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The Apache Video

(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 with ground forces requesting support from Crazyhorse, the Apache flight. They mention a group of people, one of whom has a weapon.


It’s hard to see, because we’re looking at a low-resolution version of a low-resolution video looking at a distant target, but the guy does appear to be carrying an AK. It looks like the Apache’s found the group that the ground forces were talking about.




After identifying further members of the group, the Apaches requested and received permission to engage. Only after receiving permission did they first fire weapons. Once they had downed all targets, they stopped firing. They did not fire on the wounded. When a van arrived to evacuate the targets, they requested and received permission to engage. Only then did they disable the van.

Wikileaks is consistently referring to these men as ‘civilians.’ They may not have been uniformed military personnel, but they were definitely combatants; they may not have been currently actively engaged in a firefight, but there had been small arms fire from that area since before dawn that day. The mission of both the Apache element and the ground forces was to eliminate any insurgents and/or weapons caches from the area.

After the fact, it was discovered that two of the people killed were in fact Reuters employees, and that in the van were two children injured by the attack. Coverage of the video has focused on this. It’s tragic, but the newspeople were in the company of armed insurgents and appeared to be part of that group. As for the children, they were simply not detectable from the Apache.

It’s worth looking at the official report. (Local Cache) The results findings begin on page 11 of the PDF. The report contains necessary background information, such as the fact that the infantry less than 200 yards away had been receiving small-arms fire all morning.

There are plenty of people out there calling this a war crime, murder, and worse. That is simply not the case. There are people out there who recognize this (1, 2, 3), but they are too few.

War is a terrible thing, but this was not a crime. This was professional pilots reacting appropriately to a hostile situation. I feel sympathy for the noncombatants in the group, but they brought it upon themselves.

2010 04 06 army
opinion Comments (0) Permalink

Fixed Wing Multi Engine Qualification Course

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 about this.

I can’t estimate right now my chances of actually getting that transition. Right now, it seems like the BN CDR is opposed to the notion of junior warrants transitioning straight from flight school to Korea to the FWMEQC without ever having actually deployed. However, that’s exactly the profile which the branch manager said they were looking for for these applications. I expect the BN CDR to recommend disapproval of the application; what I don’t know is whether that decision will be automatically upheld by the selection panel.

For me, the application is a pure win situation. If I don’t get in, I lose nothing. If I do get the transition and then move to a fixed-wing unit, I get qualified and experienced in a mode of flight it’d be very expensive to pay for on my own. If I get the transition but then get sent to another Black Hawk unit on its way to deployment, I still haven’t lost anything; it’s not that I dislike rotary-wing flight. I just take the expensive qualification and don’t get experienced at it.

There is one drawback: if I do get selected for the qualification course, it’ll add another year to my ADSO. I think I can live with that. Really, all the Army needs to do to keep me around for a career is keep giving me expensive and cool training in exchange for a year or two of extension at a time.

We’ll see how it goes.

2010 04 06 army Comments (2) Permalink

Miss Saigon

It turns out that it is very possible to enjoy a show performed in a foreign language. It’s not at all the same thing as watching a performance in a language you already understand; it involves buffering current events, then processing over the past few minutes of performance to construct a narrative that matches the observations.

I’m sure that the Miss Saigon that I experienced was substantially different from the one that was written. It was enjoyable enough that I’m willing to live with the differences.

Also: it wasn’t surprising that they burned real incense when the lead was praying; it was impressively strong to waft over the entire audience, but it made sense. What really impressed me was the tobacco and pot smell of the Dreamland strip club; I’ve no idea how far they went for verisimilitude, but it was striking.

2010 04 04 brain flotsam Comments (0) Permalink

Another Date, Another Breakup

Met, ate a fancy dinner, saw a performance of Miss Saigon. It turns out that the play’d been translated entirely into Korean. Not particularly surprising given the theater location, but the website played the songs in English.

Left the theater, got the speech that’s becoming creepily familiar. “You’re a great guy and I’ve enjoyed our dates, but I don’t see us having any romantic potential.” She was having more trouble making the speech than I was receiving it. I made a joke, left her laughing. Then we studiously got into separate subway cars for the 90 minute ride home.

I’m kind, polite, respectful by default. It’s not too much effort on my part to be attentive, even witty. However, I just have not got the hang of being sexy. The the eerie similarities of the last few breakup speeches suggest that it is an essential quality.

2010 04 03 life things Comments (2) Permalink

Pictures from Last Night

It was an interesting night: I was at a B-Boying (breakdancing for those not down with the slang) competition. As a second date, it was quite fun; as an event to photograph, it was a challenge; as a skill, it was intimidating.

horizontal kick

More images here, at the flickr set.

Statistics, because I am a nerd:
Photos taken: 178
Photos discarded as terrible: 80
Good photos: 7
Programs written to get rid of the raws left over after discarding the terrible photos: 1

2010 03 28 life things
photos
programming Comments (0) Permalink

EA Tech Support is Useless

Transcript of chat log:

KIETH: Hi, my name is KIETH. How may I help you? [06:05:08 PM]
coriolinus: hello keith [06:06:14 PM]
KIETH: hello, [06:07:05 PM]
coriolinus: I’ve got Bad Company 2 installed via Steam [06:06:35 PM]
coriolinus: I played it a bit a few weeks ago, put it down, and tried it again today [06:06:48 PM]
KIETH: Okay. [06:07:55 PM]
coriolinus: The problem was that after loading the game, pressing the “Resume” button, and loading the maps, it dumped me back down to the desktop with no error at all [06:07:18 PM]
KIETH: Carry on. [06:08:02 PM]
coriolinus: it happened when I was logged into the servers and when I wasn’t [06:07:37 PM]
coriolinus: All I’m trying to do is continue playing where I left off, but this game keeps crashing seemingly immediately as it finishes loading the level [06:08:10 PM]
KIETH: Please provide me the dxdiag of your PC. [06:09:21 PM]

