Why I Am The Way I Am...

...is explained a lot by my thought processes regarding the title of the preceding post.

I knew that I wanted to include something about "candy stripers" in the header, just because that peculiar form of headgear was so indicative of the poorly-thought-out situation of the Special Forces in the early Eighties.

The problem was that my brain immediately seized onto the craptacular 1978 porn movie of the same name, which may well have been my first encounter with the genre as a junior in college; remember, in the Seventies porn was not the ubiquitous magilla it is today, where the entire Internet is effectively a monstrous vehicle for conveying into your home images of two strangers fucking. You actually had to go to a real theatre to see these things and encounter the trench-coated masturbaters and speculate on just exactly what on the floor was so sticky. It certainly made the whole business less...businesslike, and a lot more ridiculous.

So as I was recounting the history of the SF, circa 1981, every so often I would break out in spontaneous chuckling thinking about the, um, intersection of the hard men of the Green Beret and the hardcore women of the Silver Screen.

There's no real excuse for this, and I have this problem a LOT; it's just how my mind works like flypaper - anything and everything sticks to it, and is likely to get stuck together in inappropriate ways.

Sorry, but there it is.

The Army I Knew: Candy Stripers (SFQC I)

I arrived at Ft. Bragg in the late spring of 1981 with the idea that I wanted to be a Special Forces medic. There were a whole bunch of things wrong with that idea that I was too stupid and callow to understand but that the U.S. Army should have known - probably did know - but was ignoring right at that time because to deal with them would have been painful and inconvenient.

The first was that I had no business being there at all.

In 1981 the Special Forces was still a bit of a tough sell in an Army that was generally defined by several competing conventional war advocates.

There were the big cannons, the "heavy Army", that thought of itself as having won WW2 and was still centered around the armored formations then largely stationed in Germany training to fight the Battle of the Fulda Gap. I had no idea what that Army did and still largely don't; my service since my initial entry training has been entirely confined to the light infantry and light artillery. But there was certainly no room for a bunch of goofy types playing injuns with the natives there.

The other Army was often referred to as the "Airborne Mafia"; the guys whose careers revolved around the regular parachute infantry and artillery formations that clustered about the American Southeast; XVIII Airborne Corps and the 82nd Division at Ft. Bragg, and the Ranger battalions at Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia. (We were told that there was another Ranger battalion somewhere near the Pacific Ocean but, frankly, nobody really believed that).

The SF was an oddball outlier of the Airborne Mafia, though, and still didn't really fit well there.

It was jump-qualified, yes. But it was populated exclusively by senior NCOs and officers who had no troops to lead. And while rumor had it that these guys were superbly qualified in their MOS they were also supposed to be utterly unreliable, undisciplined wild men who couldn't lead four privates to the latrine unless the privates were half-naked Bushmen who spoke Urdu and wiped their asses with their hands.

The "heavy Army" considered these nuts somewhere between a submersible tank and a fairy story; there just wasn't any connection there at all.

The Airborne, light community had a very peculiar connection; the SF were considered both the ultimate light infantryman and a dangerous waste of perfectly good potential platoon sergeants and company commanders.

So the outfit operated in an odd kind of gray area, which for the "old hands" in the SF seemed to be a perfectly delightful place to work.

I should note here that, even as I was wandering onto the "pre-phase" area over in the old 1st COSCOM part of Ft. Bragg to sign into the enlisted version of the Special Forces Qualification Course (or "SFQC"), the SF was changing drastically and as my battle buddy jim would probably tell you, not really for the better. To digress a bit, the original notion of the outfit, what made it "Special", was its direct descent from the old OSS "Jedburgh" teams of WW2; a very small organization designed to work with non-U.S. irregulars to create guerrilla outfits and subversion/sabotage undergrounds - "Free French" sorts of things. In Vietnam the SF had worked with a lot of the mountain tribes to create guerrilla "Mike Forces", but had also been shifted into acting as trainers and advisors to ARVN line units.

The big change came in 1977 with the official establishment of 1st SFOD-Delta - the "Delta Force" of movie, comic book, and lunchbox fame. Now the SF was in the business of "direct action"; conventional small-unit tactics designed around the sorts of reconnaissance and raiding that the U.S. Army Rangers had previously monopolized. In effect Charlie Beckwith and his pals turned a large portion of the USSF into a clone of the British Special Air Service.

I think that this was and is vastly more important than has often been recognized.

Because up until that point the rest of the U.S. Army really didn't know what to do with the SF. They looked on these guys as the weird kids in the flop down at the end of the street; kinda smelly, kinda hairy, probably subversive, and just generally not really..."Army".

But a bunch of straight-up, crew-cut door kickers?

THAT, both the Airborne and the treadhead Army types could get behind.

So here we are today.

But in the late spring of 1981 I knew none of this. All I knew is that the SF seemed like a sort of thinking-man's Army; a bunch of guys who could sneak into places the enemy couldn't control, cause a lot of mayhem and creative destruction with a couple of bits of wire and some C4, and then, if everything went to hell, blow the shit out of the place and grab a hat. And I really liked that idea - the idea that even as one guy in an army of half a million I could make a difference, play a teensy part in changing the world. Mind you, I never got to thinking far enough ahead to wonder what I would be changing that world into...

