The difference between my new duty station and the old was profound.  Kunia was just flat out depressing; most of the people who served there were whinging first-termers, the facility was old, and underground with no natural lighting.  In spite of the adequate fluorescent lighting and neutral color scheme, it couldn’t seem to be a cheerful place; it had a general low-level bad vibe about it.  Just getting in to work was a pain; the parking lot had inadequate parking during shift turnover, and once one did find a parking space, there was a long set of stairs to climb, followed by a quarter-mile walk through a large, echoing, paved tunnel that always smelled like exhaust fumes (because the guards and a few other privileged folks didn’t have to walk the tunnel if they didn’t want to).  It felt like a quarter-mile walk into a dungeon.  However long it took people to commute to Kunia, they would have to tack on an additional ten minutes just to get into the facility from the parking lot.  I don’t think I knew anyone who really liked working there, whether or not they were first-termers.  And I served two consecutive tours there!

JICPAC entrance (image credit: http://www.weblo.com/property/Other/JICPAC/402679/)

JICPAC was so much nicer.  The building was a relatively recently constructed, modern facility.  It didn’t have windows, but it had tasteful concrete panels with wavy designs on them on the outside walls (check out the last picture on page 3 in the photo album here; also the comments on the ECP desk pic on page 2 are pretty good).  There was adequate parking right outside the building, or just a short walk away over a small hill.  There was even a civilian-run coffee cart outside during day hours that served delicious hot chocolates and pastries (there was no chow hall, but that was no loss).  Once in the building, it didn’t look much different than the innards of Kunia (generic bland government/military décor) but the vibe was more positive and dynamic; there was a good sense of mission and purpose there.

The watch floor had an “upgrade” though, that compared to Kunia, was absolutely awful. A significant portion of one wall was taken up by a huge projection TV screen, which was tuned in 24/7 to a news channel, almost always Fox News.  My political leanings have always been liberal (and still are), and being forced to listen to blaring Fox News broadcasts for twelve hours at a stretch was a level of hell that Dante could have written about with considerable enthusiasm.  Actually, any TV blaring would have been hell; I can’t stand having a TV on if I’m trying to do something else, which I always was when I was on the watch floor (duh) but having to listen to Fox News just made it that much worse.  The psychological stress of constantly trying to tune out unwanted video and audio (my desk faced that damned TV screen) while trying to concentrate on something important was considerable; I was usually brain-dead when I left work, which was not a good condition to be in, especially when I had to face rush hour traffic after a day shift.  The reason for the news channel monitoring, though, was that JICPAC’s intelligence mission was much broader than Kunia’s, and the watch floor needed to know what was being reported by civilian sources in the event the watch might have to respond to some inquiries about that reporting.  But seriously – the watch officer-in-command could have just had a little TV at his desk, or at his assistant’s desk, and the rest of the watch floor could have had a lot less noise pollution.  But also fewer live car chases, which admittedly perked things up when they occurred (such classy reporting, Fox!).

I had enjoyed the luxury, at Kunia, of concentrating on one tiny portion of JICPACs intelligence mission – Russian Pacific Fleet activity.  It had been my whole professional world and I had smugly cultivated contempt regarding all other non-Russian missions (and also the silly Russian Far Eastern army mission; the Russian air force was pretty cool, though), and lamented the frequent neglect of the Russian mission in favor of China and other occasional hot spots.  I had to expand my understanding of what was important, though, at this new job, which I did, although reluctantly.  It was really hard to give a crap about pokey little North Korean fighter jets or Chinese “fishing trawlers” when I’d spent six years focused on sexy and dangerous Russian SSBNs, SSNs, and DDGs.  I had to face the reality that Russia really wasn’t that much of a threat (which I knew all along, really), and therefore intelligence assets necessarily had to get applied elsewhere.  It was my own personal introduction to realpolitik.

My transition to this new worldview and work was helped considerably by having really great coworkers.  My work division was a small one, with maybe about a dozen people, and was staffed by middle- or senior-enlisted Navy, Army, and Air Force folk, none of whom had been Russian linguists (if I recall correctly).  We were the “cool kids” on the watch floor; we monitored a specific and sensitive type of reporting, and passed it along to the watch floor on a need-to-know basis.  We basically functioned as independent consultants; nobody that we worked with was in our chain-of-command, or even wrote our yearly evaluations.  All this, plus a blessedly short and relatively hands-off chain of command, and no whiny subordinates to babysit, made working in this division something of a dream job.  There was a great sense of camaraderie and egalitarianism; I felt immediately that I was liked and respected both personally and professionally.  Many, many layers of bitter cynicism and defensiveness slowly started to peel away from my psyche as I settled in there.  My biggest social challenge was to figure out how to interact with my coworkers as a respected colleague instead of as an intensely disliked outcast.  It took me several months to figure it out, to be honest; I had been something of an outcast my whole life, so this was a brand new way of interacting with others for me, which I was certainly grateful to have the opportunity to learn.  My four useless months at Goodfellow, I think, helped me be much more open to this opportunity of forming a new social identity than if I had transferred straight to Pearl Harbor from Kunia.

In performing my day-to-day job, I mainly worked with two people, an intel officer and his/her enlisted assistant.  These were the people I provided consultation for.  The first officer I worked for was a young snobby female Navy lieutenant who clearly resented that I was taking the place of a cute, charming, chatty, and flirty male Army sergeant.  Fortunately I didn’t have to work with her for too long, maybe a couple of months at most.  I worked with a few other officers too, all Navy if I recall, and male, and much friendlier.

Eventually the schedule worked out that I spent most of my time working with an Air Force officer that I’ll call Lt. Doug.  He was several years younger than me and apparently had excellent taste in blonde Navy enlisted chicks, because he pretty quickly developed a crush on me that after a while must have been obvious to just about everybody who worked nearby (I know at least some people knew, because I was teased about it at one point.)  He was at least a foot taller than me and as goofy as a thirteen-year-old boy.  He was also a VMI graduate with strong conservative political leanings, and he liked nothing better than to provoke me into some sort of political or social issues discussion, during which he would agree to pretty much everything I said.  If he wasn’t provoking me, he was trying to provoke someone else; the watch floor was usually a pretty boring place and he liked to liven it up a bit.  Some people appreciated his efforts, and some just had the crap annoyed out of them; he didn’t care either way.  He shared my disdain for non-Russian military targets, which earned him my professional respect.  He also understood how sensitive the intelligence information that I provided him was.  Not all intel officers appreciated that, and to prevent any inadvertent security violations, I was supposed to “scrub” any reporting I provided him of all the sensitive bits.  With Lt. Doug, though, I could just hand him the original report, and I could trust that he wouldn’t compromise the highly classified parts in his own reporting (which I had to check anyway before he sent it out).

Did I date him?  No.  He was an officer, and in the American military officers are not allowed to date enlisted, period, no matter if they are in different services, or how disparate their jobs or chains of command are; such intermixing is considered to be detrimental to good order and discipline (and banning it has a really strong stench of elitism, but I don’t care to launch into a discussion of that).  The chances of Lt. Doug and I ever working together in the same chain of command were virtually non-existent (my chain of command was entirely separate from his) but it didn’t matter.  So we had about a year of working together and enjoying each other’s company on all those murderously long twelve hour watches, and I enjoyed the novel experience of working with a warm, fun, and friendly human being that I felt genuinely safe with.   And then he transferred out.  I didn’t even know he had transferred out (I thought he just had some temporary duty elsewhere).  I found out from a third party, a female Air Force officer who had gone on one date with him (before I worked with him), and who snidely asked me one day if I was missing my boyfriend.  I had no idea what she was talking about, and then I genuinely confused her because I obviously did not know he was gone.  She had made a pretty significant assumption about me and Lt. Doug (whether she was kidding or not) that could have gotten both of us in a lot of trouble if any member of our respective chains of command had really believed it to be true.

