Dream of Waking

This has been a long time coming, eh? Six years in the making. It’s not my last working week either, that was months ago. This is my last actual week. Rather uneventful too. Just getting some paperwork stamped and signed, and standing around to get an award for spending six years fixing computers.

In four days, my Army obligations will, for the most part, be officially over. I have plenty to be spiteful of but I can’t for the life of me dig up those graves. I just so happy that this is all finally over and I can go back to a normal life and move on to being more than just the dude who fixes your printer.

Here’s the short list of people I want to publicly thank; Martinez, Parlier, Thomson, Reina, Wilson, Key, Hice, Laforest, Blythe, Lawson, Saro, Burditus, Killman, Sweet, Jackson, Jones, Welsh, Baker, and O’Rourke.

I stop shaving on Wednesday and I stop wearing the uniform on Thursday. Beyond that I’m just working on being a real person again.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce that I have my early Army release date set. As of January 22nd, I’ll be officially out of the Army. That’s 90 days early and I start my terminal leave (using up some vacation days) on January 8th. I could’ve started terminal leave a lot earlier but I’ve been telling everyone in my unit January 8th and if I spent all my leave time, I wouldn’t have any to sell. Selling leave isn’t a great trade but I’d rather have a big bundle of cash right before I start school than two months of not working and still getting paid.

So if I wasn’t doing much work before I’m definitely not doing much now! I start the out-processing rigmarole on December 15th, which will either be super easy because not a lot of guys are getting out the same time I am or absolutely impossible because everyone will be on Christmas vacation.

In case you don’t know me at all, I am super excited about getting out of the Army and finally moving on with my life. Ever since the beginning of my last deployment (November 2007) I’ve felt like I’ve been stuck in an enormous rut; unable to progress in my career with nowhere to go and no help to look to. I’ve been doing the same goddamned job for my entire enlistment in the same unit on the same post. I’ve gone nowhere and seen nothing but 1-32 CAV and Iraq. It is well past-time that I start something new.

Of course I’ve been told for years that there’s plenty of other jobs and places in the Army but I never saw any of them and even if I were to stay in I wouldn’t have seen any change until at least 2011. I showed a few people I knew a few things early on and they held on to me as long as they could and then handed me off to the next guys who did the same thing, my own career be damned. I think it’s safe to say that, like all soldiers, I’ve been used up and abused and now I’m ready to be cast aside.

So what the hell am I doing anyway? I’m going to school! Southern Illinois University Carbondale! I’ll be studying aviation flight for two years before moving on to finish out the two years for a bachelor of science degree in aviation management, and since I have so many existing credits anyway, I may take a minor in computer science. In four years I’ll be flying planes for a living. I really couldn’t be more excited!

This week I turned in the paperwork that will bump the end of my enlistment up to January 8th. Provided it gets signed, and I’ve been assured a number of times that it will be, I’ll be out of the Army in less than 90 days.

Two weeks ago I blew the rest of my Amazon trade-in credit on five new games. I got F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (PC) (obviously), Far Cry 2 (PC), TimeShift (PC), Red Faction Guerilla (X360), and Dead Space (X360). I’ve given them all a shake to see which I’m more interested in, ended up playing all the way through F.E.A.R. 2. I’m playing Dead Space a chapter at a time, which has been about 45 minutes to an hour of gameplay at a time.

I’m absolutely struggling to bring myself to finish TimeShift. I’m probably three levels from the end now and it is so mediocre that it hurts. I knew it wasn’t a great game to begin with but I had some hopes that it’d take the time suit in some interesting directions. Nope.

Katie and I have been doing some cleanup and repairs to the house to get it ready to sell. Selling the house is the biggest question mark in the entire shift from Army to school. A lot of our plans hinge on it going well, so many that it makes me nervous to have such a single point of failure. What’s worse is I can’t wrap my mind around anything else that could be done to alleviate our burdens if selling the house doesn’t go well.

In less depressing news, I sincerely can not wait until I get to school. There are so many things I want to do there and so many things to look forward to. I may have fucked up my first college run something fierce but I’ll be damned if it goes anywhere near that bad this time.

