My Military Experience – Tour Three – Part 1

Before I could start my third tour of duty down at Pearl Harbor, I had to spend four months at Goodfellow AFB, Texas, taking a basic cryptology analysis course; it was a required qualification for the billet I would be filling.  I asked my future co-workers at Pearl Harbor if I would actually need the course, or use it in any way on the job; the answer was no.  I didn’t relish the idea of having to leave my home, my car, my stuff, and my cats for four months for no good reason, and live out of a cheaply run hotel on a small Air Force base in the middle of nowhere, during the worst of the blistering central Texas summer heat, so I called the detailer to see if I could wiggle out of the course.  No way – it was required (and it was this phone call that almost cost me that Pearl Harbor billet).  So a fair amount of your hard-earned tax dollars were spent on shipping me to Goodfellow in May 2001 and putting me up in that cheap Air Force hotel with water that tasted like mud and air conditioning that kinda kept the rooms cool, at the cost of leaving them smelling kinda like stale dirty laundry.  My residential experience at Goodfellow was remarkably similar to my first one.  The terrain around the base hadn’t improved in looks, either; it was still flat as a pancake, mostly brown, with lots of scrub brush and very few real trees.  Central Texas makes the gently rolling Midwestern scenery look mountainous and fecund in comparison.

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.