All Alone in the Night

"Why can he not fight for those he loves?"
Eowyn, The Return of the King

As a general rule, when the particularly odd types suggest that the right is in some way comparable to the fanatics in the Muslim world the west is currently fighting, I tend to tune them out. Then I read Kathleen Parker and wonder if there isn't some small justice to that argument.

Ms. Parker has an opinion piece up in today's Washington Post arguing that Iran is in some way morally superior to the west because they dress their women up in hijabs rather than letting mothers of young children go to war. "When a pretender to sanity such as Ahmadinejad gets to lecture the West about how it treats its women, we've effectively handed him a free pass to the end zone and made the world his cheerleaders." That may be how Ms. Parker sees the world, and she is probably correct that much of the Muslim world will concur with Ahmadinejad's opinion, but the fact that much of the world relegates women to second- (or third-) class citizenship is no indicator that they're right.

Let's begin with the obvious. The average woman shouldn't be a frontline soldier. Modern combat requires a degree of physical strength that most women (and some men) simply don't possess. As I prepare to go to Iraq, I have to accustom myself to wearing 30 pounds of body armor, plus a pistol and a carbine and ancillary gear that adds another ten-plus pounds. Assuming an average woman comes in at 5'5" and ~140 pounds, that's 28% of her body weight. Running around in all that will wear down bodybuilders, and physiologically, women start out with less muscle mass and so are going to wear down faster, on average. But not everyone is average. The U.S. Army used to require strength tests for certain specialties, and it would be wise to go back to that, as some men really shouldn't be on the frontlines any more than the average woman, and some women probably could pass muster if given the chance. Combat arms would still be predominantly male, but testing based on ability rather than gender would probably make the Army better off in the long run.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things that the Army needs done that don't require physical strength. In today's Army, the ratio of tooth to tail is extremely low; most soldiers are involved in supporting the small number of fighters. While many combat arms types like to think that makes the others lesser soldiers, the fact is that without that tail, the tooth would fail in short order. An M1A1 tank will run out of fuel in a day, and ammunition even faster in heavy combat. An infantryman carries only enough supplies to sustain himself for a few days at best. The Army does thousands of things every day that don't directly involve combat, but are no less vital to accomplishing its mission of defeating America's enemies. And for the vast majority of those jobs, women can do them just as well as men. Since it seems safe to assume that both men and women's abilities are normally distributed, preventing women from serving means the Army ends up with less-qualified men doing some of those jobs. That is no way to run national defense.

Further, while I may be in the minority, I believe that everyone has the right to decide for themselves what they want to do with their life. Like the U.S., Britain uses only volunteers in its military. I don't know why Seaman Faye Turney joined the British Navy. Maybe she just needed a job. Maybe she wanted to be part of the great tradition that marks the Royal Navy. Maybe she wants to see the world and sees the Navy as a path to that end. Whatever her reasons, her presence among the 15 captured British sailors in Iran strikes me as an indication of the strength of the west, not our weaknesses. An Iranian woman would never have the chance to choose the life Faye Turney has chosen. No, she would not have left her child behind while she went off to war, either, as Ms. Parker notes with no small outrage. But men have been leaving their children behind to go to war since the first group of cavemen decided it would be easier to steal another tribe's stuff than to make their own. That's not a good thing, but I fail to see why women should be denied the right to fight for what they believe in simply because their plumbing is different.

Would Seaman Turney's child be better off if she were there to raise him all the time? Maybe, but it seems to me that Seaman Turney is teaching her child a pretty important lesson by being away: that the important things in life are worth making sacrifices for. Many may disagree with what she has chosen to sacrifice for, but I hope we can agree that she should have the right to make those decisions.

Which of our societies is stronger? The one that forces women to stay home and raise children, or the one that allows (if not yet encourages) women to choose their own fate and to do what they do best?

This seems like an opportune moment to introduce myself, since it gives me an easy starting point for my first post. It's not something I really like to think about, but it is much on my mind right now.

I am an officer in the U.S. Army. I am preparing to go to Iraq for a year or longer as part of a Military Transition Team or MiTT. Our purpose will be to support a battalion of the Iraqi Army, helping them to become more effective soldiers so that they can secure their own country. I will be leaving sometime in late June or early July after I complete training at Fort Riley, Kansas. I have been in the Army in some capacity for almost 19 years, although I still have almost six years until my retirement. I have served as a tank platoon leader, tank company executive officer, company commander and in more staff positions than I would care to count ending most recently with a tour as a battalion executive officer. Now I will serve as a team leader for an eleven-man team.