My training course, at least, was everything the first one had not been.  It was easy and I had no significant amount of homework that I can recall.  (The very next class after mine, though, took a completely revamped course and had tons of homework – I really dodged a bullet there.  A coworker who transferred to Pearl Harbor several months after I did had to take the new course, and it was just as useless to her as it had been for me – yet more of your hard-earned tax dollars wasted on unnecessary training and temporary billeting.)  My stress level during these four months was a lot lower than it had been for several years, since well before I had started my first tour.  I only had about a half dozen classmates, some of whom were annoying, some weren’t, and I was not in the least bit obligated to socialize with them, which after one or two half-hearted attempts (on all sides), I did not.  I spent most of my free time in my room, reading, or at the arts and craft shop, painting ceramics.  I slowly rediscovered that I was a kind, decent, pleasant person that I could enjoy being around.  I had the time and energy to work out regularly, which I did, and which I would have had to do anyway because I had started failing weigh-ins for the semi-annual physical readiness tests (PRTs).  I gained some strength and lost a little weight.  Not enough of either, though, because I was eating crappy chow hall food and doing a lot of useless cardio, but I didn’t know then about eating properly for weight loss and how to do proper strength training as I do now.  I at least made some progress, which was what I needed to show to keep the Navy off my back about my PRT scores.

I finished my course at the end of August, and had to stay a few more days in order to take the advancement-in-rate exam (another expensive time-wasting program).  I flew out of San Angelo to Dallas on September 7 or 8, I believe, and had what felt like a ridiculously short flight from Dallas to St. Louis (I was used to flying non-stop from Honolulu to St. Louis, which is about eight or nine hours).  I spent a few weeks home on leave; I planned on flying back to Hawaii on September 28.

I was sleeping in late on September 11, 2001 at my mom and stepdad’s house in rural Palmyra, MO, when a phone call from my mom woke me up from an odd dream where I was looking at a gray building with black smudges on it (my mind had interpreted it as a shed painted in gray and black camouflage).  Mom told me to turn on the TV, and I saw the live news images of the terrorist attack in New York, with an announcer repeatedly saying “we have no idea what’s going on” in a few dozen different ways.  It was too big to process, really; I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and after watching the news for several minutes, I decided not to try.  I looked out the window; there was a gorgeous late summer rural Missouri day shining away outside.  That I could understand; and I looked back at the news, told myself “This doesn’t affect me,” and turned the TV off and went about my day.  I could sense the hysteria that would result from this event, and I wanted no part of it. As the details of the attacks emerged over the next few days, I knew that giving in to the fear, paranoia, and viewing the subsequent obsessive and maudlin news coverage would be a victory for the terrorists, and I was not about to give them that – and I have never given them that.  My background in military intelligence wasn’t the least bit terrorism-related, but people asked me questions nonetheless, and I talked calmly about the sensible ways to increase our intelligence and readiness for terrorist attacks based on some of the more reasonable stuff I read in the papers.

I was glad, at least, that I was home on leave, because I knew my mom would have been worried sick about me if I had been at my duty station, and that would have been no fun to deal with at all.  I carried on with my home-on-leave plans.  I went with my Aunt Deannie to visit my cousin Missy and her family in Peoria that weekend, and with everyone else, marveled at the lack of contrails in the sky over Flyover Land for several days.  I also toured Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Missouri.  I’ve always had the usual locals’ contempt for Hannibal (it’s a pretty rough town, and what isn’t rough is really touristy, so I had pretty much avoided it), but I love Mark Twain’s writings, and caves, so it seemed like a cool thing to do.  The gift shop was filled with the worst pile of souvenir schlock I’ve ever seen, and the cave itself was unremarkable, but the stories about it were great – well worth the tour.  I had a pretty nice visit home, all in all.  Air travel was back to something resembling normal by the time I flew back to Hawaii on September 28.  My luggage did have to get thoroughly searched when I flew out of Quincy, though, and that search was performed by a female grade school classmate of mine, which felt a little awkward; I mean, which is worse – watching someone you don’t know, or someone you used to know, poking around in your undies and toiletries?  Neither one of us mentioned knowing each other; I think that would have somehow made it a little more awkward yet.

I was very, very lucky that I had not been at my duty station during the few weeks after the attacks; security was ramped up to its highest level, and I heard stories about how it took forever to get through the entrance gates on base to get to work, lines of cars backed up for several blocks, all cars getting searched, et cetera.  Security was back to mostly normal, though, when I reported for duty.  Dodged another bullet.

What I couldn’t dodge, though, was the new watch schedule.  The previous 24/7 watch schedule had been divided between five teams, and was a pretty easy schedule, even though it was a rotating shift schedule, which I had hoped I would never have to work again.  It was only one week in five of night shifts, and a liberal amount of time off, so I thought I might be able to handle it.  My future coworkers commented that the chain of command hated the schedule (too nice a schedule for all the lowly watchstanders) but they couldn’t do anything about it.  9/11, though, finally gave them the excuse they needed to kill the five team schedule; I never did get a chance to try it out.  By the time I had arrived, less than three weeks later, the watch teams had been dropped to four, and the new schedule was a brutal rotating twelve hour watch – four days, 6 am to 6 pm, 1 day off, four nights, 6 pm to 6 am, four days off – repeat.

Where’d that extra watch team go?  Off twiddling their thumbs on their new straight day schedule, working as brand-spanking-new terrorism analysts with virtually no terror to analyze – certainly none that in the least way posed a threat to national security, or even American military interests in the Pacific Fleet area of responsibility (AOR).  Fortunately for the new terrorism analysts, though, it didn’t take much to justify their existence after 9/11 (sound familiar?).  A couple of my coworkers were due to transfer out shortly after I arrived, and they both commented that they were so happy to be getting out of there when they did – “this place sucks now” is an exact quote.  Presumably the chain of command got some big fat kudos for being so responsive to national events, and also their willingness to “make the tough decisions”, i.e., ask sacrifices of their personnel by forcing them to work a horrid schedule – which of course, the chain of command didn’t have to work.

I will readily admit my bias regarding terrorism (more on that below), and will not apologize for my contempt regarding all the supposed terrorist threats JICPAC began to monitor (or monitor more closely) after 9/11.  I had to read a lot of this reporting during my three years there, and it never failed to amaze me how monitoring tiny little bumfuck insurgency groups (using terrorist tactics) in third world Asian countries could be a justifiable expenditure of significant military intelligence resources.  My intelligence background was as a Russian Navy specialist, and I considered a threat to national security to be the deployment of a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, capable of first strike nuclear attacks against any target on the planet, and virtually undetectable once it was out in the open ocean, running silent and deep.  I considered a viable threat to American military interests in the Pacific Fleet AOR to be something like a Russian destroyer (an anti-aircraft-carrier platform) or an anti-submarine-warfare cruiser, both with known and considerable capabilities for hunting and destroying their intended targets.

This is a real threat to American security - a Delta IV ballistic missile submarine (image credit: http://www.nukestrat.com/russia/subpatrols.htm)

But Russia was so 1980s; the U.S. military had been adrift for about a decade without a cold war to fight, and was staring down the barrel of some serious downsizing.  Terrorism was a bright, shiny, exciting and mysterious new target that almost no one understood really well, so virtually no effort or expenditure could be considered ridiculous, no data point too insignificant to analyze and report.  It’s not unusual to read nowadays about the billions and billions of dollars wasted on TSA and the “security theater” that it engages in; what we probably won’t hear about for decades, if ever, is how much money and effort was wasted in prosecuting terrorism targets that were obviously never a serious threat to U.S. interests.  I can say this; a lot of Russia analysts (military and NSA) who were seriously worried about keeping their jobs were able to re-purpose themselves as terrorism analysts and keep their paychecks coming; a lot of military Russian linguists headed back to DLI to become Arabic linguists so they wouldn’t get forced out.

Terrorism is not a military target. It is criminal activity with political ends, and as such it is best handled by civilian law enforcement.  That’s simply the pragmatic point of view.  What naturally follows from it is that since the U.S. Constitution draws a bright clear dividing line between civilian and military power, the military should not be involved in prosecuting terrorism targets; the military should NOT be involved in any activity that in any way involves domestic law enforcement!  The founding fathers knew well the abuses of power that could result when the military was used as a way to either enforce or circumvent civilian law, and we have our own shameful modern day example of such an abuse of power in the creation of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Terrorism is not a military target. The whole point of terrorism with its ever-changing tactics and its use of civilian resources is to avoid a large scale military campaign, which is a really good idea, because the American military (when unrestrained) can vaporize just about any other nation’s military assets, infrastructure, population, and ecosystems.  A common phrase about the military is that it is always fighting the last war; but the military will never really adapt to fighting terrorism, because terrorism isn’t warfare, it’s harassment.  The global war on terror (GWOT) that Bush was so adamant in promoting was a complete joke (just like that other fearmongering GW – global warming).  Using the military to fight terrorism is like using a sledgehammer to swat at a mosquito.  It will always be a tremendous waste of resources, and cause a lot of collateral damage.  This was obvious to me even in the fall of 2001, and it was obvious to a lot of people much smarter and more experienced than me in the intelligence community (the money quotes in that hyperlink are in the last two paragraphs).  The decision-making power, however, was for the most part vested in people who had something to gain in cultivating paranoia, and the need to “look like something was getting done” prevailed.

