Veterans Day

Veterans Day for a Platoon Sergeant
November 10, 2006 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
San Antonio, Texas

I retired from the Army twelve years ago. Even though I was a platoon sergeant for less than year, it was still the defining moment of my 22-year military career. During that short period, I took a platoon of interrogators to the first Gulf War. Before we left Germany, I reminded my platoon that we were well trained to accomplish our mission and to defend ourselves. Their job was the mission. My job was to bring them all back in one piece. As a direct support unit, we were at times close to the battles, but we never shot at anyone and no one shot at us. Vehicle accidents and mine fields were our biggest threat. A sister platoon lost two soldiers who violated safety regulations and smashed a hummer into a concrete culvert. My soldiers all knew when they got into a vehicle, they couldn’t leave until they looked me in the eye and recited the safety rules they had to follow. Then they had to look every passenger in the eye, say their names and the names of their spouses and children. They drove away with a fresh reminder of the awesome responsibility they bore. It may not seem much like war, but the modern Army deploys about seven support personnel for every front-line fighter, so my “combat” experience is more common than that of guys who actually dodge and throw bullets.
Twelve year after leaving the Army, I still see the world through a platoon sergeant’s eyes. My family is my most important platoon. The first time my oldest son got into the car to drive the whole family outing, I used the same “look me in the eyes” briefing I’d used in Desert Storm. Then he looked at his mother and each of his brothers in turn. He drove away with me riding shotgun and know the awesome responsibility of having not just a steering wheel in his hands, but our lives.
Since retirement, I’ve been teaching English as a second language to professional adults. Every class is a new platoon. There are a lot of similarities. We have a mission, but the students have to accomplish it. I help them and guide them, and sometimes I have to kick them in the butt, but I very rarely lose a student. We all make it. I can’t choose who will be in my classes, anymore than I could choose who would be in my platoon. They’re all mine, with all their strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows. I never have a problem with playing favorites – the highest status my soldiers could achieve was to be a member of my platoon. I had to work harder for some, not so hard for others. See, as platoon sergeant, I had to help every individual succeed. The better they performed, the better my platoon became. It’s the same with my classes.
I don’t just think about myself on Veterans Day. My father was a gunner on a B-17 during WWII. His plane was shot down over Germany and he spent the last 18 months of the war as a POW. He belonged to the Air Force and stayed until he was medically retired for arthritis. He struggled with pain, alcoholism, debt, and life until 1965, when he ended his own life with a .22 caliber bullet. The Veterans Administration ruled that his death was service related. I think they were right.
I think of my brother, Jimmy, on Veterans Day. He joined the Army and went to Vietnam. The Purple Heart and the medical discharge he got when he came back to the States didn’t seem to help him much. He led a hard life for a dozen or so years, then ended his own life after finalizing his fifth divorce.
I think of my mother on Veterans Day. When Dad left her and eight kids, she took over the family. I won’t say she was a better platoon sergeant than my father, but if the mission was to raise us and prepare us to lead successful lives, then she accomplished it.
I’ve struggled, too. I miss the Army in ways my wife can’t seem to understand. The “band of brothers” concept may seem corny, but it’s still real. I could trust my fellow soldiers – I supported them and they supported me. In my experience, the civilian world doesn’t work that way. Teaching is a good second career because when I close my classroom door, it’s just me and my class – me and my new platoon.
It took a while, but I’ve changed my mind about the Army and about war. When we were in Desert Storm, I didn’t think about the meaning of it all until the war was over. We had to sit in canvas tents in the desert in 120 degree heat for over 2 months until it was our turn to go home. That’s when I started to question why we were there. Even then, we all knew the Army would be going back. I believed one thing – we were never there just for the noble cause of liberating Kuwait. I was certain of this truth: no oil, no war. That’s the way I saw it. I wondered why no one wanted to say it or admit it. I mean, was the true purpose of the war like Voldemort, something we knew was there but was too horrible to say out loud? That was an epiphany for me. This wasn’t just true about Desert Storm; it was true about all wars.
I followed that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. On Memorial Day of 2006, I helped establish the San Antonio chapter of Veterans for Peace. We’re small and we’re not very active, but it feels good to know I belong to a new band of brothers.
I’m writing this at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in downtown San Antonio. The statue is beautiful and sad – one wounded soldier lying unconscious on the ground, another kneeling, feeling for a pulse and looking skyward for help. An M-16 rifle lies useless in the mud. At that moment, shooting and killing are no longer part of the mission. I can’t help believing both soldiers would have been better off if they’d never picked up an M-16 in the first place.
This statue is on the corner of Jefferson and Martin. I used to wish it had been placed somewhere more peaceful. After sitting here for a couple of hours, I think it’s appropriate, though. See, everyone knows it’s there, but they’re used to it. They walk by or drive by without a glance. Twice a year, on Veterans Day and Memorial Day, events are held to “remember” vets, both living and dead. It makes us all feel like we do our part to honor our veterans. Well, I think that’s a bunch of crap. Statues don’t help vets heal. They don’t train them for jobs or feed their families. They don’t give them new legs or arms. I know Americans hate taxes, but the only way to support vets – really support them – is with money. Wake up tomorrow and say, “I’m willing to pay slightly higher taxes to pay for training programs, VA hospitals, a better GI Bill, and transition programs.” That’s the only true way to honor us. The US is not doing it now. While this war is still going on, a war that has created over 4 million new war veterans, military and VA hospitals are being closed. Despite the high percentage of Hispanic vets from the Rio Grande Valley, there is no VA hospital there. Vets are being told that the expense isn’t warranted. THE EXPENSE ISN’T WARRANTED! But someone will find money for a new statue somewhere. I don’t think those statues are for soldiers. I think they’re built to salve the public conscience.
This happens every Veterans Day. I end up angry. I guess a lot of us are, though. I do wish that anger would help us speak out more. I’m not above guilting people into doing what’s right. Since Veterans Day, San Antonio buried another homeless Vietnam vet. Our statue wasn’t much use to him.

