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.

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

• A young woman who was in the process of getting kicked out the Navy when I was in-processing after my broken service – Seaman Recruit Heine – (pronounced hiney – or it may have even been spelled that way; I don’t remember.)
• I worked for a lieutenant commander for several months who really didn’t like me, and she made sure I knew it; I thought it appropriate that her last name was Means (although I would have left off the “s”).
• I worked with another officer in that same office who was not terribly fond of me either, and who was, in fact, somewhat rude to me; he was Lieutenant Rudrud (rude rude).
• One of my instructors in Air Force ROTC was Major Wempe (pronounced wimpy).  He was a pilot, and his pilot nickname (perhaps to compensate for his real name?) was Hammer.
• The commanding officer of the Naval detachment at Monterey when I was there in 1993 was Lieutenant Commander Joseph Blow.
• And the best – I’m not making this up, because I went to language school and C school with this guy.  Can you imagine walking around and being addressed in the manner below, and not being able to do anything about it?  Because it’s actually your rank and name?!      Seaman Craver

Okay, I don’t normally solicit comments, but if you know of any real-life examples of funny names in the military, please post them below.   Something about the juxtaposition of military rank and funny names is particularly amusing, so please limit your comments to military folks, unless it really is a super-duper funny name, for which of course I will make an exception.  For example:  I saw this name on a mailing list once:  Ima Jean Feeler.  (What part of the jeans do you think she is feeling?   The heine?  Yeah, I thought that part too.)

Satellite image of O'ahu, with all the print and arrows supplied by yours truly. This image was taken from an angle, so the island is a bit skewed compared to a direct overhead view. Click on the map to see a larger version, or right click and select "open link in a new tab" to open in a separate tab, for easy reference whilst reading the blog entry below.

Something I did not anticipate, as a Russian linguist in training at Monterey, California, was receiving orders for Hawai’i.  Sure, I had put it on my “wish list” of duty stations, but the truth is that linguists had very few options for duty stations, and even less freedom in choosing, especially their first one.  All I ever really heard about was Russian linguists getting stationed in Misawa, Japan, and how cold and snowy it was there most of the time.  I was so convinced that I was going to Japan (although not very enthusiastic about it) that I bought a very nice flannel sheet set and a wool blanket to use in my barracks room in Monterey, because I figured it was a good long-term investment.

Perhaps this was all the prompting the puckish cosmos needed, because not long after, I found out I had orders for NSGA Kunia, Hawai’i.  I didn’t end up getting my money’s worth out of the flannel sheet set and wool blanket, and I’m happy to say I didn’t care, then or now.  I was ecstatic; visions of tropical beauty, white sandy beaches, and palm trees danced in my head.  And this was back in the pre-internet, primitive early 1990s, so I didn’t have much to go on regarding what to anticipate in Hawaii.  I expected what little I had seen in advertisements and on Magnum, P.I. – green, lush, and eternally pleasant.

Imagine my shock, then, upon arriving on O’ahu (the Hawai’ian island where Honolulu, and most of the people and military bases are located), and being assigned to live in barracks at Naval Magazine Lualualei at West Loch.  (The barracks and part of the naval magazine were located at West Loch, near Ewa Beach, and the other part of the naval magazine was located at Lualualei, way up the Waianae coast.)  Check out the map above – see how most of the western half of the island is brown?  Many parts of the leeward side of the Hawai’ian islands, it turns out, are hot and dry enough to keep cacti happy, and conditions that keep cacti happy are apparently also pretty good for munitions.  As you can imagine, a munitions storage and handling area is a very sensitive, highly secure facility – we were not only required to show our military ID upon entering the base, but also when exiting.  My duty station was about a 20 minute drive north, located just southwest of Schofield Barracks.