But, regardless, here's the thing; think about the sort of soldier it takes to do something like that.

I can think of a lot of qualities inherent in that sort of troop. But I can think of one thing that he's NOT:

A cherry-ass private straight out of AIT.

Which, of course, is what I was.

In 1981 the U.S. Army was going through one of its periodic stupid-spells about troop training and end-strength.

The Seventies had been bad for the SF; a lot of the guys who had thrived in Vietnam were bored shitless in peacetime. Even more were not fundamentally suited to sitting around Bragg training. My buddy jim reminds me, too, that post-'72 a lot of good officers and NCO's were let go - "reduction-in-force'd" or "RIFted", and because of their hairy-ass rep a lot of good SF guys went out in the RIF. Many simply retired after putting their twenty years in.

And, remember, the regular Army still wasn't all that enthused about these weirdo Green Beanies playing Howlin' Commandos in the piney woods, meaning that for a hard-charging NCO looking to make Sergeant Major, or for a career-minded officer, a stretch in the SF could be a career killer.

And the then-policy of taking only non-first-term enlisted soldiers and non-volunteer officers into the SFQC meant that if sergeants weren't volunteering the intake numbers to SF were down. Way down. So the intake numbers for the SF groups were down, and god-forbid that the numbers should go down.

So the Army decided in its infinite wisdom that it needed to start sending privates to SFQC.

And that meant PFC Lawes went from Jump School to bunking in the old WW2 barracks over in COSCOM, spending his days speed-marching and running and generally killing time waiting to head out to Camp Mackall for the first Phase of SFQC.

When I think back to that time and the immense foolishness of the U.S. Army the thing that comes to mind is what we wore on our heads and what that said about the idiocy of the entire business. Because what we wore we had no business wearing; a green beret. With a "candy stripe".

It's been decades since anyone's seen one of these "nonqualified personnel bars", so I should explain, and in that explanation I think you'll see the point.

Because the whole idea of the beret - useless hat that it was - was purely as a sign of military skill.

The original SF beret was a sort of secret handshake. It was pure rebellion, a raised middle finger to the rest of the Army, a sign that the rebels, guerrilla fighters, and wild men were harder, stronger, sneakier, and deadlier than other soldiers. And it remained that way until JFK fell in love with the idea of super-soldier American freedom fighters and authorized it for official wear.

But it was STILL a secret handshake. Only real SF troopers could wear it; the cooks and clerks and bakers in the SF groups had to make do with regular old issue hats; p-caps, ball caps, whatever. And - if you know the Army - you can imagine the heartburn that caused the dress-right-cover-down senior officer types that populated CINCland. All these different hats in formation! How...unmilitary! Ribbon-adorned bosoms heaved everywhere...

So word came down from on high; every swinging richard in an SF unit - including an SF training unit - shall wear the funny green headbag. Regardless of what they did or could do.

Which kind of negated the symbolism of the hat, obviously, which was more important to the team guys than military uniformity.

So. The groups finagled the regulation by coming up with a gradation of hats.

Fully qualified guys wore the beret complete with the full flash - the shield-shaped bit of colored cloth that was particular to each group; white for the training group ("JFKCMA", as it was called), yellow (with the three red striped of the RVN, at that time) for 1st, red for 7th, green for 10th...you get the idea). Which, by the way, produced the term "flash-qualified" as shorthand for a fully-trained SF trooper.

The rest of us; ash-and-trash, trainees, goatherders - we wore a rectangle cut from the same flash as the assigned group. So, being assigned to training, I wore a green beanie with a little white rectangle under my "De Oppresso Liber" scroll and crossed arrows. Meaning absolutely nothing; for all that I might look the look, I was no more capable of fighting in an unconventional war than I could have understudied the lead in a Bulgarian porno film.

The thing I wore on my head was a ridiculous mistake, for me, and for the U.S. Army.

As I was soon to discover.

(Next: SFQC II, or "Indigestion on Honeybun Hill")

The Army I Knew: Light Sleeper

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post about AIT and jump school; sleeping on the floor and burning paste wax. Both were peculiarities I encountered at Ft. Benning for the first time. They tended to reappear any time I went to an Army school, but Benning was the first.

The former was a simple expedient to having too much to do in too little time.

We learned very quickly that we were expected to keep our barracks to an IG inspection standard daily, from the uniforms on the hangers to the items in the drawers to the tightness of the bunk. Anything less meant returning from the day's training to find a nightmarish disaster that had to be repaired by the next morning.

One thing we quickly learned was that beds don't HAVE to be for sleeping. And that a tightly-made rack could easily be used as a static display whilst the exhausted GI managed to camp out on the floor using his sleeping pad and poncho liner. I don't think I spent a single night in my jump school rack until the night after the final jump. I dusted the blankets and tightened the corners, but that was all.