Ohio River and Louisville, looking southeast from the Sheraton

I just got back from a trip to Louisville, Kentucky, where I stayed at the Sheraton Louisville Riverside Hotel* while attending a regional Unity conference, which I really enjoyed (Unity people are on average pretty awesome).  Due to a potent combination of food sensitivities and food snobbery, I had decided prior to the trip that I would take my own food, and cook it while I was there.  I also had decided on staying at the hotel instead of trying to find a local bed and breakfast, because of a bad experience I had at a B&B for last year’s conference in northern Indiana (and it was just a lot more convenient, being on site, which was important because I’m the admin assistant for the regional association).  I made arrangements with the hotel to get a fridge in my room, which was free if it was for medical reasons, and they didn’t even require me to show a doctor’s note for it or anything.

Well, I’ll admit I felt really weird taking a hot plate to a nice hotel, and I’m plenty paranoid about using hot plates anyway, but it worked out surprisingly well.  Yeah, it was a lot of work, what with cooking the food, cleaning up, washing dishes, etc, but I think part of the reason the week went so well for me was that almost all the food I ate was decent home cooked food with no weird stuff in it, which is not what you get even in nice hotels like the Sheraton Louisville.  I took bacon, eggs from pasture-raised chickens, homemade gluten-free pancakes, plain organic yogurt, and blueberries for breakfast, and (previously slow-cooked) chuck roast, beef broth, and organic potatoes and organic sweet potatoes for lunch and dinner.  I also brought plenty of butter to slather on the pancakes and potatoes.  The hot plate was brand new and worked really well; it heated up quickly and maintained temperature well, although it did take quite awhile to cool down (not bad for an $18 hot plate).  The little non-skid feet worked too well; they liked to stick to the stove mat (detaching from the hot plate) when I needed to move the hot plate after it had cooled down.  (To be fair, a lot of stuff likes sticking to the stove mat, which is probably why they re-designed it.)

I still ate about five meals out, which is about 4-5 more than I usually eat out in a week, but I was careful (kept them gluten-free and relatively low-carb) and it all seemed to work out okay.  I also didn’t gain weight – I’m very happy about that!

Other trip highlights:

• The Louisville Science Center – when I paid for my admission, the clerk asked me if I wanted to donate $1 to science.  I asked “What science?” and he paused for a moment, then laughed, and joked that it was for cloning – I guess he’s not used to getting asked that question.  Turns out it was for the Science Center, which I was okay with.  I watched three awesome IMAX movies – Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, Sharks, and Lewis and Clark – the Great Journey West.  I got freebies related to two of the movies, the best one being a poster map of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  I had planned on checking out the center’s exhibits after the movies, even though they were all kid-oriented, but there were also several dozen kids there at the time, with some of them running around like they were high on sugar or something, and the rest of them were yelling.  I seriously do not remember kids being so loud when I was a kid!  I had to leave before my head exploded from all the noise.
• Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory – I just went here because I had some time to kill and the hotel shuttle was going to be picking people up there.  I paid $10 for a short tour of the manufacturing floor, and got my free little souvenir bat (no idea what I’m going to do with it!).  The best part of this place was the intoxicating scent of fresh wood shavings (no wonder “woodsy accents” are so popular in perfumes and colognes).  The second best part was all the prominent signage warning people that baseball bats are not allowed on planes except as checked luggage.  Oh, and the 120 foot tall baseball bat out front was pretty cool.
• The musician for the conference was Karl Anthony, who did a great job and provided a beautiful concert Tuesday evening at Unity of Louisville with cool laser lights and lots of audience-participation chanting.  The huge dome of the sanctuary was perfect for the laser show!  Karl certainly earned his paycheck; he had to be there for the entire conference, provide music in the morning to get everyone going, and for the evening events, plus the concert mentioned above.
• I was given a beautiful necklace by one of the exhibitors, Dr. Steve McSwain, which apparently is a very popular necklace with Unity folks; he calls it the Unity Pendant.  I love this necklace!  I wore it all week. 
• The hotel staff were awesome; I had to pester them several times to make a few copies of important documents, get let back in my room after locking myself out, etc, and they were very accommodating.  My room was clean, quiet, and comfortable, with a very nice view of the Ohio River (I was on the ninth floor).  The banquet meal was decent, and the lunch I ate from the Bristol Bar and Grill was pretty good.  Somewhere up the chain, though, someone had overbooked the hotel, so a lot of our members got moved to different rooms, and our meetings got moved around too, some at the last minute, because the Rutgers University football team was staying there for their game in Louisville, and apparently they outranked us.  So we all got to see and marvel at the fuss involved in accommodating a Division I college football team – a lot!  There were about 100-150 people there total (I heard differing numbers from otherwise reliable sources), and about 85 of them were actual football players (Rev. Ron quizzed one of the coaches; and thanks to Rev. Ron for any sports facts in this blog post, because I don’t know diddly about sports).  For our last two days there, everywhere we went in the hotel, there was someone wearing red and black.  Hey, Rutgers security guards – you didn’t think about people up in the tenth floor conference room spying on the team while they were practicing their offensive and defensive stuff down in the parking lot, did you?  You’re lucky I didn’t take some video on my iPhone and post it on YouTube.  I would have had to care about football, though, to do that, so lucky for you, I don’t.  Congrats on your victory over Louisville.

Next year’s conference will be back at Potawatomi Inn in Pokagon State Park, Indiana, a lovely, clean, quiet place that serves mediocre food swimming in hydrogenated vegetable oils on its best days.  I’ll sneak my hot plate in when I’m there next year, and I know I will be eating a lot better than just about everyone else in the hotel.  Hopefully none of the guests will be beating my door down while I’m cooking bacon.

*actually, the hotel was in Jeffersonville, Indiana.  But we were right on the river and we could see Louisville from the hotel, so I guess that counts as Louisville.

~o~o~o~o~

I deserve a dream low-carb cruise to the Bahamas because, as I humbly submit and endeavor to prove below, I have performed a tremendous service for humanity.  No, I am not referring to adopting my treasured cat from an animal shelter, snatching him from the jaws of certain death, housing him in opulent feline luxury and feeding him a healthy no-carb diet.  I am also not referring to my thirteen years of heroic service enlisted in the God-blessed United States Navy as a Russian linguist, where I fought off the Red Menace day after day with little more than a pair of headphones and some primitive audio recording equipment.

No, these accomplishments, as selfless and humanity-serving as they are, do not warrant a dream low-carb cruise to the Bahamas.  They are simply demonstrations of my generous character, and a way of putting into context my greatest contribution to the planet thus far:

A fabulous, easy, low-carb peanut butter pudding recipe.

Oh yes – it is not only possible – I have created it.  Googling for such a treasure may have sadly left the multitudes empty-handed, but no longer.  The low-carb peanut butter pudding craving masses may rest now in the knowledge that their quest is at an end – their cravings may finally be assuaged.  And that is not all.  For the recipe is easily adapted into a tasty peanut butter sauce, that can easily grace both ice cream and cheesecake, and still be worthy of its and my acclaim.  O how I praise thy name, low-carb muse!

Like all geniuses, I must acknowledge that I stand on the shoulders of giants.  This amazing yet simple recipe did not spring fully-formed from my head; nay, it is an adaptation (clever, if I might say so) of a conventional and rather unremarkable recipe found by chance, lying virtually unnoticed in the deep and dusty recesses of the great Kraft Foods on-line recipe archives, probably rarely visited and little loved.  It shone forth to me, however, like a glinting gold nugget swirling around in California creek gravel and cold, clear Sierra Nevada snowmelt.  Moved by fate, I sensed its inherent potential and snatched it up, eager to explore what I now realize were its mythic low-carb dessert possibilities.

