Never Been Average

The Chaplain shows movies on Friday night. Last week it was Clash of the Titans, which I saw while I was at Pendleton. I wasn’t too impressed, so I didn’t go. Today’s showing was Prince of Persia, which I went to. As I walked back from chow to the tent where the movie was being shown, I suddenly recalled scenes from M*A*S*H, where the characters sat on wooden benches, and threw popcorn at Klinger when the movies stopped rolling. I wondered if I would be sitting on a wooden bench--the chapel that Sunday services are in has wooden benches much like them. I was almost disappointed when I got there and found out I would be sitting on a metal chair. But not too disappointed, because it meant I got to sit on something with back support.

Prelude. I remember at one point, not all that long ago, sitting in a briefing evaluating the performance of a unit where a commanding officer was being told that his Marines were average. When the brief was over, he was angry. “Never in my life have I been average,” he snapped.

I promise this post will make sense at some point.

I had a project earlier today where some work my Marines completed was being inspected for completion. The inspector pointed out details that had been overlooked--nails that had gone through the plywood but not the stud behind it. Nails that had been done with a nail gun and not gone into the wood entirely, and then not been finished off with a regular hammer. I realized that I was good at holding myself to a standard of excellence, but actually fairly bad about holding my subordinates to a standard of excellence.

I’m too worried about being the bad guy, about whether they’ll work for me willingly or grudgingly if I come down on them to hard. About whether I have the stamina and endurance to stick around long after I want to because I am holding Marines to a high standard and they have not completed their task yet. But if I don’t do this, I am setting myself up for a career of having my Marines be just average.

I know some of my Sergeants are holding my Marines to a standard of excellence. A civilian inspector recently came to look at a different project some of my Marines had done, and told our Battalion Sergeant Major that the work was better quality than some Seebee projects he had seen. This was quite high praise. But obviously, I have problems in other areas.

Military commanders aren’t judged on what they accomplish. Their actions might be examined for strengths and flaws, as Gen McChrystal is learning right now, but their successes and failures lie in what their subordinates do or fail to do.

Earlier in the month I took some Marines out to a project site to drop them off. We had enough logistics vehicles that we went in two separate convoys, with me in charge of the second one. As I drove up to the entry control point (ECP) for the patrol base, I heard over the radio that a corpsman was needed at the ECP. I hopped out to find a Marine standing with his weight on his right leg; some heavy equipment had dropped onto his foot. (He broke some toes and suffered some pain, but will be fine. He didn’t get sent home.)

A couple hours later I fielded a stern call from our Battalion Commanding Officer, informing me that I was not their friend, and that I had better hold the Marines to a standard. That was something that my Staff Platoon Commander at The Basic School pounded into my head--if I didn’t hold to the standard that was established already, I was setting a new standard.

So, I think one of the biggest things I need to focus on now is holding my Marines to a high standard, and not worrying about whether they’ll like me or not. Not gonna be easy to do.

See? I told you it would all make sense in the end. Except for Prince of Persia. That was random. :-)

Groundhog Day

Yes, I have reached that point in the deployment, where every day feels like groundhog day. Get up, go to work, stuff happens. Problems are solved, go to chow. Do it again in the afternoon. Go back to the barracks, watch some Stargate, take a navy shower (whereby you turn the water off every time you apply soap), go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Actually, today has been going pretty well, which means that I’m waiting for the ball to drop. A few of days ago I dropped about half of my platoon, a bunch of lumber and materials, and a couple pieces of HE off at a small patrol base to work for a couple of weeks. Getting them out the door left me exhausted, and of course I didn’t drink enough water the day of (insert obligatory Gen Petraeus joke here), so I spent Wednesday trying to re-hydrate and feeling like crap while doing so.

I did get some good news the next day afternoon. My platoon has been so busy that I was running out of Marines to cover all of the projects we have going right now. For example, yesterday after evening chow (which I ate around 1945) I stopped by a work site to see how they were doing. They only had four Marines working on the project (they were waiting for two more to show up) and didn't have any power tools, so I stayed and helped them out for a while. So the good news is that we’re getting reinforcements from the rest of the company. Now I’ll actually have Marines around to take care of all the little tasks that come up during the day.

