"Thank You For Your Service"

"Thank you for your service."  I get a lot of that these days.  Frankly, I don't know how to respond.  Why thank me for my service?  I didn't do it for you or anybody else.  I did it for very selfish reasons.  I joined the Navy because it offered exotic places like Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, as well as surface ships, submarines, and airplanes.  Any one of those things was better than any other job available when I was graduating college, like being an assistant manager in a Pampers plant in southeast Missouri.  It wasn't altruism that brought me into the Navy, it was the prospect of seeing and doing some really neat stuff.

I stayed in the Navy because they kept giving me cool things to do and great people to do them with.  I got to drive ships and lead teams of really sharp people.  I went to some amazing places (Japan, Korea, Philippines, Kenya, Singapore, San Diego, Australia, Hawaii, Panama, Washington DC, Honduras, Norway, England, Scotland, Belgium, Bahrain, Italy, Dubai, the Netherlands, Germany, Diego Garcia, Bosnia, and Guantanamo Bay, to name a few).  I was put in charge of a cutting-edge technology development program where we literally were inventing the technology as we went along.  I led and managed two overseas field sites.  I went to sea on a battleship and, during a gunnery exercise, watched a 16" shell as it flew for miles toward the target on the beach.  I went to sea on submarines four times.  I managed a set of operations during one brief war (Desert Storm).  I met my wife.  I worked with some of the sharpest, wittiest, most capable, and most driven people in the world.  Later, several years after retiring from the Navy, I got to work in Iraq with the reconstruction effort, and then in Afghanistan to help build their governance capability.  In all of this, we had a mission, a purpose, something that was much bigger than just making a buck.  Cool stuff, all of it.

And people thank me for this?

I have to admit, I have been extremely lucky.  I wasn't drafted to fight a brutal war, even though the draft was still ongoing at the time (I had a high draft number).  I've never personally been shot at, that I know of, and never been in a firefight.  I did lose a couple of friends to an IED in Iraq and a sailor to a motorcycle accident, but those aren't things you thank somebody for.  No, I just had a wonderful career doing fascinating things with great people.  I couldn't have asked for more.

There are many, many others who have not had the same experience.  The ones who have visible or invisible wounds, both from combat and everyday operations.  The ones who lost their families because they were gone all the time.  Many service members paid a really high price for their service, and those are the ones you should legitimately thank.  Not me.

So when people say "Thank you for your service", I'm thinking that they should be saying something like, "how the hell do I get some of that action?"  I know how to respond to that question.

A Trip to Victory Base

I hope you remembered your favorite veteran today.  I had to work.  Not that it's such a big deal here.  I mean, what else is there to do?  Go hang out at the mall?  I went out to Victory Base for a meeting.

That sounds pretty simple, but it isn't.  Victory Base is out at the airport, maybe ten miles away, and getting there means traveling through the Red Zone.  Since you can't just hop in your car and drive, even if your car is an armored Excursion, you have to go in a military convoy.  They run several times a day.  I signed myself up for the out-and-back trip several days ago.  This morning, I put on my PPE (Personal Protective Equipment, meaning my body armor and my helmet), grabbed my shoulder bag with notebook and sketchpad, and headed for the rhino station.

Our convoy pulled in right on schedule.  It consisted of several large MRAPs and two Rhinos.  As I've noted before, the MRAPs are big and evil trucks, with 50-caliber gun turrets sticking out the top.  The Rhinos are essentially buses that look like motorhomes from a Mad Max movie.  I was busy sketching a Rhino when the call came to load up.  We were soon at the last gate before the Red Zone and the Rhino crew told everybody to set their weapons to "amber" condition.  The young lady sitting next to me, a civilian in body armor carrying a really stylish purse, calmly slapped a loaded magazine into an automatic pistol that I didn't know she had.  

A convoy like ours is an intimidating thing.  Imagine that you're tootling along on your way in to work and you look in your mirror and see some mean-ass monster truck bearing down on you with a machine gun aimed right at your rear window.  What are you gonna do?  Yup: you make an immediate, uncontrolled dive to the median or sidewalk or anywhere else that's not in front of that damn truck.  Roads magically clear out in front of us.  When I went out in that Blackwater convoy a few weeks ago, we had military and Iraqi policemen stop traffic for us.  MRAPs and Rhinos don't need any help.

Victory Base proved to be interesting.  It's huge, for one thing: it completely encircles the Baghdad airport.  And since it's American-controlled, it feels very much like America.  We stopped by the BX.  There was a Subway, and a Cinnabon, and Taco Bell.  Okay, so they were in prefab trailers instead of your typical stores, but still.  And the BX was almost like one at home.  It actually had a variety of things that I would consider buying.  Quite a step up from the one in the IZ, which is really more like a Mini-Mart with a rather strange collection of goods.  

I had a long meeting with an organization that's building a lot of our projects.  Good people, all of them.  Then it was time to head back and catch the Rhino back to the IZ.  Our trip back was a bit quicker than the morning one.  We got home with no trouble at all.

Time to post some new sketches:

Here's one of our guards at a post by the Embassy.

A palm tree in front of the Palace ...

The view from my seat inside the Rhino on the afternoon run today.