MIddle Weekend Adventures

 

There was once a time when the serving in the Army National Guard was fun. But that was largely before my first enlistment in 1984 when the “old timers” would tell stories about massive weekends barbecues deep in the woods of Fort Jackson. Those parties were only topped by the ones that supposedly occurred during the two-week summer camps. Raging poker games in the barracks and quite illegal beer and food runs off post in army vehicles had become only whispered legends by the time I was a private (E-1) fresh out of basic training.

By 1984 the entire Army National Guard was entering another stage of its evolution. During the Vietnam era the National Guard was more of a joke being a much desired refuge for rich and well connected kids wanting to avoid the dangers of those distant jungles. After Vietnam the National Guard languished in a benign, apathetic limbo where the only thing worse than the insufficient training and discipline among the soldiers was the broken and out of date equipment they were issued.

When I finally joined in 1984, Ronny Raygun had already set in motion the changes that would totally remake the National Guard into the professional force it is today.

I stayed a weekend warrior for two years before going active duty in 1986 and during that time I caught an echo of the easy going style of the Old Guard. By that time weekend drills in the local armory were well organized with the required maintenance on equipment being performed as well as professional training classes being held. But still, there was an underlying understanding that we were not active duty troops and that at the end of the day our family and civilian jobs took first priority.

It was during the two-week annual training where the most hints of the Old Guard could be found during that time. Those two summer camps before I went active duty the first week would be spent in the field sleeping in leaky tents and vehicles along with playing at our various military occupational specialties. The second week had us in the barracks still largely playing soldier during the day but sleeping in hot and miserable barracks at night. Yeah, the hot and miserable barracks were an improvement from sleeping in the field. That is if you could sleep during the raging poker games that went on most the night and breathe the thick secondhand smoke from all the burning cigarettes.

Concerning those poker games, I have to mention that many of the wives of these guys had apparently been told that their husbands did not receive that much in pay for those two weeks. This was cover for many returning home almost broke after having lost it gambling. Now between the first week in the field and the second week in the barracks was the middle weekend. I remember it as a time when all discipline evaporated and the troops did what they wanted. Some just drank themselves into a weekend stupor with what money they had on hand. We're literally talking about whole mountains of empty beer cans at the start of the second week.

Not wanting to deal with clouds of cigarette smoke and Olympic-level drinking, I got in my car and hauled ass to a friends' house or went back home. Understand, I'm not passing judgment on those guys staying in the barracks. By the mid-1980s when I joined, all the rich and well connected Vietnam draft dodgers had returned to full civilian life. That just left the lower-middle class guys who worked rotating shifts during the rest of the year at Georgetown County's two major employers, the steel mill and the paper mill. The middle weekend of summer camp was in many ways their only vacation away from the demands of their jobs and families. I just didn't want to endure the smell of stale beer and breathe their second-hand smoke.

Of course, I went active duty army in 1986 and didn't have to deal with annual summer camps again until I returned to the National Guard in 1990.

When I returned to the National Guard in 1990 a great deal had changed. The Old Guard with its laid back attitude along with its lack of discipline was a bad memory. Even the more responsible but reasonable National Guard that existed when I joined in 1986 had evolved into an excessively gung-ho organization that was beginning to look upon its members civilian jobs as impediments to the mission. This was a situation that would only get worse over time.

What had also changed was the middle weekend. My first couple of summer camps back after leaving active duty had me traveling to some interesting posts with small groups, so I couldn't complain too much. The training was actually fun and I was still single and interested in having a good time. By the time of my first summer camp with the rest of my unit though, the whole basis of how things went had changed.

Not only did my unit still spend the first week out in the field playing soldier, but the second week as well. We would return to the rear area to stay in the barracks for the middle weekend. But even then the officers and NCO's weren't going to allow anything like the freewheeling antics that were once normal occurrences.

As a former active duty soldier I completely agreed with those changes. My problem came when the senior NCO's started making noises that they were going to no longer allow us to leave the post during the middle weekend. I'll put it to you frankly, there isn't any army base my National Guard unit frequented for summer camp that I would want to be stuck at for a weekend.

By 1996 I was married and had a son and as you might expect, the idea of being forced to hang around at the barracks during the middle weekend was supreme bullshit. That year my unit was doing summer camp at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Now understand, Stewart is amazingly close to beaches but as a new dad I wanted to be with my son.