I hardly remember the day, now, when fate brought the unimproved recipe to me; however, it little matters.  The recipe in its current form has been enhanced far beyond its humble sugar and Cool Whip origins.  My low-carb forge has tempered its peanut butter and ricotta steel, and it shines forth brightly now, forevermore cheering those benighted souls who never dreamed they would see the day a fabulous and versatile low-carb peanut butter pudding recipe would exist on God’s green earth.  I am grateful, and humbled beyond words, to have been the conduit for this quantum leap in low-carb peanut butter pudding recipe innovation.  It is for this great service, and this service alone, that I deserve a dream low-carb cruise to the Bahamas.

~o~o~o~

Basil the cabbie, probably sometime in the early 1980s, had been married to a woman who was an employee at GCHQ (I don’t know her name either; I’ll call her Beatrice).  At that time, housing was available on the grounds of GCHQ for its employees, and so Basil and Beatrice were living in a nice little flat near GCHQ, and Beatrice, presumably, had a blessedly short commute to work.

One evening after they had retired to bed and the room had grown quiet, Basil heard something rather odd, a very soft noise at the edge of his hearing.  Dah-di-dah-dit di-dit dah-di-dit dit …

“Can you hear that?” he asked Beatrice.

“Hear what?” she asked.

“That odd noise,” Basil described helpfully.

“No.” Beatrice answered, and that was the end of any conversation about odd noises that night.

The next night the same thing occurred – Basil heard that odd little noise, asked Beatrice if she heard it, and again she had not.

The noise continued to recur, though, and strangely enough, Basil could only hear it when he was in bed.  He eventually managed to convince Beatrice that he was not making this up, and since what he described sounded a lot like Morse code, Beatrice talked to someone at GCHQ, and amazingly, managed to convince that someone to come to their flat and have a lie down on their bed.  That gentleman did, in fact, hear Morse code, and shortly thereafter a higher-ranking succession of GCHQ personnel dropped by to lie down on the mattress and hear the Morse code.

After discovering that Basil’s mattress was receiving a rather sensitive Morse code signal, some GCHQ people approached Basil with some bad news.

“We need to take your mattress,” they told him.  “It could compromise British national security.”

“It’s my bloody mattress, and you’re not taking it,” Basil replied.

Well, apparently they couldn’t argue with that.  Basil got to keep his mattress, and not long after he refused to give it up, it fell silent for good.  GCHQ had changed their Morse code frequency so the signal could no longer be received by Basil’s mattress.  (Wouldn’t you have liked to have been the guy who had to write that memo?  “We have to alter the frequency rota because we have confirmed that an unauthorized mattress is receiving the current signal.”)  Basil and some GCHQ people speculated that perhaps the pig iron in the mattress’s box springs had just the right kind of crystal in it that it was able to pick up that one particular frequency.

This would have been a funny enough story as it is, but it gets better …

Basil’s mattress was the second occupant of that flat that had compromised British national security.  The previous occupant had been Geoffrey Prime, an infamous British turncoat and GCHQ employee who had informed the Soviets that Britain and the U.S. had cracked some high level Soviet encryption codes.  At the time that Basil’s mattress started its classified pillow talk, the British were still very sensitive about the whole Geoffrey Prime incident, and Basil’s mattress made a few people just a bit more jittery.  Eventually Basil and Beatrice moved out of that flat (and took the mattress with them), and the Brits tore the flat down to its studs, looking for any devices or other evidence of espionage that Prime might have left behind.

Basil, in addition to being a cab driver, was also a funeral director.  He was no fan of Prime, and stated quite firmly that he would offer his funeral director services for free, if he could see this traitor get buried.  According to Wikipedia, though, Prime is still alive; he was released from prison in 2001, and is living somewhere in Britain (if he’s smart, he’s nowhere near GCHQ).  I sincerely hope that Basil’s mattress, after learning its lesson that silence is golden, had a long and peaceful mattress life, and had no more run-ins (lie-ins?) with the British authorities.

Do you trust your box springs to not reveal your secrets?

I sure did make tons of progress in figuring out just how messed up I was, throughout this whole second tour, and McVader and Varena were only part of that education.  McVader left Kunia around November 2000, and although afterwards I was feeling a sense of relief and starting to feel a tiny bit like myself again, I was still dealing with Varena and my passively hostile subordinates who thought I was out to get her, and a few other things besides.  I guess the universe decided that since I was still down and out in December 2000, maybe I would like a nice book to read while I was lounging around on the floor.  That book was “The Highly Sensitive Person” by Dr. Elaine Aron.  I can only assume that being almost at rock bottom was the best place to experience a quantum shift in my self-perception.

The simplest way to describe this book is that it was about me.  A little more involved explanation is that Ms. Aron neatly summarized my lifetime of literally feeling like an alien in whatever surroundings I found myself in, an outcast and a freak, and she reassured me that all the highly sensitive traits that made me so weird were actually normal for about 20% of the U.S. population.  I had the weight of a lifetime behind my perceptions of myself as a marginal and barely useful member of society.  Ms. Aron insisted that I was unique and valuable, that I could live a happy and fulfilling life and also make a meaningful contribution to society because of my gift of high sensitivity.  She also commented at some point that the military probably isn’t the best place for highly sensitive people.

The shock that this information produced on my already compromised emotional system was profound; I sought counseling in January 2001.  I initially contacted the Kunia chaplain, who informed me that he could only refer me to counseling services if I was suicidal.  I wasn’t suicidal, but I really felt I needed counseling, so I had to pretend to be suicidal in order to get help; it really wasn’t much of a stretch, honestly, considering my state at that time.  After the first few steps, but before I actually saw a counselor, I started to waver; just deciding to seek help and talking to the chaplain had helped me feel a lot better, and receiving mental health counseling can jeopardize security clearances.  I decided to stick with it, though, and I had a pretty good sign that I made the right decision; my psychologist’s name was Tara Smith.  Tara Smith had been my deceased sister’s name!  I was stunned when I saw her name on my appointment card.  Dr. Smith was a wonderful counselor who put a lot of work into helping me build my self-esteem, and she made it clear that she enjoyed working with me.  She pretty much ignored the highly sensitive stuff, though (which is rather common, according to Dr. Aron) so I’ve been on my own in trying to navigate that.  It hasn’t been too bad; just being able to put some sort of a normative label on my “not like other people” experiences has been enormously helpful.

In addition to the counseling, I managed to do a few other things right during this tour, too.  I got a notion in my head to buy my own condo, and that turned out to be a really good idea, especially since I lucked into getting a good realtor (I talked about this in more detail in my “Living In Hawaii – Mililani” blog post).  I also managed to find some non-military friends (well, one was retired, a couple were in the reserves, but the rest were civilians)  in the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild.  I started taking remote viewing (RV) lessons several months after I arrived back on O’ahu, and found myself part of a very interesting group of people.  This is something that I hardly breathed a word about at work, even though the president of the guild was a retired Green Beret, and our RV methodology was adapted from the RV techniques used by the Green Berets.  People had a low enough opinion of me as it was; I didn’t need to have any woo-woo stuff tacked on to my already poor reputation.

I also started taking geology classes at the University of Hawaii, and really enjoyed them; UH is a great place to study geology!  My Geology 101 field trip was to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island (Hawai’i).  The highlight of the trip was hiking out to a surface lava flow and playing with molten lava – I wrapped some around a marble, and made my own lava rock.  I’ll eventually write a blog post about the Big Island, and you can bet I’ll mention the molten lava bit.

When it came time to negotiate orders for my next duty station, I hoped, but didn’t really expect to stay in Hawai’i.  The CTI detailer had made it perfectly clear when I had re-enlisted three years earlier that he would only give me orders for Hawai’i with the understanding that he would send me wherever the hell he needed me when my second tour was up.  So I wasn’t too surprised when I called his replacement three years later, and I was told I would probably be sent to Ft. Meade, Maryland (NSA), because those orders were much higher priority than the one available Ru-ling billet down at Pearl Harbor.  I said I needed to think about it, and I did, for about ten days.  I got out a map of the Washington, D.C. area and looked at all the attractions and thought, wow, I think I’d like to live in that area – East Coast, I’ve never lived there, could be really interesting.  So I was looking forward to getting Ft. Meade orders, when I called the detailer back.

