Search for a routine

I am still getting into the swing of things here in the desert, trying to develop a routine.  I am very fortunate that I am responsible for multiple locations not just here at Camp Arifjan but also two out along the Arabian Gulf - Ash Shuaybah and Kuwati Naval Base.  That means I can be out and about, and I have been taking full advantage of that.  I also get a vehicle, a Pasaro.  Kuwaiti drivers are not the worst I have ever seen, that title belongs to Neapolitans, but they are up there.  Because Kuwait is this vast, flat desert there are few/no overpasses, so if you have to get to something on the left side of the highway you drive past where you need to go and make a u-turn.  The u-turns are official, but the left lane here is the same as the left lane in America except fast here means about 100 mph, so every time you make a u-turn you have to cross a lane full of crazy people to get to the middle or right hand lane.  When there is a wreck (and there are lots of them) the Kuwaitis tend to leave the crashed car(s) along the side of the road for a few days or weeks.  It makes driving around here exciting.

Then there is the desert.  This is the season when Kuwaitis take to the desert, they build these huge tent camps right alongside the highways because it is too godawful hot to go out in the spring, summer, and fall.  These camps are their weekend getaways; they have huge blowup castles for the kids, the older ones have four-wheelers to tool around in the desert and the extended families have cookouts and light off fireworks at night.  We have been getting lots of rain lately (we even had hail last night, who knew that could happen here?) so the desert is blooming a bit but it can't hide the incredible amount of trash everywhere left by the people in the camps.

There isn't much in the way of Christmas spirit.  Everyone tries - our tent workareas are all decorated and the leadership has given everyone that doesn't have a watch both Christmas Eve and Christmas off, which is very cool.   However, there is cargo moving through and so many of my folks have to work.  If they work, I work, so it will be just another day.  Besides, you can't put lipstick on a pig, this is a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas like the US does (come to think of it, no other country wonderfully commercializes Christmas like we do and that is why we rule) so it really doesn't have that electric Christmas vibe that I hope you are all experiencing right now.  The kids are all out of school and counting down the days, all the houses are decorated, stockings are hung by the fire with care, and on and on.  Not that this is at all depressing, it isn't in any way, it just isn't Christmas.  Maybe it is like Christmas in the Australian Outback might be, it is turned down about 15 notches or it is like a single candle trying to illuminate a dark empty barn.  Something like that, anyway.

On the bright side it is a good crew here, from the top down.  I am fortunate to have few personnel problems so far and the other officers, chiefs and sailors are fun to be around.  I am trying hard not avoid being biased towards the folks I brought from Ft Dix, but boy are they doing well.  It may be the fact that we are all bright-eyed and bushy tailed as we are the latest "wave" of sailors here.  There is the November crew, not that they came in November, they were the "N" Customs iteration and the military phonetic version of N is November.  They came in March and some left in September, some left this month and some leave in March.  The first "Oscar" wave arrived in mid-November and is here through May, then our wave, Oscar 2, got here in mid-December and is here into June.  There won't be another wave, Papa, until April or May.  Anyway, maybe we are all eager or maybe we just have a very motivated group, but it is nice to see them all excelling.  

My routine has switched up a bit, I am working out in the afternoons now.  All my life I have been a morning guy, figuring that those hours are mine to manage and the first thing to go is always the afternoon workout, either because of work or family obligations.  Here we have a critical mass of folks that do this crazy workout in the afternoon from 3:30-5, so there is peer pressure to not miss it.  Thursday we did, among other things, 150 step-ups, 100 reverse lunges, 50 squats, 5 minutes of push-ups, 10 x 30 seconds of pullups and a couple other things.  My predecessor is a physical fitness guru and has devised these workouts and now I ache all over.  Of course this fouls up my plans to call home as I am no longer getting up at 4:30 am, so we have to figure out that end of the routine.

That's it for now, off to a softball game.  Gotta keep busy...

AJ

Well, I am finally in Kuwait and starting the job I was picked to do.  The flight over was pretty uneventful.  Because we took Navy transportation we had to overnight in Scotland so the aircrew could get a rest period in.  A few of us took some time to walk around the town of Irvine, but we were only on the ground for 12 hours and a lot of that was spent checking into the hotel or sleeping.  We had a quick stop for fuel in Souda Bay, Crete then we arrived in Ali al Salem, Kuwait.  It is a smallish airbase with a Navy Customs presence, so they took care of us until we could get bused over to Camp Arifjan, or AJ.  The trip here was pretty depressing.  The whole desert along the sides of the road is just filled with trash of all descriptions.  The highways in America may have trash alongside them, but I guess the grass and trees cover it up a bit or maybe those Adopt-a-Highway folks actually pick things up.  Here there is no place for the trash to hide.