It took a little persuasion, but my first sergeant decided to let me go leave Fort Stewart and go see my son. It was going to be an easy trip for me since all I had to do was hit I-95 and drive up to Manning, South Carolina where I would meet my son and wife at her parents' house. So that Friday afternoon at the beginning of the middle weekend, I got in my 1988 Ford Escort and hauled ass heading north.

I love my wife and kid by one of the sacrifices I had to make for them was selling my 1984 Chevrolet Camaro and getting the Escort. My Camaro had class and style, and been the reason I had scored as well as I did with the ladies back at Fort Carson. But as a family man, my Camaro pretty much sucked for driving your kid and wife around.

So we got a used four-door escort hatchback with four-cylinder engine and a crappy radio. It was dependable, it had cargo space, and I could fit a baby seat in the back. Surprisingly enough my Camaro turned out to have better gas mileage that the Escort but my wife didn't find that interesting.

About about two hours later I'm driving north on I-95 with the pedal to the floor doing about sixty miles and hour. The radio has lost all reception so I'm listening to the one cassette tape the player had destroyed and getting pretty tired Kenny Rodgers crone about his damn card game. Yes, I had a Kenny Rodgers tape in my car, it's a long story in its own right but understand I'm not a fan. The cassette player seemed to have its own idea of good music so I went along with its choices.

At some point after I passed the I-26 interchange the terrain around me opens up enough to allow me to see some sky. To the west I see clouds, some dark and heavy but nothing unusual for South Carolina. The weather that day for the entire state was sickeningly hot and soul-sucking humid but at least the AC on the Escort was a real winner.

The drone of the road and Kenny's whining about some woman leaving her family with a crop in the field caused me to zone out for a few minutes. What suddenly pulled me back to consciousness was a totally unexpected flash of lightning and the corresponding boom of thunder after that. Once I gathered my meager wits and wiggled my butt in the seat a little to make sure I hadn't shit my pants I looked over to my left and saw what was happening.

In the space of a few minutes that party cloudy day had completely changed. To the west of me a huge chunk of the sky had gone completely black, with the lightning flashing it looked like someone had opened the gates of Hell. Instinctively, I switched over to the radio and almost immediately heard the blaring noise of a weather alert.

At first all I heard was the Weather Service's robotic voice saying that a tornado warning was in effect for numerous counties along I-95. Yeah, no shit I thought to myself as the wind began trying to push my car off the road.

Mr. Robot was soon replaced with a panicked human voice saying this storm was throwing softball-sized hail and that if you were between certain mile markers on I-95 that you should seek shelter absolutely right now. Now I've never been good with math but right after I heard his words I saw a mile marker sign and realized I was smack in the middle of where he said all shit was about to fly.

Low and behold that was when the funnel cloud became visible on the left side of I-95. After a momentary scan of surroundings, I realized I was the only car on the road. Yeah, all the other smart people had probably heard the weather report on their dependable car radios and found shelter. I had somehow hit the one bleak and undeveloped section of I-95 in the whole damn state.

So, I said fuck it, gripped the steering wheel harder and ignored the funnel cloud and the growing sound of a train. No, I didn't look back on the funnel cloud so I don't know for certain if it had touched down and became a full tornado.

The rain went from a few drops to torrential and the booming of thunder made me feel like I was driving through an artillery barrage. Luckily, I somehow stayed on the road and didn't hit any fool who decided to stop in the middle of the interstate.

The sound of the train faded away but the rain never really letup. I did find the exit for Manning and successfully navigated the county roads to my in-laws house. These roads are seriously in the boonies to the point visitors traveling in that area might want to stay alert for any banjo playing.

Much to the chagrin of my dad-in-law, I pulled into his driveway before nightfall and was greeted by my smiling wife and young son. Weather reports did say that a tornado had touched down near that area but it was impossible for me to know for sure if the funnel cloud I saw was it.

The rest of the weekend was great with me having lots of time with my family. When I returned to Fort Stewart Sunday evening I found out that commanding officer had restricted everyone to the barracks just minutes after I left. His stated reasoning was to keep accountability and prevent needless accidents during annual training.

This decision by the CO pissed off the first sergeant and with me walking around with a huge shit-eating grin because I got laid and saw my kid over the weekend didn't help with his disposition. So much that I caught a bunch of crappy duties during that second week in the field.

I didn't care, outrunning a tornado was probably one of the funnest things I ever did during summer camp.

Working Around Hurry Up and Wait

 

Anyone associated with the United States Armed Forces should be intimately familiar with the concept of “Hurry up and Wait.” For those who don't have a clue, that phrase is used to signify a screwed up situation in which a person or group is forced to quickly complete a task, or reach a destination by a certain time, only for nothing to happen at that scheduled moment. In the military this usually occurs when other required tasks have not been completed.