I talked to the senior detailer this time, who was in some kind of very strange, generous, and industrious mood, and I told him I was requesting the high priority orders for Ft. Meade, because I knew I couldn’t get the low priority orders for Hawai’i.  He promptly offered me the Hawai’i billet.  I was so stunned, I stuttered, and asked to think about it for a few seconds, then said hesitantly, sure, I’ll take those orders.  I was on the phone with him for about ten minutes as he entered all the info into his computer.  He said he was taking care of a lot of stuff, but I didn’t know what he meant.  But getting off the phone and telling a few people about it, I didn’t feel elated.  I thought about it that evening, and decided to call the detailer back and say, no really, I want the Ft. Meade orders.  So I did the next day, but it was too late.  He had taken care of everything already.  Normally, this process takes a week or two, so this sort of timetable surprised everyone I told the story to.  I was locked in tight to the Hawai’i orders after a ten minute phone call.

But wait, there’s more!  I e-mailed my next duty station and said I was interested in taking a tour and finding out more about the place.  They e-mailed me back and said that my billet was going to get switched to a non-linguist billet, so I’d better call my detailer and find out what was going on.  I talked to my detailer, who didn’t know squat about the billet change, and he stated quite firmly that my billet could get switched to MS (cook) and it wouldn’t matter, I would keep those orders.  That was a pretty solid commitment, and I made plans accordingly.  I had to call the detailer again several weeks later about something, though, and I almost lost my orders – he had finally found out about the billet change through official channels, and tried to talk me into switching to Ft. Meade.  I stuck to my guns, though, since I had certainly acted in good faith throughout this whole process.  Amazingly, I really did (unintentionally) pull off something that almost never happens in the military – three consecutive tours in Hawai’i.

My third tour in the Navy was, with one notable exception (crappy rotating shift schedule), everything that the second tour had not been.  I was surrounded by people who respected me, both personally and professionally; I was treated like a grown-up from day one.  All of my co-workers were on their second, third or fourth tours of duty; they were mature, hard-working, really smart people that were always a pleasure to work with.  It was a joint command, so I was doing the same job as my Army and Air Force co-workers, instead of working a strictly Navy mission alongside Navy folks.  I had no subordinates, and a fairly limited chain of command that pretty much left us watch standers alone.  I worked as a respected advisor with senior enlisted and junior intelligence officers.

I had three main challenges when I started my third tour:  one, to learn an entirely new job that was only tangentially related to my prior work as a Russian linguist; two, to adapt to a brutal twelve hour rotating shift schedule, which I had never worked before; and three, to shed a lifetime of defensiveness and fear in my dealings with other people.  I’ll write about these challenges, and a lot of other stuff, when my military experience series continues, with Part 3.

~o~o~o~o~

Since this was the tour from hell, I couldn’t just have social problems, health problems, and problems with an important member of my chain of command; I also had to have a crazy subordinate who convinced everyone that I was “out to get her”, all while she was begging me for attention every work day.  Varena was a homely, awkward chick a few years older than me who was so easily overwhelmed by the stress of our job that she struggled to pass even the easiest of our three job qualification requirements (JQRs).  She barely passed it on the third try after some very intense tutoring by a guy she had a pretty intense crush on.  Although she passed that JQR, she could never be relied on professionally; her ear was poor, and she couldn’t even manage her computer screen well enough to produce a decent transcript.  She was so obviously emotionally unstable that even the gruffest male sailors in our division walked on eggshells around her (including McVader).  Our chain of command didn’t know what to do with her; she was incompetent but pathetically sincere, and wasn’t breaking any rules.  They couldn’t send her to a different division to do a different job, and they couldn’t “fire” her.  So any watch team that she worked with pretty much had to babysit her.  The cover term for this was that she just needed “more training.”  Varena played along with this conceit, in an understandable attempt to preserve some self-respect, and therefore she was very consistent in her demands for more attention, i.e. more training.

Varena suffered pretty badly throughout her entire tour at Kunia; she was acutely aware of her incompetence and lost few opportunities to flagellate herself for it.  She was a gifted artist who was also highly intelligent and sensitive; she simply had no business doing this particular job.  I warned my chain of command that I thought she was a suicide risk, even though she had never talked about suicide; I really was worried about her.  One incident in particular highlighted her emotional instability for me.  Varena had thick, dark, shoulder length hair that she was very proud of; when in uniform she had to style it in such a way as to wear it above the collar, according to uniform regulations.  Her hair was so thick, though, that it often worked its way out of its bobby pins and fell below her collar.  Our work environment was informal enough that this happening on occasion was no big deal.  One evening when Varena was particularly stressed out at work, McVader humorously (and with no malice) pointed out that her braid had worked its way loose; Varena’s response was to grab a set of scissors and chop it off.  McVader, of course, was shocked at the inappropriateness of Varena’s behavior (women who are proud of their hair do not violently and arbitrarily chop it off in such a manner) but he didn’t know what to do – it’s not like she took a knife and cut herself, although in my opinion it is pretty damned close – so he walked away.  I doubt the incident was ever addressed.

If she was simply incompetent, it would have been a chore to deal with her, but nothing too bad; it wasn’t unusual to have a few people in the division who couldn’t do the job well.  Unfortunately, she also developed an odd obsession with me.  I was one of the few people who attempted to engage her, rather than ignore her or walk on eggshells around her.  I expressed belief for a fair amount of time that she was capable of improving her job performance, if she could just manage her stress better.  I also had asked her to housesit for me once when I was off-island on a month-long trip (to Russia – paid for by the Navy), and I think she decided from this that we were supposed to be best friends, or something.  As her supervisor, I was supposed to provide her with more training, which she demanded pretty regularly, and pretty regularly had no demonstrated effect on improving her competence.  I finally begged off by pointing out to her that obviously I wasn’t a very good trainer for her, and I asked one of the other members of my section, Treya, to work with her – a member that Varena didn’t seem as likely to harass as much as she was harassing me.

Varena also realized pretty quickly how unpopular I was in the division and at some point started telling the other members of our watch team that I was out to get her.  They didn’t believe her at first, but she was so persistent in her complaints, and since I was no charmer, they eventually believed her.  Never mind the fact that they could see with their own eyes how I interacted with her during work, which was generally calm and polite; she somehow convinced them that I was doing all this harassment on the sly, via computer chat or somesuch.  I found out about this much later, at the very end of my tour.  I didn’t know what was going on; I just knew that my subordinates went from being decent towards me to being cold and distant, and I had no idea why.  I didn’t question it, though, because I was accustomed to being treated that way by pretty much everyone.  I know now that I at least should have asked, although who knows if I would have gotten an honest answer.

Of all the problems I had during my second tour, Varena’s behavior was the most frustrating because it was the one I had the least power to change.  Given what I know now about personality disorders (I’m pretty sure she had one, probably paranoid personality disorder), which tend to be remarkably resistant to treatment or any other external changes in environment or the behavior of others, I don’t think there was a lot I could do.  I set boundaries when I could, but Varena could choose to not respect those boundaries, and there was nothing I could do about it – and she knew it too, and often ignored them.

What Varena was doing could also be labeled harassment or creating a hostile work environment, but whatever it might have been, it didn’t matter.  We both knew the chain of command wouldn’t back me up if I made a complaint about her behavior – so I didn’t.  That, at least, is one thing I did right – not get my chain of command involved (other than expressing my concerns about her committing suicide, which was blown off), because it was no use.  My division chief had already made it pretty clear that she was my problem, not his.  The division chief’s indifference aside, Navy conflict resolution/harassment regulations are best applied to personnel problems that are clear cut and easy to resolve.  The average military leader doesn’t want to recognize the complexity of most real-world, genuinely messy situations, the kind that, in the absence of clear, incontrovertible evidence, are too easily boiled down to “which party is more trustworthy and valuable?  And which party do I dislike the most?” which were almost all the situations I found myself in during this tour. (To be fair, a lot of civilian leaders don’t like those kinds of problems either, but military leaders tend to be even more averse to “people” problems than most.)

I did eventually come up with an idea that turned the focus of Varena’s attention to someone else (I admit without pride that this was my primary consideration in hatching this scheme) which ended up exposing an even deeper vein of her instability.  Treya and I were transferring out of Kunia at roughly the same time, in mid-2001.  Treya was an E-5 who had never worked as a supervisor.  I suggested that she be allowed to take over the watch team, and I would work as her assistant supervisor.  That way, she’d get some supervisor experience on her transfer evaluation, and she’d have me around to support her.  Varena had previously expressed a high opinion of Treya and (in my defense) I figured that Varena would chill on the crazy stuff once Treya was in charge.  That’s not what happened, though – Varena’s craziness just got transferred to Treya, in a very dramatic fashion, and Treya and the rest of the watch team finally realized that I was not Varena’s problem – and I had the relief of realizing that as well.  Varena also started acting strange towards the other team members too.  One of them was mature enough to later apologize to me for thinking so badly of me (and treating me badly), and told me a little of what Varena had been doing behind my back.