There’s a hole in front of division headquarters. About three weeks ago a mass email was sent that said that the section of road in front of division headquarters was closed until further notice to repair a sinkhole. A sinkhole. Not that there’s no sinkholes on Fort Campbell but the ones I have seen are no more than two feet deep and maybe three feet around. All manner of construction equipment has been milling around in front of the division building for three weeks. They’re still doing repairs.

This division headquarters is basically brand new. It was completed last year. I know some jobs have been overtasked and undermanned but you’d think that when building a brand new, rather expensive division headquarters, someone would’ve consulted some engineers about the structural integrity of the land within 50 meters of the building. Maybe put some dirt in that sinkhole before dropping a large building right next to it. These sorts of things would make sense, right?

Unless it’s not a sinkhole at all.

I’m on what is basically a two month vacation from work. I’m in classes. Classes that are required for promotion. A promotion I won’t be getting by my own choice. I don’t think the Army gets much better than this, honestly. My hours are steady again and my schedule doesn’t change every fucking day. I’m in this class with fifteen other people who do the same job I do and a couple of them are even worth talking to! I can bitch about stupid stuff that typically goes on at my normal job and these guys actually know what it’s like!

Non-shocking fact: most of these guys did other jobs before to get to the rank that I would be getting promoted to (which is hard to obtain in my job), before they reclassified to my job. This is why my points for E6 are so high. All the E6s are reclasses. And what do you know, I’m far more knowledgable than they are at this job! This is another way the Army is fucked on promotions that I didn’t even consider. It’s easier to jump the ranks in a different job and reclass to computers than to come up the ranks, gain the skills and knowledge, and then get promoted to E6 in a timely manner. I just took my first test and a lot of what this first week is covered in AIT, which even reclasses have to go through, and it’s almost surprising how many of them struggled with it. It may not be stuff we do every day but it is a perishable skill that needs periodic refreshment and these are the guys who’ve come out of training much later than I did.

I don’t want to bash these guys though, they’ve done their time in other jobs and fulfilled the requirements to be where they are today. The system that put them here is inherently flawed. Some of them toted a rifle for most of their Army career, and now they’re punching buttons. To put them in the same position of responsibility as someone like me, who’s done the job for four plus years, says to me that the job is interchangable and that all that matters is the rank you wear. That’s insane. If I were to be swapped with an infantryman at my rank I would absolutely lost, because I don’t have the experience of doing that job that the responsibilities I’d inherit requires.

This wasn’t supposed to turn into a rant, I swear.

Today I scheduled my first pre-seperation counseling. This will probably be the longest year of my life.

ABC News: Gates Announces End to Army Stop-Loss

This is easily the best news I’ve read since President Obama took office. Though the article says stop-loss will be phased out over the span of two years, this gives me a huge amount of hope that I won’t be stuck on the next bullet train to hell. Stop-loss is a despicable practice that turns volunteers into conscripts and I am undescribably happy to know it will finally end a nightmare that has affected countless lives.

The definition of clueless leadership.

The single notion that repeated, long deployments are not the source of the increased number of suicides is absolutely ridiculous. That “resiliency” that develops is apathy. It’s depression, and anger, and loss. It’s knowing that even though you’re putting in your time overseas, the Army needs one more body to fill up that plane going back to another meaningless fight so you can watch as the world you know disintegrates. It’s the hopelessness of knowing that the deployments will never end for you. “Resiliency” is what’s driving us to suicide.

Note: This entry is getting a lot of attention! I’ve disabled mandatory registration for a limited time to encourage discussion.

Ever since I enlisted, I’ve taken more notice to politics. It seems like my day to day life changes everytime the President farts. It gives me great interest in seeing the outcome of this election be in my favor. That said, I support Barack Obama as the next President of the United States.

It was basically a no-brainer. Obama has never supported this war in Iraq and he’s the one of the few politicians who seem at all concerned in ending it. I’m in a combat manuever brigade. My deployments will not end until the war in Iraq does. A Republican administration will do nothing to take us out of Iraq. McCain himself said he will keep us there for another hundred years. They say we won’t establish permanent bases in Iraq but when I go to the bigger bases that’s all I see. New construction. We’re digging in for the long haul. Under Republican rule, this country will become another hardship tour duty station such as Korea or Germany.