Let me tell you this, though; linoleum is fucking cold, and don't let anyone tell you different.

The other requirement was perfectly - and I mean perfectly - glass-like linoleum floors.

First of all, nobody - nobody who valued their lives - wore their boots into the barracks. Like little Japanese schoolboys, we took off our shoes at the door.

But the true, genuine, mirror-bright shine was only possible through the workings of modern technology which, in this case, meant Johnson's Paste Wax^TM, an electric buffer, and very small private, and a selection of terrycloth towels.

Here's how it worked.

First, you set fire to the can of paste wax; this was easy to do but hard to control - the trick was to make a sort of field-expedient handle out of a wire hanger and not mind the second-degree burns you got out of the sloshing, boiling-hot liquid wax.

You poured this liquid onto the floor and then, with a miniscule troop perched on it and a folded terry towel under it, ran the buffer over and over the waxy floor.

The effect was magical. Decades-old linoleum gleamed like jewels. I remember being mesmerized by the pure military poetry of it. Mind you, it could do nothing to close with and destroy the enemy, heal wounds, defend borders, succor allies, or defeat the enemies of my country. But it sure was pretty.

I also remember vividly one of the student leaders doling out this piece of advice regarding the floors; "You-all will want to remove your footgear before walking on my floor, because whoever fucks up my floor will be fucked up in reciprocity."

Indeed.

The Army I Knew: AIT and Jump School

So we're up to the spring of 1981.

The Army booked me a flight from Newark, New Jersey to San Antonio, Texas so as to get me to my next stage of entry training; medical specialist Advanced Individual Training, or "AIT".

(Note #1: in the Eighties the enlisted medical field jobs were given an occupational code "91"; your basic combat medic was a "91-Bravo" - the medical MOS has been renamed several times since then. The one peculiarity of military medicine is that it is one of the few MOS that is slotted into combat, combat-support, and combat service-support units. Since we were (and are) technically a CS/CSS job we were open to men and women, but the guys knew that the sweet, sweet REMF slots were going to the ladies. You had a 91B MOS and something hanging? You were going to a line unit somewhere. That was just how it worked and, I assume, still does...)

And so late in the morning after our "graduation" from BCT a handful of us were herded into a GSA van and driven to the airport, handed our travel vouchers and tickets, and pointed in the general direction of the boarding area.

(Note #2: Army commercial travel in the Eighties was - so far as I can tell - very different from today in that the only acceptable outfit to fly in was either the Class A or Class B greens. The idea of flying a commercial airliner in fatigues...well, let's put it this way; when I was permanent party in the Eighties the married guys who lived off-post could stop on the way home or the way in to get fuel. But that was it. God help you if the post MPs caught you in the Piggly-Wiggly in your duty uniform/Class C/fatigues - no matter what seven kinds of hell your Old Lady would give you for not stopping to pick up coffee creamer and tampons. Your fatigues were considered your sloppy jeans and a T-shirt, and as a professional you were expected to appear in public in the equivalent of a business suit; your dress uniform. Recruiters never appeared in public in fatigues. PAO types, ROTC cadre, career counselors...dress greens. The current enthusiasm for running around in fatigues still baffles me, but it appears to be here to stay.)

One thing I remember is how ridiculous I felt. The AG-44 "army green" Class A uniform really was a sad sack (it had only one tiny positive; it was wool, unlike the AG-489 that replaced it, which was a nasty wool-poly blend that looked and felt like a leisure suit) when you had nothing to dress it up.

The hat was the horrible stiffened-peak garrison cap, the so-called "cunt cap" which was nearly impossible to wear without looking like a conehead. The greens thenselves could not be pressed, wrinkled when you looked at them, and even when clean looked dingy and unimpressive.

As trainees were were innocent of the magic of Corfam, the insta-spitshined low quarter shoes that every trooper bought as soon as he could afford them; our black shoes looked equally dingy.

The only ornaments we sported were our bolo badges and the ridiculous "Army Service Ribbon", the so-called "Fireguard" ribbon, since it symbolized nothing more than breathing while on the government's payroll.But that is what we had, and so we shuffled onto the half-empty airplane, enjoyed our Cokes and peanuts (believe it or not, airlines actually fed their passengers in the Eighties) and arrived in San Antonio near midnight; tired, rumpled, and mildly disoriented. Luckily for us the USAMEDDAC reception had detailed a van and driver that got us onto post and into our racks before about 0300.

First call was still at 0500...

I don't want to talk too much about AIT; the training was probably very like it is today; the basics of combat first aid interspersed with some tactical advice from the cadre, the senior of which were still, at that point (as they have become once more) combat veterans. But my personal AIT had some interesting grace notes.Perhaps the best - for me, anyway - was that my little group from Ft. Dix had arrived at the very tail end of the fill for the cycle, and so the barracks of our AIT company had filled up. We ended up bunking across the PT fields in a nearly empty bay in a nearly empty barrack.