Another bright spot to the past few days has been the world cup games going on. They start 1830 our time, which means for a couple nights this week I’ve sat down to chow right around the 60-70 minute mark, with the game running on the flat screens in the chow hall. There have been a lot of TCNs watching the games lately as well; last night I sat next to two gentlemen waiting for the Uruguay game to show at 2330. So it’s a fun atmosphere in the chow hall in the evening. Wednesday’s game was Spain vs. Switzerland and a well-played, exciting game to watch.

I want to thank everyone that has been sending me letters and e-mails. Letters especially put a huge smile on my face, and I try to answer them when I can. I will also try to post more, but when days start at 0600 and go to 2130, it's difficult to find the time.

Preparing to Get Very Sandy

Monday was my first day that I actually ran a project “outside the wire”. A quick refresher: we all live inside a rather large base surrounded by large berms of earth and many guard towers. Any time you are inside such a camp, or even a small base, as long as it has protection from direct fire (gunfire), you are considered “inside the wire”. This means you don’t have to wear your PPE (personal protective equipment-- flak jacket and Kevlar helmet among other things) when you’re walking around, you don’t have to take special precautions when driving, etc. When you go “outside the wire”, you wear special uniforms that are designed not to melt, you wear your PPE, and you have to have security vehicles when you drive around.

Our project was pretty simple: a HESCO pit 14’ tall and 30’x30’ inside. EOD wanted a protected location to do some work with all of the unexploded ordnance, or UXO, that they find, so we loaded up, went outside the wire, and built some HESCO for them. The purpose of HESCO is to replace piles of sandbags. It’s essentially a chain-link fence that folds out in squares with a special textile on the inside to hold in the sand. You open it up, get it in place, and then use a tractor to dump sand inside it. Once you’ve dumped the sand inside, you get some Marines on the top with shovels or rakes to level it off. You can stack HESCO once it has been filled, and it comes in many sizes—from 2’x2’x2’ to 7’6”(H)x7’x7’. It’s much quicker and easier than having Marines with shovels stacking individual sand bags.

So that was our project. It was about 100m outside of camp, right between two guard towers. We had to drive a little farther than that to get from the gate to the place where we built it, but we never went farther than a kilometer away from the camp. So it was a nice little milk run—a practice run for me for all of the different tasks and procedures needed to successfully run a trip outside the wire.

It took two days. The first day went really well. The second day…had a few more hiccups. Our TRAMs (tractor, rubber tire, articulated something-or-other; what we were using to shovel dirt into the HESCO) will only fill HESCO up to 11’ high. Our first layer was 7’. Our second layer, yes, was 14’. So instead of our two TRAMs filling HESCO, we had one excavator filling HESCO. Turns out our excavator operator was not that experienced, so it took a little while longer to fill the top layer than it did to fill the bottom layer, even though there was twice as much dirt in the bottom layer.

It is by far not the operator’s fault. We are attached to 9th Engineer Support Battalion, which is based in Okinawa. Due to restrictions in Japan, the heavy equipment operators are not given many chances to practice moving earth around. So he was a little new to his trade, and it took a little longer. That’s okay. We lived.

We also had a nice little sand storm the second day. I was splitting my time between monitoring the BFT, which I told you about last time, and going out and checking on the Marines. When the sand storm hit, I had been sitting in the truck, reading The Face of Battle (very slow to start, but picked up once I got past the first chapter), and glancing up at the BFT every once in a while. This particular time, I looked around to my gunner and asked him how he was doing.

“Preparing to get very sandy, ma’am,” he told me. I looked out the front window to see that the sand storm was about a minute out. This was wasn’t nearly as bad as the one the night of the fire, and it lasted less than five minutes. But, yes, it was very sandy. We were a few hundred meters away from the work site at that point, so I couldn’t see the Marines at the work site while it lasted. Once it was over, I attempted to regain communications with the COC (Combat Operations Center) and couldn’t. I waited a few more minutes, occasionally glancing back to the work site, which I could see in my rear view mirror. When I didn’t see the excavator running after a few minutes, I went out to check on them.