Again, given what I know now about personality disorders, it is not surprising that Varena just picked up with Treya where she left off with me, but I was convinced, just like the rest of the section was, that I was a big part of Varena’s problem – and I wasn’t.  The only thing I could have done day-to-day regarding this situation was for myself – to recognize that I wasn’t personally responsible for Varena’s behavior towards me, find a place of peace inside myself whenever I had to deal with her, and let things be.  (I might have managed that every once in a while, but not very often.)  It’s one level of self-education to see and understand the ordinary behavior of other people reflecting yourself back at you.  It’s another level entirely when you enable crazy people to latch on to you in expressing their own dysfunction.  Thanks in part to Varena’s behavior towards me, I am more aware now of my tendency to try to “rescue” people (which says a lot more about my own problems than the people who supposedly need help) and of my false belief that if I am not strong and reliable and stoic, then everything will go to hell in a hand basket.  Turns out the world doesn’t need me to rescue it, and it’s even okay to ask for help once in a while, or admit I can’t handle something – thank God!

~o~o~o~o~

next and last installment:  The Terrible Tour Two, part d – some progress, and moving on

There had been some personnel changes in my division at Kunia during my brief flirtation with civilian life, the most dramatic being that it had a new division petty officer, PO1 McVader (not his real name, of course; but McVoldemort seems a little too clunky).  McVader was really impressive at first; I remember thinking with relief that we finally had a decent, proactive and hard-working E-6 in our division, after a long string of bad luck.  He was a tall, thick-built guy, and since he shaved his head bald, his nickname was “Mr. Clean.”  He was charismatic and outgoing, and he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Tom Hanks – he even sounded like him! – and most importantly, he seemed dedicated to taking care of his sailors.  After only a few months, though, I realized (along with everyone else) that the only problems he was willing to take care of for his sailors were the ones that helped him look good – and we were on our own if they didn’t.  He also didn’t spend a lot of time in the division because he was out schmoozing chiefs and officers, swapping sea stories (he was aircrew, and they always have good stories about clunky old P-3 Orion malfunctions or POW training or really wild aircrew parties or something).  He also had the expectation that all the female members of the division should flirt with him, even though he was our supervisor and he was married and had kids.  Something he liked to do, when a female linguist requested help with some audio, was stand directly behind her chair and rest one arm on the desk on each side of her, hunched and hovering over her at a very close and intimidating distance.  And he was smart enough to do all this stuff in such a manner as to make it impossible to make a complaint about him.

There was probably some assertive yet tactful way of dealing with McVader and also preserving my dignity, but I quickly grew to dislike him so much that I didn’t even entertain the thought of maintaining a decent working relationship with him.  I did not flirt with him and made it perfectly clear that I was never going to kiss his ass.  That sounds all courageous and defiant, but it was really just boneheadedness.  My unwillingness to even consider any options that might have made life easier for me was plain stupid, and I paid dearly for it – he made sure of that.  The negativity of my relationship with him was an enormous source of stress for me – and probably little more than an annoyance to him.  I was the one who paid the price for my inflexibility, not him.

We had a kind of odd dance, back and forth, during the two and a half years we worked together (one that he got to lead most of the time due to his rank and position).  He actually nominated me for a Navy Achievement Medal for some useless work that I did at his direction.  I didn’t want the award, though, because I felt it was about him and making himself look good, not me.  I suppose it was possible that it was an attempt to earn my respect – I did receive the award.  However, I was in a really bad place then, and I mistrusted him more than anyone else in the division.  I’ve only ever received two counseling chits for bad behavior in the military, and they were both due to my defiance of orders from him.  The really interesting thing to me was that for the second one, when I was looking particularly angry and self-righteous, he was clearly nervous; I understood, somewhat dimly, that he was actually intimidated by me, but there was nothing I could do with that knowledge to my advantage.  He left Kunia in November 2000, just after making chief, and I was defiant until the bitter end.  I never addressed him as “chief” because I didn’t feel he deserved it; I called him “chief petty officer” with a slight emphasis on “petty officer.”  I had taken a play from his playbook; I was disrespectful to him in a way that no one could say broke any rules.  He knew it, and it bothered him, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

Several months before McVader left Kunia, I found out from a co-worker that he had been telling our whole division some very bad and untrue things about me, mainly claiming that I could not be trusted.  I had already had some other problems with him, and with this information I realized I probably had a valid harassment (hostile work environment) complaint against him.  I won’t bother enumerating those problems; suffice to say that in talking with a female E-6 that I respected, she agreed with me, and I decided to make the complaint.  But the whole thing went really, really badly – some of it I probably should have anticipated, and some of it I could not.

I wrote up my complaint, and it was several pages long – really bad idea.  Even I recognized then that it was just too much verbiage, but I wanted to provide as much detail as possible.  I should have just stuck to providing a brief, one page summary, and filled in the details later when I actually had a chance to talk to someone.  Writing a book about this problem, as complicated as it was, just made me look like a hysterical little girl.

I took my complaint to a chief just outside of my chain of command, Chief Bishop (his division worked with ours).  This was actually a good idea on the surface; my division chief, who I had named in my complaint, was part of the problem, so I couldn’t take it to him, and I had reason to fear reprisals (a fear that later turned out to be justified).  I even asked around to make sure Chief Bishop was cool, and he was.  However, as I mentioned earlier, PO McVader did a lot of schmoozing, and unbeknownst to me, Chief Bishop was one of McVader’s biggest fans.  Chief Bishop had a few days to read my complaint, and when I met with him again, he condescendingly informed me that I was overreacting, but strangely did not give me back my complaint document right away, even though I asked for it.

From a chance remark made by an E-6 co-worker several months later, I figured out that (apparently) Chief Bishop went straight to my chain of command with my complaint – and for anyone who knows anything about handling harassment complaints, THIS WAS A REALLY BAD THING TO DO – as in, I could have called the Inspector General once I found out, and some heads might have rolled.  It’s likely that both McVader and my chief had the opportunity to read that document, which is probably why I didn’t get it back right away when I asked for it.  The E-6 I mentioned above knew about my complaint, too, and there’s no reason why he should have; so chances are a lot of people knew who had no business knowing.  But I didn’t find out about Chief Bishop’s violation of my confidentiality and trust until this E-6 made his comment.  By this point, McVader was already in the process of getting involuntarily discharged due to medical problems, so attempting to re-submit the complaint would have been a waste of time.  And it didn’t even occur to me to make a complaint about Chief Bishop, as justified as my complaint would have been; he was well-respected at our command, and I was still very unpopular, and now a troublemaker on top of that.  Not taking this drama any further was a smart thing for me to do.  It saved me further stress, and perhaps even some official consequences more severe than counseling chits.

The silver lining in my horrid relationship with McVader was that my naïve, conservative small-town golly-gee unquestioning obedience and respect for authority was thoroughly broken; that was a not inconsiderable gift McVader gave me, one that I very much appreciate to this day.  I had never thought myself capable of being so independent as to defy orders and be disrespectful to a superior.  I know that I could have conducted myself better, and certainly in a respectful manner more advantageous to myself if I had made the effort to at least try; but maybe this was the only way I could get rid of my deeply ingrained awe of authority.  Several years later, after I started studying A Course in Miracles and really learned the importance of forgiveness, McVader was one of the main people I had to do a lot of work on forgiving.  I eventually had a dream where I hugged him and forgave him, with joy.  That is one of my better memories, and something I think about when I am struggling to forgive others; I at least know what is possible.

~o~o~o~o~

next installment:  The Terrible Tour Two, part c – the subordinate from hell

—

Courage allows the successful person to fail -

and to learn powerful lessons from the failure –

so that in the end, it was not a failure at all.