Although in my experience it was dumbass officers and their inability to plan or outright fear of making a decision that triggered most Hurry up and Wait scenarios. Either way, back in 1999 I was forced into a Hurry up and Wait/no-win situation between my wife and the South Carolina National Guard that I so successfully navigated by changing the rules Captain James T. Kirk would have approved.

It started on Saturday morning on a typical drill weekend with my squad and I performing our usual duties. That involved our preventive maintenance checks on both our communication equipment and the military vehicles and took most of the morning. Nothing exciting and my squad went about the duties efficiently but still having a good time catching up with each other.

After chow, the rest of that day was spent on various soldier's training classes with neither the officers nor senior NCOs saying anything about important tasks that were supposed to be accomplished. And when we had the final formation later that afternoon, everyone in the unit went home thinking the Sunday drill would be a breeze.

The next morning though something had radically changed. The First Sergeant's demeanor at roll call that morning was icy at best and when the company CO (Commanding Officer) appeared, the entire unit knew something bad was up.

The company CO was at best a mediocre officer with little imagination and less personality who rarely left his office during drill weekends. Past experience had shown when he did walk out on the armory drill hall floor among the troops, something quite bad was about to happen.

The CO told everyone that the battalion commander, his boss, wasn't happy with our performance and that no one would be going home that day until he had a happy smile on his face. That to make the battalion commander happy would require a visual inventory of all our equipment. Something that probably should have started bright and early the previous morning to have a chance of being accomplished in a reasonable time.

Once the CO said his piece the First Sergeant took over and instructed the cooks to begin planning an evening meal, which meant we'd still be at the armory well past eighteen hundred hours. (6:00pm)

Here's where this situation was really going to screw me over. My son, who was four years-old at the time, was supposed to have his first soccer game around 2:30pm that day. Throwing more troubling gasoline on the fire, my wife and I were supposed to supply the after game snacks for the entire team. These snacks, consisting of twenty juice boxes and twenty packs of cookies, were being stored inside my car which was in the armory parking lot.

My wife's attitude about the National Guard was in no way going to get her invited to the wives' support group. Simply put the Guard had a really bad habit of fraking up any family plans. If something important or fun was going to happen in our area that month, you can bet a large sum of money that it would occur the same weekend as drill.

Naturally, after formation everyone was assholes and elbows to try and get everything done so we wouldn't have to stay so late. Remember National Guard troops are “citizen soldiers” who have civilian jobs and didn't want to be dead tired the next morning at the start of a normal work week. Even worse, some people work nightshift and would be going to work around eleven o'clock that night.

Contrary to what can only be called propaganda put out by the National Guard, most civilian employers hate having workers who also play weekend warrior. Having an employee in the Guard screws up work schedules and has a habit of pissing off coworkers who end up covering for the individual who is playing Guard soldier. Patriotism in America may be a mile wide but its depth can often be measured in inches.

My main issue was my son's soccer game. Missing that game was going to get me in big trouble with my wife and the rest of the team because of the snacks. But all during that morning I had absolutely no idea how I could break away in time or even get the snacks to my wife since she wouldn't be allowed on armory property.

Despite what the CO said about needing to make his boss happy, the rest of the morning turned into a Hurry up and Wait nightmare. All the unit officers got rounded up for an important meeting which somehow brought a stop to all activity. None of the NCOs wanted to proceed without assurances that their decisions were the right ones.

By chow that early afternoon I was getting pissed. I would have accepted the circumstances and continued to play the good soldier had the inventory continued like it was supposed. But when you had about one-hundred seventy or so troops just sitting around doing nothing it was time for me to think out of the box.

That outside the box thinking took the form of an old fashioned telephone booth inside the armory drill hall. Remember this was 1999 when cell phones hadn't yet become totally widespread. Yes, the phone booth was a relic even back then, but a nicely convenient one.

The drill hall floor was a buzz of activity, so no one really paid attention to me as I stepped inside and closed the door. Plus this phone booth was on the far end of where the company offices were located, so there was little chance anyone high up in the leadership would see me and later figure out my plan.

My plan revolved around calling one of my brothers and having him phone my unit and say he was involved in a car accident in Columbia and would need a ride back up to Easley, South Carolina where he lived. Which is more or less a two-hour drive from my location.

