My Military Experience – Tour Three – Part 2

Alright, so where was I?  Okay … I had just arrived back on island after four months in the gawdawful blazing heat of central Texas.  The fall weather in Hawaii was lovely – a blessed relief.  My two cats had gotten fat because their catsitter just piled food into their bowls instead of carefully portioning it out as instructed, and they expected me to continue this profligacy, which I did not.  (They registered their complaints often, but neither this nor the food restriction resulted in much weight loss for them.)  I had to find someplace in my little Mililani condo to store several boxes of stuff that I had somehow managed to accumulate while living in a small hotel room (including a huge gorgeous amethyst geode that I bought at the Caverns of Sonora gift shop for a ridiculously low amount of money).  And I needed to learn an entirely new job and become acquainted and fit in with an entirely new set of coworkers, while working for my first joint chain of command.  I was, however, still working on a 24 hour watch floor; I was at least familiar with that (unfortunately).

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.