I’m going to Disney Land!

Where the sand has OCEAN to go with it. Makes a huge difference, I tell ya.

The Filipino worker there had a hard time understanding what I wanted.

“Large coffee, please.”

Another soldier walked in behind me.  “You, sir?” The Filipino asked.  “I’ll have the same,” the soldier said.

He pointed at the super large Mother Of All Coffee cups.  That was twice the price of the large that I wanted.  “No,” I told him.  “The triple of house coffee.  The large.”

“Medium?”

“No,” I said.  I walked over to the sign and pointed at what I wanted.  “This.  This right here,” tapping on the billboard of menu items.

“No triple, sir.  Large in this cup?” he asked pointing at the Mother Of All Coffees.

“Sure, why not.”  I gave up.  I looked at the other soldier.  He shrugged and smiled. “I don’t know either,” he said.  Good, so I’m not the only one confused about all this.

I got my coffee and went outside.  The bazaar was in full swing.  Having a cigarette and some coffee, I was in a better mood and went to the first stall.  Let’s see what we have.  The Major was standing out there with bags in hand, so I went next to him.

He had cups and crap that were fake stone, from Pakistan, and some shamaghs.  The shamaghs had the head coils and a skullcap for ten bucks.  Obviously, we were getting ripped off in Iraq.  Oh ,well.  Not by much, since the whole combo would be fifteen bucks in Iraq. 

I wandered from booth to booth, getting the calls by the vendors.  I wanted to see what trinkets were available and maybe try out some Arabic, to catch the differences in the language from there to here.  Some slang would be the same, common to the Gulf region.  Some was different.

“Mista!  Mista!  You come holla at me!  You give me good deal!”

What? 

“You want some bling bling?”

What?  Do I look like a Bling Bling kind of guy?

“Mista!  Which one you like?  You make me good deal!”

Most of the time, I got my point through with Standard Arabic.  Some of the Gulf slang was in my vocabulary.  Once I lapsed in Arabic, they were friendly for the most part, and impressed to varying degrees.  It was amusing.  One guy was very friendly and helpful.  I was able to pick up some new words for some of the traditional clothing, different names for the same thing.  I almost felt obligated to buy something, but I left before the feeling took too strong  a hold of me.  Cheap Pakistani and Japanese knock-offs don’t scream Kuwait to me. 

Most of the stuff was the obligatory fare.  Shoes, boots, by the truckload.  Shawls, some of nice Kashmir wool, scarfs, head wraps.  Cups, saucers, stone animals made of hard plastics.  Fake Ivory.  Cheap tin daggers with Rhinestone scabbards.

“What is this?”  I asked the seller in Arabic pointing to writing engraved on a fake ivory horn.  The English below it said “Good Friends.”  I had a feeling it wasn’t that as a translation.

“It is the last words of The G-d.  You know, …” and he proceeded to recite the end of the appropriate  surra to me. 

“Okay, I see,” I told him in Arabic.  I didn’t, but I had heard it enough to recognize it somewhat.  “How much is it?”

“I give it to you for 50 my friend,”  he said in Arabic back to me. 

“Not fifty,” I said.  “It’s nice, but no.”

“Okay, 45 for you.”  He was pushing the Arabic to see how much I could keep up.  I had no intention of getting it, so I didn’t feel that it was necessary to continue bargaining for a language lesson.  In Judaism, it is actually considered a sin to lead someone on for a sale when the buyer has no intention of buying.  There is a moral principle about leading someone on under false pretenses.  It is just good morality.  I was not going to be talked into dropping some money today on stuff that I really do not need.  Nor did I want him to think that I was going to spend money, and he should make a pitch, maybe lose face somehow with his peers, self-esteem, whatever.

“No, thank you.  I have no money.  Thanks.”

“No money?  No, you’re American.”

“No, I have no money today.  Thank you, my friend.”  And I walked away.

The wind was really whipping up now.  Stands were blowing over, tarps getting ripped off.  Sand was everywhere, and most of the natives had their faces covered.  Some of the Americans did too.

Arroyo came wandering over.  He had some cute trinket for some woman back at work.  It sounded weird, that she was of no political importance, not his boss, but he felt obligated to get her something.  Odd.

For his boss, I pointed him out the fake stoneware.  His boss was an older well traveled drinker.  Some fake stone plastic shot glasses would be the thing.  Arroyo didn’t know, decided not too and wandered to the PX.

I wandered to the Internet.  There were a lot of people there now, with units finally coming in at night due to the weather.  I waited five minutes, got on, checked email, and left.

It’s one of the inevitably simple things that takes you by surprise, much like a grenade.  Very simple.  Heat applied to combustible material .  Too easy.  But the ramifications of pulling the pin, well, that’s not so simple.

There is the obligatory reflex answer of “not bad” snapped off without thinking.  And that is true, but it doesn’t give and specificity.  Some detail is probably wanted by the questioner.  A noncommittal answer is only going to invite follow-up questions, more probing this time, possibly with the accusation of being sheltered and withdrawn.

I fished out a cigarette and lit up.  The cuffs on my uniform were still rolled up to hide the blood stains on the cuff.  This morning, it had been a fresh clean uniform, hopefully the last for a while until I got the dirty ones to the laundry, then to be packed up until we move out of this base.  The stains had seeped through though and could be seen faintly still.  I looked down.  On my thighs there was blood, someone else’s, mixed with dirt and salt and still damp with sweat.

A reply of “I’m dehydrated and covered with someone else’s blood” is also a true statement.  For me, for most of us that don’t hang out in the air conditioning sipping fruit smoothies, this is no big deal, a simple recitation of observations.  But to transmit this to the outside world would be a bad idea since there is a lack of knowledge and context of these things.  This is simply real life, as real as it gets, life in the Third World away from the shopping malls and suburbia.  Most people cannot, or just do not, want to handle that.  Putting them on full-on blast with an answer is just not an option.

Screw this, I thought.  I had jumped on the Internet quickly to check my email one last time before cutting the connection and pulling out all the wires so that I could clear housing.  I have to clean up and get done.  Waffling over an email from left field was going to hold me up and waste time.

*click*

It’s the stream of a motion blur that swirls around til you drown…

This morning has been easy enough.  Pat down people, search them, banter in a mix of Arabic and English with the regulars.  Then the normal slack period and slow trickle until lunchtime.  Patrols come in, patrols go out. 

There was some scheduled maintenance for the afternoon.  Those due an afternoon off, like myself, were going to stick around to service trucks, generators, and other equipment i preparation for the new unit taking over.  No problem, we bang it out, and we go home.

I walked into the Command Post and dropped my ruck and armor.  The struggling air conditioner was a welcome relief from the 120 degree humidity outside.  “So what do we have going on?  What do we have to do?” I asked the NCO In Charge.

“Well, you’re going to work with Sergeant Robert until he’s done with you.”

“Okay, we have what?  Generators, trucks, forklift, the C-Vehicle.  Anything else?”

“Well, wait until after lunch, then we’ll see what Robert has.”

I don’t wait until after lunch.  I’m not hungry.  I am tired and would like to go.  Now. Waiting around for specific details was crap.  Give me a task and an end state and turn me loose.  Damn it.

“Cee Pee, this is Checkpoint Alpha.  We have a pickup coming down the lane with lights flashing,” the radio crackled.  What the hell?  I just came from that checkpoint.  What’s going on?

“Turn the camera on it and let’s see what what we got,” someone said.  We were all glued to the screen.

“Cee Pee, this is Alpha.  They’re coming kinda slow, this might be some bleeders.” 

The radio operator called down to Alpha. “Alpha, Cee Pee, can you see what’s in the bed of the truck?”

“Negative.”

“Roger.  Checkpoint Delta, this is Cee Pee.  Can you see into the bed of this truck coming down the lane?”

“Cee Pee, this is Delta.  It looks like there might be some people in the back, but I can’t really make them out from this distance.”

The pickup was clearly in the lane on the screen now, the cab blocking a clean view of the bed, only some heads poking up and frantically bobbing.  The front passenger door opened and a policeman jumped out.  From the neighboring fields, a few people stared running in towards the truck.  “Okay, we got bodies. Get that camera off the truck.  I don’t want Base Command to see this shit,” said the NCO In Charge.

Doc Luscious sprinted for the door from his position of radio operator and I was behind him by half a step.  The armor was thrown back on in one fluid move. Doc scooped up his aid bag without breaking stride and bolted for the ambulance outside.  I was hot on his heels with Cool Breeze piling out the Command Post donning his armor behind me.   Doc heaved his aid bag on the hood of the ambulance and started the engine.  I scrambled into the passenger side and jumped in the middle.  Cool Breeze, about twice my size hopped in the passenger seat.

Doc stomped on the gas and we flew down the lane in a cloud of dust.  Loose rocks from the gravel bed pinged on the floor of the ambulance as Doc steered around the Jersey Barriers along the lane.  I started pulling out blue Nitrile gloves, pairing them off, passing some to Cool Breeze, one for me, putting a spare in my cargo pocket just in case.  I held a pair for Doc for when we stopped.  The stones crunched under the tires and the floor continued to pop from the ones being kicked up.

Brush away all the memories. Keep the cries curbside…

In my room, I was cleaning up to clear out of housing.  My bags were stacked on my bed, a mop and  broom in the corner.  I had taken off my uniform top, my tee-shirt still being soaked from the day’s heat.  In front of the air conditioner were two bottles of water that I had taken in from outside and added some mix into for electrolytes and flavor. 

I went outside to the pallet of water that was in the next housing pod.  Our First Sergeant could not be bothered with dropping off a pallet of water in our housing area.  He instead left it at the TOC, preferring that we walk the kilometer or so for water.  The reason was that if he got some for our housing area, other units would come by and swipe it.  Thus, he would be supplying everyone with water.  But, in reality, we were the only ones without water, so we did all the swiping.  And besides, what is so bad about providing other soldiers with water?