This opened up wonderful vistas for us, poor stupid trainees that we were. We were completely ignored by our trainee leaders, and the medical training cadre may very well not have actually known where we were. We "made our bunks" by folding our linens and putting them in our lockers. Inspections? None. Fire guard? Why bother?After the rigors of BCT this seemed like lotos-eating luxury, and, sybarites that we were, we lolled in it shamelessly. But we weren't fools; we knew how precarious our slovenly life was and so made sure not to draw attention to our unsupervised existence. It worked, and we remained idle bodies for ten weeks.

I hate to admit it, but I didn't take nearly the advantage of the far more lax regimentation at Ft. Sam Houston. I have no idea if the the current training environment at MEDDAC is a sort of Fellini-movie orgy but in 1981 many of the young soldiers arrived from much more strict BCT posts than the Ottoman hareem that had been FDNJ and found themselves effectively unsupervised after duty hours amid what must have seemed like a cornucopia of healthy young adults of the opposite sex.

The fucking was Homeric.

Bound up as I was in nice-middle-class-boyness and a modicum of military sheepishness I was only peripherally involved in the swiving; a kiss here, a grope-and-cuddle there...I may have been one of the handful of medics who emerged from Class 6-81 unscrewed. Alas. Si jeunesse pouvait...sigh...

I did spend a little time in San Antonio. I sat on the Riverwalk under the tamarind trees, enjoying the view and marveling at the beribboned glory of the trainees from nearby Lackland AFB (little did I know that embryonic wing-wipers got ribbon for every-fucking-thing, including marksmanship - all I knew is that the weediest of them seemed to have more fruit salad on his chest than Audie Fucking Murphy...).

I also visited the Alamo, history buff that I am, and was struck by how small it seemed, tucked away inside urban San Antonio. It was hard to picture it was standing in the middle of butt-rump nowhere as it had in 1836.

The occupiers of 1981 appeared to be exclusively middle-aged white people somewhere between 25 and 60 pounds over their ideal body weight wearing clothes that had probably looked pretty sloppy when new.

It was hard to picture it as a battlefield, and even harder to imagine it as some sort of Ground Zero for heroism.The training was fairly simple, and hours less than demanding, and it was a pleasant couple of months before I was driven to the airport and decanted onto an airliner bound, this time, for Ft. Benning, Georgia and U.S. Army Airborne School.

-----

The jump school I attended, the school that had been running as such since the Sixties, and the school (so far as I know) that still operates today, is a three-week course run by the U.S. Army Infantry School. At the time the notional military unit that comprised it was called the "4th Student Training Battalion" and consisted of four companies, 42nd through 45th.

I understand that it has been renamed after one of the old WW2 parachute infantry regiments but no matter - it's still Jump School. The round of Ground Week - Tower Week - Jump Week hasn't changed.

Interestingly, the original course as designed in the Forties was called Paratrooper School and included all the tactics needed to work in an airborne infantry unit; assembly on the drop zone, moving out as a unit, and so on. This was cut down in the late Fifties or early Sixties, perhaps largely because the school became the sole parachute jump training for the entire U.S. military (along with numerous foreign nations) and the tactical part of the POI was considered excessive.

As with AIT, the actual details of my transit were unremarkable, and there's no need to revisit them; you can find all sorts of information about Jump School on the Internets.

I will mention two moments, though.

The first was some time in the middle of Tower Week, I think. We had had a long day (they were all long days) and were somewhere in the middle of the night when one of the company cadre, one SSG Gaddy, woke us up and "cabled us down" - the formation area outside 44th Company had four long steel cables stapled to the ground on which we formed up in roster number order

(I was Roster Number 118, which says something about the bizarre sorts of things that stick in your head even after thirty-one years)

- and proceeded to bomb us with a long and not particularly coherent rant about Death, Judgement Day, and Salvation or something to that effect.I vividly remember thinking somewhere in the midst of this bizarre oration

(to this day I'm not sure if he was drunk, bored, or simply nuts, or fucking with us just because he could - unlike the dreaded Blackhats, the actual Airborne School instructors, the company cadre were a collection of casuals, transients, and (I suspect) goofballs, fuck-offs, and fuck-ups who had been assigned to babysit trainees because they could do less harm there than anywhere else - and probably never will)

that one of us - Gaddy or me, standing out there in the warm Georgia spring night when we should have been sleeping, was fucking insane and at that exact moment I wasn't sure which one of us it was.

The other incident involved a very tall Marine sergeant and the company's daily march down to Lawson Army Airfield during Jump Week.

As a private, all I had to do to get through three weeks was keep my head down, my boots shined

(and I learned very quickly that I could not spit-shine them enough to avoid the dreaded "gig pit" and scurried down to the bootblack stand at the end of the battalion area and paid up. The bootblacks painted my boots with some sort of gawdawful shiny glop (that cracked off in several hours and had the long term effect of ruining the boots with a scrofulous residue of petrochemical scurf) that got me through morning inspection and the extra pushups)

and complete five successful parachute jumps.But the NCOs and officers were graded on "leadership", which meant what the U.S. Army considered "leadership", meaning drill and ceremonies and the small change of troop leading.