OK, I'm pissed

I just stay so mad all the time. I'm pissed off because we let Republicans lie to us. Bush says the economy is great, and that's true for his billionaire constituents. But I got my property tax bill this month and it's scarier than anything I'll see on Halloween. For the first time, I'll have to pay it with a credit card. This great economy has me on the ropes financially. I'm cancelling magazine subscriptions just to get by! There's a little light at the end of the tunnel - I'll pay my car off in about three months. I'm pissed off because our Republican governor is telling us what a great job he's done on education, but the schools here are so bad and so unsafe, we've been homeschooling for 8 years now. So I pay sky-high taxes for schools so bad we won't use them. Yeah, that pisses me off. And it pisses me off that I live in Texas, land of the "rape-my-sister" Republicans. I call them that because Dick Cheney or W. could come to their house, rape their sister right in front of them, and they'd still vote Republican. I mean, the Republicans have already raped and pillaged our federal budget, raped and pillaged Iraq and Afghanistan (in the name of freedom, no less), raped and pillaged the Constitution, but hey, Bill Clinton got a blow job in the Oval Office, so they can never vote for a Democrat again. And I'm pissed because, for the first time, I'm teaching methodology to other teachers. I'm qualified, motivated, and really good at it, but I've got this student who's decided to be pissed off, too, so she's miserable and she's making damn sure I'm miserable, too. Talk about a turd in a punch bowl. And, secretly, I'm still a little pissed that my kid got into Rice University as a National Merit Scholar, then went down there and just plain old bombed. Lost opportunity of a lifetime on his part; lost $20 grand that I'll be paying for the next three years.
Well, I'm being paged. What the hell, that pisses me off, too.

It's over

So the training is over. I'm pretty sure I'll be recertified, but I honestly don't think the other two people should be. In their last interview, they botched it as badly as anyone could have. The candidate was truly angry by the time they finished, and he had every right to be. Oh, well, stuff happens.
Then I was informed that I would be teaching OPSAV for the next 4 weeks. That's a course that focuses on speaking fluency, primarily for pilots and public affairs officers. So all I have to do is devise scenarios for them to speak, then sit back and let them talk. It's actually pretty easy.
That great economy Bush talked about apparently wasn't so great after all. The earnings reports for the quarter he bragged about were terrible, so the stock market dropped 200 points. His mouth spews shit and you just have to wait for reality to make it smell bad enough for people to get it.
I actually must have been in a better mood this week. One of the trainers said I was "sensitive" and a colleague said I always seemed to have a smile on my face. Huh? Me? Just two weeks ago I was accused of being a curmudgeon.
Oh, a colleague of mine and I also had to give a presentation on our trip to Iraq. That was actually kind of fun.