I'm sure everyone can imagine the reaction to the news about extending combat tours to 15 months. That's a tough blow, as it means that we'll all be away from our families for about 18 months when you add in our training time here at Fort Riley. We'll see divorce numbers going up, although I don't know what this will mean for retention. The assumption would be that people will be more likely to get out, but people don't always react the way we would expect. Since I'll be down to about four years until retirement, I certainly won't get out over this, although I do hope it won't cost me my marriage. But it's going to be a real hardship on soldiers and their families.

Conversely, this may help the war effort, as one of the keys to counterinsurgency is knowledge of the enemy, and the twelve month rotation policy meant that people were generally only getting truly comfortable with their area of operations about the time it came for them to leave. I don't think it's a coincidence that we haven't really won a real war since we started sending soldiers into combat for a tour rather than for the duration. People have a very different outlook when they know they don't go home until they win, although that's a challenging thing to ask of soldiers in environments like Iraq and Afghanistan. But it's something to think about.

In any case, I'll be talking about my experiences here, both in training and once I get into theater. I can't promise to tell the whole truth here; certain details will be omitted for security reasons. But I do promise that what I do say will be the truth as I see it. I hope people will take advantage of the opportunity to hear about what we're doing in Iraq, as I don't think this is the kind of story the media is good at reporting, primarily because it is a slow process and therefore doesn't fit the normal story templates. Feel free to ask questions and I will answer what I can.

Monday we start our real training for Iraq. The last two weeks we have been doing preparatory training, so I'm going to take a little time to talk about that.

When we arrived at Fort Riley, we were put up in barracks on Custer Hill, which is the part of Fort Riley where most units work, including the one responsible for preparing us for training. They are accustomed to having large groups come in to be trained, which means that their schedule was too expansive for our smaller class; there was a lot of open space on the schedule, which meant a lot of time where we didn't really have anything to do. There's not much the unit can do about that directly, but it would have helped had we known that going in so we could have done a little more work preparing opportunity training for our teams during dead space in the training.

One of the things that make this training much more challenging and I think useful is that we have a lot more responsibility for our training. Most Army schools involve a lot of being in receive mode: students all have roughly similar experiences, the program of instruction is very precise and the classes are designed to ensure that everyone comes out knowing what they need to know. But for the MiTT mission we are bringing together 10-15 soldiers from across the Army with varying degrees of experience. So the instruction can't be designed as one-size-fits all, because the types of soldiers being trained are too diverse to allow for a simple training solution. Instead the Army determines what people need to know as minimums, and it is the responsibility of the team commander to figure out where they need to focus in order to get to that point, plus to identify other areas where the team needs to train in order to be as successful as possible with the mission. It's a challenge, but that makes being a team commander a lot more fun because you are ultimately responsible for deciding how to train your team.

Having said that, it would have been helpful to know that going in so we could have set up some training for quiet moments so we could have taken advantage of the slack time in the training. It can be rightly argued that I should have figured that out on my own, but it would have been nice to have some one point that fact out to me anyhow, since even the best of us drop the ball from time to time.

Still, I was impressed with the efficiency of the process. We drew a lot of equipment for the trip: uniforms, boots, body armor, helmets, elbow and knee pads, eye protection, ear protection, gloves, weapons...three-plus duffel bags full of gear, to be precise. That could have been a very painful process, but the draw was laid out very intelligently and we were able to execute each draw about as quickly as anyone could expect. Having been through more than one equipment draw that was far more painful than necessary, this experience has been a pleasant surprise.

The one disappointment I have had has been the mandatory training. There are a number of classes that every soldier must take before going into theater, from Equal Opportunity/Prevention of Sexual Harassment (this may sound dumb, but this is particularly important going into a combat zone because when other restrictions are lifted, some people forget that others need to stay in place) to country briefings and lots of information on how to address the IED threats. The briefings were all conducted with a large number of soldiers in a theater environment using what we call 'Death by Power Point': one briefer standing at the front of the room reading slide after slide after slide. Most of the instructors were pretty good, but the amount of real learning that takes place in that environment is pretty low. The training would have been a lot better if we had simply been given the slides and a place where we could go through them as teams. This would have allowed us to conduct group discussions drawing on our experience and knowledge and would have resulted in a lot higher level of learning for all concerned. But it would also have required a lot more resources: rooms, computers to show the slides, etc., so it's not overly surprising they did the training the way they did.