They were fine, if a bit sandy. We got the excavator up and running again, and I mentioned to my PltSgt that I was having trouble getting comm with the COC. He wasn’t surprised; the atmosphere wasn’t very conducive to electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere. We kept working, completed the project, and returned to base.

Turns out we were out of touch with the COC longer than I had thought, and much longer than we were supposed to be. The BFT messages I had been sending throughout the day hadn’t been making it to the COC, which was a problem. I had been sending BFT messages back to our company offices (one at our camp, and one at another camp a ways south of here), and those had been making it through, and I had been getting messages back from them. But not the COC. So I learned a big lesson for next time.

This is the part I hate most about being a 2ndLt. I already put in time as a junior worker bee, and now I’m back to square one, making mistakes that I should know not to make. It’s frustrating, and every day is a learning experience. I like to think I’m getting better at it, and then I go and do something stupid that makes me wonder if I matured at all in those five years after college. Sigh.

Happy 29th Anniversary to Mom and Dad! You are amazing examples as both parents and spouses, and I could not be more proud of them. I love you!

Energy Conservation and the Marine Corps

One of the questions that came from my last blog post was why we kept the A/C on so strong in our room, as it wastes electricity and would make it more difficult to adjust to the climate here. It’s a perfectly fair question, although we haven’t had it on quite so strong recently; we’ve been putting it on fan vice A/C for the past few nights. Yesterday morning when I woke up, it was actually cooler outside than it was inside the room. In fact, it’s supposed to be below 100 for four days in a row, starting yesterday. You wouldn’t think it would make that much of a difference, but I have indeed gotten to the point where there’s a day in the high 90s and I think it feels like a nice day. This is how I know that I’ve gotten acclimatized.

Regarding energy conservation. In case you haven’t figured out, fighting a war is not exactly environmentally friendly. This includes energy use. For example, when we go outside the wire, like we did Monday and Tuesday, we didn’t turn our vehicles off, even though they were sitting in the same place all day long. There’s a couple reasons for this. First is that unless you have a purpose for being outside the vehicle, such as working on a project, you stay inside the vehicle and keep the doors closed. This is because the vehicle’s armor does a much better job of protecting you than your PPE, or personal protective equipment. So one of the reasons you leave the vehicle running so that the personnel inside don’t cook.

There are other reasons, too: the vehicle needs to be powered for all the comm and BFT (Blue Force Tracker, the program that shows where all the nearby friendly units are) to work, you need to be able to go somewhere at a moment’s notice, and you don’t have to worry about the vehicle not turning back on if you never turn it off. What all this amounts to is that for 8-10 hours, I was “wasting” a lot of fuel. But what would have happened if we had been attacked? It was highly unlikely—our project was literally right underneath the guard towers on base—but it was a possibility we had to be prepared for. We would have needed to maneuver the vehicles to keep the threat away from the personnel working on the ground; that time it would have taken to start the vehicle could have made a big difference.

That’s a pretty unlikely scenario; the more likely scenario is that one of the work trucks we took out there, such as the dump truck or the trailer to haul the excavator, wouldn’t have wanted to re-start. That would have also left us unable to pick up and move at a moment’s notice if we had wanted to. So fuel consumption is not typically something we worry about.

As far as electricity goes, we don’t worry too much about conservation—water conservation is a bigger consideration. Our electricity comes from generators (ie fuel) and “shore power”, which is a power grid here on camp. I don’t know where the electricity is generated, but conservation is not something that is stressed. We are encouraged to conserve as much water as we can—turn the water off when you’re soaping up in the shower, don’t leave it running while you brush your teeth, etc.

This is not to say that the Marine Corps does not discuss energy conservation. It’s actually a hot topic in the Marine Corps stateside right now, as it’s an important issue to our Commandant. The Marine Corps actually had its first building LEED certified last year. I forget exactly what LEED stands for (you can probably google it), but it’s an organization that certifies that buildings are energy efficient. And HQMC is looking at ways to make bases and operation state-side more energy efficient. But here in theater…we haven’t gotten there yet.

I hope that makes sense. Any questions—just ask! And thanks for the e-mails. They were a huge morale boost in the middle of this week that I needed.