AJ itself is a huge city, but a lot of the residents have left.  I am told that at the height of the Iraq war this place was packed, there were 6-7000 more soldiers here than there are now, and everyone leaving Afghanistan or Iraq and rotating back home spent three days here going through what is called the Warrior Transition Program.  That is now located in Germany (so I have that to look forward to in June…) and of course there is no more war in Iraq.  We are also trying to do more work processing folks right in Afghanistan so they don’t have to make a stop in Kuwait.  All that means that life has slowed down a lot here.  The place has amazing facilities – two exchanges (like a mall), Starbucks open 24 hours, great gyms, a huge dining facility, all within walking distance or a shuttle ride if I want to go over to the other side of the base, but there is this slightly weird vibe here with all of the empty tents.  Maybe I will get used to it.

I give up a little in privacy.  I went from my own hotel room in Norfolk to a shared 4-man room at Ft Dix (there were only 2 of us in it and at least we could close the door) to a modified open barracks here at AJ.  The officers below O-5 and Chiefs get what used to be an 18-man barracks.  They stuck in a bunch of 7/8 height walls and sectioned off these 3-man spaces.  Each of us gets a bunk bed and about 4 lockers positioned around the bed to make a little room.  The lockers and walls don’t go to the ceiling, so while you have the illusion of privacy any noise you make travels throughout the space.  There are tons of items from past residents; I had two TVs and lots of random stuff (foot powder, Pepto Bismol, sheets, and a tourniquet among other things) left in my room, along with ¼ inch of fine desert grit on everything.  I am better off than the rest of the sailors; they are in a true open bay with no walls or TVs.  I don’t get the impression that folks stay in the barracks much, though.  They work, work out, eat, and come back to sleep.  Then the next day comes and off you go.  There is apparently a group that gathers to smoke cigars outside, you can get Cubans here so I might try that out.  There is an MWR tent that shows movies 24/7.  All in all, not bad.

Moving Day

Finally, after 37 days at Ft Dix the end is in sight.  

The FOB experience was not as I had anticipated and resulted in some Army deaths from verbal shrapnel.  We were out there with an Air Force class and it really seemed as if they had forgotten about us.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was when a chaplain didn’t show up on Sunday for services.  I don’t care one way or the other but I have some sailors that really rely on Sunday worship.  We had checked and re-checked just to make sure there actually would be services, but it turns out the Chaplain was in Ft Meade.  Since he didn’t wake up that morning and teleport, I had the crazy suspicion that the Army had known about this and neglected to tell our class, so I called just about everyone I could get the number for and complained, then wrote an e-mail and copied everybody I could think of, then I bitched out the training staff I could find.  After all my constructive criticism about how our training could be done better, this was the one thing that got the Army to listen.  I had a Brigade Command Sergeant Major find me the next day, a two-hour meeting on the FOB experience with the training and operations folks, and some phone calls with various Army folks once we got back.

Ultimately, listening is one thing and getting a monolithic organization to change is quite another.  Senior Chief and I went to a meeting with the two Brigade Commanders in order to validate that we had accomplished all of our training.  I had a captive audience so I let them have it in a respectful way (what can they do, send me to Kuwait?) after telling them that I held their instructor corps in very high regard.  They smiled and nodded at me like I was a crazy person, which I suppose is the way you handle an unhappy customer in any line of business.  I think they are happy we are moving on, I am told that we leave behind a legacy of extreme competence (we were always early and always prepared), that we were a fun-loving group, and that we (I) threw too many verbal hand grenades.  My Senior Chief is former Army, and he counsels me that the reason he left the Army is because it is an organization that delights in quickly marching folks 20 miles only to have them wait wherever they are for 3 days.  The Navy could never do that, there would be too many sailors asking why and trying to figure out a way around the march, and ultimately trading some tools for a van so they could drive, or looking up some obscure regulation that forbids marches of more than 15 miles on the second Thursday in March.  On the flip side, sometimes you need someone to just shut up and go take a hill, and that is where the Army excels.  It all comes down to understanding each other’s culture, I suppose.