Halfway across the parking lot to my destination, I pulled out my lighter.  On my hands was a clump of red stuff, thick and granulated.  Oh, shit.  Did I forget to clean up?  Miss something?  I had worn gloves, right?  Where the hell did this come from?

It took me a second to figure it out, but it came from the powder mix I used for the water.  I had used a red powder, some kind of cherry or cranberry. 

Maybe I should avoid using red mixes in the future.  I don’t need this kind of confusion.

I’ll be ashing on the images that have all been caught inside…

We came up on Checkpoint Alpha and jumped out.  The inbound pickup was pulling in the gate and off to the side, out of the main lane, partway into the search lot.  In the bed was a mass of people, screaming, yelling, noise.  Shit, this was going to be a doozy.  Four, maybe five.  Women in black abayas were wailing shrilly making a racket.  Men in bloody dishdashas, the man-dresses, were hollering and screaming.  Doc peeled off, threw open the ambulance doors, and ran up with a stretcher that he pulled out.  Other soldiers were coming up now, one with another stretcher.  He put it down on the ground buy the bed of the truck.  Doc tossed his down on the ground next to it.

Iraqi Policemen came out the front of the truck.  The men in the back started pulling their wounded down.  One was limp, manhandled down in a supine position. Another was holding his arm.  The rest seemed fine at first sight.

The one holding his arm was standing at the bed of the truck.  He was staring at his friend being carried by six or seven other people.  Sobs and wails from him cut the air.  I took him by the shoulders.  “Habibi,” I told him.  “Lie down.  Lie down here,” pushing him towards the nearest stretcher.  His friends put the other body on it as I was cajoling him towards it.  Immediately, I put him on the other one, with a little more gusto this time.

He wouldn’t lie down, preferring to sit.  Doc was checking the other people, doing a quickie count of what the other injuries might be.  I looked at this guy in front of me.  He had a hole in the front of his forearm.  Blood was all over his shirt.  Tied above the hole was a shamagh, not quite tight enough to be a tourniquet.  “Any other wounds?” I asked him.  He was awake and alert, staring at his friend on the next stretcher.  He wasn’t paying any attention to me.  His breathing was good, though, which is a good thing.  He could certainly make enough noise, so there was not likely any perforation of the lungs somewhere. 

I looked at his dishdasha.  Other than spattered blood, there were no holes.  Nothing was on his legs.  I turned over his arm with the tourniquet and he screamed in pain.  On the back of his wrist was a three inch gash, a chunk taken out clear down to the bone.  Ligaments were visible with bits of meat hanging out.  Blood oozed thick and tarry, a minimum of fluid plasma.  The blood was bright red, in clots, moving like honey, a byproduct of his chronic dehydration.

Running up his arm, there was another hole in his bicep on that arm.  Feeling and looking around on the backside, there was no exit wound.  Very little blood was coming from this wound.  Simple gunshot wound.

Glancing over at the other patient, I saw him unattended, lying on his back motionless, staring at the sky.  The one in front of me could wait.  He was going to last another five minutes.  The other one needed attention and needed it now.

I sprinted over to him and before I knelt down, I could see part of his brain was hanging out his left side.  He was completely unresponsive.  “Hey, brother, are you with me?” I asked in English.  No, he wasn’t.

There was another dark stain on his left chest where a bullet punched into his lung.  He was still breathing, but it was labored.  His emaciated frame showed his heartbeat, but it was slow and weak.  The pulse at his neck was hard to find.

A friend of the patient knelt down at his head and began sobbing.  He reached out to cradle the wounded man’s head, but I stopped him.  “Back up!”  I hollering in Arabic.  “Back up now!  Go over there!” pointing to a spot by the truck.  The Iraqi Police took up the call and produced batons.  They began yelling and herding the women and others with their waving sticks.

“Doc!  This one has a head wound and sucking chest!”  Doc came sprinting over with his aid bag.

Doc didn’t so much kneel as collapse on his knees next to the man.  He did a quick assessment too, looking over what he had.  I pointed out what I found: “Shot to left head, brain matter exposed, shot to left lung, shot to left upper arm, that’s all I got.”  Another soldier crouched down too.  I looked back over at the first patient with the arm wounds who was struggling to sit up again.  Doc started pulling stuff out of his bag.  “Hey, Doc.  If you don’t need me to assist, I’ma tend to that other one.”  Doc Luscious nodded.  “Okay.”

La-La was pulling up with the trauma bag.  I knelt back by the first man picking up his injured arm.  He screamed again, holding his wrist with his good hand. I looked at the tourniquet.  “This has to come off,” I said, in English to the people around me.  Fumbling with knot, I could not get it undone right off.  “Anyone got a knife?”  Someone produced one from behind me.  It was a large flip open type that looked vicious and came open with a nasty snap.  One look at this and the man started clawing at the tourniquet, getting it off in a flash.  “Well, that’s better.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him in Arabic.  “This is going to hurt.”  Rummaging through the trauma bag, I pulled out the Curlex gauze to sop up the blood and stop the bleeding.

Blood was flowing a little more freely now, but still thick and viscous.  One roll I jammed in the gash on his wrist to plug the hole while he screamed out again.  “Quiet,” I told him in Arabic.  “Tell the interpreter your name.”  One of our ‘terps, MacBeth, stood over us.  “Get his info,” I told him. 

I rolled the man’s arm to the side to get a better angle at the wound.  La-La held up the arm as I unrolled the other roll of gauze around the arm to cover the wounds and hold everything together.  “Okay, I need an Ace Wrap,” I told La-La.

He rooted around the trauma bag some.  “Ain’t got none.”

“Okay, need more gauze then.”  I tied off the Curlex in a knot on the top of the wound to give a little more pressure.

La-La put another roll in front of me.  I tore it open and started wrapping his bicep.  He continued to scream out with every motion.  “You’ll be fine,” I told him Arabic.

Once I was done wrapping his bicep, I looked over at the second one.  Doc and Cool Breeze were working feverishly.  “Nine Eleven is on the way,” someone called out.  I elevated the arm up loosely by the forearm to elevate the wound in the wrist.  “La-La, here.  Hold this up.  I’ma give Doc a hand with the other dude.  If it starts bleeding through the bandage, lemme know and we’ll do something else.”  La-La took hold of the arm and I took off to the other patient. 

This second one had a dressing on his chest with a valve where the sucking chest was.  Another dressing was on his side to stem the bleeding from another wound that I missed on his trunk.  There was blood all over his stomach, but it didn’t appear that he was too badly hurt there. 

He was rail thin, skeletal almost.  Bones and hips held up his skin.  His heartbeat, faint and erratic was clearly visible on his exposed chest now.

“Okay, I need you to gently lift his head,” Doc Luscious told us.  Cool Breeze cradled his head behind his ears.  I straddled him over his chest and held his head from the base of the skull, heels of my palms on the side of his head, my thumbs along his jaw line.

One eye was swollen nearly completely shut, the other stared blankly at me.  His jaw was slack, spittle pooling on one side slowly oozing out of his mouth.  His face was covered with a short stubble of a badly maintained close beard, teeth brown from lack of care.  The skin on his face was a leathery olive, years of hard work in the sun having taken its toll.  Rasping, he still fought for air, clumsily sucking it it, making noise occasionally with what was probably agonal breathing.

“Hey buddy,” I asked him in Arabic, “you with me?”  He stared at me with his one unseeing eye.  There was still a glisten to it, the dark brown of the iris standing out, framing his pupil, normal in dilation, looking out ahead. 

Whatever stimulus was coming from the light of this world, he was clearly only seeing the next.

Doc loosely wound the bandage around the man’s head, keeping only enough pressure to keep the padding on his brain tissue in place.  The man’s chest kept rising and falling.  His unseeing eye never blinking, holding steady my gaze, staring through me, beyond me.

“Allah be with you,” I told him softly in Arabic. 

We set his head back down gently.  I looked back to the first patient as La-La called me.  The other patient’s wrist was visibly darkened as the tarry blood seeped through the dressing.  “Hey Doc, if you don’t need me right now, I’m going back to that other dude.”  Doc grunted an okay as he dug back in his aid bag.

Coming back to La-La, the bandage was soaked through on the wrist.  His blood might have the consistency of asphalt, but it was still not stopping.  “Okay, I need some more gauze.”  Looking through the trauma bag still open on the ground, I didn’t see any.  Shit.  What the hell?

The other day we had used up a bunch on a group of four that had come in riddled with holes.  Then, the following day, we had another one.  Normally, we would restock the bag immediately.  But with the pending change of command for our replacements, the aid station was closed down and the stocks packed up in conex containers.   We couldn’t get to them because they had been checked and sealed by customs already.  This was all done because we did not think that the incoming unit had attached medical staff.  In fact, we were specifically told by the incoming unit that they would not have any medics, and would rely solely on 911 to support them.  We would find out shortly that they did have medics, and they wondered why we were not planning to just leave the medical stocks. 

I was going for a standard field dressing to put on top of everything, and thinking maybe a tourniquet, when Doc Luscious came up behind me with more Curlex.  He jammed a wad on top of the dark spot to the renewed howls from the injured man.  An Israeli field dressing was unraveled and wrapped around the wadding with the man writhing the whole time and making as much noise as possible.  “This one has an exit wound?”

“Yup, two shots to the left arm, wrist had exit wound, about three inch gash.  One wound to the bicep, no exit.”  I told Doc.

“Nothing else on him?”

“Nope.”

“Well, let’s give something for the pain.”  Doc whipped out an autoinjector of Morphine while holding the wadding f the pressure dressing.  Holding it out in front of him with his free hand, he pulled the cap off, then asked La-La to hit the purple colored end.  A needle popped out.  Doc sized up his target and jammed it in the man’s thigh.  Another scream came out of him.  “Hold this for a ten-count, La-La.  Then pull it out.”  La-La took it and counted to ten, then pulled it straight out.  