Including marching.

Marching, for the U.S. Army, meant "calling cadence". This is a relatively recent feature of Army life, dating, so I understand, from the WW2 era when African-American units used chanted call-and-response cadences to keep marching step. These "jody calls" ran around the Army by the late Forties and are now considered part and parcel of "leadership" - you march troops, you gotta jody-call cadence.

Apparently this was not so in the USMC, circa 1981. The NCO in question, a very tall staff sergeant intended for a Marine Recon unit, was perfectly competent at drill commands, keeping time, and could call the step in the peculiar "'Eft, 'eft, eftrawt'eft" USMC fashion (although once, for pure entertainment, he tried to teach us an "oblique" - a disaster never repeated).

But he swore up and down he couldn't call cadence.

The company cadre (of which I've already unburdened myself) dogged him through the entire course. He had to call cadence; his "leadership" evaluation portion of the school depended on it. He needed to learn one cadence, he needed to use it, as the final week approached he seems to have been pushed harder and harder to find a way to accomplish this "critical" task...

Finally Jump Week arrived, and SSG Lanky was put in charge of the company and given the dire warning that it was this march or doom. So we right-faced and marched off on the road down through the housing area towards the airfield and our parachutes. SSG Lanky eft-eft-efting through the battalion area and past the supply sheds, with one of the cadre glaring at him and shaking his head ominously.

Finally, with less than a mile to go and the final slope through the living area and past the post elementary school in view, Lanky cleared his throat and produced his cadence, the only one I guess that he had stashed in the back of his head.

-----

Well, the story is that the adorable, tow-headed offspring of one of the majors stationed at the USAIS hopped on his mommy's lap that evening, peered wide-eyed up at her, and in his childish treble asked guilelessly:

"Mommy, what's a 'ping-pong pussy'"?

Because here's the only cadence SSG Lanky could remember:

"I know your momma,
She's a good ol' whore!
She's got a ping-pong pussy,
And a rubber asshole!
She's got knots on her titties
As big as my balls!
And the stench from her gash
Could make a dead man crawl!"

I understand that no one ever asked SSG Lanky to call cadence again.Well, the rest is nothing special; I made my jumps, got my wings, and was shoved onto a bus headed up the road for Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where the U.S. Army intended to make me into a highly-paid, highly-trained, high-speed, air-ram, fuel-injected Special Forces soldier.

And that is a tale for the next time.

Tales from the Trail 1: The Mad Shitter

Fort Leonard Wood was fucking cold.

We were there in November, and I was told by the Leonard Wood cognoscenti that FLWM had two seasons; summer, and fucking cold. And at the moment it was fucking cold, and so was I.

But a drill sergeant is expected to be as impervious to cold as he or she is supposed to be immune to fatigue, fear, and uncertainty. Whatever else a trainee soldier may see during his or her Basic, they are not supposed to see a drill sergeant acting tired, afraid, or confused.

Or cold.

So I stood outside the nice, warm instructor's hut out in the middle of the scraggly woods on Range 37 and tried to look warm.

I was detailed as the company dogsbody that day; driver, runner, assistant Senior Drill; whatever was needed, that was what I was. But that morning the company commander had his own priorities, and they had nothing to do with my assigned duties.

"Sergeant Lawes," CPT Crowne asked sotto voce, "where, right now, at this very moment, is the Shitter?"

Now a normal, sane human being, hearing that, would have pointed the officer in the general direction of the latrines over by the woodline to the southwest. But a normal, sane human being would not understood that that term, at that particular time and place, had nothing to do with a place. It was a person.

PVT Flux wanted to be a soldier more than he wanted anything in the world.

Other eighteen-year-olds wanted a muscle car. Or a ridiculously awesome gaming system. Or to get inside the scented panties wrapped around the taut haunches of Suzy Creemcheese, Prairie Homecoming Queen and pride of West Lynn.

Not Joey Flux. He wanted a Combat Infantryman's Badge with two stars.

So he threw his gawky, badly-formed body at Basic Training like a spastic berserker, punishing himself and the equipment he fought to overcome. He was awkward at drill, slow and uncoordinated at PT, painfully incapable of the simplest military tasks.

But, oh, how he wanted to be a soldier. If desire, will and love alone could have been the masters Joey Flux would have been fucking Audie Murphy.

But mere military incapacity was not the impediment; this was the volunteer Army, and the numbers had to pass muster if even the slowest recruit had to be pencil-whipped on to their units. Let the gaining units chapter the poor bastard out, was the general opinion; they had nothing better to do. Here at BCT, Ft. Leonard Wood Missouri, we were in the business of making shit into soldiers and, by God, soldiers or one sort or another they would be.

But not in this case.

In this case, it WAS the shit that was the problem.

Because, you see, PVT Flux had problems beyond his ineptitude at D&C, general subjects, and PT.

He had an incurable inability to control his bowels around authority.