So I found out quickly that most of the green and lush parts of the leeward side of O’ahu were usually parts that were irrigated, because there wasn’t enough rainfall to keep things green otherwise.  [This was so because the Ko’olau Mountains on the windward part of the island stopped most of the rain clouds from passing over the rest of the island (prevailing winds came from the northeast most of the year). You can see this in the map above – there’s a line of clouds on the eastern side of the island, kept from going further west due to the mountain range.]   The West Loch base was not irrigated – it was dry, dull and spartan; drab concrete buildings and a lot of bare red dirt or brown, beaten down grass.  It did have a few palm trees, though.  The air was inevitably hot and dry (daytime temps were almost always in the upper 80s or low 90s) so the barracks needed to be air-conditioned in order to be comfortable.  The “conditioned” air inside the rooms was usually stale and clammy.

The charms of West Loch were not just visual, however; they were also aural.  The base  was located directly under one of the incoming flight paths of Honolulu International Airport and Hickam Air Force Base.  Many times a day a passenger jet or fighter jet would scream in for a landing, just a few hundred feet above the barracks.  Even when I was in my room with the door closed, if I was on the phone and a plane flew overhead, I couldn’t hear the other person and they couldn’t hear me.  The fighter jets were much louder than the far larger passenger jets; fortunately, there were fewer fighter jets flying around than passenger jets.

The barracks were maintained by navy boatswain’s mates and cooks, fleeties on a lucky shore rotation; they certainly weren’t fond of CTIs (who weren’t even allowed to be fleeties and only rarely got deployed on any sort of mobile platform).  Fortunately, my boot camp company commander’s frequently expressed contempt for spooks prepared me for that.  Their contempt for CTIs mainly manifested itself in a peculiar talent for needing to knock on CTIs doors on mornings when CTIs were sleeping in, recovering from night shifts (and we all worked various shifts, so that was a peculiar talent, indeed).  Also, while their mail got delivered to them at their workshops in Lualualei, our mail got dumped in a volunteer CTI’s room, and we had to just drop by every once in a while and sort through the pile to get our mail.  That probably violated some postal regulations, but I guess naval magazine barracks are exempt from those regulations.

There wasn’t even a chow hall at West Loch!  So if us poor sailors were hungry and off work, we had to go to a military base to get fed for free (Kunia or Pearl Harbor were the nearest ones), or make a food run to Ewa Beach and use our own money to pay for our food, because we weren’t entitled to comrats since we were living in barracks.  There was a Taco Bell and a few other fast food places in Ewa Beach, so you can guess where I went most of the time, and I’m sure most of the other sailors did the same.  There was a shuttle that ran between Kunia and West Loch, and I think to Pearl Harbor too, for those sailors that didn’t have cars, but I think it would have taken less time to walk to Ewa Beach, eat some fast food, and walk back, than take those shuttles back and forth; West Loch was pretty far from everywhere.  Fortunately I had a nice little used Honda Accord that I had purchased in San Angelo with most of the proceeds of the $5,000 bonus that I had received upon graduating from C school.  [I didn’t actually receive a check for $5,000; it was about 72% of that, because the military would always withhold 28% for taxes on bonuses, even though no one was in that tax bracket!  So I didn’t get to see the rest of the bonus that I was entitled to until after I filed my taxes the next year.]

The best thing about West Loch was leaving it.  When I did so on foot, I walked through Iroquois Point, a pleasant military family housing area at the mouth of Pearl Harbor, right next door to West Loch.  The housing was all single family or duplex houses, single story, made of the usual concrete block material.  They weren’t much to look at, but the area certainly was – some of those houses were right on the beach!

It was on a walk through Iroquois Point not long after arriving on O’ahu that my nose detected an intoxicating perfume, which I quickly discovered belonged to a gorgeous, simple five-petaled white and yellow  flower that I’d never seen before, growing on a small tree with big glossy leaves.  I later found out that flower is called plumeria.  It comes in a few different colors, but I think the white flowers are the most beautiful, and they are certainly the most fragrant.  They are often used in leis, which they are ideal for due to their color, scent, and velvety soft texture.  There’s nothing quite like the feel of soft plumeria flower petals against the sensitive bare skin of your neck, especially when combined with their perfume, treating your nose to a gentle whiff of heaven.  I decided right there that plumeria was my new favorite flower.