“Okay, now bend the needle,” Doc told him, “and set it over here.”  He put it down.

An ambulance pulled around the corner of the Hesco barrier from the main road.  Air Force medics jumped out.  Doc went over to meet them and give them the rundown.  They went to the brain injury patient and went to work on him.

Our arm patient was sitting back up again.  He was staring at the other man still gazing blankly at the sky.  Eyes glazing as the morphine was hitting him, he didn’t have the struggle left to call out his friend’s name.  Only some mumbling escaped.

But I couldn’t put it down.  No, I couldn’t put it down…

There were still streaks of dirt on the floor.  The water from the bottles was hot since it had been sitting outside all day.  Still, after two washings, the ingrained dirt and dust was still coming out of the floor.  No matter how much I cleaned, there was still dirt coming up.  This was a Sisyphean task.

One more pass with the hot water and floor cleaner this time.  Then that was it, no matter the result.

I took the bucket of water and tossed it out the door onto the sidewalk.  Water flowed off into the surrounding ground, leaving an alluvial wet spot of dirt that was rapidly evaporating off in the summer sun.

Let’s break the window panes and separate the walls from all the nails…

“Shit, we’re losing him.”  The Airman straddled the man and began pushing on his chest rhythmically doing compressions.  The chest of the man collapsed with each press down.  The other took out a respiration bag and began ventilating him.  My patient sobbed some more, no tears falling from the dehydration and fluid loss.

‘Cause maybe if we’re loud, we’ll stay alive while everybody wants to join the fight…

“Okay,” I yelled outside.  “The Internet is going off.”  I produced a knife and slashed into the wires coming from the ground outside my trailer.  The last few remaining lights on the switch flickered out.

Cut even if we barricade the door and seal it with the blood found on the floor…

“C’mon man, stay with me.”  He continued to do compressions stopping every ten or so to check for a pulse.  One and two and three and …

We’re always going to cross the finish line…

The room was set up back in its orginal configuration.  I picked up my bags and took them outside to the five-ton truck that was going to carry us over to housing. 

While everybody wants to run and hide…

Satisfied with what they could get from him, they prepared to load him into the ambulance.  Adroitly, the medics moved to the corners of the stretcher and two others appeared to assist.  In one fluid motion, the stretcher was lifted and moved to the ambulance.

“Okay, buddy, you’re next,” I told my guy.  We lowered him down flat on the stretcher.  “La-La, still have that sharp?”  I asked about the morphine needle. 

“Doc secured it already.”

“Cool.”  Two others came up to the stretcher and glanced quickly at our guy.  “Okay, lift on three. One, two, three, lift.”  And everyone pulled up to bring the stretcher smoothly up.  We went around to the back of the ambulance  His head was by me, so I had to turn around quick so that we could get him in head first.

We had to bring him to shoulder height to get him in.  Same drill.  “Ready?  One, two, three, lift.”  And he was up and in with no problem.

Doc came up with the paper that had the patient information.  While we were working, the interpreters had gotten names, ages, and information about the incident for us.  “And this guy here,” Doc said pointing to the arm injury patient, “had 10 milligrams morphine.”

“Okay, we got it from here,” said the attendant on the back of the ambulance.  “Are these your stretchers or ours?”

“They belong to us.”

“Okay, we’ll do a one-for-one for now.  Later, we’ll come back and straighten it out.”

“No problem.”

“Can you close the doors for me?  Thanks.”  And the ambulance took off.

But now it’s too late…

The housing representative came in and looked at the room.  “Hello,” I told her.  “This is a lovely studio that can fit two decorated in Early Modern Government.  It comes with plenty of room for a little kitchen area and a common space for entertaining.”

She smiled a little while she glanced around and then signed the release forms. I was done.

…

We picked up the garbage on the ground and kicked dirt on a couple of puddles of blood.   I pulled off the Nitrile gloves and threw them out.  Hmm, some blood on my cuffs.  Rolling up the cuffs of my sleeves, the problem was out of sight, so it was fixed for the time being.  I reached down to my ankle pocket on my pants and pulled out the bottle of hand sanitizer that I always kept on me.  Squirting some in my palm, I rubbed my hands together to make sure that I was reasonably clean in case something had punctured or rubbed against me, or something. 

In theory, I was supposed to burn these uniforms.  But this was one of my favorites, old, broken in, worn thin like pajamas.  There were burn marks on one of the legs, reminders of past times when I was careless with a cigarette in the gun truck rolling on patrols and convoys.  Like hell I would burn them.  I would, however, write up a memo stating that to cover myself and then take it to the laundry near the hospital that had a separate medical laundry just for this sort of thing.

We got back into the ambulance that we had driven down and rolled back up to the Command Post.  Doc Luscious was positively ecstatic, smiling widely as he dropped his gear back in next to the door where he kept it for easy access.  “Hey can I bum a light?”  he asked me.

I gave him the lighter and we smoked together outside.  “Yeah!  I got to do some work today.  I got some action today.”

“You know, the other doc, what’s his name?  The one here yesterday.  Rogers?  He’s going to be pissed at you.  He came down here for a shift hoping to get some patient action going on, and all he got was one guy with the clap.”

“Yeah, he’s going to be pissed when I tell him.”  Doc took a drag.  “The clap?  They came here for that?”

“Well, it was a urinary tract infection or something.  We wrote it up as the clap.  Doc was pissed.  He was counting on a bleeder when they called ahead about it.  Told us the guy was unconscious.  Turns out he’s on meds, didn’t drink water, surprise! what a shock!, and passed out in the heat.  So we called it the clap and sent him back.  I think Doc was ready to shoot him just to make it worth his while.”

Doc Luscious smiled and took a drag on his cigarette.  “Yeah.  But I got some action today!  Heh.”

…

I climbed in the back of the truck.  My bags were in the corner, next to my armor and K-pot.  Rules were that when riding in the back of a truck, or in any tactical vehicle, I was supposed to put on my K-Pot.  Instead, I laid down flat, staring up at the sky.  I was now invisible to the outside world.  For all intents, I no longer existed on this plane.

The sky was a deep blue, fillling my view.  Some clouds were passing over.  The rumble of the truck’s deseil surrounded me as we took off.  Vibratations came up and wafed over my body.  It felt good.  Soothing.  Relaxing.  Like a massage.

Slowly, the truck rolled to our new desitinaton in transient housing.  Clouds spun lazily as we turned corners.  A MEDEVAC chopper came roaring over, passing on the edge of my sight.  I was still enveloped in blue sprinkled in white.   What turns we had made were beyond me, having lost all sense of direction long ago.  Soothing.  Relaxing.

I started to close my eyes and drift away.  We had come to our new home.

Lyrics: “Common Reactor” by Silversun Pickups. Copyright Silversun Pickups.

If I was so inclined, it could even be configured to FTP the page to my server automatically once the page was updated so my site could in theory have the latest most up to date version of my listening habits. I never did that, but it was there.

You may have noticed the last.fm link on the sidebar of my blog. This site does exactly that, and more. Rather than FTP a page to my server, it updates its server with the last song that I listened to. Rather than overwrite a page, it uses a database for more effective use of technology. But the magic is in the fact that not only do I do that, others do too. And so, I can see what other people are listening to, something new might pop out at me, and I can find other people that are also interested in a particular obscure band or format. This makes the same thing that I did before broader. It makes it social.

The technology itself isn’t daunting. Rather than move pages to my server, I update a database on my server. And not just me. Others make accounts and update the database with their listening habits as they happen. It seems so simple. Why didn’t I think of something like that?

There are a lot of seemingly simple ideas that are floating around the technology realm that is improving user experience and the value created with interacting with whatever site. So why isn’t more of that happening? In her post “Adopt Early, Adopt Often”, Suw Charman makes the case that a lot of companies are too slow on their development cycles and need to adopt at a more rapid pace. Interesting post; however, there may be legal constraints for rapid fire adoption. Banks and other financial organizations, for example, might have various due diligence processes that must be adhered to, either for internal controls or legal compliance. Also, the posting doesn’t explain how to avoid just adopting the flavor of the week, the X is the New Black sort of thing, which would have the adverse effect of incurring continuous changeover costs with successive adoptions. These costs may or may not be trivial. While customers would probably respond favorably to incremental improvements, rapid fire adoption might leave the customer with a feeling of confusion, that the experience is too chaotic. Finally, one has to adopt the technology in a productive manner, not just do the “me too” instantiation, like was pointed out in her “How can anyone get a blog this wrong?” post. Grabbing any implementation for the sake of simply saying that something was adopted will not do. The technology itself, and more importantly how it fits in with current practices and models with both its enhancements and limitations, needs to be properly understood. Otherwise, you will be jumping on the next Beta Max or Microsoft Bob.

At the other end of the spectrum is avoiding anything new or being a foot dragging traditionalist. Quite possibly that mindset was at the law firm mentioned in the “How can anyone get a blog this wrong?” post. Since paper is the natural output of the legal process, and the firm is likely to be cultured organizationally to tend in that direction, how can PDF not be anything but a natural progression? Failing to see the limits of the medium of PDF (slower load times over the web and use of plug-ins for a browser) and the advantage of what the technology offers (HTML is a markup much like PDF in a general sense) leads to a failed implementation. It is even conceivable that the implementation was done quickly in line with the rapid fire adoption. Given the likelihood that the PDF documents already exist, or are easily generated in line with normal office practice in this case, it would be trivial to move them to a directory on a web server, and update the index page dynamically.

