Month 11 Day 10

Notebook entry

Four reports given, meeting priority intelligence requirements, lines of operation synchronization, Secretary of Defense, class with major Kraus, class me and Qais, Najibullah no-show

Journal entry

The gym was a regular old experience this morning. 

I came back and met up with Bernie.  He had good initiative and bad judgement, and he took the PIRs to the General and the general Pen whipped them.  That is fine except that the General has no idea what they are for.  I was hoping that he could all go in there together and speak with him about how important they are. 

I went the LOO sync meeting it was pretty long because the Colonel wasn’t there.  The guys all had the ‘good idea fairy.’ It was pretty aggrevating especially when  they started talking about shit that they did not know anything about like the economics of poppy they wanted to treat it like a differentiable good rather than a commodity.

After that I came back and I did the SecDef dog and pony.  Capt Nowak had scraped together some Chai boys and told them to dig around in the dirt because the General had fucked everything up and told all of the soldiers to go to the literacy class, the SecDef was not going there. He was supposed to go see driver training and machine gun classes. I found one of the random entourage in the crowd and spoke to him.  I got onto a guy named David S Sedney, the Deputy Assistant SecDef for Af, Pak and Central Asia.  On any other day he would have been a VIP all by himself and would have been hounded by the CO, but because the SecDef was here, everyone got tunnel vision, including LtGen Kelly, BGen Craporatta, and the LtCol.  That was ok by me.  I let him have it.  I told him everything about how fucked up this place is.  I wasn’t varnishing shit, ethnic problems, manning problems, planning problems, basic inability to function.  What was amazing was how unsurprised he was.  That was actually good to know, but a little disturbing because I'm like 'if you know this and you are at the top, then why are we still here?'  He has been involved with Afghanistan for the last 10 years and he is saying that things are getting better, Maybe i'm too critical, maybe he knows it's bad but doesn't know the full extent. I basically walked with him for the whole 20 min dog-and-pony, I gave a little info to one of the reporters from the New York Times.  At the end he gave me his card, I sent him an E-mail in case he needed any additional info, I can’t imagine he will, but I figured, what the hell.  Meanwhile Gen Shujai was talking his little head off to the SecDef.  I guess the boss had briefed Dinar to be a bullshit filter.  In a way it was a good thing because the General asked the Secretary to give him some type of medal, but Dinar translated it ‘my secretary, he is very happy to meet you.’ Wouldn’t it be cool if he really saw what a fuckstick our General was. 

10 min after the dog and pony was done all of the classes were packed up. 

Maj Kraus came to do his own class with Maj Tawoos.   Tawoos was being resistant to sending Najib to my class.  No skin off my nose, you just done get reports.  I don’t give a shit.  I did a class with Qais. He is really frustrating.  He took notes a couple of days ago then lost them.  He took notes today and revealed that he couldn’t read his own writing.  He’s having real difficultly remembering the areas in his own AO.  I got doubly annoyed in class because the battle Capt came up and started to show him some stuff, he started out ok, but then he drifted into errors, saying things were places they were not.  It’s annoying because I realize I am the only one who actually sits down daily with these guys and tries to force them to learn.  Everyone else just does some event with them, never tests them, and calls it a day.  Anyway, when we’re done Qais folds up his notes in his pocket where he will undoubtedly lose them again and starts bitching to me about how he’s an E6 and he’s filling an E5’s billet.  He’s been here six months and he hasn’t been promoted—really six fucking months, what do you think this is?  The sense of entitlement is amazing, you’ve been in the military for 9 months only three of those on this base, and you want a promotion?  All this after he can’t remember N,S,E,W.  I told him to bloom where he is planted, learn, and maybe he can get promoted based on his hard work.  I don’t know if that’s true, but I just added life-coach and career counselor to my job description. 

Far off view of the SecDef  'Dog and Pony' Show

tighter view of the SecDef  'Dog and Pony' Show