I'm not talking about a fear of truly Olympian power; a lurking dread of having his heels locked by the Chief of the Army Staff or the Post Commander. Merely being addressed sharply by SP4 Joremy, the orderly room clerk, would put Flux in a state of immediate knee-knocking terror. And if he was addressed by someone as exalted and terrifying as a drill sergeant he would nearly faint with panic.

For PVT Flux officers were pure, blind, sphincter-loosening nightmare.

The first time he demonstrated his peculiar affliction was when he was stopped by one of the cadre lieutenants while scurrying into a classroom early in cycle. He apparently hoped to avoid the august notice of this lesser god by lowering his head and speeding up to double-time, but he had made the mistake of passing alone and the officer must have been bored, or feeling shirty, because he halted Flux to harass him for not saluting.

I was told that the second john mistook Flux's look of panic for military intensity, and so stood awaiting the required gesture of respect which was, indeed, rendered with trembling hand. But it was accompanied by a sound not unlike the sudden tearing of rotten burlap, and both young soldiers were enveloped in a choking miasma of used chili mac and assorted secondhand GI chow.

The 2LT recoiled in loathing, and Flux's drill sergeant descended on him with fire and brimstone. This, needless to say, didn't help. The poor youth, having voided everything he could, merely subsided in a heap and had to be helped into the squad bay and hosed down in the shower.

Well, things went to hell after that. The wretched kid was beyond embarrassed, his superiors were roughly equally divided into horrified, disgusted, or amused. They tried, I'm told, everything they could think of. But the poor guy just pooped everytime he caught a glint of rank. He was hopeless.

By the time my USAR unit arrived to shepherd the young men of A/3/10 through two weeks of Basic Rifle Marksmanship poor Flux had experienced several more of these incidents, had been referred to Community Mental Health, and had been assessed unfit for service. It wasn't for lack of trying; I spoke gently to the poor kid, and he really, REALLY wanted to go on. It wasn't in his mind but in his bowels that the fear of military authority was so terrifying.

It was pure hindbrain - the caveman instinct when the sabertooth was on the slope above the trail, the direwolf glaring from the cleft of the rock. At the moment he was confronted by the menace of rank his monkey brain simply took over, and his monkey ass provided him with something to throw, perhaps. Or made him too noisome to be worth predating. Or something.

I really have no idea.

But the other victim of this sad little psychological drama was my commander. I'm not sure to this day if it started with CPT Crowne's predecessor but I've always suspected that this hearty sportsman, bursting with corn-fed Midwestern brio, took one look at the weedy little man who showed up to replace him and proceeded to take the mickey out of my boss with stories of the Mad Shitter and his insane desire to defecate on every officer of the United States Army.

From what I could tell from that moment, in the mind of CPT Crowne, PVT Flux occupied the same place that the hashishin of Alamut came to represent in the minds of 12th Century Crusaders, or the kamikazi in the estimation of the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet; a frightful nightmare, the walking embodiment of sudden and unexpected horror.

My commander apparently pictured this poor wretch as some sort of walking bomb packed with deadly feces and fuzed to explode at the merest sight of an insignia of commissioned rank. That he was trapped in a BCT company with a home-grown Sunni suicide shit-bomb. CPT Crowne seemed to believe that the Mad Shitter lurked in ambush in every billet room or behind every blind corner of every training area, awaiting the opportunity to turn his back and hew down a selflessly-serving Reserve officer (married! with children! a churchgoer! Republican!) with his fearsome anal Claymore.

This dreadful fate so consumed his imagination that by the fourth day of our rotation the man was utterly useless and remained so the entire cycle. When he wasn't funking about looking for the Mad Shitter he was worrying about where poor Flux was and coming up with schemes to remove one or the other of them from each other's proximity, and that's what he was worrying about at the moment instead of the cold.

"Sergeant Lawes, here's what you need to do." he hissed, his eyes darting about like a ferret's in a cage, "You need to find the Shitter, and you need to take him back to the company area. Now."

I looked at the poor sod with as much pity as I could muster beyond my own chill. This is what the hell the Army has come to. Bill Calley and now this. Christ on a fucking pogo stick.

"Well, actually, sir, I need to remain with the trainees. The CUCV is the designated evacuation vehicle in case of an injury, you may recall."

CPT Crowne glared at me, his slitted lids almost hiding the panic in his mustelid eyes.

"All right, sergeant, if you're going to be that way. Inform Senior Drill that my CP will be in the cadre office until the trainees return to their bivouac site."

Yeah, the only place on the entire range where young PVT Flux can't go, you poor weasel, I thought, but gave him my best SFC Nelson salute, holding it until he turned and scampered away.

Poor Flux. He was still there, on medical hold awaiting his release from Active Duty on a Chapter 11 (Unsuitable to the Needs of the Army), when my two-week rotation ended and I got on the bus headed back to Portland.

I never found out what became of the Terror of the Tenth Infantry, the scourge of the shoulder insignia, the briefly notorious trainee soldier known to legend simply as the Mad Shitter.