But, proper implementation can lead to a success, synthesizing something that gives a value that wasn’t there before. For a breakdown of how the BBC implemented various technologies, see SHiFT: Euan Semple – The Quiet Revolution. By enabling the conversations in the corporation, even a large corporation like the BBC, information can get out and the talents of the organization as a whole can be better utilized. All it takes is a little forum, a little talking.

This is social computing, doing away with outside consultants, arbiters of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ a company should implement something. Consultants have their own interests, which may not be the company’s. Or the consumers. This is a success story.

Consultants, mind you, need not be the Mid-Town Agency type with expensive threads, power ties, and other trappings of success. Consultants are any agency that is used to filter out what is available and what is suitable for our tastes and standards. Or wallet. We use a consultant when we look at the movie listings in a newspaper. The paper is a consultant of what is important in the world, what cultural pop stars are on the rise, and what time that latest box office rave is playing. Similarly when we tune to our favorite Top 40 format radio stations. The paper gets the news feeds, condenses them, decides what is and is not important for their circulation. Same with the radio station; if it is owned by a major company like Radio One or Clear Channel, it is getting from a central source all the available input and a prepackaged decision as to market suitability. Consultants are also the mavens in your life that you look too to provide expert advice, be it a lawyer, a doctor, or that girlfriend of yours who always knows the least little bit about every song ever made.

The choke point for putting information or creative output in the hands (or minds) of consumers is the distribution channel. There are a thousand movies to see. There are even more books. Tom Shone writes in the New York Times Book Review (“Criticism for Beginners”, Dec 17, 2006, p. 27) that there are 10,000 new novels produced every year, which he calculates would take 163 lifetimes to read. This is obviously information overload, and one single person cannot possible get to all of that vast information solely. The lowering of distribution barriers will only increase that output and is addressed in “The democratisation of everything and the curators who will save our collective ass”. Consultants, like Big Media Journalists, are the curators of information. By using social computing, we enable a large scale increase of the amount of information and experience that can be tapped into. Keeping in mind ‘Sturgeon’s Law’, we can still get out the useful information from within, and develop a closer sense of communication, a togetherness almost. Humans are social animals, and the place we spend half the waking hours, work, needs to meet our needs of communication. Social computing allows for a dialog rather than dialectic with information flow and creativity.

Ms. Charman makes an interesting distinction. Previously, we had gatekeepers. They had the access to things like games, movies, concerts, books, what have you, and told us what was worthwhile. Now, with social computing, we don’t need gatekeepers. Each of us has access to a piece of something. Using social computing, via MySpace or last.fm, we share that information. Competing ideas come in and varied opinions are shared. The need now is not for a gatekeeper that has access to the totality, the need is for curators to help sort through the potential information overload. There is a subtle distinction here. I can go to a museum and have a curator point me in a particular direction and guide me through the exhibits as the expert. But that does not stop me for being able to wander around seeing all of the display items on my own without any outside input. And the cost to change curators of information with social computing is minimal.

Certainly, there will be a need for expert advice on particular issues. We will still need to see doctors for disease diagnosis and treatments. But, with blogs and wikis, we will be better armed with available information and a more knowledgeable patient. Similarly, lawyers will still present briefs on behalf of petitioners, but again, the client is able to prepare herself better with the availability of legal codes on the web.

Steve Yelvington, summarized the shift in relationship of producer, consumer, and arbiter this way:

The end of mass media. Here’s what the 20th century gave us: A population of consumers whose economic role was to eat what they’re served and pay up. These “people formerly known as the audience” are alienated, disengaged and angry. Instead of setting our sights on building a nation of shopkeepers, bankers and passive consumers, what if we set our sights on building a nation of participants in cultural and civic life? Perhaps this world where everyone can be a publisher will not be such a bad place.

The customer in a social computing context is no longer a passive consumer. Now, the consumer is active, seeking out, or simply exposed to much more, things worth retelling, the good things, the curiosities, and the irrelevant. They no longer have to take what is given to them. They can find something else. In fact, they might already have a couple of ideas of where to start.

The idea is that the user enters in the title of a book, and the UnSuggester will offer up anti-books, which are the polar opposite books. Interesting idea: not just the Amazon suggestions of “hey, other people spent their money on these titles, too,” but “hey, you should really avoid these.” But why bother with that? Well, homophily, that’s why.

Let’s face it: most people like a given something and will stick with other things that are similar. It’s something called homophily, liking the same or similar things. Like Boy Band music? Well, you will probably go for the other Boy Bands too. Like low-fat vegan cookbooks? You probably have more than one, and glance continuously at new titles of low-fat cookbooks that come out. Part of the reason that Hollywood does sequels is that consumers will scoop up similar themes, not just the dearth of creative ideas. Financially, it’s a reasonable bet to film something in a proven creative vein instead of risking money on a new idea that is untested. Thus, Police Academy 17: Morons on Patrol, The Baghdad Edition.

The flip side is that following same or similar ideas makes a barrier for new ideas to enter. It is difficult for something that isn’t a “me too” idea to enter in our lives. We naturally pursue similar things that are enjoyable to us and avoid what we think is similar to things we don’t like. The result is that our tastes, reading materials, television shows, movies all become a homogenized block varying only slightly in degree.

This is not to say that we are all clones of each other culturally, becoming consumers little different from Bubble Gum Blondies of Pop Music. We are in fact different, having different niches that we prefer, but it becomes difficult to find new niches, new ideas. The individual niches can be serviced in the market, more and more with niche marketing as companies pursue the Long Tail of consumer taste, and individually we have different combinations of likes and dislikes. But when we go looking for some new thing, be it a book or movie or album, we tend to stick to similar things since that is the available information to us for decision making. I like this genre or author, so there is a good chance, or at least better chance than random probability, that I will like it. I dislike that sort of music, so there is a better than even chance that I will not like similar albums.

The mixing of dissimilar items for someone’s taste is not the usual state of affairs for most people. John Emerson at Idiocentrism humorously refers to this with his comment:

As I understand it, people who enjoy both a book and its anti-book are monsters of perversity and moral equivalence. Now that the determination of anti-books has been placed on a firm scientific, empirical basis, it’s become much easier to ferret out such loathsome creatures.

The New York Times Magazine Supplement did an article about homophily. In this article, the idea of exposing one to different tastes and ideas that would be outside the normal fare comes up, so creating “serendipity”, which is a proxy for anti-homophily. The LibraryThing blog refers to the UnSuggester making it in the New York Times article, since looking into what would be the “anti-book” for our given favorites would hypothetically be a good way to open us up to new ideas that we would not normally be exposed to.

Serendipity, however, is not “anti-homophily” or even a close proxy, but instead an ingredient to prevent stagnation or homogeneity. Homophily is not necessarily a bad thing, since it is a method that people use to make decisions with incomplete information. We make approximations based on what we know already and extrapolate that to new things. What could be a problem or limiting trend as a result of homophily is homogeneity, which would be the natural outcome of excessive homophily since horizons would never be expanded with newer concepts, ideas, sounds, or whatever. Serendipity gives the needed antidote to homogeneity. Serendipity breaks up the routine and either lets in some fresh air to set us off in a new direction in addition to what we pursued before, or informs us that we really don’t like that new direction either. This becomes additional information that we incorporate with homophily in decision making.

John Emerson does his own bit of investigation on his blog with the UnSuggester looking at homophily and serendipity. He notes some interesting things about the particular results offered up by the Unsuggester:

It seems that some people buy only one kind of book, and these seem to be of three kinds: pulp fiction (e.g. Pratchett), contemporary lifestyle fiction (e.g. Brashares), and Christian books (e.g. John Piper). The Christian books are opposite to the other two categories, but there’s a considerable tension between the lifestyle books and the pulp fiction too. All three categories are the opposites of modernist, decadent, and cynical literature, and the lifestyle and pulp books tend to be opposed to all serious literature of any kind.

Intersesting observation, that some with narrower tastes can upset the smaller sample and so “skew” the results, assuming that this sort of modeling can be taken seriously.

At bookpress, the same observation is made in the comments by Emerson, although this time he makes reference in regard to wildly broad tastes upsetting the sample. For example, “Murakami seems to have a cult whose reading tastes are very peculiar”. If there is too small of a sample available to the UnSuggester, scattershot outliers can be just as upsetting to the results as excessively narrow tastes since not enough data is available to make correlations with any confidence.

How are such models generated? One method that is available for correlating many different things mathematically is Assortative Mixing in graph theory.

Specifically, we are using this technique (I am assuming now, since LibraryThing doesn’t spell it out) looking at how close two books are based on “similar characteristics,” which is the library shelf of the user as a proxy. Interesting take, but I don’t really know enough about graph theory to comment thoroughly on that, or the converse: nodes with the most dissassortative (or least assortative) mixing are the “anti-book” and not likely to be come across in the normal fare of the consumer’s selection.

The unanswered question here, however, is whether the anti-book is merely an item that is not likely to be encountered, or whether it is a prediction of taste, that the consumer would not like the “anti-book.” With assortative mixing, the anti-book would be the one that was not likely to cluster with homophilic choices, so the answer would be one of not normally encountering. There may well be some prediction of distaste, in that encounters with what is non-homophilic in choices would be not enjoyed which would reinforce the homophilic selection. However, it seems to be that by and large, the dissassortative node is not inherently distasteful automatically. It would be a better measure of “not liking” if the consumer had an assortative mixing of what is not to their liking and shy away from nodes displaying similar characteristics.

So let’s give the UnSuggester a run on some titles that I have right here, right now in front of me and have just finished reading. We can get an idea of whether this is recommending something not likely to be encountered, something not likely to be enjoyed, or some combination of both. More realistically, we can get an idea of how the UnSuggester matches up with my reading tastes. First up is Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard.

