I’m finally out of inprocessing, or at least the formalized briefing portion of it. There’s still a bit more to go, but the rest takes the form of a checklist of tasks to complete. Mainly it revolves around people to meet and notify of my presence; it will hopefully not take more than a day or two.
One of the most valuable bits of inprocessing was a tour of fatal accident sites, with a focus on how proper leadership could have prevented them. There’s a hill where a AVLB accidentally ran over two pedestrians because it was avoiding a Bradley coming the other way on the narrow road. There’s a bridge where an untrained driver drove a FIST-V over the edge, and an elevated road whose edge crumbled, rolling a M-113 16 feet into a rice paddy below. At each of these sites, there was substantial post-accident reconstruction designed to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. Still, it was emphasized that the real failures weren’t failures of engineering, or even of untrained crews. Leaders should have been there to train the crews, to make sure the soldiers were performing the proper maintenance on the vehicles, to ensure that everyone knew what was going on and what should happen in the event of contingencies. In short, the leaders should have been doing their jobs. My rank makes me a leader by default; it’s instructive to know what could happen if I don’t take that seriously.
Unfortunately, not all the training was that good. It seems that Korea has something of a reputation within the Army, or at least the high leadership here feels that it does. This, it appears, is where young soldiers go to drink and debauch, where they lose their constraints and go wild. After all, they’re in a foreign country; why should there be consequences? This is where discipline and proper training and procedures go out the window. After all, we’re patrolling the most stable armed truce in history; what could go wrong?
Whether or not those things are true (I don’t have the statistics), and whether or not Korea even has that reputation (I don’t have the Army experience), the General is determined to fix the situation, and that means that everyone else in the chain of command has got to get their own words in on how to improve the situation. That, in short, is why inprocessing takes three weeks instead of the two days of logistical details that happen after the formal training bits are over.
On the other hand, I can now repeat details from an hour-long lecture on how to safely operate a multi-kilowatt generator.
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