[cut for length]

KIETH: Okay. [06:10:37 PM]
KIETH: Sorry. [06:12:31 PM]
KIETH: The game is not tested on windows 7, 64 bit. [06:12:57 PM]
KIETH: Please run the game on compatibility mode. [06:13:14 PM]
coriolinus: i see [06:12:41 PM]
KIETH: Is there anything else I can do for you ? [06:13:37 PM]
coriolinus: when does EA expect to extend compatibility testing to modern hardware/software combinations? [06:13:15 PM]
KIETH: No. [06:14:33 PM]
‘coriolinus’ disconnected (‘Concluded by End-user’). [06:14:59 PM]

In other news, don’t bother buying Bad Company 2.

2010 03 26 geekspeak Comments (1) Permalink

Fixed Wing Progress

Discounting flights over five years ago:

Lessons so far: 6
Hours so far: 9.7

Two more lessons until the solo: one pre-checkride review to touch up all the maneuvers, then the checkride itself. After that, a solo, then maybe 10 more hours until a private license.

It looks like flight skills are, in fact, transferable between fixed- and rotary-wing.

2010 03 14 life things Comments (0) Permalink

In the last seven days

I had Thursday off to go to Yongsan for an appointment.
Despite that, I worked 48 hours.
I flew 9.1 hours in a UH-60 and 2.1 in a Cessna 172.
I read three novels and four volumes of a graphic novel.
I wrote approximately 2500 words of essay, blog, and correspondence.
I spent 12 hours socializing with friends.
I visited Everland amusement park.

I think I have a legitimate claim to being busy.

2010 03 13 life things Comments (2) Permalink

On the Beach

Just finished this book. It is a gem.

Some stories are great because of the tremendous imagination of the author. Some are great because of the engaging tone and style in which they are written. This book is great because every word intensifies a single emotion: despair. Not one is wasted or counterproductive.

I like to think of myself, in general, as a happy nihlist. There’s no inherent meaning or purpose in life, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying myself in the meantime. This book is the story of a nation forced to the same outlook.

I loved it. You may not have the same reaction, but you will absolutely react to it in some way. It is worth reading for that alone.

Nevil Shute, On the Beach (Amazon)

2010 03 11 book reviews Comments (0) Permalink

Google Wave

I tend not to be an early adopter of tech. With software, it’s because most software in the world exists to solve problems that I don’t have. With hardware, it’s that and the fact that new hardware is expensive as well.

Thus it is that I only recently joined Google Wave.

My impression before joining, based hazily upon half-remembered opinions I’d seen in the tech news and blogs, was that it was (like the laser) a solution in search of a problem. Nobody seemed to know quite what to do with it, at least at first.

It’s not that hard a problem: as email is optimized for two-party communication, wave is optimized for n-party communication. At its most basic, it falls back to simple email: asynchronous communication between two parties. If both parties happen to be online simultaneously, Wave updates the conversation in realtime. The content is stored online forever on a remote server whose administration and upkeep costs have been abstracted away from the user experience. None of this is beyond the capabilities of modern email.

Wave’s advantages come into play when more than one person is interested in the conversation. Native threading of replies lets sub-discussions happen naturally. Collaborative editing tools allow people to improve working copies of a document without the hassle of mailing the current revision to every person as each edit is made. The internet nature of the thing is exploited to give each message a unique URL, meaning that wikis are an extremely natural application of the technology. At the same time, permissions are all managed by the overall Google structure.

The most common use case for Wave in the general zeitgeist is that it’s useful for online gaming. There’s that, but there are also much simpler, more general cases. For example, my little brother’s birthday is coming up. Everyone in my family is going to get him something, but we’ll want to converse before buying both to share gift ideas and to ensure that we don’t duplicate gifts. Wave is very well suited for that sort of discussion. With email there is a list of recipients that must be managed per reply and a message-centric format which encourages excerpting and replies to all, generating much traffic and taking much inbox space. Wave’s format identifies the conversation itself as central instead, reducing traffic and repetition. In the end, it reduces the process involved in having the discussion, which makes it the superior technology.

Email has one major advantage that Wave currently lacks: interoperability. Email is at heart a message format defined by SMTP and extended with MIME. Any client or server conforming to the format and performing the expected operations will interoperate with any other, which has lead to the ubiquity of the tech. Wave is, for now at least, an application, not a format. To get on Wave, you need a Google account and an invite from a current wave user. Then you use the Google viewer to view the waves on the Google server. It is very much a one-company phenomenon. This, I believe, is to Google’s detriment. If they open the format and ideally the current software implementing it, wave could eventually become as big as email. It would no more be tied to Google than email is to ARPA, but it would be everywhere. Right now, Wave can’t replace email as a primary means of communication: even if I could sell the idea to everyone with whom I wanted to converse, they couldn’t all get accounts. Opening the format might change that.

Wave is still beta tech, and it is very obvious in places. For example, right now, anyone can edit any message in any conversation in which they are a participant. One major requirement for the final version will be the implementation of various levels of access control. Relatedly, there is some version control for the textual content, but rich content and in particular dynamic widgets which are deleted are gone forever.

Still, this is a technology with some real potential, particularly if some means of interoperability is established with classic email. Once it’s cleaned up, polished, and open-sourced, I can see it being big. Until then, it will remain a niche product.

2010 03 09 geekspeak
reviews Comments (0) Permalink