shutupyeats
ShutUpYeats
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Page 24, another transitional one.
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My local queer bookstore is being threatened with eviction over their free narcan and fentanyl test strips, free store for the unhoused, and free narcan trainings.
Bluestockings is an incredible worker-owned community space that has been apart of the Lower East Side for 25 years. But in the last couple years, they've faced increasing harassment from the wealthier neighbors moving in and complaining about the presence of unhoused people around their store front. Despite all their community work being allowed by their lease, the landlord is pushing for an eviction.
Please help support Bluestockings! Visit them (if you're local), order books online, donate! We need more queer and community-oriented spaces, not another overpriced coffee shop or chain franchise.
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"Quiet, Sergeant Major, the grown-ups are talking."
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It's a matter of historical record that former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was the 3ACR Commander for the Tal Afar deployment. He's very loosely depicted here - please don't sue, Sir. I have no idea who the Regimental CSM was - and neither does ANYONE - ZING! I do have a more positive, or at least ambiguous, depiction of a Sergeant Major coming up in ... two stories from now. One short one, then that one.
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I feel like anyone who's been in the military in the past, what, 40 years, will know about the Jimmy Deans without any explanation, but it will be a mystery from anyone who served before that, or not at all.
So, sometimes you're in basic training or Airborne School or whatnot and you're out training so you can't go back to the DFAC to eat, and the Army can't be bothered to bring out hot food in sawdust boxes called Mermites. So what do you get? Not MREs - those cost the government like eight bucks, and have frankly too many calories for almost anything short of filling sandbags 16 hours a day. No, you get a shrink-wrapped tray with a can of sausage or tuna or meat paste, a can of Pringles, a juice box and some other similar shit, none of it remotely edible, and at least at one time made by the Jimmy Dean Sausage Company, a division of Tyson Foods, who were the low bidder.
One time in Iraq, we were out in the field for like a week building a combat outpost in Tal Abdah, which is in the middle of nowhere, even for Iraq. The BSB came out with some PLS flat racks full of HESCOs and concertina wire and whatnot and one flat rack full of pallets of hot bottled water ... and Jimmy Deans. We rat fucked them for the Pringles, ate nothing but crispy salted potato paste for a week, and left the rest for the cavalry that came out after we were done to occupy the place, and for the mice. The previous COP build hadn't gone well, and I think it was the Brigade Commander's way of punishing us.
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Page 19. Back to stuff I didn't make up.
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Three-point slings were a thing for a while, driven by the fact that they were non-standard and therefore cool, and were sometimes used by Special Forces, until everyone realized they sucked and, if you're left-handed, will jam the ejection port and lead to an instant jam. Of course, I got issued one last year.
Before RFI was a thing and even once it was, the Army was very liberal with allowing Company XOs and Supply Sergeants to buy COTS individual equipment from catalogs with almost no accountability. What a time to be alive.
And, since this is the internet, I'd like to emphasize that most or all of the Vietnamese people that I've met are very smart and nice, and that research increasingly suggests that an author can depict fictional characters as holding negative stereotypes without themselves holding those stereotypes.
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The real unrealistic thing about this little sequence isn't the unofficial patrol - that's just an exaggeration. It's the whole idea of unobserved fires by the IA in 2005, or ever. It was the early days of MITT Teams, so someone might have thought it was a good idea, and nowhere does it say that they actually fired the thing, or had more than those three rounds.
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Page 16 has actually been up on my website for a week, not that anyone goes to websites anymore.
Most of the things that I depict in these either happened to me, happened to someone else that I know personally, or are at least based on something like that. Obviously things get moved around in time and place, but basically derived from reality. However, this one incident and the next few pages are something I just made up, as the most borderline plausible insane thing you could do and maybe get away with.
That being said, there were shorter undocumented patrols that did take place, such as the time my Platoon Sergeant and I climbed over the wall of FOB Marez and walked down MSR Tampa in our shirtsleeves to do some impromptu reconnaissance.
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Bearing in mind that 10,000 miles on a HMMWV is the equivalent of 750,000,000,000 miles on a HiLux.
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Page 14. This story is partially a look at the fact that there were a surprising number of Vietnam vets in the Army even at this late date - mostly National Guard CW5 helicopter pilots. It's partially a story about the wartime volunteer Army's desperation for manpower drawing in people who wouldn't ordinarily be there at all, and some of the situations that creates. It's ALSO a sort of thought experiment about someone who (a) really does want to be there and (b) can't be coerced by the Army short of a firing squad. Military leaders in the United States are, as a whole and taking on with the other, on average, by far the most risk-averse, ticket-punching, block-checking, what-does-the-regulation-say, slide-turns-green group of ostensibly armed killers in human history. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and the system is designed to breed them and to winnow out anyone else. The best civilian analogy that I've heard is: imagine if a law firm made you wait 20 years to make partner, fired half of prospective partners 18 years in, and handed each new partner a one-time million-dollar check on top of his or her salary. You can imagine the kind of people that does and doesn't retain. In some ways, that's a good thing - Napoleon and Caesar were dynamic risk-takers, and we don't want any of those. It's also the source of the very valid criticism that the Iraq and ESPECIALLY the Afghan wars were fought one year at a time, over and over, with the intention of avoiding defeat just long enough to repeat the cycle. This is the story of a guy who's not playing that game.
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Page 12, after a break due to real job work commitments. Interestingly, if I were to put this and everything else into a book now, this would be page 186, plus front matter and so on, which is more than I'd given myself credit for. About 28 more pages of this story puts me at 214, which makes for a pretty good-sized book and makes me feel better about hitting my arbitrary 250-page goal for this one. For reference, 7 Nissan - my first/practice full-length book from 2014, was only 119 pages, which about the limit below which you can't print the title on the spine.
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Page 11.
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Here's an experiment. If I post the first ten pages of the story all at once so they make some more sense, does it increase engagement? Probably not.
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