Maya Angelou

—

I previously stated in other blog entries that I did not plan on writing about my second tour of duty, in part because I had talked about it to a certain limited extent in my first military experience series, but also mostly because it sucked – it could easily be called the worst three years of my life (and that’s saying something).  I also do not like discussing any of my negative experiences because I really hate coming across as a whiner.  The truth is, though, that my second tour could have gone much differently if I had been more willing to take some responsibility for my part in how people treated me, and if I also had made an effort to recognize reality and cope with it appropriately instead of attempting to view my situation (which was difficult and a bit complicated) through an uncompromising, martyr-like lens.  The powerful lessons I learned then, as painful as they were, do inform my decisions and self-understanding now though, and much for the better – so I thought I’d share, and perhaps exorcise a few remaining personal demons from that time period in the process.  Fair warning: this “tour two” series is not going to be nearly as entertaining as my previous military experience posts.  This was the tour from hell, and my primary focus is on some very unpleasant experiences, how poorly I handled them, and, of course, what I learned in the process.

~o~o~o~o~

At the end of my first tour of duty, I knew enlisting had been one of the smartest things I’d done.  I had worked a lot of different jobs prior to my Navy service – fast food, waitressing, print shop and camp counselor, to name the main ones – but none of those jobs really pushed me to explore my capabilities.  My Navy job had done that, and as a result I felt much better about myself – so I was feeling pretty positive about my Navy experience in general.  During my exit interview with the command master chief at Kunia, I pointed out that the pluses and minuses of being in the Navy were no different than any other job – every job had its ups and downs, so I had no serious complaints.  He cracked a big smile and asked me, “Would you please get on the 1MC (loudspeaker) and say that?”  He had to listen to a lot of first term sailors whine about how much the Navy sucked.  I knew better – it was really no different than any other job.

I flew home to Quincy in October 1997 with about 45 days of terminal leave.  (I never again managed to accumulate that much leave.  A big part of why I had accumulated it in the first place was the limited opportunities to take leave during my first year and a half of service, due to training.  I also wish now that I had used up a lot more of that leave in Hawai’i, but I was just too much of a worker bee to recognize my need for it then.)  I had applied for college at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb to study geology, been in contact with the geology department, and was really looking forward to starting classes.  Then reality hit – I couldn’t afford it.  The GI Bill in 1997/1998 was paltry compared to what it is today, and I didn’t qualify for federal financial aid because they based my financial need on my Navy salary (I still don’t understand that!).  So I worked a couple of part-time jobs at the post office and waitressing, and reluctantly decided to re-enlist, because nothing nearly as lucrative and challenging as my Navy job was going to come my way in Quincy.  I wanted to go back to Hawai’i, too, but I didn’t want to go to Kunia, because of the bad social situation I left behind there.  However, the only way I could go back to Hawai’i was to Kunia.  It still amazes me sometimes that I did so.  This decision alone is all the proof I need that I had a deeply masochistic streak, although I certainly could not have recognized that at the time.

One mistake I made upon returning to Kunia was to be deeply bitter about my previous social problems there, so much so that I pushed away a few people who, to my surprise, treated me kindly upon my return.  I didn’t trust them – I couldn’t imagine anyone who had previously been unkind now being kind to me for any reason.  I wasn’t willing to recognize that people and situations always have the potential to change for the better.  I had also been gone for eight months; it could have been an opportunity to soften my own character enough that some bridges could be mended, but it never occurred to me to do so.

Another mistake was to pass on a few different opportunities to get put on the straight day watch shift (5:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.).  The day shift was not glamorous; it generally had a very slow optempo and was usually where they put the less capable linguists.  I was a good linguist, and I wanted to do my duty and earn my paycheck (I was so serious about accomplishing the mission!) and I wanted to be where the action and recognition were.  I also wasn’t willing to take seriously the toll that my previous three years of rotating shift work had taken on my health (in addition to the stress, and crappy diet and lifestyle).  My body did remember how hard that had been, though, and my health declined even more quickly this time around.  I finally faced the reality that my healthy was suffering, and moved to day shift about halfway through my tour.  I never adapted to it really well, though; getting up at 3:30 a.m. never agreed with me, and I still had a crappy diet and lifestyle, and I was always pretty stressed out about something or other at work, so my health didn’t improve much.

In another health-related development, about two-thirds of the way through my tour, I got put on mandatory physical fitness training (PT) due to a marginal score on the semi-annual physical readiness test (PRT).  I’d always loathed PRTs.  I’ve never been an athlete, and I was so scared whenever I took one that I could actually feel my fear sapping my strength, rather than enhancing it.  I always just barely passed, and also usually barely made it under the maximum allowed weight requirements.  (I’d never had to engage in a regular physical fitness routine, not even at boot camp – we hardly ever went, because our company commander hated taking us to PT!  I didn’t even technically pass my boot camp PRT – I was a few sit-ups shy of the minimum passing score – but my monitor just passed me anyway.  Other people weren’t so lucky and were stuck at boot camp an extra two weeks, just to bring their PRT score up a few points.  I freely admit I would have cried buckets if I had been forced to stay at boot camp for another two weeks, especially just because of a few sit-ups.)

So I was put on mandatory PT in the spring of 2001, and had to run regularly as part of my exercise routine, for the first time in my life.  A few weeks after I started running regularly, I started having numbness, tingling, and a sense of pressure in my left ankle and foot while running (which went away about a minute after I stopped running).  Long story short – I was diagnosed with compartment syndrome and put on a temporary no-running chit.  Some people are just not built for running, and I am one of those people.  I found out much later that running is actually really bad for many people, and that running injuries are very common, especially in people who are overweight – which I was.  (This injury never entirely cleared up; I still avoid running (no problem!) and I have to be careful about standing around on hard surfaces for long periods of time.  Amazingly, though, I can walk for over an hour and have no problems.  It’s the repetitive high-impact stress of running, and the unnatural stress of just standing around, that aggravate the old injury.  And thanks to this problem, I also got a 10% disability rating from the VA after I got discharged, so technically any place that hires me can claim me as a disabled veteran for their EEO numbers.)

~o~o~o~o~

next installment:  The Terrible Tour Two, part b – the supervisor from hell

It’s a mystery to me that people will fly into Honolulu airport, take a courtesy shuttle straight to Waikiki, stay in a huge high-rise hotel in the midst of pavement and concrete and tens of thousands of other people (mostly tourists), maybe get down to the beach a few times and drink some frozen fruity concoctions, get drunk and probably get a bad sunburn too because the sun is so much stronger than they expected, all while surrounded by several hundred other crispy tipsy people, and then fly home, and think they’ve been to Hawai’i.  Technically, that’s true – but Waikiki compared to the North Shore is like comparing an ungarnished McDonald’s hamburger to a juicy, tender, well-aged and perfectly cooked rib eye steak; they’re both beef, but the similarity ends there.  The experiences of consuming those two foods, just as the experiences of visiting Waikiki and North Shore, are completely different.  North Shore wins hands down.  You should go there, and the sooner the better, because it’s that awesome.

Long before I ever had the opportunity to live on the North Shore of O’ahu, I fell in love with it, when I visited the Waimea Valley Hi’ipaka.  I was still living at West Loch at the time, and the contrast between there and the North Shore was dramatic; I had finally found the lush, green beautiful Hawai’i that I had originally anticipated when I got orders to Kunia.  The energy and sense of place on the North Shore is distinctly different from any other part of the island, in the best possible way.  After I had been there once or twice, I hoped I would have the opportunity to live up there, and I eventually did, for eighteen sweet months.  And not just anywhere – I lived in a condo in Waialua, right on the shoreline, falling asleep to the sound of the ocean surf rolling up the sandy beach.  If it hadn’t been for the mosquitoes, heat, humidity, rotating shift work, and certain financial constraints, I might have just stayed there forever.

When PO2 Dan and I moved into our apartment together, I knew it was a short term arrangement; he was transferring out in six months.  That at least gave me more time to find a roommate than when I had to rush out of the barracks.  I eventually found a roommate in Megan, a Navy Chinese linguist about my age who had been my roommate for awhile in Monterey.  She was a prickly-skinned introvert like myself with whom I had little else in common; for example, a beautiful abstract painting I brought home from the Monterey street market, that I thought looked like a blooming flower, she declared “looked like barf.”  Perhaps viewing this painting could be some sort of Rorschach test to assess for optimism or pessimism.  She was definitely a pessimist.  I had so little faith in my own aesthetic taste at that time that after she called the painting barf, I took it down and didn’t display it again for quite some time.  (That didn’t deter me from buying similar paintings from the same artist, however, and I now consider those paintings some of my best art purchases ever.  The artist, Cas Sea, wasn’t making much more money than I was as an E-3, so she was willing to sell them to me for dirt cheap.  I’ve displayed them everywhere I’ve lived since.)