The list leads off with books on Christian Spirituality, but by number nine on the list, we have the Harry Potter paperback set. While I don’t have that specific reprinting, I have purchased them, and read them all like a crack addict. Anyone interested in the particulars can ask The Wife what happened with the last novel: we had a competition to see who would finish first, giving each other cagey stares and quick glances at bookmarks before any conversation that could remotely lead to something that would involve the storyline. “Hi, honey. How was your day?” “Don’t tell me what happened! I haven’t gotten to that part!”

Damn Harry Potter, which incidentally is the most widely read/held book in LibraryThing.

Moving right along, we come to number 16, Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, et al. which is in fact on my wish list. As are numbers 19 (Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas), 32 through 34 (Ambient Findability by Peter Morvile which I just added two days ago, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, and A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram) and number 39 (Refactoring by Martin Fowler). Yeah. Not looking too good. We’ll also not mention that I read Built to Last by Jim Collins when I was working for The Fabric Company. Or that I used it in B-School to shake up the occasional professor.

Okay, I’m a programmer by trade, so most of these selections are something I am likely to get in relation to keeping up the job skills. Except for the fact that I like this sort of analytical problem solving, so while I work at a Sun Shop (Java, Solaris, Eclipse, the whole bit), I don’t have a specific need for Ruby. But I am really curious about the hype. And where does Wolfram’s book on the idea of Emergence work into the picture of my reading if not pure intellectual curiosity?

Well, the light reading from Leonard is the red herring then, and I should search for something programmatically themed. Something like Programming Perl by Larry Wall which is also sitting in front of me.

And the list bogs down right off the bat. I have to own up to reading the number one listing, White Oleander by Janet Fitch. In fairness, chicklit is not really my fare, the book was [insert noise here] for my personal taste in fiction, and I know that I will never get those hours back in my life. But it made the time on the train back and forth to work pass. If by UnSuggestion, we mean that I won’t like it, right on that score. But as for the likelihood that I will or will not read it? Well, let’s chalk it up to being an outlier.

Overall, however, this list seems more on the mark. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares isn’t one that is high on my list of books to read, being right after the list of ingredients for artificial sweetener. I have read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton at number nine on the list, but that was decades ago in (grumble, grumble) middle school, and all the kids were doing it. Just like methamphetamines, which I wouldn’t recommend either. Same with Little Women at number 19, although that was high school, and, yeah, we’ll just leave it at that where it belongs.

The only other notable exceptions are The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel. O’Brien’s work is highly recommended by a couple of people around these parts (but that could be ascribed to the wartime setting of both the book and my current residence) and I own Wurtzel’s book. It’s somewhere in the house, I think. As I recall, I enjoyed it too, although I liked Postcards From the Edge better.

Interestingly, there seems to be a lot of Janet Evanovich novels on the list, all of which are right now sitting in the TOC courtesy of some care package. They didn’t really appeal to me before, and now, based on the eerie coincidence of seeing them on the UnSuggester, I will continue to ignore them.

In the interest of full disclosure, however, my reading tastes tend to be eclectic and so will naturally disrupt any homogeneity. The same goes with my musical tastes. So, I may not be the best test case for something like this, and in any event I am a sample size of one. But it does give some insight to what I might otherwise be missing, and is a starting point for looking in new directions.

On a lark, one of the side links labeled “You will not like!” is Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. Now, I can’t claim to have read the book, but having children running amok in the domicile, I have seen the movie, and it wasn’t insufferable. But the reading list for UnSuggestions for Ella Enchantedis incredible. I estimate that I have read or have on a wish list nearly one fifth (14/73) of the titles. Now, that is serendipity.

You know, The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger keeps coming up in the lists of UnSuggestions. Maybe I should take a look…

This is not to say that we casually cast aside our fellows’ needs. So, we balance what we can do for others with the knowledge that we can’t do everything, nor have everything done for us. Happens all the time here in a military setting. Among soldiers, there are conversations that run along the lines of “married guys shouldn’t do X because they have families to consider” immediately countered with “single guys shouldn’t have to do X since they have yet to marry/have children/lived their lives.” To be sure, there is “I don’t want to since that puts me at risk” but in a tight team, most would willingly absorb damage meant for his. Moshe Rabbenu demonstrates this later when he talks G-d down from the water-tower after the Golden Calf for the benefit of the Israelites. Moshe takes on an additional personal expense or risk to intervene. He didn’t have to, but he did. If he hadn’t, he personally would have been successful in life, but at the cost of the nation. Like we will see with the Red Heifer in a moment, for others he is willing to take on the possibility of personal diminution so that others have the benefit.

Honestly, it’s a lesson that some of the local Iraqis could use also. There are many times when it is “You Americans need to (give us)…” As long as there is that ultra-dependency, they will have nothing larger of their own, like a nation, only what crumbs someone feels they should get. The Kurds and radical fringes (Jesh al-Mahdi, Badr Brigade, Soldiers of Heaven come to mind) know that lesson all too well, and are more than willing to pony up individually for their collective good. And that’s why there will be a Kurdistan, and eventually I think a fractured “Shi’a-stan” with the broad middle driven out with increasing polarization (in my humble opinion).

Also, this was Shabbat Parah, so we have the Haftarah portion from Ezekiel the promise that “I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land.” While not actually in the promised land of Israel (beaches are better than oil fields anyway), we are here in cradle of civilization, the Garden of Eden, bounded between the Tigris and Euphrates. We are about 45 minutes to an hour south of Sammara, both historically and presently blood soaked. A Byzantine Emperor was killed in battle there, and another barely escaped with his life from a rout by the Saracens. Assyrian armies marched through here, systematically defeating the Babylonian armies that had preceded them a few generations previously under Sargon. Moshe Rabbenu would have led the tribes to the west of here, positioning everyone for Joshua to cross the Jordan. Where arrows and javelins had flown through the air, tracers and RPGs now do. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I have returned to the origin of civilization, where we devised the division of the day into 24 hours, hours into 60 minutes, weeks into 7 days, the circle in segments, grain into beer. While the first writings were creation myths and receipts for debts, this was closely followed by writings that the neighbors hadn’t paid said debts, were in general deadbeats and drunks to boot, so let’s get together an army and invade them. And I find the place pretty much unchanged.

But we see in Ki Tisa a condensation of life, a pattern: revelation, rebellion, and restoration. The revelation of the tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments is followed immediately with the rebellion of the Golden Calf. Restoration comes with the second set of tablets. We have that same thing today, here writ large. In the Garden that once held the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we found revelation. Writing, time, ethos, mythos. But, then came rebellion. We ate of that fruit, and nothing has been the same since. Like a fire, it could warm, illuminate, keep predatory animals at bay in the night, burn horribly, or destroy. Sins of the Golden Calf continue, with the propagation of ideas contrary to sense and sensibility. Firebrands preach their particular flavor of the weak.

But the next step is restoration. At some point we have to get our act together and bring this silliness to an end. How, I have no idea. But the clues are in the Haftarah where the Red Heifer is used to purify. While the ashes purify, those involved with the preparation are made impure until the evening. There will be some dirtiness to whatever solution we come up with, the inclination to look out for the self interest and avoid the personal diminution by being involved with the preparation. But we are told “and I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh,” so we know that for the sake of what makes us human, we have to sometimes rush into the figurative burning building.

John Agresto, who was the American Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education made and interesting observation in his book Mugged By Reality. Every time there was an explosion, whether he saw it in the papers, on television, or witnessed it, Iraqis ran away from the blast. Americans always ran towards it. Despite the highly individual nature of Americans, the low Power Distance towards authority, the laissez faire attitudes, the seeming divisiveness of Americans, we always gelled together in times of need, especially the needs of others, despite personal risk. We are more than willing to undertake the reduction of personal levels of “purity” in the preparation of the figurative Red Heifers of today, be it nation building, putting on bandages, whatever.

And so we return to the individual price that each of has to pay in the collection of silver shown to us in the opening verses of Ki Tisa. Each has to pay some price, some common price. There is no escaping or evading it. In some form or fashion, we have to undertake a loss of sorts, the same loss no matter how it is counted, to make the silver sockets for the Tent of Meeting. We get something in return: a solid foundation for the tent. But, we also need to be mindful that sometimes we have to balance the needs of others and the whole group with our individual preferences. Someone needs to prepare the Red Heifer at personal expense so that everyone else can benefit from it.

Well, it looks like we have extended period of fun and will be going into extra innings. Our unit is one of the ones that are being extended in theater, so we get to stay another 125 days here in country. Of all the brigades in theater, ours is the only National Guard brigade, and the only full brigade extended. There are some are some Marine battalions that are also extended, but they are only looking at 60 to 90 days of extra time. Not us. We’re in it to win it. In for the long haul.

Actually, if we are here any longer, it will be a permanent change of station for us. I should start looking into housing costs for the local villages. Something nice I could move my family into. It seems like that is the only way I am going to see them again. That or wait for Representative Rangel’s proposed bill to draft men and women up to the age of 42 pass the legislature, have my wife drafted, and maybe see if she can be sent here for a tour. Work with me, folks; we’re going to have to get creative with this.

So, leaving aside any discussion about whether or not the surge will work, I’ll stick to how we came to find out. The same way as the rest of the world: by Yahoo News.

It all begins in the morning of January 11th. The President had given his State of the Union address the night before, where he indicated his commitment to Iraq and announced that he was going to send more troops to surge the level of forces in country. I had woken up early and while milling about in the housing area, I ran into Arroyo. He was all flustered with the latest rumor: we were being extended in country and Bravo Troop was being moved to Ramadi as part of the announced surge. I and another soldier talked him down from the figurative water tower about that one. It had to be complete bullshit. There was nothing official about us being extended, plus what sense did it make to pack up a troop, move it 100 miles to another city for four months of operations? In the time that it would take to pack an entire unit’s worth of equipment, convoy it down, unpack it, then pack it back up to move to Kuwait and ultimately the States in a few months, there would be little left over for actual operations. Plus, that means the unit coming in to replace Bravo, who is unnamed and unknown, would have to have their equipment shipped here. Plus, add time to train them up. Plus, add time for Bravo to learn the ropes in Ramadi. No time left and that would put two units on the road moving equipment, taxing an overburdened logistics net that somehow has to support the movement of all these troops into theater. It would make more logistical sense to drop the new unit in Ramadi, since that is less traffic, less ramp up time to learn the ropes overall, and more time on the ground. Granted, Big Army is prone to some spectacular episodes of illogic, but this would be too much. Relax, Arroyo. Just another case of him being excessively anxious about every little thing. Not to mention acting like an Iraqi: if it is rumor, it must be true.