After that everyone was free for the weekend.  Tracy and the kids came and got me and we went to Philly.  I had not been there since Tracy and I spent a weekend waaaayyy back before we got married, so last century.  It was great to see everyone, the couple hours we saw each other at Thanksgiving was just a taste and not nearly enough time.  We went and saw Christmas lights at Macy’s, historical stuff downtown and the Franklin Institute.  It was still way too short, though, and the whole good-bye for the third time really stinks.  After hearing all of the many balls Tracy has to juggle all by herself it makes my job seem extremely easy, even if it sounds like the kids are stepping up and trying to help as much as possible.  I told Tracy a story of one night at the FOB when one of the supply guys brought me back some strawberry ice cream with strawberries on top after he made a run back to the base and she told me I had better not get used to treatment like that, things will be very different come mid-June when I return.  I do like that ice cream, though.

Downhill from here

I am writing this right before I head to the FOB, a mock-up of a forward operating base installed right here on Ft Dix, NJ.  It has big canvas 16-person tents, shower trailers, guard towers, everything you would want in a FOB.  However, I have to get this out before I go as there is no internet in the FOB.  Not that conditions are super Spartan or anything, the Army just didn’t pay the wifi bill.  War is hell.

 Camp Arifjan in Kuwait won’t be like that at all, it is more like a large city than a remote base so I will be sure to have access to the internet - if not in my box in the desert than certainly in the Starbucks.  We are not savages after all.

I think I have either stayed the same weight or gained a little.  The food here at Ft Dix is outstanding, far better than anything I ever had on any ship or Navy base so no matter how much I work out or run around doing Army training I think I am just treading water.  The killer is the frozen yogurt, because they also put out strawberries, peaches and other canned fruit that you can ladle all over it and then top with whipped cream.  One night both frozen yogurt machines went down, that was a tough one.  Everyone knows that when the LT gets his dessert he is a far happier man than when he goes without, so the Chiefs run recon now to make sure everything is up and running.  One night a Chief actually took the bag out of the machine and cut it open at our table, an ice chunk had stopped up the nozzle.  Navy ingenuity at its finest.

I find myself getting used to some of the Army terminology.  It is still a lot like talking to an Aussie or something, you think you have the thread of the conversation then some words get used that don’t seem to have the meaning that you are used to and you get completely lost.  For instance, “contact” in the Navy is a blip on the radar, something you have identified but you don’t necessarily know what it is.  You might say ‘I have a contact bearing 250, range 4 miles”.  In the Army, contact means something that is shooting at you.  We were playing at convoy operations, and every time one of the sailors would say something like “Contact at 3 o’clock” the Army guys would get all hyper.  We have to keep explaining that we are in the Navy, and things are different in the nautical world.  I like a lot of the phraseology, it can be very colorful.  Someone smart is high speed, the opposite is a crayon-eating bastard.  Hook and pile is Velcro, a sliding fastener is a zipper.  They are fond of saying “too easy” or “easy day” or “tracking” in response to a request.  The one I don’t like is “hooah” which can mean anything but no.  An instructor might be giving a lesson and pause every 30 seconds or so to say “hooah”, as if saying “can you see the subtle difference here?”  to which you are supposed to respond “hooah”, responding that you do in fact appreciate the finer details of defilade.  I have tried to ban our sailors from using it, but it can be so mindless that sometimes they forget.

Anyway, we will be back early next week.  After that it is straight downhill, we “validate”, have a couple days off then take about a month to fly military air to Kuwait.  I have been trying to pull a lot of info out of the folks already there, it sounds like it should be an interesting time.  I am going to be the Company Commander of Alpha Company.  It is a mission the Navy has been performing for years, so everything is pretty institutionalized.  I’ll ease on in and see what there is to see.

Holiday season

So another Thanksgiving has come and gone.  I didn't think about it until after the fact, but it was the 20^th anniversary of the first time I spent a holiday away from home - in 1992 I was somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea on the USS Kalamazoo.   I remember that we had a pretty good turkey dinner; it was good being on a supply ship because we always had a ready supply of fresh food since we in turn had to give it out to the rest of the fleet.  I remember thinking that even though it stunk to be away from home for my second-favorite holiday (Christmas obviously being in first place by several lengths) that at least I was part of something worthwhile.  This year’s meal was something else, though.  I have seen and done some pretty awesome things in my 20+ years in the Navy, but this event was like nothing I have ever been a part of.

