Poetry Contest for Minnesota Mil-Kids

The office of U.S. Sen. Al Franken, (D-Minn.), a former writer and performer on "Saturday Night Live," has announced a creative way to celebrate April as both Military Child Month and National Poetry Month.

(In addition to being the cruelest month, April 2012 may mark an early return of some of the 2,700 citizen-soldiers of the Minnesota's 1st Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division. At least, that's what some news reports have begun to indicate.)

According to a press release, Franken is hosting a poetry contest on a theme of “My experiences as a Military Child.” Children of military families from Minnesota are encouraged to enter poems of not longer than 300 words. Deadline is April 16.

Entries should include the following information:

• Name of entrant
• Parent/guardian name
• Postal address
• Telephone number
• Name of entrant's school
• Age category (Kindergarten to 6th grade; 7th to 9th grade; or 10th through 12th grade)

The entries will be judged on relevance to theme, creativity, judges' impressions, fluency, structure, and technical excellence.

Ten winners in each category will receive an invitation to Franken’s St. Paul office to meet him, his wife Frannie, and special guest judges including:

• Minnesota Commissioner of Veterans Affairs Larry Shellito
• Minnesota Poet Laureate Joyce Sutphen
• Adjutant General of the Minnesota National Guard, Maj. Gen. Rick Nash
• Minnesota Commissioner of Education Brenda Cassellius
• Minnesota author Kao Kalia Yang
• Minnesota Lynx Coach Cheryl Reeve

The top poems in each age category will be framed and displayed in Franken’s office in Saint Paul, Minn. and in Washington, D.C. Each winner will also receive an autographed book by Garrison Keillor, famed Minnesota author and host of the radio program “A Prairie Home Companion."

For more information, see the press release here. Submit entries to:

poetry@franken.senate.gov

or to:

Office of U.S. Sen. Al Franken
c/o ‘Poetry Contest’
60 Plato Blvd., Suite 220
Saint Paul, Minn. 55107

War Stories and Coffee Talk

I wore my Afghan media mufti earlier this week. The madness of deploying and not deploying to Afghanistan now over, I'm volunteering again as a board member in our homeowners association. Our suburban neighborhood was developed by Pioneer Hi-bred, a company with a proud Iowa history and connection to the land. Developers interspersed lots of green spaces among the houses and cul-de-sacs, and even designated a prairie restoration area.

One graduate school degree later, I now understand that the term "restoration" presumes that there was prairie there to begin with, and I'm not intellectually prepared to argue that we're turning back the clock in any way.

We city-folk in Iowa tend to think two things about our land:

1. Before European settlement, it used to be prairie. There may have been buffalo. And tall grasses.
2. Today, it's industrialized, planted out in corn, hogs, and soybeans. There is very little "nature" left in our patch of the Middle West.

Still, the prairie is a unique feature to our neighborhood, and gives us a sense of place and character that wouldn't otherwise be found in our otherwise cookie-cutter production homes. A few board members, volunteers, and contractors were going to walk the terrain this week. We'd recently hired a crew to conduct a prairie burn, and wanted to assess the results. We also wanted to plan our summer attack on weeds and invasives.

So I wore the same kit that I wore in Afghanistan. I've taken to calling it "mufti," after the British military custom of altering the uniform for off-duty wear. (Think "fez and slippers," because I know I do.)

Red Bull Rising blog readers may remember how I agonized about what not to wear during my 2011 embed with the Iowa National Guard's 2nd Brigade Combat Team (B.C.T.), 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division (2-34th BCT). As a citizen-soldier, Uncle Sam tells you exactly what to pack. When you're a civilian writer, however, Uncle Sam gets a little passive-aggressive: Don't wear camouflage patterns or military equipment. No weapons. Bring your own flak vest.

The Arabic word "mufti" originally meant "an Islamic scholar who is an interpreter or expounder of Islamic law." I enjoy the multiple layers of meaning. Makes me feel like bit of an infidel.

For the prairie walk, I wore my tan ACU-style trousers (cargo pockets!), my civilian Gore-Tex hiking boots, and a wicking T-shirt under a powder-blue long-sleeved travel shirt. The kind that you can hand-wash in a sink full of non-potable water, and afterward dry in about 60 minutes of Afghan sun. And my Iowa Cyclones ball cap, subdued brown instead of the usual cardinal-and-gold.

To paraphrase a favorite line from "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), however: "Before the prairie must come the coffee."

When I walk into the local Starbucks for a cup of the dark stuff, I'm greeted by the same National Guard officer who hired me on temporary duty back in summer 2010, after my wife and I learned three weeks before mobilization that I'd not be deploying with the rest of the 2-34th BCT. I'd worked with him previously, when he had been the brigade's executive officer. In 2010, he had been the state mobilization officer, and asked me to join an Iowa "white cell" team. Our mission was to help get the Red Bull to Camp Shelby, Miss., then to Fort Irwin, Calif. After that, we joked, the brigade would be "beyond our help."