I finally wander into the TOC to begin my shift for the evening. As soon as I come in, Jeffery asks me if I saw the news about our extension. I tell him that no, I haven’t seen it, but I have been hearing rumors about it. He tells me that Yahoo News is reporting that we are getting extended, and ABC News is reporting the same thing. There are a bunch of news stories to that effect and they all say the same thing: we stay with the surge.

Outside, the rain clouds in the sky opened up and a steady drizzle came down turning the ground into mud.

One of the younger kids in the mortar platoon, Bloomfield, who looks like a twelve year old kid with a wad of dip in his mouth, came into the TOC. He wanted to use one of the military phones to call home, the idea being that he connects to a base stateside, gets transferred to a 1-800 number so there is no cost to the government, and uses a calling card to pay for the call home. This way, he only has to pay the domestic rates on the calling card and not the international rate, so the 500 unit card that he purchased will last for a couple of hours instead of the normal 20 minutes. No problem, I tell him. Go right ahead.

I got back to my mission critical task of surfing the internet looking for news articles about this extension rumor. Sure enough, the same couple of AP and Reuters blurbs were on most of the news sites outlining that a National Guard Brigade was going to be part of the troops extended for the surge. They weren’t particularly informative and didn’t name us directly, but when there is only one full National Guard brigade in theater, that narrows down the choices considerably.

Bloomfield came back after a few minutes and told us that his parents got a call about us being extended. Someone from the state rang them up in the morning and told them that we were all staying as part of the surge. Do we have any information about that? What exactly is going on?

Fuck if I know, dude. There’re rumors, but there’s not much more. Nothing official. You can, however, look into the crystal ball of internet news sites and try and figure things out with us. Stare into the strangely mesmerizing multimedia presentation and read the electronic tea leaves.

The Captain came out of his office and let us know that he was going to the Squadron Commander’s office. There was a huddle of some sort at the higher headquarters because of the rampant rumors of the extension. No problem, sir. We’ll hold the fort. He moved the dots on the magnetic board that showed where the higher leadership was located, putting himself from the column marked TOC to Other.

Pfeiffer came waltzing into the TOC, looking to do the same thing that Bloomfield did earlier. He wanted to call home on the military line with the phone cards and chat with his fiancée. Pfeiffer was a nice kid, who was pure as driven snow, saccharine as white bread. Or rather, he was once. While he might not be wheat bread now, he was a little toasted.

Pfeiffer was due to marry his fiancée in July, not long after we were scheduled to be back from deployment. He had proposed to his girlfriend on Christmas leave a year prior, surprising her when he got off the plane with a proposal and ring. He didn’t so much as take a knee as fall over his own feet. But, it got the message through.

He came back out to the front desk a dozen or so minutes later hot under the collar. His fiancée had gotten a call from the state telling her that he was extended. She was in tears, pounding on him for information. They had planned for a wedding in July, now that was obviously postponed. Things had to be cancelled, rearranged, put off. What do we know about all of that?

We don’t know.

“Well, I think that is a bunch of crap. What the hell is my fiancée getting calls for if we don’t know? And if we are extended, how long is it going to be now? We did our year, dammit!”

We don’t know.

“Somebody needs to find out about what is going on. I think that’s pretty fucked up that we have to get our information from ABC.”

The Captain is at a rumor control meeting. Check back later.

Pfeiffer left, shaking his head. He was understandably upset, but none of us had anything to offer him, other than the newswire feeds. Sorry, dude. We are on the same sinking boat. I don’t have a line to offer you.

The Captain returned from his meeting with the Squadron Commander about an hour and a half later. He tells us that there is nothing official as of this moment, which is around five in the afternoon Iraqi time. He went to the meeting with the Squadron Commander, who just got out of a conference call with the Brigade Commander, who just finished up a tele-conference with the Theater Commander. The Theater commander said that he has nothing official from his higher headquarters on who is staying beyond their scheduled rotation for the surge. Yes, he has heard and read the news also, but as it stands now, nothing has come down to him. Sorry.

So, as of five in the evening our time, nobody in country had heard anything official. But someone back home did and spilled the beans to the press, not to mention called wives, girlfriends, and parents. Somebody knows something, but they aren’t telling us.

Rod comes in to use the phone to call home. “Hey, Rod,” I tell him. “Be warned: there have been news reports of us being extended and the last two people that called home said that someone from the state is calling around to all the families telling them that.”

“Are you fucking serious?” he asked incredulously. He was probably having the same thoughts that led me to give him the heads up. His wife wasn’t the most calm person dealing with stress, and an absent husband and an infant was stress enough. She was likely to be apoplectic about this.

“Now, the Captain just got back from a meeting at Squadron these rumors flying around, and they are getting from the theater command that there is nothing for certain yet.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“Just telling you what I’m hearing. Take it as you will.”

“Shit,” he mutters under his breath. He looks down the hall at the phone room, back to me, down at the desk, deciding if he really wants to take the plunge. Maybe it’s all bullshit. Maybe not. He takes the key to the phones, and goes down the hall. “This better not be the case,” he calls out.

It is. He comes back 30 minutes later livid. His wife is in the same condition of the upset fiancé. She is bouncing off the walls about it. Tears, yelling, sobbing, screaming, wondering why this is all happening, how this is all Rod’s fault somehow in exquisite detail. Naturally, he is the outlet for her pent up frustration about this. So, naturally, we have to be his outlet for his anger and frustration. Continuing the cycle of anger and violence.

That night, when I get back to my hooch, I get online and chat with my wife with instant messaging. She asks me what my orders say. What orders? Well, she was told that we have orders about this. So just look at them and I can answer all her questions about the extension. As if. We don’t have any orders; we have to guess and watch the news like the rest of the world.

When she got the call at home that morning, she thought that something happened to me. Maybe I wasn’t posted in the TOC anymore and failed to tell her about that and something had gone horribly wrong. Maybe something else happened. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

My Wife was apologetic that she had to tell the kids about the extension that afternoon when they got home. I’m not sure why she felt the need to apologize, since that is something that a parent has to do, and it isn’t exactly like we could hide it from them. Hey, isn’t Dad supposed to be here now?

She didn’t have much of a choice about it, though. At school, the teachers of my oldest three, the ones in school, told my kids that they were sorry about their dad being extended in Iraq for the summer. What? Oh, didn’t you hear, little child? It’s all over the news. Your Dad gets to stay in Iraq as part of the surge. I suppose that it would be too much to ask for that my kids could hear this information for the first time from their parents, and not the news or their teachers.

Of course, when they got home, they had questions. Is this true? What does this mean? Why? And so begins the explanation from Mom of how this means that the Bat Mitzvah of the oldest will be rescheduled again. We had to put this off once because of the deployment and the inflexibility of the command to grant me leave then, even if it is my R&R leave. So, again, we have to cancel plans, find an available date, study a new parsha, and basically reset our lives again. Number One is pissed about the whole thing, and understandably so. Number Three was upset with the planned post-deployment trip to Disney World getting canceled for the time being. “Aw, I was going to go to Disney,” she said. Yeah, I understand. Mom was going to go to Punta Cana with Daddy, too, but both of those are going to be put off. Never mind the reservations canceled, the inability to actually plan for another date since there is not a shred of information for us as to new return dates, or the inevitable trying to make plans on short notice once I get home consequently getting worse accommodations and paying more for not having long term reservations.

All the frustration can be summed up with the question that my wife asked me: “why don’t you know?” I know it was not meant to be accusatory, but it was hard not to feel angry at that. Why don’t I know? Other than the illogic and philosophical absurdity of the question of knowing why I was not able to divine knowledge denied to me, it becomes the resonance of all that is wrong with this situation in particular and this deployment in general. Why don’t I know? Did I miss something? Did someone else miss something? Was I now or at any time a member or sympathizer of the Communist Party? Why don’t I know?

What amazed me the most, though, at the end of the first day was that the State Adjutant General, the TAG as he is known, got information and took it upon himself to have the State Family Readiness Group (FRG) call all the wives at home and work. And yet, the theater commander knew nothing official as to who is staying on longer. And we couldn’t possibly let the soldiers actually call their families and clue them in on what is going on officially straight from the soldier’s mouth. No, instead it is better for families to get calls from state organizations saying “sorry ‘bout your luck” and walking away when there is no way that the families can get in ready contact with their husbands. It’s better to set the seeds of doubt and fear as to what the husband is holding out on, what information is not getting passed, what things are being omitted. Open door, toss in grenade, walk away.

If that is family support, I think my marriage will do better without it, thank you very much.

Outside, it is still raining. The muddy puddles have become soupy lakes. Everything is a mess and contaminated by earthen slop.

The next morning, I saw SGT Krank out front of our hooches when I came out to get ready for work. “What’s the word from the planet crackpot?” he asked me. Not much, just a circus with all the extension nonsense.

“Yeah, those bastards from the FRG called my wife at work yesterday morning. I told them not to call her. Every time they get contact information for back home, I tell them not to call her. I don’t want her part of that, and she doesn’t want to be part of that. But they called her up at work anyway.”

“I think it was the state run organization that did that.”