A large part of the Cherry Hill, NJ community comes out to an event at a local hotel and cheers on a bunch of sailors, soldiers and airmen training at Ft Dix.  It started 9 years ago when a local businessman names Eric Spevak teamed up with a Jewish War Veterans post and has grown every year.  Our caravan of 4 buses was escorted by hundreds of motorcyclists down 295 and when we arrived we walked through a gauntlet of over 1000 people that turned out to see us.  I must have talked to over a hundred different people, and the number that said they have been there every year was just unbelievable.  Lots of people wanted to hug us or just touch us, it really made me want to step back and say, “Wait, you obviously have the wrong group here.  We are just heading over to Kuwait for a bit.”  It really was humbling and I wish all those on the front lines could have experienced just a little part of that.  Here is a local story on the event: http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20121123/NEWS01/311230020/Soldiers-served-Thanksgiving-feast-Cherry-Hill?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Inside we were served a feast fit for a King, feted by many local personalities (including Ms. New Jersey 2000 and 2012, see my awesome pic) and to cap it all off we got to see a former WWII Army Tech Sergeant get awarded the Bronze Star.  He landed on Omaha Beach, fought his way across Europe (including the Battle of the Bulge) and helped in the liberation of Dachau.  His paperwork was lost to history until a local news station profiled him, found his old CO and got the award pushed up the chain of command.  He is 87 now, there aren't too many of these WWII heroes left.  Then a mom got up to talk about her son, LCPL Jeremy Kane, who had died during combat in the Helmand Province.  Very moving.

When we got back Tracy and the kids were standing in the parking lot, which was awesome.  They were on their way up to northern New Jersey and timed the trip so we could get a few hours together at the base’s Rec Center.  Once we got past the dragon at the entrance we got to catch up a bit, eat candy and play some games.  I must have been asked a couple dozen times today about the visit and if it was fun.  It is sort of like asking someone to describe what their pizza was like when you are on a diet and can’t have any, I think – they were just living vicariously through me.

We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Between now and Dec 4^th we roll from training event to training event.  Land Navigation is followed by Movement Under Fire and Hand Grenades is followed by Counter IED is followed by three days and nights at a pretend Forward Operating Base, and if you are asking why I am doing any of that training you are a couple of steps ahead of a certain service that I have promised myself I will try not to malign.  Enough of that.

This usually begins my favorite time of the year.  After Thanksgiving I am allowed to play Christmas music all I want, I start to decorate the outside and pull the inside boxes down from the attic.  Is is amazing how fast the days go by between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I am home, I hope that rule holds true in Kuwait.

Arrrmmmmyyyy training, sir!

Sorry for the length and delay in posting, it has been a busy few days...

Everyone told me that this training would be crazy, but there really are no words to describe the complete disconnect between the actual job I will be doing in Kuwait (leading a group of Navy Customs folks) and the training I am getting.  Rather than create their own training center the Navy (and Air Force and Coast Guard) all send their folks to the Army for training, so anyone going to Central Command (CENTCOM, which includes Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and Kuwait) goes to one of about a dozen or more Army posts for training before flying overseas.  On the face of it that makes great sense, it should be more effective, efficient and cheaper to do it this way.  In actuality it is a huge mess.  Kuwait is a lot like Canada in that the US has a huge presence there and it is essentially a benign area (although you have to be careful in Quebec , those Quebecois are crazy).  Even though by policy the US doesn’t have any “permanent” bases in the Middle East for all intents and purposes we have many in Kuwait and the most dangerous things over there are the drivers.  I won’t need Kevlar body armor, we won’t be traveling in convoys with HMMWVs and MRAPs, and there aren’t any IEDs dotting the countryside.  However, a lot of my training relates to all of that.  The Army has one particular set of training standards and they apply them evenly and without thought across everyone, regardless of service or mission.  We don’t actually get Customs training until our last 2 days here. 

