Worrying about the kids

I don’t have kids of my own so I worry about other peoples’ kids. Maybe you can relate.

It was recently my privilege to attend Warrior Leader Course in Eastover, South Carolina. I have a few observations, condemnations and sprinkle of pithy commentary.

The first, and perhaps most important observation I have to make is that the Army is desperate to retain soldiers. With this desperation comes the need to lower standards. The lowering of standards is going to get people killed. It used to be that you had to pass the physical fitness test to graduate from the Warrior Leader Course, which used to be called Primary Leadership Development Course. Now you can graduate without being able to pass three simple events. A timed two-mile run, sit ups and push ups done in insufficient quantities are no longer grounds for being sent home. Maybe we’re all just tired from being deployed so much? Five of my squad of 17 soldiers were unable to pass their tests after the second try and therefore received a “marginal” on their graduation. The numbers do not include the three soldiers who were sent home early for having too much body fat to meet the Army’s requirements. Let me ask a question. Would you like to serve in combat with someone who is “marginally” physically fit? I would not.

Moving on to academics. The first half of the course was strongly focused on “academics.” I put the word academics in quotes because a lot of the information we were expected to learn was completely useless stuff like how to wear your uniform properly. Garrison skills may, over the years, ingrain some form of automatic discipline into a soldier that will make the commander smile as he walks by, but garrison skills do nothing to contribute to winning battles. Mixed in with learning the rules and regulations were materials that I did benefit from. These materials covered such items as how to move a squad through rural and urban terrain. We actually got to practice the use of these techniques will firing blanks into the faces of fellow squad members and having simulated artillery thrown at us. And that is always good stuff.

Some of the people in my squad had very low IQs. I’m pretty sure my test answers were being copied on the day of the written exam but I can’t prove anything. Let’s just say there is a direct correlation between IQ and muzzle awareness. If you ever find yourself in a group of people with loaded rifles, keep an eye on the dumb ones, because they tend to swing the rifles around while they talk and that’s just plain dangerous for the rest of the group.

The amount of bitching that went on was simply amazing. I have never seen such an eclectic group of ne’er do wells. We had a mix of 20-something battle hardened kids with solid field soldiering skills and bad attitudes mixed in with a group of older soldiers like myself. The young ones were a mix of cocky immortality fantasy bravado and PTSD covered with a layer of brash boasting and foul language. The older ones were a mix of plain dumb, apathetic, unwarlike and regular old tired. A few of us fell somewhere in between the various layers of maddening dysfunctional behaviors. I’ll call those guys the glue. They managed to hold us together but just barely.

We got up between 0330 and 0500 every single day for the entire course. One morning someone turned on the lights a few minutes early and I was so angry I couldn’t stop loudly bitching for 15 minutes. Those stolen minutes of sleep are precious. I managed to avoid a repeat performance the next morning only by putting myself into that dead zone those in the military service learn to escape to. Most veterans have a place they can escape to at will, and I turned mine back on. I hadn’t used it since I left Iraq.

In between learning to patrol, sniping at each other from across the desks where we learned how to wear our uniforms properly and eating bad food, we played video games. The last two days of the course consisted of “simulators” including a virtual convoy, a virtual shooting range and virtual patrols run entirely off Zboards on laptop computers.

My squad of soldiers probably isn’t much different from any squad that has existed in the last few hundred years, except maybe for the logistics and raw firepower available to them, but I worry about the kids. Most of them will probably see a lot more conflict in the coming decade(s). Some of them will die. So I worry and I bitch and I try to be the best soldier I can be. I love those kids, and I hate them all at the same time. I love the military and I hate it too. I keep trying to learn and I keep getting older and maybe crankier in the process. I wonder if any of my experiences have been worth anything. I’m hoping the answer is yes.

I’m also hoping the kids are going to be OK when they get done growing up.