I was on another walk sometime later through Iroquois Point when out of the corner of my eye I casually caught a glance of a squirrel darting along a tree branch.  My Midwestern brain circuitry ignored this perfectly normal event, until a few steps later, when I remembered – there are no squirrels in Hawai’i.  Well, there are large rats and mongooses, but I didn’t catch enough of a glimpse to tell which one.  I lived on O’ahu for ten years, and I think I saw a mongoose scurry across the road maybe two or three times total.  I’m reasonably certain I never saw a rat.  (I did have a rat in the attic of an apartment I lived in later, but I never actually saw it.)

My one other significant memory of encountering something interesting and nature-like was when I walked to Pu’uloa lagoon at the far end of Iroquois Point.  There wasn’t much there but a small pier for a shuttle boat.  I glanced down in the water and saw something smooth and translucent that my eyes and brain couldn’t quite process at first – a piece of tissue paper?  A plastic baggie?  I finally figured it out – it was a jellyfish.  There is something about a jellyfish that always seems to invite poking it with a stick, but I didn’t do it.  It was minding its own business, so I let it be.  Maybe that created some good karma for me; I never once got stung by a jellyfish while swimming in Hawaii (or anywhere else, for that matter).

the jellyfish I saw looked a lot like this

So, yeah, living at West Loch was disappointing compared to what I had anticipated prior to my arrival on O’ahu, in July 1994.  As an E-3 (seaman) I was required to live in the barracks, and I didn’t have a choice of barracks either.  Fortunately, I made E-4 (petty officer third class) during the spring promotion cycle in 1995, less than a year after I had arrived, and as an E-4 I received permission to move off-base and receive comrats and BAH to pay for my food and housing.  I couldn’t afford to live on my own though, so I had to find a roommate, and quickly, because rumor had it that if you didn’t move off-base within 30 days, they withdrew permission.  That rule made so little sense that I was sure it was true, and I didn’t try to find out if it wasn’t.

next post – Living in Hawai’i, Part 2 – Mililani, featuring Dan the roommate, eucalyptus trees, and moving from concrete block barracks to a poured concrete apartment building.

As the end of my first tour neared, I knew that enlisting had been one of the greatest decisions I had ever made.  I had learned much about my capabilities that I could barely have guessed at prior to enlisting – significant but largely untapped potential had been transformed into solid professional achievements.  I never seriously considered staying in for twenty years, though.  The Navy had mostly just been a job to me and I wanted to move on to something that I was really passionate about – geology!  I decided to get out of the Navy and go back to school to study geology.  I had the GI Bill, after all, to pay for my schooling, and I guess my professional success gave me the confidence to face the physics mountain once again.  I flew out of Hawaii about 7 weeks prior to my EAOS (end of active obligated service), because yeah, I was such a workaholic, I had accumulated that much leave (we were allowed 30 days a year of paid leave).  I was so happy to be out and living the civilian life again – I didn’t miss the Navy much at all.

Something I felt, though, as I was preparing to leave Hawaii, was that I would be back.  I didn’t feel like I was done with Hawaii.  I had no idea when I would be back or why, but I knew I would be.  And as it turned out, I did go back to Hawaii, a mere eight months after I left.  The GI Bill was grossly inadequate at that time to cover college costs, and I didn’t even qualify for financial aid because they based my eligibility on my Navy income – which I was no longer pulling in (duh!).  So I never made it back to college.  I worked a couple of different part-time, unsatisfying jobs, and made the reluctant decision to re-enlist.