I am at this wonderful point in my career where I have more than 20 years of service, I have had a couple of commands and I can take or leave making the next rank, so I don’t have a problem telling people when I think things are wrong, and that is what I have been doing.  My opinion is that this is a huge waste of time and money and my rabble-rousing has apparently made it up to the Brigade Commander (the guy in charge of executing the training) and I have to talk to him after Thanksgiving.  In the meantime I just keep writing things down and reporting the craziness up the chain of command.  I really, really dislike the whole military culture of putting down the branch of service that isn’t your own and I try very hard not to let the sailors see what I think and feel (except the Chiefs, who occasionally have to talk me down) but this is institutionalized thinking at its worst.

It is amazing how quickly you go into a news vacuum.  I am aware that we reelected the President (or the Kenyan as some here are calling him) and that Israel is spinning things up against the Palestinians.  I am also aware that several current and former general officers have been very, very naughty.  Beyond that…I don’t know much of what is going on in the wide world.  The day is consumed with details about training and who is sick and who didn’t receive a gas mask and where is the supply van and why don’t our comms work.  Every evening we solidify the plan for the following day and tentatively set the plan for the day after that.  Then it is bedtime.  If I get up early enough I get in a workout and the cycle repeats.

I did thoroughly enjoy qualifying on the M9 pistol, even though if I have to start shooting things in Kuwait we have big problems.  I used to be a pretty good shot back in the day; I worked hard on becoming an expert with the .45 and the M16.  It is all physics and how you arrange your muscles and bones to support the weapon, so it is really something that anyone can do well with enough practice.  I haven’t shot a whole lot since, I may get to a range every couple of years for what they call familiarization fire, where they just make sure you know how to safely operate the weapon.  I wasn’t the best in the Navy class, but I was in the top grouping and that was with a malfunctioning pistol.  These uppity kids have to be kept in their place.

The group dynamics are fun to watch.  This is a little bit like Survivor in that a bunch of strangers get thrown together and have to survive various challenges.  The military hierarchy and discipline roots out a lot of the stuff you would see on a reality show, but I know for sure that there will be sickness and that sooner or later there will be a fight, probably over a female (I got some feedback on that word from my last post – that is just what the fairer sex are called here.  If one has to go into a male barracks room they call out “female on deck”).  Well, the crud is already creeping around the barracks - we have sent a couple to the ER and a couple to sick call - and I am getting wind of unrest among the troops.  Some have never had to share space with others like this before and have problems when they don’t get their way.  There is absolutely no privacy here, which can make calling home uncomfortable, particularly if there are issues at home.  And of course we have young, single males and females vying for each other’s attention.  All of that really makes for interesting leadership challenges, and Thanksgiving could really amplify the problem as it is a tangible reminder that we are all away from home and our families. 

The main part of the FEMA presence is finally leaving Ft Dix.  There are still tons of state troopers around but the lines at the galley (or DFAC [Dining Facility] as the Army insists on calling it) are going to shorten up a bit.  We have fun throwing Navy words at the Air Force (we are actually in their barracks) and the Army and they have fun throwing their super special terminology back at us.  That part of inter-service rivalry I can deal with, as long as it is in jest.  It can be an obstacle though.  There was an event on our training schedule last week called PATS – obviously an acronym for something, but what?  I was told it stands for Protection Assessment Test System.  Well then, why didn’t you say so!  Turns out it is a system to test the seal on your gas mask, they use a very nice-smelling incense in lieu of teargas, which is a plus.

I heard Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” last week, which is only the best Christmas song (and best Christmas album cover, or CD cover, or virtual cover or whatever it is called now) ever in the history of the world.  Then I remembered won’t be home to torture everyone with Christmas music this year, and that they may discover an awesome new Christmas candle scent without me, and who is going to hang all the outside lights and they don’t even know my system to put everything away so it is going to get all messed up and I won’t get my birthday lasagna this year and then she starting singing the words and pretty soon it wasn’t as fun to listen to as it usually is.  