Never Victorious Army

My friend seydlitz recently posted an excerpt from an article in which a U.S. officer lauds the performance of the Afghan troops he has worked with."I watched them run toward the sound of gunfire..." he writes, ""...despite often having only a Vietnam-era flak vest or less to protect them. These men are Uzbeks, Hazaras, Tajiks and, increasingly, Pashtuns — former rivals now working together. They are the beginnings of a nation."And yet MAJ Lujan worries that his nation is going to abandon these hungry young soldiers; "Rather than resignation, America should show resolve...to empower those Afghans willing to lead and serve."

I don't want to use this post to take one side or another about whether the Afghan soldiers should or shouldn't get more or less support from the U.S. First, nothing I will say will have any affect one way of the other, and, second, I don't have anything near enough information about the Afghan troops involved or the tactical situation on the ground to be able to make an informed judgement about whether such U.S. investment will produce a commensurate return.

But one thing that DOES give me heartburn - and I do want to offer a comment about - is the question of how long it should and can take to create an army.One constant meme we U.S. citizens are fed is how long it takes for the training and equipping the U.S./NATO has been doing to take effect. Overall foreign forces have been in Afghanistan for a decade. Even discarding the first eight years - which, we are reminded, were the Afghan National Army's "lost decade-minus-two" - the intensified effort to create a viable fighting force has been going on for two years.

And at this point we are informed that a thundering two out of 180 maneuver battalions in the ANA are capable of combat without direct ISAF direction.

Only...they're sort of not. "Those two “independent” battalions still require U.S. support for their maintenance, logistics and medical systems,” LTG Caldwell (commander of the ISAF training command) admitted when Pentagon reporters pressed him on Monday morning. “Today, we haven’t developed their systems to enable them to do that yet,” Caldwell said.

Now that's fine. The ANA is having a tough time getting their shit together. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you, and sometimes the bear pulls your shirt over your hear, pulls your pants down and bloops you up the bunghole until the eyes pop out of your head. There are just days like that.

But can we fucking stop saying "Building up foreign armies isn’t easy."

It's not "easy". But it's not fucking rocket science, either. And because the Western publics now have very little experience with going through military training - and have NEVER had a decent grasp of history - they are inclined to believe this statement about how hard it is to build an Afghan Army and are nodding their heads rather than asking hard questions about what the hell is going on.

In fact, Western officers have relatively quickly built foreign levies into effective armies since Hernan Cortez drafted a bunch of Tlascalans to help him skin the Aztec Empire.

To take just one example. Back in 1860 the European powers were in a tight space in China. The Qing government was a shambles, and what may well have been the most terrible insurrection in history, the Taiping Rebellion, was rampaging all over the part of China that the Westerners were living in.

So a character named Frederick Townsend Ward - American sailor, filibusterer, mercenary, and general adventurer - doped up a bunch of ex-Taiping rebels and assorted random coolies into a European-style force that was eventually tagged with the awesome title "Ever-Victorious Army" by the Qings. Formed in 1861, three years later the little Army had a force of some 5,000 including infantry, artillery and even its own little brown-water Navy. Ward and his successor Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a British officer led the EVA into a series of beatings of the Taiping rebels, who were at that time the most formidable force in Qing China. The Qings rallied, the Rebellion fell apart, and the European powers continued their bitch-slapping of the Chinese "government" on their way to colonial sexy-time.

The thing is, the raw material for the EVA was no better, and probably worse, than the raw material for the ANA. And the resources Ward and Gordon had to make this rabble into a fighting force was certainly slimmer than that available to ISAF. And yet, in roughly a year - the EVA was beating the Taipings by 1862 - and certainly by two years this shake-and-bake Army was equal to or better than the toughest insurgent force in China.The ANA doesn't need to meet Manstein on the plains of the Ukraine, for cryin' out loud. They need to be able to execute the simplest Infantry 101 missions; security, cordon-and-search, movement to contact, combat and reconnaissance patrols. The Afghan peoples are among the fightingest on Earth, and the U.S. has organizations like the Special Forces that are supposed to be some of the finest trainers of foreign soldiers in the world.

So can we stop repeating how haaaaard it is to make an Army?

Because every time we say it Fred Townsend and Charlie Gordon flip us the finger in Hell.

Hot For Teacher Testing

When I decided to leave consulting and become a teacher (note to self: in a lifetime full of errors, bevues, and regrets, this had to be one of the real keepers...) Oregon, and the nation, were in the midst of the fervor for "high-stakes testing".

Part of this was the whole Bush "No Child Left Behind" thing, but a lot of it goes back to the "A Nation At Risk" kid-brain-missile-gap hysteria and the usual need for the usual suspects to Do Something About It, or at least to be visibly seen Doing Something.In our case we had an assessment at 8th Grade, and then another in 10th, called the CIM or "Certificate of Initial Mastery". The theory was that in 12th grade the kiddos would take a CAM or "Certificate of Advanced Mastery" - what my father and mother had taken in high school in New York state in the 1940s and had been called a Regent's Exam.

The idea was the same; to use the test to certify that the kids had learned their lessons, at least the ones the state felt they needed to learn.