Friday we moved from Custer Hill to Camp Funston. Camp Funston dates back to World War I. It's where American troops trained prior to heading to Europe to help the French and British win the First World War. Now it's also known as FOB (Forward Operating Base) Army Strong, and it's where all MiTT teams live and train prior to deploying to theater. It allows us to get some of the experience of living on a FOB in Iraq, and also provides a lot of space for training to be conducted. We'll be here for two months, and by the time we leave the team will be a lot better integrated and ready to deploy to Iraq. It promises to be an exciting ride, as we start out Monday with language training and cultural immersion training.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller

I note that quote as I realize that our first week of training is over and we're already about one-eighth of the way to jumping on a plane to Kuwait. And while a part of me looks forward to getting this training behind us so that we can get on to our mission, there is so much for us to learn in such a short time it is also mildly disturbing to know that the training is flying by so quickly.

We closed out the week preparing for qualification ranges on Monday and Tuesday. Friday night we hit the simulators and practiced firing our weapons for the first time wearing all of our body armor. It was an unpleasant experience. I'm quite happy to have the body armor, since I know it markedly increases my odds of surviving my trip to Iraq, but it is bulky and heavy and inflexible and wearing it for a full day is going to sorely test me. Saturday we conducted Preliminary Marksmanship Training, or PMI, which involves practicing firing our weapons, rehearsing the fundamentals of marksmanship, and preparing our various sights for live fire. Having grown up in an Army where iron sights were the only option, the new sights we have on our weapons make me feel like I'm suddenly fighting in the future. I won't get into the details, but suffice it to say we've come a long ways from iron sights.

Earlier in the week we spent three days on Iraqi language and culture. Arabic is a tough language and we only scratched the surface in our initial training, but at least we had an opportunity to start learning some basic phrases. The cultural training was more in-depth and should help to ensure that we avoid some of the more common mistakes made by newcomers in a foreign society. Although it should be noted that due to the Army's rotation policy and our ongoing presence in Iraq, the Iraqis are a lot more culturally aware than we are. Part of the training included a cultural immersion dinner where we all dressed up in dishdashas and ate some nominally Iraqi food (they substituted beef for lamb because lamb is too expensive) and conversed with some of the Iraqi-speakers the Army has working here.

I should mention those as well. The Army has contracted for a lot of Iraqi-speakers, most of them former Iraqis who since moved to the U.S., to actually live and work on the FOB with the trainees. They play Iraqi commanders, police, local nationals, and so on, and provide us with excellent opportunities to learn more about Iraqi culture and language. The best training we had all week came on Saturday afternoon with a meeting with two of them playing an Iraqi battalion commander and his second-in-command. A third played my interpreter and I had to role-play my initial meeting with my Iraqi counterpart. It was incredibly challenging; working with an interpreter requires a lot of concentration, and the flow and rhythm of the conversation is very different from what you're accustomed to in conversation with someone you share a language with. Add to that the cultural differences (I introduced my XO as an intelligence officer, forgetting that in Iraq 'intelligence' is associated with Saddam's internal security services) and it was a draining but very illuminating experience. We'll get seven more of those meetings, and I'm quite confident they will be a huge benefit in preparing for our mission, not to mention motivating me to learn more Arabic so I can rely less on my interpreter.

All in all it was a good week, albeit a very tiring one, and I'm quite pleased they give us Sundays off to try and recharge our batteries.

We started the week with weapons qualification. Every MiTT team member is armed with an M4 carbine and an M9 pistol, and some members also carry the M203 grenade launcher. Throw in our grenades and crew-served weapons and we're remarkably well-armed for our size, but since we travel on our own most of the time, we've got to be ready to take out anyone who decides to come after us alone until another force can come to our aid. It's therefore incumbent on each of us to learn as much as possible about our weapons and how to use them, even though if we do our jobs right, we won't ever have to fire a shot in anger.

Monday was the M4 range. It was a challenge for me because I hadn't shot an M4 in more than eight years. The first step for M4 qualification is zeroing your weapon, which is a miserable process. Zeroing involves moving your sights to the strike of the round. In other words, you fire the weapon, see where your shots are hitting, and move the sights so that when you aim at something, that's where the bullet goes. It isn't difficult in theory, but if you haven't fired in a long time, you may screw up and fail to maintain your sight picture, which means that your adjustments will be countered by aiming the weapon differently between rounds. Add to that the problem of firing in full body armor, something I'd never before done, and zeroing took a lot longer for me than it should have. Still, I got the job done and moved over to the qualification range.