Admin Week

The first week of my mobilization to Kuwait has been eventful and uneventful at the same time.  The pace of the workups goes something like this: one week in Norfolk to make sure I am not sick, lame or wounded either physically or mentally and to ensure that I am fully transferred from the Reserves back to active duty Navy, followed by a period of weeks of Army training at Ft. Dix to make sure I am ready to enter the CENTCOM area of responsibility, followed by a couple days of training on what the Customs battalion will actually be doing.  The training period got off to a fitful start because of Hurricane Sandy.  Although it was only a glancing blow to the Hampton Roads area it was still enough to curtail the majority of operations at the naval base for a day or so and throw a major wrench into the travel plans of dozens of sailors trying to get there.  I ended up being the senior officer for the Customs folks going through Norfolk, which is both a blessing and a curse.  It is always a privilege to be in charge of sailors and it is not something I ever take lightly.  I am fortunate because being responsible for a group of mobilized Reservists headed out on Customs duty is sort of self-selecting in that these all appear to be locked-on sailors, most have volunteered and for a large number this is not their first deployment.  In fact, at least 2 did this very mission just last year.  The flip side is that there is no skating by this week, just tracking where the heck everyone is spread around the country is a major effort.  I am extremely fortunate to have some solid Chiefs and a Senior Chief, these gentlemen (and one lady) are the folks that make the Navy run.  I get a little bit of street cred with them because I was a Chief myself before I went to the “dark side” and got commissioned (the Chief’s point of view, and there is a lot of truth to this, is that the pinnacle of Navy service is to reach the rank of Chief) but they are evaluating my performance as much as I am evaluating theirs. 

Logistics are my only major problem as I go through the week in Norfolk.  My flight to get to Norfolk was cancelled due to Sandy, so I jumped in my car and drove down.  Because personal vehicles are verboten at Ft. Dix, I had to get the car back home and get to Ft. Dix on my own while the rest of the crew took buses up.   I was able to finish up with the paperwork on Friday, turn everything over to the Senior Chief and Chiefs and head home.  It was great to be able to spend a few more hours with the family but not-so-great to have another goodbye.

Rules of Engagement

So I mentioned to a few people that I was going to write a blog during my deployment to Kuwait for the Navy.  Most said the same thing your elderly grandmother might say to you, "Oh, isn't that nice", and moved on without giving it a second thought.  A few asked what it might include (good question!) and one had an interesting reaction.  "Oh!", he said.  It was not the kind of "oh" you would give a particularly cool firework, not even the kind of "oh" you would say after a big hit on the ice or football field, it was more like the kind of "oh" you give when it is your turn to get your 2-year-old up from a nap and you find a large diaper surprise that has been fermenting pretty much since the beginning of the nap.

That kind of "oh" will give one pause, and he subsequently offered some good words of advice on whether or not a blog was the right choice for me.  I admit I had not fully thought out the whole blog thing.  I had some notional reasons for taking it up - I want to continue to work on my writing style, for instance.  Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised, and restricting myself to official Navy writing will be akin to only doing tricep dips for 8 months.  I am going to be very good at nonconcurring with SNMs correspondence SUBJ: PFA FAILURE 2ND CYCLE 2012 but maybe not so great at good ol' reg'lar writin'.

I would also like to communicate better.  One of the things that I admired about some past Navy Commanding Officers and that I ultimately adopted was that they issued a written command philosophy, and one of my main points in my own command philosophy is that we can't over-communicate.  I would far prefer to have to screen the noise than to never have it transmitted to me.  This blog is an attempt to communicate what is happening to me, because it is a fairly limited population that can talk knowledgeably about the Navy in general and the Navy Customs mission in particular.  Hopefully I can effectively communicate things so the audience can understand a little bit of that very, very, very specific topic.  My brother-in-law Joe is an inspiration there, his weekly takes on his life in China have been must-read material.  I also intend to share some of the things that interest me, for instance there are some great military blogs out there that I follow closely and folks might do well to look at them every once in a while.

But who is the audience?  Well, I suppose it is the people that care about what is happening to me, primarily my immediate family (hi kids!) and close friends.  I suppose it might grow wider to Facebook friends or coworkers, and if they like to read it then that will be great, but my inner voice will be talking to the people that are close to me.

One obstacle is that the Navy has published guidelines for social media.  There are the typical rules - don't publish classified info, make sure it is clear that these are your opinions and not that of the Department of Defense, don't bring dishonor to yourself or the Service, etc.  Then there is one that gives me pause - don't post information that can compromise mission security or success.  The governing term is OPSEC - Operations Security.  It means I have to be vague: no specific numbers or durations, no specific details about some of the training I will go through, that sort of thing.  Ultimately that makes the job of communicating things to the audience a little tougher, but please understand that this is not negotiable.

I hope to get to this at least once a week, but who knows what time and connectivity will be like as I move through the pipeline.  Comments are welcome.