When I get home from this deployment, I will have roughly 18 months left in service. I’m only “guaranteed” (and that guarantee is only Army strong, which is to say it can change at any minute) 12 months stateside. 18 months is a long time to dodge another deployment to Iraq at this pace, no matter where I’m stationed. I’ve basically hinged my ability to avoid stop-loss on this election. If Obama is elected, I stand a good chance of getting out of the service on my scheduled exit date. If he’s not, I can guarantee I will be stop-lossed and involutarily extended for up to 18 months; 3 months prior to deployment, another 12 to rot here while the rest of the world turns without me, and 3 months after.

Katie and I have a lot riding on this election. If I’m stuck in Iraq for another tour, I can almost promise that once I am let free I will not endure another minute in a country under the rule of Republicans. God knows they’ve sent the country to hell in the last 8 years, no damage will be repaired if another warmonger is elected. By the time I get home the U.S. will be as much of a bombed out wasteland as Iraq is after we got done removing it’s tyrannical dictator, and ours will still be there to show for it. To hell with my plans for school, to hell with the pittance of benefits leftover for veterans after the nations budget has been gutted for more war spending, I’ll be packing up everything and moving elsewhere. I’m told Alberta is a nice place to live.

Well today was the day. I’m officially promoted. I got a lot of “it’s about time!” and “Oh excuse me, SERGEANT Hub” and I’ll get more tomorrow. I’ve got pictures and even video that I’ll somehow post tomorrow.

Seriously. Mark the calendar.

I’m getting promoted. Finally. After missing it once for not having my points turned in and missing it by nine stupid points last month, I’ve got it this month. Not without some work first though! Even though I had the points and my points were all in the system, my name wasn’t on the promotions roster. After lots of what the fucks and oh my gods I talked to the supervisor in the personnel section. He said everything checked out and I must’ve just slipped through the cracks because the Army is in the middle of changing the way promotions are done (for the worse but that’s another rant later) so he put in some paperwork and now I’m good to get promoted on June 1st. Finally. After 18 months of waiting.

Almost-better news! I’m going on leave in thirty days! Well, almost, in thirty days I should be leaving Iraq and on my way home for leave. As I told Katie earlier this week, it might be weird for me, spending time with people I more than barely tolerate. I’m currently working on a human hairstyle so when I get home I look more like I belong there rather than belonging here.

June and July will be good months. Then August will be shit again.

Just after I get off work I get a little time to relax in my room before I go to sleep. I work 12 hours a day, which is longer than most people in my shop. I look forward to my three hours of downtime. After a couple hours I decide I’m about to go to read my book and go to sleep but there’s a knock at my door. It’s one of the privates in my shop. He says I have to bring my sensitive items (weapon, night vision goggles) to the shop. He doesn’t know why.

There’s nothing I can’t stand more than having my free time taken. Even worse is when I’m summoned by Private Whothefuck. The icing on the fucking cake is when they can’t tell me why I’m being summoned. I can’t stand that shit. Nothing puts me in a worse mood as fast as Joe Jackass knocking on my door and telling me I have to be somewhere for no good goddamned reason.

Whatever. I get dressed (in PTs), grab my sensitive items, and start off to the shop. On the way I run into Private Whothefuck. He got the message wrong. I have to bring my sensitive items up at 1400, well into my sleep time. He’s already gotten this message wrong once, I’m not relying on his memory for anything. I’m already out of my room and dressed, I’m not going back until I know what’s going on. I get to the shop and they tell me I need to be there at 1400 with my sensitive items. No, no one else can take them up there for me, I need to be there with them to show them to the armorer. When I ask if I can take care of it right now, they say I need to speak with the armorer myself.

I walk across the hall, and speak with his supervisor. He tells me where I can find him. I spend a whopping two minutes looking for him, found him. I say “Hey, 1400 means I don’t get a whole lot of sleep. Can I do this now?” He literally looks at the night vision goggles in my left hand, the weapon in my right hand, and tells me I’m good. That’s it. Mission accomplished. I go to the shop and let them know that I’ve shown the armorer my sensitive items and he said I was good. If I don’t do this, they’ll assume I didn’t and wake me up at 1400 anyway. I go back to my room, read my book, and seethe.

