadian general back in 2003.)

Soldiers are of mixed opinion when it comes to the three-color UCP of the ACU. (Acronyms!) It's lighter in color, so it becomes visibly soiled more easily. (With the woodland BDU, you could spill coffee on yourself without embarrassment.) It's a good pattern for in the sandy desert, urban environments, and the occasional mauve-and-mint upholstery from the 1980s. (Click here for the classic Internet photo of the latter, although I once personally witnessed the visual disappearance of a party of lunching combat engineers upon being seated at a particular diner in Fairfield, Iowa.)

So, why all this Operation Project Runway retrospective, you ask? Because Uncle Sam has apparently taken criticisms of the ACU from troops deployed to Afghanistan to heart, and will be issuing a new, MARPAT-like "MultiCam" version of the ACU to troops deploying to Afghanistan, starting late summer 2010. (The Army has been conducting a four-month test of the new pattern.) My unit is slated to deploy in a similar timeframe.

The change shouldn't be as dramatic or drastic as going from woodland to UCP. Instead, it will most likely involve the introduction of a fourth color ("coyote") to the three-color UCP. Click here for a comparison chart.

Personally, I'm hoping the troops who are Doing the Job, on the Front Line, at the proverbial Tip of the Spear get the "good" uniforms. After all, Sherpa's probably got himself an in-the-rear-with-the-gear job.

In other words, he'll blend in, regardless.

Go Minnesota!

As I was going through the shift-change reports this morning, I stumbled upon the pleasant fact that Red Bull Rising is now listed as a soldier blog by the Minnesota National Guard press room website. Here are a couple of shooting-from-the-hip-while-still-drinking-my-coffee reactions:

1. Those Minnesota Bulls are GOOD. Their state not only has a great-looking, great-working website, but they acknowledge that blogging may have actually have a constructive military purpose. AND (ahem) they detected my presence on the battlefield of ideas in less than, what, 30 days? That's lightning-quick for a military bureaucracy.
2. Guess I'd better read up on Minnesota's official blog policy, while I'm at it.
3. There is no such thing as cover on the Internet, only concealment.