“I don’t give a fuck who it was. I don’t care if it was the Governor or President himself. I don’t want anyone calling my wife about any of this shit. I want to tell her myself. Those fuckers called her at nine a.m. at work. She was so upset with getting that call that she broke down into tears and had to leave work. Then when I get off work and get on the computer with her, she tears into me. She’s going on and on about how I lied to her, how I am keeping secrets about the deployment from her, how I knew all about this and didn’t tell her, how she doesn’t believe a word I say anymore because I must have known this was coming and didn’t clue her in.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, I mean, that really pissed me off. Here I am, away for a year and a half at this point, she’s barely keeping herself together, and this comes along. And I’m the one to blame. So I wrote those fuckers a nice long email about leaving her the fuck out of their calling list.”

“Really?”

“Hell, yeah! ‘Dear FRG, I don’t know how many times I have told you this but don’t call my wife about anything. Period.’ Then I went on and on about how they have no business doing that. Those fuckers can kiss my ass. I wrote that Susie chick, or whatever her name is and laid it on her. She has no business fucking up my life like that.”

“Damn, dude.”

“Then I stomp over to the TOC and went to see the Captain. I told him that I didn’t want the FRG calling my wife and I told him that time and time again. So he goes on and on about how they have to do their job, yadda yadda yadda, the General told them to do it, and I fucking lost it. I mean, how dare they, how fucking dare they, try and tell me what is and is not good for my fucking family? When I say lay the fuck off, they need to lay the fuck off. They have my ass, they can do what they want with me, but they better leave my family the fuck out of it.”

I just smirked. When he gets on a rant, it’s best to let him go. From my experience, it is more for his psychological benefit to vent, and then be done with it. People that are not used to his style, though, (like new lieutenants) are prone to getting roped into an argument that they will never win or end up feeling verbally assaulted.

He grabbed a Coke from my fridge. “Yeah, so the Captain is like ‘Whoa, SGT Krank, you need to settle down.’ And I’m like ‘Fuck that, sir. Nobody has any business dragging my family into this and getting my wife worked up, so worked up she leaves work for the day.’ And he’s all ‘you need to calm down’ and shit. ‘They’re just following instructions from the TAG.’ I don’t give a fuck if the word came from the Pope. Fuck that motherfucker, and fuck all those clowns back in the states.”

“Feel better?”

“Yeah.”

That afternoon, the Captain gives us another briefing at the guard mount for the shift going onto the gate. He tells of his meeting with the SCO, who met with the Brigade CO, who met with MNC-I commander. Nothing on paper. Nothing for sure. No idea if our mission will change because of the surge, or what. However, with all the hoopla that has been going on, Two Star Generals back home and Governors of States don’t really schedule news conferences unless they are sure of something. So, the money is on us staying, but we have not a shred of information or proof of that. Theoretically, we might not even be staying since there are no papers on it yet.

But don’t count on it.

In the meantime, he tells us, be patient with him and tell our families to be patient. He has gotten something like fifty billion emails from angry wives, all starting some variation that he is the scum of the Earth personally responsible for keeping their loved ones in Iraq. As though he was doing this with some sort of grudge or vendetta.

The Captain did get a call from the TAG back home, though, that evening. This marked the first time that he called our command while we were in theater, and the second time period that he made contact with our unit in a year and a half. I suppose that there are greater things that occupy the minds of National Guard generals than one of their units, detached to another squadron from a different state, who itself is detached to a brigade from a third state. Especially when that unit is deployed to combat. Not that we are the only ones from our state that is deployed currently, since, well, actually we are. There was one Air Guard medical unit mobilized after we were, but they had served their four month tour and been long since demobilized.

One of the officers hanging around the TOC mentioned rumor has it that our State Adjutant General had called the home state of the squadron that we are attached to and bitched him out on the phone. Why hadn’t the Squadron Commander of this other state pushed out the information on the extension? Why were his dear troops from his Great State being left in the dark? You know, the ones that he neglected himself?

Because there is no information to push out and everyone in Iraq has no idea what FOX News is talking about, that’s why. Nice try. The blame-storming continues.

In times like these, there is one thing that soldiers can do to re-spark interest in an otherwise lousy situation: get a pool going. LT Pokei walked up to my desk and said that we should get a deployment pool going. I put out a tin on the desk and put out a pad of paper. Whipping out a dollar, he put one in the tin. “I want to be first. I choose July 31st.” “Very good, sir,” I told him, scribbling his name on the pad. LT Dammut came over and looked at what was going on. “I’ll get in on that too,” he said. “Wait!” yelled LT Pokei. “I’m not done yet. I also want July 28th, August 1st and August 5th,” he announced putting a dollar in with each date.

“Now,” asked LT Dammut. “Is it the closest day without going over, or just the closest day period?” And with that began the discussion of the rules. Once that was done with, I threw in for July 18.

The phone rang and I picked it up. At the other end was RQ, who was in Kuwait on his way home. RQ is an Individual Ready Reserve soldier, an IRR, who was called back to Active Duty to round out our troop strength. His orders were expiring now, so he was headed back to the States to demobilize. Other IRR soldiers had flown out the week before and were already back in the States, or even released from Active Duty. Right now, he was in Kuwait waiting for the next available flight out of theater.

“Hey, RQ, what’s up?”

“Hey, what do you know about this extension that’s all over the news? Here, they are saying that we are going to be sent back to our units. You know what’s happening with the IRR in this?”

“No idea,” I tell him. I then give him a quick rundown of the news and the no official word. Theater says ‘I don’t know.’ FOX News says ‘you stay.’ “Hey, if you can, get on the next flight, any flight and get the hell out of here. The closer you get to home, the less likely they would be to send you back, I would think.”

“Yeah, they just pulled all of us off a plane here. I was already on board and some female MP came on and asked for all the soldiers in our Brigade to get off. I was thinking about just staying, but all the others were getting off, I figured someone would dime me out.”

“Well, what are they telling you?”

“They don’t know, so they have us in the holding area. Dude, we were on the plane, cleared Customs and everything. I could’ve punched that chick right in her face.”

“I hear ya, bro. We don’t have any info on the IRR here, though. So hang loose, call us every so often to see what’s up and let us know what you hear there. And if you can bail, do it.”

“Okay.”

“Man, I’m sorry. I wish I could give you more, but I don’t have anything.” I hung up the phone.

LT Pokei came over then and told me that one of the overnight staff, SGT Worth, was going to go back out to the ECP since the night shift was short staffed. So, tonight, when Worth comes in, I am to tell him that tonight is his last night in the TOC and he is to call the Officer In Charge for the night shift, LT Oben, for details. Easy enough. For the most part, I hated dealing with Worth in any form, but this was a quick and simple message. Should be painless.

I heard the door open and looked up to see Nick coming in. Nick had done some runs with me on convoys as gunner when my normal gunner was taken off the road due to injuries. Or rather, due to the medications that he was on while recuperating from the injuries.

“Hey, Nick! How’s everything going?”

Things are well, and he’s here to see if he has mail. He doesn’t, so we chat for a second.

“Hey, check this out. You know that new interpreter that we hired, Joseph? Well, he’s Turkish like her, and he’s young. So, we are out at the gate the other day, and Kat is there. Now, she hasn’t met this guy yet. You know how she is all about everything that is Turkish? We tell her that we have a new Turkish interpreter, and she’s all like ‘that’s great’ thinking that it’s going to be some older guy. Then, he comes up, and we say hi to him. He’s this young guy, in shape, you know, pretty good looking. She does this double take and her eyes just bug out. Then, she looked around really quick, like you know when you are seeing if someone caught something you did?” Nick pantomimed her with mouth open and hand half covering it, then looking furtively around. “I caught it, but played it off like I didn’t see anything. So, when you see her, ask her about Joseph. Check out her reaction.”

I smirked and some others laughed. “Has her boyfriend seen this guy? His time’s going to be shortened now.”

“Oh, he’s seen Joseph. Yeah, he’s not happy about it.”

“Competition has arrived. Let the games begin. He’s sunk.”

We chatted a few minutes about odds and ends before Nick left. The Captain also came through and announced that he was going home. “If anyone calls from back home, tell them I’m at the North Gate or something and take a message. See if I can get back to them tomorrow.”

“Sure thing, sir.”

Things settled down as the night wore on and people went back to their bunks. SGT Yuse came lumbering in at his normal time to drop off his gear before going over to the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation phone center to pull his nightly few hours running the desk. “Hey, SGT Yuse,” I told him, “you are going to be moved out to the North Gate starting tomorrow night. You need to call out there and talk to LT Oben and coordinate everything and figure out the details.”

“What?” he boomed in his characteristic voice sounding like a drunken Jughead in a quantum physics class.

“You are being transferred to the ECP. Call the North Gate. Talk to LT Oben. Find out what you need to know for tomorrow.”

He stood there silently, absorbing the information. I stared back, waiting for the next round. I couldn’t tell exactly if he was having a hard time understanding what I told him, or pondering a way out of it, or contemplating a rant of some sort over this great injustice of putting him to work in a place other than the MWR phone center.

“So they want me to call there?” he asked. Okay, it was door number one. “Yes, call out there and talk to them,” I told him.

“So when do I start tomorrow?”

“How should I know? That’s why you have to call and find out. I’ve given you all the information I have.”

He paused. I still sensed a rant pending. “Why are they moving me out there?” I just looked at him. Seriously, I hate dealing with him.

“You know I have a profile for my back, don’t you?” he continued after a moment.

“Look, I’m not the one sending you out there. I’m the messenger.” I picked up the phone and held it at him. “Call Oben. Talk to him. He can fill you in.”

“What’s the number out there?”

I rattled off the extension for him, and turned away back to the book that I was reading. There was not going to be spoon-feeding of information I didn’t have to him tonight. I had enough unanswered questions on my plate to deal with a person who could not seemingly make a phone call to get the information that he needed and make things all nicey nice. Especially to another sergeant who in theory should be able to think for himself and take initiative.

