Character

Most of the first classes I work with are transferring or retiring in the next couple of months. I usually don’t talk about my coworkers but I’ll make an excuse today since he’s not around and I warned him that I was going to blog him sometime in the future. He’ll just have to read about it later.

I’ve worked for a lot of people in my time, seen various leadership types and picked up lessons from most of them. During my last deployment to Iraq, I worked for an HM1 Thomas, he was the leading petty officer of the MAG (Marine Air Group). The MAG is the headquarters element a collection of squadrons, in this case they ran the helicopters. HM1 was responsible for herding all of the corpsman of these squadrons, making sure of that all of the reports were turned in on time, that they were doing their jobs and that their Marines were taken care of. He would gather the LPO’s of all of the squadrons every week to get a pulse of what was going on and pass gouge.

My last trip was actually my second trip out there with him, I didn’t know him on the first trip but he was there the night of my first mortar attack. There were some Marines who were seriously injured that night and HM1 was the first person at the scene. He still carries that night around with him.

There are events in every person’s life that the rest of their life pivots around. I think that night was one of his. From that night through all of his following trips to the sand box, he never left any building without wearing his flak and Kevlar.

Which isn’t a bad idea if you think about it, but he carried this a bit further then that, every other day at noon, he would run 5 miles wearing all of his armor. All of the Marines thought this guy was hard as nails and a bit nuts, do you know how hot it gets there in the summer? Nothing slowed him down, he was a machine of muscle, tendon, bone in a sack of skin. I know he was one of the hardest charging corpsman I’ve ever ran across. Every once in a while he would talk someone to go out running with him, that usually only lasted a couple of runs and they wouldn’t even be wearing their body armor. Not bad for a 40 year old guy.

He gave those that worked for him an ideal of what a person in the military should be, what a corpsman should be. I know I fall far short of many of his examples but he gave me an image to live up too. Everybody who interacted with him in Iraq took something away and if they were smart, they remembered his lessons.

Being a leader is more then just issuing orders, it’s more then being the voice for the commander, it’s about caring for the people who you are responsible for and bringing them up with you. Giving each and everyone of them value for what they do and leading by example. HM1 made conscious choices to always do the right thing no matter how small the detail while still being flexible enough to shift instantly into any of the various missions that we had to do out there.

He reminded some people were reminded of Flanders of Simpson fame, even though he was hard physically, his stories tended to take on a preaching aspect (sometimes long). But there was always a moral to all of his lessons, when he taught something, he taught it in such a way to force you to change your way of thinking so you would remember it at a deeper level.

Some big shoes to fill, I hope people consider me half of the leader that he was. Fair winds and following seas brother.

Blame it on the bride

For she started me watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and instead of dishing out bloggie goodness, I’ve been watching one episode after another of BtVS. Well that is when we weren’t traveling up to northern California to go to a wedding over the Memorial Day holiday and visiting San Francisco. Just finished the series a couple of days ago and have since been on an anticlimactic fugue. Nice job Joss.

We went to Golden Gate park on our San Francisco trip, it’s the first time I’ve been up there since I was 2 or 3. San Jose was a nice and sunny 80 degrees and as soon as we went over the hilltop to go down into San Fran and the temperature dropped 25 degrees. As Mark Twain said, the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. I believe him, it was chilly.

My first class crow was pinned on last Friday by my wife and I’ve spent most of this week getting used to saying HM1 Dustman. Other then the trip, helping my old roommate James move his stuff into storage and watching Buffy…

Well I was about to say my life has been mellow but in reality, I’ve been fairly busy learning the new duties that come with the rank. It sounds like I’m getting promoted into a different deployment then the one I expected, not sure if it’s longer or not yet.

Here’s a picture of the pinning

Snoopy Dance

There is one thing in a person’s military career that over shadows everything else। While it’s nice to be presented awards and recognition, what really makes a difference is getting more money.

This morning, I was doing coverage for my Marines physical readiness test and started to get calls from different people in my command asking if I had seen my Chief yet। Um, no, is there something I need to know? No, he’ll tell you when he see’s you.

Hmm? I wonder what I did? Did someone read a post that they didn’t agree with? Did those evals I just wrote look like garbage? Was one of my guys in trouble? I got to the office and one of my junior guys was asked the same thing। Ahh, I logged on to my BUPERS online and checked my advancement status and found out that I had been selected for Petty Officer First Class. Yay!

My Chief was a little miffed not being able to put his production of yelling at us, trying to get us to confess whatever we did and scaring us to death then saying congrats, you guys are getting promoted. Sorry Chief, I would have would have gone along with the ruse and might have even had the lower lip quiver and a tear in my eye but I knew something was up when all of those guys called me. I’m sure our newly promoted HM3 would have put on a good show.
Our HN (E-3) guy had picked up Petty Officer Third Class। Then I got to thinking, all of the 1st Classes at my Flight Line Aid Station were leaving in the next few months and I might be the one taking over their jobs. Sheesh.