View of the Ko'olau Mountains from Laie Point, O'ahu. (photo credit: me. Click on pic to embiggen)

And based on how badly that second tour went – I foolishly returned to the same duty station, where I was so very unpopular – I could have easily said at the time that the decision to re-enlist was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.  A lot of crap happened that I either already wrote about in my initial military experience blog entries, or that I don’t care to write about further.  Suffice to say that I had a metaphysical epiphany one day at work during that miserable second tour – this is hell.  Not in the metaphorical sense, either.  I had decided previously that hell as advertised in conventional Christianity doesn’t exist, but I had a real, visceral sense at that moment that I was in hell.  Whatever hell was, it was real, and it could be experienced – no dying or evil acts necessary.  And I didn’t achieve escape velocity from that hellhole until I transferred out of that duty station.  The last few months of that second tour, that I mentioned at the beginning of this post (when I got counseling) were just limbo.  The four months I spent at Goodfellow afterwards were a desperately needed detox.  I felt like I had spent the previous three years of my life stewing in a cesspool surrounded by hungry crocodiles, who occasionally closed in and took a bite (usually out of my back).  That tour was extraordinarily stressful; several times during my detox at Goodfellow I had a visual in my mind’s eye of large amounts of poison emptying out of my heart.

And my third duty station?  Mostly awesome.  My fourth and final duty station in England?  Totally awesome.  I’ll write more about them later, I promise.

What The Finest Linguists Can Do

Good military linguists don’t usually know their target language well – in fact, good linguists tend to not have good global language skills, since their focus need be only on the very limited vocabulary of military communications.  Good linguists do, however, have a certain quality of mind coupled with a desire to do well that help them put everything together – the technical requirements, a strategic and tactical understanding of the target, and how to prioritize when the optempo steps up and some things just can’t get done.  Great linguists have an aural sensitivity that enables them to hear target audio that other linguists simply cannot pull out of the ever-present radio static.  I was one of those great linguists, and so was Adam.  He was my go-to guy whenever I had to confirm something that no one else could hear.  He was one of those people I’ve always felt lucky to have known, not just for his professional talent and dedication but also because underneath all the cynicism he was a great guy of considerable integrity and intelligence.  And no, I did not have a crush on him – he was gay (and really snarky, and there is such a thing as too much snark).  Adam, if you ever find this post and read it, I just thought I’d let you know I’m still proud of making up the word “ceramicry” for you.  Just go ahead and put it in your spell check dictionary, because you know it’s awesome too.

It amazes me sometimes, when I think back about where I started on the linguist journey, and how far I managed to develop a talent that took me a long time to discover and build.  I can justifiably say that I got so good, I could do the job in my sleep.  It wasn’t unusual to lightly doze off during the night watch, especially around 3:00 or 4:00 am when I could not keep my eyes open.  Naturally my coworkers didn’t like that (as if they didn’t have their moments when they dozed off too), and after a period of time, they would often wake me with, “Did you hear that?”  So I’d spin back on the audio and listen to the stuff that didn’t wake me up.  Invariably, it was Russian that I didn’t need to copy.  But I’d always wake up for the target audio.

Yeah, I was that good.

There are unfortunate consequences to being a shit-hot linguist though, especially when your division gets stuck with not one, not two, not three, but four useless first class petty officers (E-6s – who are supposed to be supervisors).  In my case, as soon as I made E-5 (second class petty officer), my chain of command decided to make me a shift supervisor.  This was in spite of the fact that I had never even worked as an assistant supervisor (usually an E-5 position).  I had happily sat in my corner for two years, focused on my one or two tasks while blissfully ignoring all the big picture stuff as well as all the administrative headaches that go along with supervising.  So while I was thrilled with this obvious display of respect and trust from my chain of command, I really had no idea what I was getting into – but given the dearth of leadership in the division, I don’t think I would have been allowed to refuse the position even if I did know.  And to make it all even sillier – the Navy had a neat-o system of promoting people first, and giving them their pay raise much later.  So there I was, wearing two chevrons on my sleeve and administratively entitled to all the rights and privileges of an E-5, while working an E-6 position, and collecting E-4 pay.  That’s the military in a nutshell.