Later that night, well after midnight, the phone rings and I answer it. It is a female captain from our Great State back home on the other end. She asks for Captain Equah and needs to talk to him about a teleconference. I tell her that he is unavailable. She asks me if he is at dinner, and if so, when he is expected back. I tell her that it is one in the morning and that Captain Equah has gone home for the evening. She is stunned. “Home?” she asks. “Yes,” I tell her. “ It is the middle of the night here. We are eight hours ahead of New Jersey.” She pauses as she digests this information. It seems that she is confused about the concept of time zones. After a moment she asks for Captain Equah’s email. She also asks if Captain Equah will attend the audio call in tomorrow morning Stateside time. I let her know that I have no idea if captain Equah is part of the teleconference. She tells me that she is going to e-mail him call in numbers and asks if I will pass along that information to him. I tell her that I will. She hangs up.

A while later, a Colonel, the chief of staff for the TAG, calls. He also asks if Captain Equah is available. I’d tell him no. He tells me that he has to speak to Captain Equah right now, it’s very important don’t I know, and asks me where the Captain is at. Now, I can’t very well tell the full bird Colonel that the Captain is sleeping and would rather not hear from idiots in the middle of the night because it is a more convenient time back home. However, I could play for time, so I exercised the bluff the Skipper wanted.

I tell the Colonel the Captain is at the North Gate right now and will be unavailable for some time. The Colonel asks how soon the Captain will be back, or when he is expected. My bluff is not working very well. I tell the Colonel that it will be at least 30 minutes for the Captain to return if I reach him by radio. The Colonel that tells me to get a hold of the captain by radio and get him back. It is very important that the TAG speak to the Captain. The General will call in 30 minutes. If for some reason that he does not call or the Captain misses him, then there is a phone number that captain can call the TAG at. I take down the number and tell the Colonel that I would get him as quickly as I can. The Colonel thanks me and hangs up.

I pick up the portable radio and I call the captain. After a few moments he answers, groggy. I let him know that New Jersey called and they need him back in the TOC for a callback in 30 minutes. He acknowledges and I put up the radio.

About twenty minutes later, the captain comes in the office. I briefed him on the phone calls that came in, about the email that he should expect, the teleconference scheduled tomorrow morning New Jersey time, and the call pending from the general. On a pad of paper was scratched the number to call, so I gave that to the skipper also. He went back to his office.

Some time goes by. No call from the General back home. Some more time goes by. Still no call. The Captain tries calling the number that the Colonel left. It goes to an answering machine that is full. No one there. No operator option. Nothing. He tries again. Same result. The Captain asks me if there was any other number left, but sorry, sir, that was the only one given.

Being resourceful, he emails and calls other officers in our parent unit back in the States looking for a contact number for the TAG. No one is answering their phones and no replies come to his emails. He stays in his office for a while, stewing, slowly increasing the volume to the classical music that he played when feeling under stress.

Finally, he gave up. “If anyone calls for me tonight, tell them I’ll call them back in the morning,” he says as he leaves. Sure thing, Skipper.

John, who had finally drifted in for his overnight shift, was standing next to the coffee pot eyeing up the Girl Scout cookies. “Shit,” he said. After a moment, he snatched up a handful of cookies. “Four more months. Might as well get fat.” He stuffed them in his mouth and wandered over to his desk.

The next day, things were a little more settled. We were finally coming to grips with our lot, and spending our time doing remote damage control with our families back home. We still had no information to give them; in fact, we were relying on news from stateside to update on us what was going on. It was clear to us now that the Generals and Governors at home had the inside line on the straight dope. Here, we still had nothing. No orders. No official information. The only thing that we couldn’t trust from home was that the state FRG was still swearing that we had our orders in hand. Not so. But with the flurry of blame-storming going on, it didn’t surprise me that someone might be covering their tracks. Then again, given the gross incompetence and lack of information, one more communication breakdown was not surprising either.

We still had to focus on the here and now, though. A report came in that there was a car that exploded in somebody else’s gate. No further details, but stay alert and stay alive out there. Of course.

Kat came into the TOC to check her mail. LT Pokei was passing through the area, and called out to her. “Kat! How are you? Hey, did you meet that new interpreter that we hired? He’s Turkish, you know.” She gave a very throaty giggle, and sauntered away down the hall to the mail room. We all laughed knowingly. I think that she had noticed the new interpreter. Noticed plenty.

Back in the States that night for us, afternoon for our families, a press conference was convened for the benefit of the press and family members. The Governor of our state showed up, the TAG called in by speakerphone. There were plenty of attendant officers and other hangers-on. They flew in by military helicopter, bounded out, gave the required words of sadness and comfort then opened up the floor for questions.

It was all done except for the fire sale by the time I got back to my hooch and was able to get the details from my wife via IM. The Governor said that it was unacceptable that our commanding officers didn’t know or didn’t tell us. The TAG, who couldn’t be bothered with actually showing up, said over the speakerphone “I won’t apologize for not having the guys know.” Which I thinks speaks volumes more about the disdain that we and our families have been treated with than I could ever write.

On the way in to the TOC on the afternoon of the 14th, I ran into some of the officers sitting on the porch of the TOC. LT Pokei and LT Dammut were sitting smoking cigars, wearing Stetson hats, and discussing the speech given by the General at the press conference. The two lieutenants were specifically talking about how the General refused to take responsibility for someone else’s fuck up, and how right he was for that. It was obviously a mutual stroke party. I debated offering up something mild, since it was plainly apparent that these two would not be convinced otherwise that the General had done the wrong thing. And I certainly wasn’t going to get roped into an argument with LT Dammut since he already detested me and there was no changing his mind once the little Napoleon had decided something and began his pontification.

Well, discretion has never been my strength. Batter up. “Don’t you think that he should have offered up something about the lack of information that got to us? About our wives getting it first? After all, it was his office that was calling the families without any notification of us what was happening.”

“But, that’s not his responsibility,” he said with his usual snide condescension. “The theater was supposed to inform us of what is happening here. His job, once he got information from General Blum, his responsibility was to get that out to the families. He shouldn’t have to take responsibility for what is going on or not going on here, that’s not his job. It’s stupid to think that he should be faulted for some fuck up by someone else.”

“But shouldn’t the soldiers get to inform their families?”

“Look, when a four star calls you up and gives you some information, you put it out. It’s his job to put it out. He was right to direct the FRG to put out the information. That’s what he had to do.”

We were going to have to agree to disagree. Plenty of times someone higher than me fucked up, and I was left holding the bag to say to my guys at least “I’m sorry it went down like this.” Or, when I did or didn’t do something based on the information available at the time, offered up “you know, maybe that wasn’t the brightest move on my part even given the lack of information.” But, maybe that is my personality and leadership style.

And the officers wonder why there is a disconnect with them and the enlisted.

Pokei, the acting XO, comes over once I have gotten settled and asks me some questions. “Is there any reason that you can’t work at the gate?”

“Hell, no” I come back with. “I’m good to go.” I go into an explanation of why the XO, who was on leave, wanted to keep me locked up in the TOC for his own diabolical purposes.

“Well, Oben is short at the gate, and requested you, if you are cleared to go out there.”

“Perfect! When do I start?”

“Tomorrow would be your last day here. Give him a call at the gate in an hour or so, once they get there and done changeover, and set things up with him.”

The timing was perfect. If I knew that arguments with officers would get me thrown out of the TOC, I would have done that sooner. And with great vigor. I know that it had nothing to do with it, but I like to pretend to stroke my self image. While the TOC is witness to some truly bizarre things sometimes that are just amusing in their absurdity, it becomes soul sucking after a short time.

The following afternoon, the Captain came out from his office and walked up to the large white board that dominates the entrance to the TOC. He wrote on that that as of sixteen hundred hours, we are officially notified. The he put underneath that 125 days from a date.

“Make sure that no one writes any bullshit on this board or messes with this. And tell everyone that they have their official notification as of sixteen hundred, so they need to call home as soon as possible and tell their wives and families that they are official now.”

“Roger that, sir.”

The Captain stood there for a moment looking at the white board. He looked harried from the past couple of days of fiasco. “Sir? Do we have an idea when the paper orders will come in?”

He looked at me with a steeled glance. “No, we probably won’t get that for a couple of days. But we are officially notified now.”

“Roger that, sir. I’ll pass it along.”

Now, to cut to the chase, I disagree with the author’s premise, which is a sarcastic send up that sums to Cake sucks and always sounds the same. Taking a sample from different albums, can that really be said about “Comfort Eagle,” “Jolene,” “Stickshifts and Safetybelts,” “Pretty Pink Ribbon,” and “Sheep Go To Heaven”? Oh, wait, your perception came from what is played on commercial radio? I’m sorry, but I refuse to take that seriously.

There is a development that happens across the albums from Cake, from first to last. Is there repetition? Just enough to make up what is a voice, not a tired shrill gnash like the rest of the Freelance Genius blog is. We all have that characteristic trait, or constellation of traits, that gives identity. That alone does not make for regurgitative nonsense, unlike the critic in question. There is enough to give comfort and familiarity, and more than enough playful diversity to give a refreshing awakening to the music.

Personally, I happen to like Cake. There is a question of personal memories which I associate with that music. I remember Number One in the On-Air Studio doing a show and dedicating “Comfort Eagle” to me, this being an inside joke on us both overusing the word dude. There is Number Two playing “Sheep Go To Heaven” over and over in the living room after we picked up that particular album at a Goodwill store shopping for clothes. And I even remember getting the first album, having it played in the car and me playing Name That Tune, or at least Guess The Artist, with songs that I had never heard until “The Distance” was played.

So I like Cake. Freelance Genius does not. And that difference is what makes the world go around.