I admit, it’s a little scary being thrust into this leadership role because I really did not expect this promotion; when I found out, the surprise in my face was total। There was a 15 dental questions that I totally eni-meni-mini-mo’ed. I had spaced studying dental supply and those questions were at the beginning of the test and that sense of failure affected my feelings about the rest of the 170 odd questions I had to go. When every question counts, I was a little worried about even passing.

Luckily, my worries were unfounded, the test was worth 80 points, I got 66 of those points which is a very respectable score in any book and I beat the total cutting score by 6 points.
Now I just have to get used to being called HM1 Dustman and seeing if I can put all I’ve learned over the years into practice.

Soldier’s Smallpox Inoculation Sickens Son

Two year old boy was placed in the hospital for seven weeks with such symptoms as kidney failure and the loss of most of his skin which has since grown back. He was taken to the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital where they said the boy was covered with “mounds of pox”. The story is here.

As someone who gives Smallpox vaccinations, when you see corpsman paranoid about giving any shot and they give you gloom and doom scenarios if don’t take proper care of it. There must be a reason. We normally give this shot out the day prior to shipping out and put a bandage on that doesn’t come off this the patient is well in country where they can be carefully monitored. We do this for liability, we screen the heck out of these guys, give them this questionnaire to fill out and even after they fill them out, we’re grilling them for possible problems, old people in their house hold? Or have young Children? If they answer yes, we usually get them in country.

Unlike the civilian doctor who will probably get sued, we would probably get busted down and sent to jail. Who wants that on their resume?

Even with all of the precautions, there are those who tend to tone everything we say out. Mark no on all of the questions and don’t follow the directions. The most recent? I’m writing about it because nothing ended up happening. One of our Marines got his shot, (which isn’t really a shot, it’s a prong shaped needle dipped in the vaccine and pricked in the skin 3 times like a tattoo) and immediately went home, took off the band aid, took a shower and rubbed lotion all over his body and didn’t even think about it till the next day and came by medical telling us what happened. He was shipping out that afternoon.

It could have been bad, I sent an email to his units medical, warning them about what happened. Our medical department took turns at chewing the Marine out which included slides, strong words and fear of gross maiming if he didn't wash his hands all of the time, don't touch his face and didn't keep the band aid on. We sent him over to see a doctor so the doctor could have his turn and let him go with more warnings about what to watch out for. His first episode of PTSD given to him by Navy Medicine. Even though nothing happened but that nothing could be because we made him paranoid, anyway. that's what I like to think.

Stepping out of the Shadows

This week has been fairly strange, I've received calls from 4 news agencies, two of them radio, one from a major TV station and a print newspaper. I ended up sending the newspaper to some other bloggers who have not been quotes as much. When it rains it pours. I've forwarded all of the reporters to the local PAO (who’s probably feeling like a press agent these days) and informed my Chain of Commands about my blogging practices.

When your name is slung around cyberspace as much as mine, it’s best to keep everything transparent. I have this re-occurring nightmare that goes like this.

My CO is in the middle of a brief with the commanding general and the general asks my commanding officer “Did you see your doc on CNN the other night?” and in return my CO gives him a baffled look.

I’m at a different squadron then the one I deployed with and normally my blogging wouldn’t gather any attention until we’re ready to deploy then I would let the powers that be know that I have a blog and have been well versed on OPSEC and I was hoping to tell my story when we were in Iraq like my prior trips. That idea got shot down as soon as I appeared on CNN (even though a link from Matt at Blackfive gives me more traffic then being on CNN). I rarely blog about my unit but being active duty, it means that I do belong to someone. It’s best to keep them informed then having them blindsided.

Really, I'm just a normal regular guy who happens to write about his life on a public forum. I’m also married to an extraordinary pretty pink haired girl and my job sometimes takes me to places that most people can only imagine. While you can read about what’s going on in the news or official military releases. What’s it like walking home in the dark in a foreign country by your self across the lonely desert? What does Memorial Day mean to a deployed guy? Or how a Marine might act if you drop a dead camel spider on their lap?

I like to write and love reading even more and want to share some of these experiences with people that are interested. (if you’re a terrorist, you’d have better luck reading tealeaves then getting any useful info out of this blog). After doing this for 3 years, getting a readership isn't the problem that new bloggers have. I'll occasionally spotlight the new talent or if I see a story that isn't being covered enough that's important to me, I'll definitely post it.

And if I think it’s really important and not being covered, I’ll call in the big dogs.

Listen to Blackfive live right now!

here on Jim Bohannon Overnight

DoD Blocking Access to Some Sites from Official Computers

One of the big stories going out around the net right now is that the DOD is blocking some social networking sites, the sites?

MySpace, Youtube, Live365, 1.fm, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Photobucket, Pandora, MTV, FileCabi, StupidVideos and Metacafe.

So what does this change for a blogger like me who’s been out to Iraq 3 times and uses 3 of the above services regularly?

Absolutely nothing.