E-5 sleeve insignia for the utility uniform (no longer worn)

I wish I could say that I quickly and easily learned how to be a great supervisor, but I didn’t.  When other people are involved, people skills are necessary, and as a shy, quiet, nerdy introvert, mine were virtually non-existent.  My people skills consisted almost entirely of radiating formidable intelligence and standoffishness, and having little ability to engage in chit-chat, or even to live a life that would make for interesting chit-chat.  In other words, I came across as a snob on my good days and a cold bitch on my bad days.  This is not how one wins popularity contests, which as it turns out is an important job skill for supervisors of sailors on their first tour of duty, most of whom are in their late teens and early twenties and who still think life is supposed to be like high school.

I had my successes, though.  As I gradually learned the supervisor job and made awkward but consistent attempts to work with my subordinates and take care of them, I earned the respect of the people whose respect was worth earning.  Anyone who cared to look past the awkwardness could see that I wanted to do well and do right by my section.

A few months after I started, I made the challenging and enormously unpopular decision to fire my assistant supervisor, Mike.  Popularity-wise in our division, he was an affable homecoming king, who could sit in a bar for hours, chugging beer and telling great stories about his world travels (he was in his late twenties, a few years older than me).  However, not long after I became his supervisor, he explicitly stated his indifference to doing the job well. “Why should I have to work hard when Jack didn’t have to?”  Jack was his first trainer and not a very good one.  His second trainer, Gina, was smart and dedicated and also had a serious crush on him (which she advertised freely even though she was married), and therefore, apparently, was an inadequate role model.  She told me that Mike was great at the job, but he just required some supervision – in other words, he really couldn’t be trusted.  For my part, I was such a doormat at the time that I actually sympathized with Mike, because I’d had my problems with Jack too.  Mike also didn’t have a very good ear and preferred to make something up in producing his reports rather than ask for help.  His stated indifference may have been a cover for being embarrassed at not having a real talent for the work, I have to concede that – but I think that mostly he just didn’t care.  His personality and his abilities were not a good fit with being a linguist.

In Mike’s place I put Adam, a guy who was junior to Mike but who had enormous talent – and a puckish, snarky attitude that had not endeared him to our chain of command.  I don’t think my division petty officer and division chief liked the idea of Adam being a-supe (assistant supervisor), but they didn’t interfere.  Firing Mike was a decision that had long-term disastrous social consequences, but professionally, it was one of the smartest things I’d done – my job as a supervisor was much easier afterwards.  If I’d had any more charm back in those days, I might have been able to pull it off without the social consequences.  Or not – Mike was the homecoming king, after all – the whole division was crazy about him, but most of them had never had to supervise him.  Even after he was switched to another section, he didn’t change his habits (I know because I occasionally still had to read his reports), but his new supervisor insisted that Mike was really great at his job, just as Gina had done.  No one wanted to admit that Mike was a liability.  And just to make this situation more pathetic, Mike was also upset about being fired – even though he was open and unashamed about being a slacker.  I never understood that.

I had another subordinate who did poor quality work dumped on me when Mike was switched out.  Sean was nervous and jumpy and consistently wrote bad reports that I had to spend a lot of time correcting before sending them out.  I finally figured out that he was doing so poorly because he unrealistically thought that once he had finished his initial training, he wasn’t supposed to ask for help.  I convinced him that my job as supervisor was to support him in his professional development, which meant helping him when he had audio that he couldn’t understand, or a report that he wasn’t sure how to write.  I don’t think Sean’s previous supervisors had been so willing to work with him, probably because he was just so high-strung and insecure.  It took some time, but Sean started asking for help regularly, from me and Adam, and he really worked on getting better.  He also had the habit of making stuff up, like Mike, but unlike Mike, he wanted to do the job well.  Sean ended up becoming a reliable linguist and an asset to my section, which helped calm him down, build his confidence, and as a result he became much more pleasant to work with, too.