Well lots of schools torqued their entire curriculums around to fit this damn thing. For example, because the 10th graders had to take a History CIM the entire freshman year social science was taken up with something called "World Studies A" and "WS-B". And because the CIM started with questions about the Industrial Revolution, we started in September with the Industrial Revolution. And from there on to WW1. And from there on to the Russian Revolution. Why Russia? Who the hell knows? Especially since in 2002 teaching the Russian Revolution was like teaching buggy-whip making. The damn ramshackle Soviet ediface had just come tumbling down - who the hell cared about the Aurora and Kerensky and the Five Year Plan and Lenin.

Though my students loved the hell out of Boney M's "Rasputin":

"Rah Rah Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Rah Rah Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on..."

Ahem.

Anyway, have you ever tried to teach history to 14-year-olds? It's like teaching sudoku to a cat. You will only frustrate yourself and the cat doesn't give a shit. Not surprisingly, for most of the kids WS-A and -B were a total wash.

Except maybe for Rasputin. They liked Rasputin.

But whether the little buggers learned history or not wasn't the point. They HAD to get the history fed them in 9th grade so they'd be ready for the Big Dance in 10th. God forbid that a teacher, or a school, or a district, flushed the CIM. You might never get funded for so much as a new Habitrail for the biology classroom again...

But I always looked at it this way; if you make me take a test and my welfare depends on it, I will likely try and do well on the test, or at least as well as I can. If my paycheck, or my standing, or my future employment rests on doing well on the test, I will bust my hump to make that happen.

But if YOUR welfare depends on MY performance?

Ha.

You'd better be a pretty sweet pal, or have some sort of serious threat to hold over me. Because otherwise, Giacomo?

You could kiss my ass. Why should I bust my butt for you?

So when I read that there was a study that concluded that "There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains.", among other things, I had to laugh. This was a surprise?

Teaching is an odd thing. There is tremendous power there. Forget the "classroom discipline", the power game between adolescent and adult that characterizes a hell of a lot of American high school classrooms. No, it's the tension in the relationship between the teacher as possessor of knowledge and the student as seeker of knowledge as old as Plato. The student has to learn as much as the teacher has to teach. The failure of one is the failure of both...so the teacher's power is shot through with faults and weakness.

And it's not really a science and its not really an art. If anything, teaching is a sort of craft, where you learn people like a carpenter learns wood, feeling the grain of them, searching for the places where the gouge will pare away smoothly, where it will bind and crack.

So when you reduce teaching and learning into the kind of test you complete by filling in little ovals with a number 2 pencil...well...let the researchers explain it: "As we show in what follows, research and experience indicate that approaches to teacher evaluation that rely heavily on test scores can lead to narrowing and over-simplifying the curriculum...provide disincentives for teachers to take
on the neediest students (and) also create disincentives for teacher collaboration."

Or, as one of the commentors on this study said over at Crooked Timber: "...it seems like it would make kids, particularly difficult to teach kids, my adversaries in a sense. If they do not improve, then I get fired. It would be so hard to keep my eye on a student’s well-being in that context and not see them as little performers who hold the key to my future. If I suspect them of being unable to help being underperformers, there’s the risk I would start to resent them."

Mmmmm.

Y'think..?

And y'know what?

I could have told you that twenty years ago, and saved a lot of money I spent on getting a teaching certificate. Because when I was an Army sergeant part of my evaluation was a graded exercise called an ARTEP. Several months before the ARTEP I would gather my squad for a friendly talk.

“We’re about to do this graded field problem” I would explain. “We will be graded as a squad but the grade will only reflect on me. The graders will not listen to my explanation of how many of you are gimps, wheezers, chronic self-abusers, morons, gomers, mouth-breathers, learning disabled products of the union between a Marine and a gorilla, the offspring being, of course, a retarded gorilla. They will not believe that the reason we fucked up were because you oxygen thieves were unable to learn. They will blame it on my being unable to teach you.

Therefore, I will carefully explain everything we will do. I will show you how to do it. I will coach you through it. You will then do it for yourselves, with my direct supervision and correction. Finally we will do it at combat speed.

After that you have my personal assurance that any subsequent failure on your part, however small, will result in your horrible lingering death, probably involving a red-hot poker and one or more of your bodily orifices, or a transfer to a posting on the Korean DMZ, whichever you fear more.”

Now I never failed an ARTEP. But this is, in effect, what high-stakes testing will do for teachers and students; make the student fuckups the teachers' problem.

Mistakes? Mistakes are good. We learn from mistakes. But fuckups? As a teacher I can deal with fuckups.But the fuckups won't like it, and neither will I.

This doesn't seem like a good way to teach, or a good way to learn.

But I have to tell you; I'm not sure if a lot of people really understand how to do these either, and that will be the subject of some of the next posts.

Oh, and just as a note?

The Oregon Department of Public Instruction never fully implemented the CAM and abandoned the CIM several years ago.

But CIM or no CIM I wonder if my students still remember Rasputin?

"Rah Rah Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
They put some poison into his wine
Rah Rah Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and he said "I feel fine"Oh, those Russians..!