Practice interrogations

OK, so we spent a day practicing the Oral Proficiency Interviews. "Candidates" from Afghanistan, Turkey, El Salvador, and Yemen, which is a pretty interesting group. They all did much better than we did. It's been over 6 years since I did an OPI, so I klutzed around, knowing all the while that my clumsiness made the process that much worse for the student. BUT...we did get a ratable language sample from all of them, and the only one who complained was the one I didn't personally interview.
My fellow students irritated me for a good part of the day. One of them said she "just wasn't into it," so I had to do most of the first interview on my own (two interviewers work together). The other student decided he was the teacher, so a lot of time when we weren't interviewing, we were listening to his bogus lectures. I did get better as the day wore on and I do feel more comfortable, so tomorrow should be better. We'll probably be doing higher level candidates, though. More interesting, but also more complicated and more time consuming. I've done 3 interviews - only 4 more to go.

Curmudgeon

What the hell. I know I'm supposed to like everyone, but I just don't. So that's the problem with the training - I don't like everyone. One person doesn't talk enough. Another just knows that his opinion is superior to facts. But I like the instructor. She's reasonable, helpful, and pleasant. Could we want anything else?
I still can't help feeling trapped, though. I'll go through this week of training, do my best, probably get recertified, all for the privilege of doing extra work for no extra pay. Still, it was a quiet day without much stress.
Dems are finally getting their act together. Hillary, Gore, and Kerry all blasted Bush for the secret spying program.
Other stuff: $38 billion disappeared in Iraq. No accountability. Just gone.
Republicans pretending to want campaign finance reform.
Executive salaries may be made public.
Mayor of New Orleans went nuts for a chocolate city.
And Bush's numbers went up, not because he actually DID anything, but because he's trying to convince everyone everything's ok...they just have to ignore reality like he does. And it seems to be working.

Shoulda

I'm active in the peace movement, so I shoulda marched on Martin Luther King Day. I didn't, though. I stayed home during the day and helped my wife get her art ready for an art auction for abandoned animals. Then later, we went to see the new "Pride and Prejudice." Vera is a Jane Austen fanatic. If there were a PhD in Jane Austen studies, my wife would qualify. Her standards are high. Added to that is the reverence we both have for the A&E version of the novel. So going to this movie was a great risk. We went as skeptics, but WE LOVED IT! We had a great time from beginning to end. The daughters were more vivacious, the story was more about Lizzie and less about Jane, but all in all it was true to Austen and a joyful movie to watch. It let me run away from the world for a while, so I appreciated it from that standpoint.
Tomorrow I go to training for Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI). These are the wonderful tests we give to make sure students have true practical skills in English, rather than just being able to pass a test. I don't like doing them. It's more work for the same pay, first of all. I also don't believe in the process 100%. And the tests are way too much like interrogations. BUT I have to do it. There aren't enough people who pass the course to get certified, so those of us who do are expected to pull our weight. See, I was overseas for so long, I require refresher training in order to be recertified. So that's my week. The trainer and I don't always get along, either. I won't comment on why - personal, very superficial reasons, to tell the truth. I should be a better person. But hey, I am human after all.
Well, I'm tired and do have to work tomorrow. Hope it's a good week.

A walk in the park

Another quiet day. After I had breakfast and read the Sunday paper, we all went for a walk in OP Schnabel Park here in San Antonio. I was skeptical, since we had to drive through a housing development to get to the entrance, but it's actually a kind of wild place. We even saw two beautiful deer. The park itself is a cedar and oak scrub forest in a flood plain, which is why it hasn't been developed. On the way down a steep bank to the dry creek bed, I slipped and hurt my neck a bit. Didn't say anything so we could finish the walk. The thing I didn't like about the park is all these guys with mountain bikes have decided this is their park, so we had to stand aside more than a few times for macho bikers. I don't know how anyone can be macho in rubber shorts, but these guys tried. The walk was still nice, though, and even the 15-yr-old admitted he'd had fun.
So then we came home to lunch, more forgettable football, and a video session of Gerry doing his forms for Tae Kwon Do. I seem to be having tech problems lately, though. My DV camera, a JVC, should hook up and play just like a VCR, but I can't even find the video jack on the stupid camera! Oh, well...I'll figure it out. I'll have to go on line, though - we can't seem to locate our user's manual.
I have gotten some rest this weekend. I really should go on the MLK march tomorrow but I can't stand crowds. John Courage and his supporters will be there - I hope there's a good showing for him. He's a good man and I hope he can win the primary, then the seat in the House. God bless him.
News is minimal - just the brouhaha about our bombing Pakistan and Ney resigning his chairmanship. I hope it means the Republican Nazi Party is crumbling just a little more.