Are you an optimist or pessimist? Flower, or barf?

One thing that Megan and I had in common was that we both liked to read, but where I read non-fiction and National Geographic (my tastes at that time), she read slasher novels.  (I made the mistake of reading one of those novels once, and if there is any one memory I wish I could have expunged from my data banks, that novel would be it.  Ugh.  Reading that book made me realize that finishing whatever you start is not always a virtue; life is too short to stuff crap like that in your head!)  Fortunately, Megan also recognized how little we had in common, and so we never attempted to become buddies, which worked out well for us as roommates.  It seemed natural, therefore, to become roommates again, especially since we would each have our own bedroom in an apartment, rather than about 150 square feet each in a shared barracks room.

I wanted to live up on North Shore, and Megan was cool with that, so we looked at available apartments in the Waialua area, in a stretch along the beach nicknamed “Cement City”.  Most of the apartments were tiny and overpriced, in drab cement or concrete block buildings with no real view.  The condos on the beach, however, were much nicer, and we found a beautiful reasonably priced apartment at the eastern edge of Cement City.  (Click on this link to see a condo from the same building; it’s much nicer than ours was, with more room and a tiny lanai (porch), but the kitchen, living room, and views are the same.)  The rent was reasonable because the unit was for sale; we lived on a month-to-month lease the whole time.  The management made the mistake, however, of relying on me to give at least one prospective buyer a tour of the apartment, and I made sure to point out every flaw, because I am just that honest (really).  He didn’t buy the condo, and we never did get it sold out from under us.  We were on the lowest floor, which wasn’t the most desirable floor anyway; the upper floors had regular sightings of whales and dolphins, but I don’t recall ever seeing any.

Rather than attempt to describe the view from our apartment, I have simply provided the pictures below, which show the view from our living room.  My bedroom was even better; it had floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows, but I can’t seem to find any pictures of that view.

View from the living room

Sunset view from the living room

And here’s one similar to the view from the beach in front of our building:

View from Aweoweo Beach Park, looking west towards Ka'ena Point

[Off-topic aside:  Do you know what I don’t miss?  Film cameras.  Nosirree, not one bit.  Going through all my film pictures that spanned a period of several years, rummaging around for pictures from the North Shore time frame, was an exercise in frustration.  For every one picture that was in focus and reasonably interesting, about 100 pictures were out of focus, and/or poorly lit, and/or poorly framed, etc.  My photography skills improved considerably once I got a digital camera and I could see in real time what the hell I was doing.  They got even better when I got a basic digital image processing program and I could correct brightness, contrast, and occasionally other elements so the pictures actually looked like what I had taken a picture of.  I am very, very grateful for digital cameras and computers!]

There were two bedrooms in the apartment, as I mentioned earlier.  One was in the back, with its own bathroom, but only one small window and no view.  The other faced the ocean and had a glass wall facing the ocean, looking north.  I really wanted the room with a view, and Megan really wanted the one with the bathroom – so that worked out really well.

The glass wall was a great idea for people who liked a great view, of course, and who also worked days and slept nights.  I remember one night, looking out the window and seeing the Big Dipper.  I fell asleep, and woke up a few hours later, and the Big Dipper had whirled around the North Star to a different position.  That was so cool. I could lay in my comfy bed in my mosquito-free room, and watch the stars.  A room with a glass wall was not a good idea, though, for people who often had to sleep during the day after being up all night.  I didn’t want to spend money replacing the thin curtains that covered the windows (because we had a month-to-month lease), so I had a year and a half of very poor sleep after night shifts because my room was so bright.

I also have a hard time sleeping well when it’s hot and humid, and the condo did not have air conditioning, so the temperature in the condo was consistently in the upper 80s.  It was just a given that if I was in the condo, I was sweating.  There was very little air circulation, either, due to the layout of the apartment; getting a cross breeze through there was virtually impossible.  Cleanliness in the apartment was not an option; dust very quickly turned to mold in these conditions, which could be hard on clothing too.  I had a leather bomber jacket turn from brown to green while stored in my closet; I had to throw it away.

Of course, it was a little cooler out on the beach, usually with pleasant trade winds blowing in from the northeast.  I preferred to go out on the beach in the evening around sunset when I didn’t have to worry about my blonde, green-eyed, pasty-skinned self being burnt to a crisp, but when the potential for sun damage stopped, the mosquitoes stepped in.  My first experience fighting the mosquitoes was so bad, I think I only ended up sitting out on the beach about a dozen times during that year and a half.  There was never a worse time and place to be mosquito bait (which I always have been, and I guess always will be).

The beach in front of the condo was pretty, but it wasn’t a swimming beach.  There was a lot of coral in that area that made swimming a potentially hazardous proposition.  The nearest area that was decent for swimming was a little park about a block west, Aweoweo Beach Park.

And on top of all this, we couldn’t get renters insurance for our household goods.  When I called the insurance company to get a quote, they asked me how far I lived from the beach; I said about fifty feet.  They said they didn’t insure any place closer than a thousand feet to the beach, due to the flooding risk from tsunamis and hurricanes.

In spite of all these problems, I loved living there.  I think there’s some sort of archetype in the collective human psyche of Hawai’i, and North Shore is the embodiment of it.  The warmth, gentleness, and generosity of the ocean, earth, and air contribute to a dreamy languor that can convince just about anyone that all is right with the world.  Just sit back, relax, and listen to the surf rolling in; maybe have a nice drink.  “Laid back” is a very poor descriptor of the energy there; peaceful, tranquil, and serene come closer, but honestly, there just aren’t enough words to adequately describe how good it feels.  The azure sky, white clouds, warm turquoise sea, frothy white-capped waves, gentle rain showers and their accompanying rainbows, green mountains and rich ocean air all seem to have the sole purpose of feeding your senses and spirit with beauty.  They certainly fed me, and I am a better person for it.

So it was with great reluctance that I moved away in early 1997.  Megan’s husband had finally gotten orders to Hawai’i (they had been geographically separated since leaving Goodfellow three years previously), and naturally she wanted to live with him, and not on North Shore, so far from all the action in Honolulu.  I didn’t want to move, because I was due to get out of the Navy in October anyway, but I couldn’t find a roommate, and I couldn’t afford to live there on my own.  Waialua is at least a 45 minute drive from Honolulu, which I considered a plus (being so far away), but that was not a selling point for a lot of people.  I bowed to reality and moved back to Mililani.  My new one bedroom apartment was in a noisy area in Waikalani Valley, but it was several degrees cooler and somewhat less humid, the area had a lot fewer mosquitoes, and I papered up the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall jalousie windows in my bedroom with black poster board so I could get some decent sleep during the day.  My 25 minute commute time was cut in half, too, and was a lot less dangerous than the drive down Kaukonahua Road, a long curvy stretch of which bordered a very steep cliff – not a good road to drive when you can hardly keep your eyes open after a night shift.

It was a privilege to live on North Shore.  Hawai’i residents have a saying, “Lucky you live Hawai’i” which has a few different levels of meaning; Mark Twain did an okay job of capturing that idea, but you really have to be there to feel the depth of it.  (He also wrote a great book about Hawai’i, which I highly recommend.)  I was very, very lucky that I lived North Shore; it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

If you take nothing else from any of my writings about Hawai’i, take this:  skip Waikiki and go to North Shore.  Drive the length and breadth of it, from Ka’ena Point to Kawela Bay.  Watch the surfers and waves roll in at Waimea Bay, chow down on some shrimp from Macky’s Shrimp Truck, then go take a stroll through Waimea Valley Hi’ipaka.  Grab a really great burger at Kua’Aina sandwich shop in Hale’iwa, then visit Pu’u o Mahuka Heiau State Historic Site.  Go to a 7-11 and snarf down some SPAM musubi, then go snorkeling at Shark’s Cove.  You won’t regret a single second of it, I promise – especially if you take me with you. 

Another view from the beach, facing east - sunrise

And another sunrise view from the beach

The surf breaking on the coral reefs, several dozen yards from shore. The surf really had to get pretty high before it would roll right up to the beach, which usually only happened in winter.

Moonrise over the Ko'olau Mountains

Click on any of the pictures to see larger versions.