Thankfully my brother answered the phone and over the course of fifteen minutes we quickly ironed out the various details required to make my scheme work. Yes, it is better to tell the truth but in this instance the means did justify the end.

After hanging up I did my best to sneak away from the phone booth hoping no one would remember seeing me there. All that remained from then on was hoping my brother, who was nursing a nice beer buzz would remember to call my unit and give me a solid excuse to get the frak out of Dodge.

A nervous thirty-five minutes later the loudspeakers mounted on the drill hall floor and outside in the motor pool call for Sergeant Johnson to report to the office. I tried to play extra casual with everyone as I reported but no one will ever say I could be an actor.

Some seriously young Second Lieutenant I had never seen before handed me a note saying my brother was stranded up around north Columbia after being in a car accident. That he was okay but needed a way back home since his car was banged up pretty bad.

Success!!!!

The Lieutenant was going to cut me loose right then but the First Sergeant, a grizzled veteran who knew all the bullshit tricks stopped me as I was walking out. I handed him the note and repeated what the Second Lieutenant told me but I knew he wouldn't buy the story. The First Sergeant, took a deep breath then looked at me with an expression that confirmed what I feared. He clearly knew the whole story was a heaping pile of bullshit.

But instead of chewing on my ass and kicking me out of the office he said go get your brother and we'll see you next month. I have no idea why he went along with my scheme. I wasn't on his shit list but then again I wasn't in the group of soldiers he tended to favor. Whatever the case, the time was coming up on two o'clock and if I hurried across town I would make the start of my son's game.

I arrived at the game five minutes before it started and only earned a stern look from my wife. My son's team had their asses stomped but me being in my army BDU's serving juice boxes and cookies was a hit with the kids.

The following month, I learned that the rest of the unit wasn't dismissed until nine o'clock that night. No one ever made a comment about me skipping out the previous month but I sure as hell did my best to stay under the First Sergeant's radar from that moment on.

Yeah, I have no regrets and put into a similar situation I'd do it again.

Sailing off the World Stage

Wikipedia defines the “American Century” as the period since the middle of the twentieth century when the United States rose to global dominance based on its economic, military, and cultural power. No where near an official hundred-year period but when you figure the European nations could still be considered major powers up until the 1960's, I see that unknown Wikipedia editor's point.

One of my college history teachers defined the American century from our active participation into the First World War, roughly 1916. His idea being that had the United States not entered the European conflict on the side of the Allied powers of Britain and France circumstances would have been much better for Germany. With Russia out of the war and dissolving into Bolshevik-inspired chaos, the German kaiser could have redirected all his forces to the western front. In short, we saved the butts of Britain and France forcing them to realize the growing power of the United States could not be ignored.

Whatever the case, up until George W. Bush plunged the United States into a trillion-dollar Iraqi quagmire, we Americans were riding high on the global hog. Our system of post-WW2 alliances around the world had at first contained an expansionist Soviet Union and then insured its constructive demise as it imploded. The American policy of international free trade allowed an unprecedented expansion of wealth that allowed possibly billions of human beings to rise above a poverty level existence. The same goes for science and technology, the human race has gained more knowledge in the last fifty years than any time in our history. We've walked the surface of the moon, sent unmanned rovers and probes to Mars and the planets of the outer solar system. Medical knowledge has grown so fast we now casually tinker with DNA, the foundation of all life. And as far as computers are concerned, the exponential growth in that technology means we may live to see an actual sentient artificial intelligence supersede humans in a couple of decades.

Yeah, huge mistakes have been made over the decades, but we're talking humans here not all perfect and wise gods. Hell, if you want to know the truth, I'm still surprised that we got through the Cold War without nuking ourselves into a new stone age, if not extinction itself. All good news, although I'm still not sure about a recent supposition I read about that suggests that while humans have polluted the hell out of the planet, we're still ahead of the game since that knowledge will eventually force us to clean up the place. The idea being that other, less aware alien civilizations in the galaxy have gone extinct because they couldn't connect the dots as to why polluted water, air, and soil was bad for them. Frankly, given the forces of human greed and total willful ignorance, I'm not sure if we will decide to clean up the planet it time.

With the “American Empire” roughly keeping the peace and allowing most everyone on the planet to prosper you would think politicians would work extremely hard not to frak it up, which might cause a disastrous regional conflict, if not another world war. Well George W. already screwed the pooch with his stupid war to bring democracy to the Middle East. No, I have not forgotten about his ravings over nonexistent Iraqi WMD's, but that's a whole other piece of bullshit not important to my central point.