In effect, this was the gentleman who started "Operation Bad Penny"—my continual visitation of Red Bull units through post-mobilization training and simulated combat.

A couple of weeks after hiring me for stateside duty, my new boss was himself called to deploy with the 2-34th BCT. He eventually commanded an Embedded Training Team (E.T.T.) in Panjshir Province, then part of the 2-34th BCT's "Area of Operation Red Bulls."

When he spots me in Starbucks this week, I'm pretty much wearing the same thing I wore when I got of the helicopter in Panjshir, minus the body armor. After we shake hands, he turns to his coffee shop colleague, and proceeds to tell the story of how his team had gotten the word that some civilian V.I.P. named Sherpa was in-bound. He hadn't made the "Bad Penny" connection that it was me, however, until I'd arrived in person at FOB Lion. It's a story I've heard him tell before, of course. I've even told it a few times myself.

It's like I say: "Big Army, small world."

The Boys Get More Toys

In a Holiday 2011 blog post, I noted that the manufacturer of Matchbox-brand toy cars had produced a design that mimicked the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected ("M-RAP") armored vehicles used by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The "SWAT Truck" was available in either basic black and friendly Infantry blue. The black one had "SWAT" painted on its sides, while the blue one said "police." Although altered, the design strongly resembled Navistar International Corp.'s MaxxPro.

During a recent dismounted patrol of local toy stores, my 4-year-old son Rain and I noted the Matchbox design has been re-issued, as part of 2012's "MBX Airport" series. Bright fire-engine red, with "Guard Services" and a Grecian helm logo on the side panels, this armored vehicle just screams "relax, dear traveler, and leave the flying to us."

Here's a fun travel tip: If, while preparing to board your next flight to sunny Cancún or Honolulu, you see an MRAP parked next to your aircraft? You should probably consider taking the bus instead.

The back-of-the-card prose on the 2012 Matchbox SWAT truck is even more inscrutable than that of its black-and-blue brethren, which noted selling features such as a "fully armored exterior [that] will crush any obstacle that appears in its path! Time to restore the peace!"

Here's how the red-truck version reads:

Great adventures fly in and out of the Airport every hour! World travelers come and go by vans and taxis. Transporters load exotic high-performance cars for international events in far-off lands. Cargo carriers careen from runways to access roads and the Rescue Crew is always ready to spring into action!

Careening cargo? Exotic cars? What kind of airport is this?!

(Answer: In Rain's world, it's probably an airport that also hosts a swarm of Matchbox "Mission Helicopters," an 1985 design also re-issued in 2012, and painted out in digital (?!) jungle camouflage pattern. They look a little like AH-64 "Apache" helicopters, with shorter tails.)

In the real world, military leaders have reportedly begun speculating what to do with a rag-tag fleet of hard-to-maintain MRAP trucks, given that the latest wars are winding down.

As the Washington Post's Marjorie Censer noted in a March 7, 2012 article, the "MRAP [...] is something of a relic, bought specifically to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan but far too bulky for a future characterized by drones, cyberwarfare, and intelligence and surveillance technology." The trucks each cost between $10,000 to $20,000 to maintain annually.

Plus, maintaining the many different kinds of MRAP trucks is a logistical headache. In a 2011 Defense Logistics Agency (D.L.A.) news article, the organization manages more than 40,000 line items [parts and supplies] for the MRAP and stocks about 25,000 of them, said John Dreska, DLA Land and Maritime MRAP program manager. Dreska heads a team of 120 government employees and contractors whose sole priority is to support repair-parts sustainment for more than 13,000 MRAPs fielded in Afghanistan and about 1,500 used for pre-deployment training in the United States."

Some MRAP trucks could find themselves repurposed by Iraqi or Afghan security forces, or by other allies. It's not unthinkable, however, that some surplus MRAP trucks might eventually show up in U.S. law enforcement, just like Tommy guns and black rifles previously migrated to civilian use.

Still, one wonders if there might be a line drawn in the stateside sand, especially when it comes to Airport rent-a-Spartans and shopping mall cops. Inshallah, even the Big City P.D. won't need to drive around in top-heavy trucks that are designed to take bomb blasts from below.

Note to the city council members everywhere: The citizens of Mayberry R.F.D. do not need to be protected and served by surveillance drones. Or MRAP trucks. Or Blue Thunder.

But, if you ask nicely, Rain will let you play with one of his.

*****

Click here for a YouTube video comparing and contrasting the 2011 Matchbox "SWAT Truck" designs, starting at the 45-second mark.