07 February 2008

"I know who's .......


From the Soldier side:
Mission Kalsu: Part 3 the burger flipper. As most of my readers have figured out by now, I have a problem with some parts of the military, I don’t like poor leaders. I call them Dumb Ass Leaders (DAL). On the other hand, I want everyone to know that almost every single enlisted person and most NCOs I worked with in Iraq were very good. I am talking about Regular, Reserve, National Guard- Army, Marines and Navy! They were all very good. I was often amazed at the high IQs many of these people had and the ability to get any job done with little or no supervision... and the absolute bravest people I ever saw!
But there were exceptions to the high quality of enlisted people and one case that I will not forget. I usually don’t pick on lower ranking people, but when I’ve tried to help them do better, and they were too ignorant to take the help, then I’ve lost hope for them.
We had one such soldier we had to work with. She was National Guard from a state I’ll not mention. She had been “talking to customers” for a total of one week when we arrived at FOB Kalsu to help. Her civilian job was flipping burgers at a restaurant or something, so she had no other experience to fall back on and she wouldn’t listen.
A lot of the “customers” we had to talk to were brought in for little or no reason. It was like that everywhere we went, but some places were worse than others. Part of my job at Kalsu was to help some of the newer “customer relations” folks when they were talking to “customers.” After our first mission to Fallujah with the 1st Marine Div, my team seemed to have a reputation of being a little above average…so, we were requested everywhere. How or why we were sent to Kalsu still puzzles me, because the folks there didn’t seem to know what they were doing and didn’t like our suggestions.
Anyway, Burger Flipper was “chatting” with some dude one day and I was sitting in as an observer and to offer tips to improve her methods—which sucked. She went down a list of questions like her job was to just fill in a form. On about her fourth question, the dude blurts out: “I know who’s bombing your camp everyday.”
I thought that was important, but Burger Flipper just went right to her next question and seemed to not even here what this knucklehead had said. I interjected and said: “hey, that might be something important, you know Force Protection stuff…”
Burger Flipper looked at me with a very puzzled look on her face and said: “what are you talking about?” (She never added my rank when she talked to me, which normally never bothered me, but she did it with great disrespect.) I had to take over the “chat” and I looked at this dude and said: “tell me about who’s bombing the camp, and tell me the truth.” This guy went of for hours telling us all kinds of stuff. After about 20 minutes, Burger Flipper caught on as to what a great “catch” this dude was and got her head into the game. As she seemed to do better, I backed off and let her do her job. This was going to be a good one....

To be cont.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

oooohhhh this does not bode well...lol