I don’t know where these guys who are complaining forward are stationed at but out of my 3 tours, there was a maybe a month of time when we were able to get to these sites from work before it was cut off to our entire base. So we went to the internet café if we wanted to upload pictures and blog posts. I’ve always done it from the internet café, if you’re going to be someone who’s visible like me who blogs under his real name, you have to follow the rules. Another thing no one has mentioned, blogspot.com has been blocked from most of the work computer in Iraq, it’s not a bandwidth hog. That does bother me a bit because I use blogs almost as much as I use the regular news to get a pulse on the world. Know how much blog surfing you can get done in the 30 minute time slots at the internet café? Not much.

Know what happened for that month we could visit those websites? It slowed everything slowed to a crawl, pages wouldn’t load and there were people who wanted to get official work done and it took forever or the .mil sites would time out. So speaking as the geeky guy who loves MySpace, youtube and photobucket, it was a breath of fresh air when the IT guys blocked the heavy bandwidth sites. The internet was moving again and I could get some official work done.

For the guys forward, this rule came about after most of the local networks had blocked these sites anyway, it just puts all of the DOD under the same umbrella. I think it’s a good rule in the war zone unless band width improves but it is sort of silly to do it in the rear where bandwidth is cheap. An even better answer would be to improve the bandwidth, we’re putting enough money into the NMCI, with the amount of money we drop on those guys, we should be able to stream HDTV. Alas that is far from reality.

OIF Hero SGT Mark England beaten & tased by Las Vegas Police at McCarran Airport

Cat sent me this way with her post.

Sgt Mark T. England of the US Army National Guard was a medic getting ready to deploy forward with his unit when the March 10th incident happened at the McCarren International Airport in Las Vagas. Mark was tased 3 times and beat with night clubs by 2 Las Vagas police officers the second video is shot it from a different angle and shows another police officer joking and making kicking motions with a TSA agent. When it was all done and over with Mark was left with bruses all over his body, 3 fractured ribs and questions. Two months later, still no charges were filed against him and he been unable to deploy due to his injuries. Cat fills the details pretty good enough but the videos speak for themselves.

Part one


Part two

I hope this doesn't happen to me when I go to Las Vegas!

Update:

This is about to show how many voices the blogsphere can bring up when we see an injustice being done. Some other people who are talking about this (I borrowed some of these from Cat and others from Technorati) and I've posted the links below.

Townhall just posted about it

You have to scroll down but Miss Beth's Victory Dance has a post up

Retired Senator and 2008 Presidential hopeful blogs about it here

A Soldier's Prespective has blogged about it here

Antimedia post here and cross posts at Old War Dogs

Bahbahgirls has a post titled Abuse of Power

The statements from the Englands can be read here at the Military.com forum

The Joker has a post here

Jon Kauffman posts about it on his MySpace Blog

Colby won the 2007 Blooker Prize

I was listening to NPR earlier and heard that Colby Buzzell won the top 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize for My War and the interview they did with him. 10,000 dollars is a lot of spare change to most bloggers. Good job man!

You ask, what in the heck is a blook? It’s a blog that gets published into a book, Lulu is the usually the publisher of these with their print-on-demand service. The judges were surprised this year by how many of the winners were published by major labels.

(H/T Kat for blogging about it and reminding me to blog about it too)

A further Step into Cyberspace

How soon before they put a Wi-Fi receiver inside of my head so I can access the internet with out using the computer middle man? I was chatting with my cousin Greene in Darwin, Australia on MSN and he asked, do you use Skype? I asked why, I already use a Voice over IP phone though my cable and he asks, can you use that to talk to me for free? Well you know I am about free stuff.

So I downloaded the software hooked up the webcam and mic and a minute or so later we were talking by video conference. Voice quality was good and the picture came though clear. Wish we were allowed to use this in Iraq. Sigh, another place for me to go on the internet.

An afternoon in DC in less then 7 minutes

Video of spanding an afternoon with two DC blogging buddies wandering about all over DC. A great afternoon, my lovely bride does a lot of the talking but we all take turns (she looks better then me anyways). No Conference clips here though.

Cooking with Sean

My friend Stacey was talking about making Crepes for her mom on mother's day which made me crave crepes and I'm still playing with the new video camera. I made a minute instructional video on how to make crepes, check out the fine flipping technique! My wife is up in San Jose picking up the dog so I'm at home sick with a cold that I picked up in DC and bored. Yes, I'm a dork.

For MaryAnn,
I filled these with cream cheese, boysenberry syrup and sprinkled powered suger on top. I ate them to fast to take a picture.

For making one serving of the mix I used half cup bisquick, a little under half cup of milk and one egg, made 4 crepes.

PS. Happy Mother's Day to all of my mom readers!

Highlight Video of the Milblog Conference

taken by me with the camera that was sponsored by USAA for winning the Navy Milbloggie. I wanted to get more footage but was actually pretty busy doing interviews and such.

Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently started funding new research into the study of blogs as a way of information analyst and war fighting. They’re analyzing patterns of links and stories, finding the pattern behind the greater picture as a whole. Wow, they’re giving these guys 450 thousand dollars to do it, I wonder if they’re looking to hire somebody who has a very good handle about what’s going on in the blogosphere?

I wonder if they'll notice me linking their story?

(oh wait, this was 2006)