And then there was Lindsay, a totally hot blonde chick who was assigned to my section a few months after I started.  I’ll admit, I’d never had the opportunity to see how stupid guys could act around really hot chicks (not being hot myself, nor having had any friends who were either) so this experience was a real eye-opener.  Our work area was a joint watch section, where Army, Air Force, and Navy all had their separate sections doing their own thing, but we all worked the same schedule, so it was pretty common to socialize amongst the different sections when optempo was low, since we all saw each other every workday.  After Lindsay started in my section, there was a definite uptick in male Army and Air Force visitors as they came to meet the newest member of the section and just hang out.  One remarkably homely married-with-kids Army guy was so frequent a visitor (and so frequently encouraged to visit by Lindsay) that I finally had to tell him that Lindsay was just too busy to have so many visits, and they were going to have to limit their socializing to off-duty hours (which I’m pretty sure didn’t happen).  Lindsay clearly enjoyed the attention from the guys and encouraged it.  To a certain extent I don’t blame her for that, but she had that arrogance and sense of entitlement that so many beautiful people have – a shallowness of character that does not recognize that some things must be earned, rather than accepted as one’s due, especially when inappropriately given.  Fortunately, on a later tour of duty I had the privilege of working with and becoming friends with an equally attractive blonde chick who was a class act; not all hot chicks are like Lindsay.

My chain of command was also besotted with Lindsay and wanted to give her an award – normally given to CTIs who had been working at our duty station for a year or so and had consistently been good performers – while Lindsay was still in training.  One of my jobs as a supervisor was to help my subordinates get the recognition they deserved, and my division chief put me in the unenviable position of having to discourage him from giving Lindsay an award that she had not earned.  I don’t doubt that he thought I was at least a little bit jealous of Lindsay, which was not true – but at least he gave the award to someone who deserved it.  Lindsay would have been all too happy to receive it (she would have somehow justified it), and she would have rapidly become one of the least-respected members of our division.  You’re welcome, Lindsay.

As it was, she later attempted to manipulate our division petty officer into giving her another recognition that had been given to someone else by crying and telling him how upset she was that she didn’t get it.  He was so disappointed that he couldn’t help her – no kidding.  She lost a lot of respect when word of that got out (I might have had something to do with that).  She unashamedly informed me later that she was really mad at “whoever” had told other people about that.  I hope the incident taught her to at least be more careful about her manipulative behavior, though.  And if she really did know that it was me, it didn’t put a significant dent in her brown-nosing of me.

To give Lindsay her due, though, I will say that she worked hard at her job and became pretty good at it, and she was particularly well-known for her global language skills.  She was also good at handling the day-to-day workload and was reliable enough that if I had needed a replacement for Adam, she would have been a good choice.  I trusted her professional integrity when she was actually doing the job.  That’s the ironic aspect of her self-absorbed behavior – she was hardworking and capable, yet she still felt the need use her looks to be manipulative and put herself before others.  It really wasn’t necessary – she could, and did, earn other people’s respect the old-fashioned way.  But the old-fashioned way takes time and a lot of effort, and breezing by on good looks does not.

Why wasn’t I jealous of Lindsay’s beauty?  Because I had never been interested in receiving the sort of mindless attention that I saw showered upon her.  I’m an introvert, and I want my interactions with people to have substance, including any admiration that might come my way.  The flash and pop and empty gestures of extroverted interaction have never been satisfying to me, and the just-based-on-looks attention I saw Lindsay receiving eagerly was amusing at best – and annoying the rest of the time.  It looked to me like eating cotton candy – a little bit of a sugar rush, but mostly hot air with no real nutrition.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be considered attractive, because of course I do.  Being Lindsay’s supervisor, however, gave me abundant opportunities to confirm for myself that I really did not want to be heartbreakingly beautiful.  I’d much rather be Mary Ann than Ginger.  Mary Ann has more freedom to be herself, I think; Ginger has too many limiting expectations placed upon her because of her dazzling beauty, and the kind of empty attention that Ginger normally gets tends to warp one’s character rather than deepen it.  There was much more to Lindsay than her good looks – she had genuine substance and character –  but it seemed that even she had a hard time realizing that.

—————–

Subsequent subsection d – Stay in or get out?  and what makes a good linguist