That wasn't much more fun, as I still hadn't mastered the techniques of firing while wearing body armor. I did qualify, but only barely, and I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to reach out and touch the enemy at long ranges. Fortunately, a lot of my team members shot much better than I did, so at least I know that they're capable of getting the job done if we see a triggerman in the distance.

That evening we fired the night tables. These were actually easier than the day tables, first of all because our night sight was already zeroed so you could go right into the table. It also helped that you can fire the night tables from a seated position, which was far more comfortable and stable for me. I failed to qualify the first time because I fired from the kneeling position and because it took me some time to get used to the technique (it's markedly different from day fire). My second time I shot 36 of 40 targets, though, so I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to reach out and touch someone in the dark, particularly as we'll have better night vision equipment in country than we have here in training.

We got back from the range around 0100 Tuesday morning after offloading our vehicles and performing some maintenance, so it was less than four hours later we were getting up to head to the pistol range. Firing pistols is a lot easier than firing rifles for several reasons. They're lighter, so the fatigue factor is much less, and you don't try to engage anyone further away than perhaps 25 meters with a pistol, so the targets are much, much closer. (The Army's furthest target on the rifle range is 300 meters, and the Marines shoot out to 500 meters.) I hit 26 of 30 targets on the pistol range, and just about all of my guys did well with their pistols, including one of my Navy guys who shot 30 for 30.

Next up was the M203 range. The M203 fires 40mm grenades and is a huge force multiplier for a small team, as it allows us to engage targets who are difficult or impossible to engage with direct fire. Having the ability to rain high explosive grenades on enemies several hundred meters away is a big help. While my M203 gunners engaged their targets, the rest of us went back to the rifle range to get some more practice with our M4s. That was a very good idea, as we fired 80 more rounds, this time from more difficult positions, but shot better than we had the day before. As with anything, the more you do, the better you get, so we'll do a lot of weapons fire en route to Iraq to ensure we're as proficient as possible before we ever have to fire a shot in anger.

Thankfully, we closed out the M203 range around 1500, so we were able to get back to our barracks at a decent hour and get some good sleep that evening, recharging our batteries for the rest of the week's training.

There are some articles one reads that force you to ask if the author is not making it clear enough that he's joking, or if he's just seriously deranged. At the top of that list is Dan Simpson's piece examining how to rid America of guns in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings last week. In this piece Simpson explains his plan for ridding America of all its guns and making the world a better place. Let's take a look.

First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

A logical first step, although Simpson must be intelligent enough to realize that many people would not, in fact, be willing to turn in their weapons. Simpson explains how hunters would be permitted to keep their weapons in a centrally located armory and could withdraw them with a hunting license and that weapons with historic significance would be placed in museums. Then he gets down to the nitty gritty: how he would root out those guns not turned in willingly.

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.

Clearly, since such sweeps could not take place all across the country at the same time. But fairly quickly there would begin to be gun-swept, gun-free areas where there should be no firearms. If there were, those carrying them would be subject to quick confiscation and prosecution. On the streets it would be a question of stop-and-search of anyone, even grandma with her walker, with the same penalties for "carrying."

This is where the reader has to wonder: is Simpson serious, in which case he is a dangerous man whose right to vote should be arguably taken away from him, or is he attempting to illustrate just how ridiculous the idea of eliminating guns from society is? I hope it is the latter, but I fear for the former.

What Simpson is proposing is nothing less than a police state. He wants to empower the government to search you and your property at any time for no particular reason. That is precisely the type of tyranny the United States was founded to protect citizens against, yet Simpson apparently would welcome being subjected to that kind of treatment. If he is serious, and I continue to hope the article was intended as some kind of poorly-executed parody, I hope Simpson will do us all a favor and move to some place like North Korea or Cuba, where gun crime is low and the citizens are subject to just the kinds of treatment Simpson advocates.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have fought and died over the years to preserve certain fundamental liberties from tyranny. People like Simpson illustrate why it is so important to continue that fight even today, because there is no one more dangerous than a man who wants to do things for your own good.

Hat tip: QandO.