It’s utterly ridiculous that it took one Corporal who’s willing to fight for his own sleep to fix this. There’s four other people in my shop higher ranked than me who just didn’t give a fuck. It’s not their time they’re taking. No one else is losing sleep over it. And for something so trivial that it wouldn’t have taken more than someone saying, “Can he do this later tonight? Can he do this now so we don’t interrupt his sleep?” If I were Joe Nobody with no sense of self-preservation, I’d have been up there, half awake, for no good reason.

There’s a big misconception about the Army. That every soldier is a brother. That everyone is looking out for the person to their left and right. That we’re all in this together and we’re all on the same side. But we’re not. It’s basically every man for himself and if you’re looking out for anyone else you’re needlessly burdening yourself. No one else is looking out for you.

There was a good article about religious discrimination in The New York Times (posted here) wherein a soldier who has declared himself atheist finds himself threatened by people in his unit who refuse to respect his (lack of) religion. It also goes on to describe a few instances where being an atheist is used against him in trying to get promoted or even enjoy a thanksgiving meal. Though these are extremes the article cannot begin to highlight how the only religion in the Army is Christianity.

In the Army I am constantly hammered with god this, jesus that. God’s everywhere. Every prayer is Christian. Every religious service is Catholic or Protestant. Even functions that have no need for religion get some god injected into them. The worst offender was early in my enlistment when a couple’s first deployment meeting was offered. It might as well have been called “The God and Sex Power Hour”. It was an hour long sermon. No one told me this was a Christian service. Katie was seriously offended by how this supposed couples meeting was just another way to push god on us.

The Family Readiness Group started putting out a monthly newsletter. This too takes no consideration into the fact that not everyone in this unit is Christian. Come on now, is it really necessary to push god in a monthly newsletter aimed at my wife and other spouses while we’re away? Don’t they think that the Christians in the group are already going to church on Sunday and the non-Christians are doing their thing without the need to remind us that Christianity is the only Department of Defense approved religion? The worst part is that I know it was brought up in an FRG meeting that not everyone is Christian and it’s not necessary to put prayers and inspirational messages in the squadron’s FRG newsletter but the end result was it was God’s way or the highway.

I can’t even watch a little Armed Forces Network (Department of Defense satellite tv) without hearing about god. Every message from the Chaplain’s Corps is a bible verse or prayer. There’s even little messages about “who’s going to be there for you? God.” Hey, you know who else is going to be there for you? Allah. Abraham. Moses. Buddha. Vishnu. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Xenu. L. Ron Hubbard. Eris. Nobody. Nothing. Do we ever hear about anyone other than Christian God? No.

I find it absolutely ridiculous that the Army and Department of Defense operates “religion neutral” and refuses to recognize religions other than Christianity. Either come out with it and say that Christianity is the only authorized religion in the Department of Defense or quit playing lip service to neutrality. I’ve been handed plenty of Christian religious materials and it’s just as easy to say “no thank you” as it is to not hand them out to begin with and not playing to one religions fiddle would better serve the purpose of seperation of church and state.

That’s how many points I missed promotion cutoff by this month.

Size 7.5 Wide. Desert tan. Hot weather type. Army standard issue.

I give up my sizes (top, bottom, hat, gloves, boots) about once every three months. Once every three months someone (usually supply) needs my sizes for god knows what. I cough up the same sizes every time; Small-Regular, Small-Short, 7.25, 8, 9.5 Regular. This last time we went to get new uniforms before this deployment I got small boots. I got small boots because the guy there told us not to go by the size we usually wear because these were different boots. The boot he gave me that he said was 9.5R was too big. The boot that felt closest to fitting was 7.5W. Whatever. I’m not wearing them right now, my boots are fine.

So I didn’t wear them until about three months into the deployment. 7.5W is too fucking small. They don’t fit. I can’t get them swapped out because I’m in Iraq and there’s not shit that can be done out here about it. Oh well, one pair of boots down the drain. It’s a good thing the Army buys us new uniforms while we’re in country, hopefully I can get a new pair of boots that fit.