The success of American global leadership since the end of WW2 has rested on the twin pillars of free trade and military alliances. NO! It's not a perfect system, especially since the vast majority of the newly created wealth is controlled by an incredibly small percentage of rich elites that do not hesitate to throw their weight around. But when the alternative was a planetary scale nuclear wasteland, I'll go with what we have and try to reform it.

Well if George W. wasn't bad enough we now have a narcissistic A-hole occupying the White House hell bent on not only wrecking the relatively successful global trading system but totally alienating our long time allies. Right from the get-go Trump said during the 2016 presidential campaign that he was going to throw out all the trade deals that have been made. His reasoning was that the United States was being taken advantage of by our allies. That the poor hapless Americans were the fools of the world. A really hard thing for anyone with any knowledge of modern history and a smidgen of economics to believe since the United States created the game and wrote the rules.

True, a lot of old technology jobs went overseas causing a great deal of economic troubles for those working in the affected industries here in the United States. But anyone with just a few extra grams of intelligence and ability to look beyond self imposed blinders would understand millions of American jobs depend on selling products to the wider world. Yes, free trade hurts but in the long run that is how you continue to promote overall economic growth. Yes, trade treaties can be structured better on a number of fronts like supporting organized labor and protecting the environment.

All Trump supporters hear is that bastard promising to bring back all the nifty lifetime factory jobs their granddaddies and fathers worked. The trouble though is if you want to worship the religion of capitalism you have to follow its tenets. Which in this case means businesses are going to search out the cheapest labor to maximize their profits. The funny thing above all the empty promises of bring back those factory jobs is that automation will eventually remove most if not all human labor from the equation.

Unbeknownst to Trump supporters, and the bastard himself, economic issues translates directly into security considerations. Namely that no single nation can secure international peace all by itself, no matter how much egotistical nonsense permeates right-wing media. This is where overturning the international system wiser men and women created becomes a form of suicide.

China, the rising superpower out to remake the world in its image, just launched its first home built aircraft carrier. Its first carrier, a piece of Russian made junk that they bought from Ukraine and totally rebuilt gives them a fleet of two. No big deal you might say, Britain has two aircraft carriers as does India. And several other countries all possess single aircraft carriers, with most of them nothing more than token symbols of national sovereignty. And honestly, if you combined all those different aircraft carriers from those other nations they probably couldn't scratch the paint of the U.S. Navy.

But China is different, their ultimate goal is to take control of Asia and the western Pacific. The current Chinese government is an often brutal authoritarian regime still carrying a grudge over how the Western powers abused them from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. China is already a great power with the will and ability to become a superpower. And no superpower wants the navy of another country cruising around in what the perceive as their backyard. So they will continue to build and refine their aircraft carrier program to achieve that goal. Now the Chinese don't necessarily want a giant rerun of the Battle of Midway, in this day and age that would cause more problems than it solves.

No, the Chinese have come to believe that they will inherit Asia and the Pacific as the United States withdraws because we can't hack the cost anymore. One recent report on economic growth has that by 2030 the Chinese economy will be worth $42 trillion while the United States will be at the $24 trillion level. So keeping up with the Chinese will become impossible for the United States to do alone. What's worse is that wrecking the international trade system for stupid and destructive reasons will only make it harder for long term economic growth that will enable the West in general and the United States specifically to keep up with China. That doesn't even begin to take into consideration how damaged economic ties will make it difficult to get the Western nations to rally together militarily should China decide to use their growing navy to forcibly take control of the regions they want.

This is where aircraft carriers are the most useful. See first of all they are offensive weapons of the highest order. You do not maintain a such a fleet to defend coastal waters. You possess carriers to project military power and national influence far from home.

Despite all the moronic level rhetoric about “Making America Great Again” the Republican party and Trump are on the verge of gravely damaging the long term future of the United States. Since the end of WW2, every member of the United States government, both Democrat and Republican, has understood our own national security is tied to that of our allies. Remember the great Ben Franklin is quoted to have said to the other Founding Fathers that would either all hang together or we will hang separately. Pissing on your allies and economic partners just to score cheap points with the MAGA Marching Morons is not the actions of a nation with a future.

Measuring the beginning of the American Century is subject of historical debate. However it is quite possible that future generations will measure the end of our global dominance as Election Day November 2016.

Source material: Foreign Policy-April 25, 2018 “China's New Aircraft Carrier is Already Obsolete” http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/25/chinas-new-carrier-is-already-obsolete/