The paradox of excellence is that for doing good work, your reward is more work to do. Actually, it’s not much of a paradox unless you assume that a fundamental goal at work is to earn the most pay for the least amount of trouble, which seems a very reasonable goal. It’s not quite the [...]
At the beginning of this month, I got a task: I was to produce a comedic video short, 10-15 minutes long, celebrating the tenure of the BN Commander, to be shown at his outbound Hail and Farewell dinner. One of my peers would back me up, and I’d have command support for getting the filming [...]
(Preface: I am neither an official Pentagon source nor an official spokesman for the Army. I am a US Army UH-60 pilot otherwise entirely dissociated from this event; these are my personal opinions.) A video was posted recently by WikiLeaks. It’s gun camera footage from an Apache engagement on 12 July 2007. The video begins [...]
Dropped off a packet today to apply to the FWMEQC. Fixed wing transitions used to be a perk available to old crusty warrant officers with over 20 years of service. Recently, someone high up decided that it’d be good to have some younger fixed-wing pilots as well. I have to admit, I’m kind of excited [...]
It’s that time of year again: the entire BN took the day off to attend mandatory seminars. Until lunch, it was the familiar parade of lectures that boil down to “It is better for you personally and for the Army if you are not a drunken boor.” After lunch, we had an interesting tour of [...]
Sometimes the high-security lock is so high security that it won’t open, or close, or release the key, until you get in and bang on it with a sledgehammer a few times. Once that’s done, though, it turns with a sweet, oily smoothness.
The army’s schedule accommodates no man. It doesn’t matter that I signed in from leave three days ago or that I’ve been living from a duffel since the beginning of October. Today there was a mission! An important, long-planned mission which, since I’d been gone for the duration of the planning, basically required me to [...]
I just finished out a two week long exercise for the Army. I can’t talk about what I did, because the nature and conditions of my work are classified. That’s too bad: my role in all this doesn’t really deserve the paranoia, and I would really like the opportunity to vent a bit. Nothing, really, [...]
“It’s really a pain to take leave to a foreign country; I’m just trying to take my wife and kids to Thailand and I’m getting all kinds of procedural flak about it.” “Yeah, the S2 shop at Brigade has to approve all travel not to the US. It’s all to cut down on the Prostitution [...]