Wrong. Even though I give up my sizes once every three months, supply decided to go with what I was issued more than nine months ago. A size I’ve never worn before as I’ve always worn size 9.5R boots. Every pair of boots I own are size 9.5R and every pair fits except these two pairs of worthless boots. So since I’ve got a brand new pair of boots that I know don’t fit I thought I’d take them to my supply guy so I can get them sent back and get a proper pair out here that do fit.

Wrong again. My new supply guy must get off on fucking other soldiers because he basically told me I could go fuck myself. He said he can’t (or won’t as I believe is the case) send them back and I could try to find someone who wears a 7.5W boot (no one) and give them to them and let me get the right size when they get their stuff or else I’m stuck with boots that don’t fit. So I’m stuck with boots that don’t fit for a second time.

So if no one wants these brand new 7.5 Wide, desert tan, hot weather standard issue Army boots, then I’m either giving them away to some Iraqi kid who needs them (most likely) or throwing them in the trash (out of spite). Because 7.5W boots are worthless to my 9.5R feet.

Edit on 28MAR09: Somewhere in time, this article was edited. It wasn’t edited by me. I don’t know who edited it. It’s a shadow of its’ former self and missing everything bad I had to say about the promotion system and I don’t have the will to work up a furor and write all out again. So here’s the long and the short of it; if you suck your first sergeant’s dick enough to get a board appearance, you’ll get promoted to E5 or E6. Leadership abilities or job proficiency be damned.

Original: The Army’s promotion system beyond E-4 is garbage. It is not designed to promote the best people for the job but the ones who play to system’s requirements.

Lots of words ahead that no one will read. TLDR: Working hard won’t get me promoted so I have no desire to work hard.

(more…)

I’ve come to realize that my relationship with the Army can be best described by the Tool song “Bottom” off of Undertow. The irony here is that my commander used a section of the lyrics to put on the back of our troop t-shirt but I know that it means something different to him and completely opposite to what it means to me.

I can’t hide the fact that I’m a Tool fan but you definitely have to work backwards to see progression. 10,000 Days sucks but if you go backwards through their discography they get a billion times better. When all I owned was Lateralus, Aenima, and Undertow I thought it was the opposite and that Lateralus might have been a hiccup but then I heard Opiate and listened to Undertow again and I realized that I had it backwards. They go from fucking awesome to what the fuck.

Not Ft. Campbell. Not even Kentucky or Tennessee. I hate the little box of a hotel room we live in. It sucks. Thankfully, we’re moving into housing within the next two weeks. 900+ sq. ft. of goodness to settle into.

I also hate the lack of good computer+internet time. Without an internet connection and a general lack of just TIME, not bored-time or game-time, simply unoccupied productive time, it’s impossible for me to do such things as make a new layout for this site that takes advantage of new Movable Type features or even secure it against comment spam, which is why the comments are still off.

I can’t wait to move. I can’t wait to unpack EVERYTHING. I’m making a list of magazines and a newspaper to subscribe to because I’ll finally have an address. And when I order things online, I’ll be able to get them as soon as they arrive because they’ll come straight to my door, not my parents’ house to wait for me to come get them.

Nothing can ever be perfect for me. I’ll always find something to complain about.

Hey, how about some positive news! White Wolf is have a 60% off (almost) all their Ravenloft D&D material. I’ve ordered everything in two shipments. And it’s not the old stuff either, this is the new updated Ravenloft material. All three core books are $14.00 and they’re the priciest books in the collection! And in more D&D news, a local gamestore (local to Ft. Campbell that is) is affliated with the RPGA (a d20 role-playing association) and are running two sanctioned events in March. So I can register as a player and score some reward points AND get in some D&D time! The shortfall is that there’s two gamestores in the area and this one isn’t the nice one. I mean all the people there were actual role-players, not Warhammer nutsacks or paintball goons, but their inventory was kind of out-of-date and (this probably only matters to me) I think they allowed smoking indoors. But I’m still going. To both events.

And once I get moved into housing and get all my necessities set up, maybe I’ll be happy.