Baby Steps

So I had a quiet day. My wife was gone most of the day with my 15-yr-old and my 11-yr-old was upstairs playing computer games. I'm reading a book about the 1918 flu pandemic. I'll add comments about it when I finish it. I did watch some very forgettable football today while I read. I also got on my exercise machine, FINALLY, and hope to make a habit of it. If I take a sensible approach, I know I'll be consistent.
Few thoughts of work or the war or politics. I need that.
This evening, the four of us (Vera, the boys, and I) played Scrabble. It used to be a given that I would win, but Gabriel and Vera have both won recently. They are all getting better and I'm really glad about that.
No anger today. I guess that's a good day.

A good day

Measurable success is always appreciated. Another teacher gave me these 5 students with the caveat that they wouldn't talk much. By the end of this week, they were talking a lot. One of the students from Oman failed his test last week, so when I asked him about it, he described enough to tell me he had a problem with test-taking skills. I gave him a little advice about how to take our computer-delivered tests, and he was the first one finished AND he passed. Hooray! Even better, one student from Poland shook my hand after class and said he appreciated how I taught the class.
I try not to let my anger and frustration at the politics of our country spill over into my work, but sometimes I can't help it. I mean, I'm mad all the time that we seem so willing to ignore our Constitution and our founding fathers as we hurtle toward a theocracy, that we ignore good, common sense and let our president lie us into war, let him tell us a massive national debt is a GOOD thing, that spying on Americans is necessary, that torture is ok. Are we that stupid?
That anger colors so much - I resent the Jesus freak woman across the hall, even though I know she lost a daughter a few years ago and her faith helps her cope. I avoid the "Bush right or wrong" Republicans - I get pissed off just seeing them.
I don't think Bush is destroying America. I think he's already accomplished the task. We are no longer the good guys. Pride and greed, considered sins when I was growing up, are suddenly virtues. Lying is telling the truth, and telling the truth is lying. If I were a religious fanatic, I think I could make a pretty good case for Bush being the antiChrist.
Well, I just need to hang on till he's out. I hope against hope that Americans will recognize we need to throw the bums out in the next two elections.
I've been tired a lot lately. Maybe it's the no-meat thing. I've only been a vegetarian for a couple of months, and just don't have any energy. My wife's trying to help me with it.
So how do we get America back?

Why I changed the name

I changed the name for this blog because I realized that what I really needed to do is blog therapy, to get all the frustrations and animosity out of my system that builds up when you work for the poster organization for the Peter Principle.
I've been working for the Defense Language Institute English Language Center for over 10 years now. Most of the time, it's a great place to teach, especially when I get sent overseas. I've taught in Latvia, Taiwan, Japan, and Iraq. I don't know why, but teachers at DLIELC aren't respected. They are the bottom of the food chain. But when we go overseas, we are honored, treated with respect, given the academic freedom to do our jobs to the best of our abilities. It's wonderful and we also get the opportunity for international travel. We are also paid above the going rate for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).
This week I've been teaching a military module to familiarize students with Explosive Ordnance Disposal vocabulary and procedures. I have 5 students: 2 from Oman, 2 from Poland, and one from Lithuania. The three European students will be going to Navy SEAL training in San Diego. The Omanis are going straight home when their English training is over. It's a good class and they are a great example of why I say that I will always enjoy working at DLI because when I close my door, it's just me and the best students in the world.
Having said that, I do find myself angry a lot, and I'll probably sound more negative here than I really feel, since I want to use this spot to rant, to let out frustrations. I'll do my best to balance that by talking about daily triumphs, too.
I think this will help me continue this blog longer than I usually do, because it has intrinsic value - I don't NEED anyone else to read it and react, but if they do, that will be fine, too.
Enough for today.