Monday, July 8, 2013

Month 11 Day 8

Notebook entry
22 reports given, e-mail catch-up, early out, weapons cleaning, curious case, shaking one-on-one.

Journal entry
I did my normal Friday routine.  I slept in until 0630, caught up on E-mails, cleaned my weapon.  I tried to talk to Suzan in the morning, but she was out.  I watched the Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the afternoon.  I thought it was good, but for all of the hype it wasn’t great. 
I worked on networking and contacting recruiters because of the new order that talks about the ability to get out 12 mo before your EAS. 
The only thing of significance was the LtCol deflecting a 1 on 1 with the SecDef.  He used the reason that he did not want to offend the general by meeting with him alone as an ETT.  Capt Nowak was also personally invited to a luncheon with the SecDef and was told to ignor it on the procedural grounds that the requirement needed to be provided to the team, and that we would source it.  Instead we are doing the walkabout with the SecDef and that’s it.  This pissed off Brian, Graham and me.  Its annoying because the man seems to be trying to get to ground truth, and is doing it the best way possible, removing the brass and having one on ones with the people with experience.  I spoke to the Colonel about it this morning (the 9th) (I should not disguise how difficult this was to do it is not a comfortable situation to talk to a man many years your senior, who outranks you by a significant degree, but I figured I was asking him to do the same thing, and the issue was significant enough--not being entirely honest with the civilians who run the military--that I decided to confront him on it) and he said this was not the forum to address these concerns.   He said that he was going to bring up the ethnicity and logistic issues that they were having, but was not going to bring up corruption, personalities, etc because those issues are too micro-but a 240 Bravo class is somehow strategic?  He said that I could go to the luncheon if I liked and air my concerns.  I think that I will, and I think that I will find a nerd and chew his ear off about how this level of command is nonfunctional.  After I was done talking to him he yelled at Capt Arthur and Capt Brawny for not having the balls to talk to him, I wasn't trying to incite that. 

I also got into it with Capt Brawny about David Ricardo and the theory of comparative advantage.  I proved to him mathematically.  He’s like ‘when they closed the Caterpillar plant in IL, that screwed hundreds of people’ sigh, his Republicanism is founded in shock-jocks, and anecdotal evident not economics.  I occasionally forget that he is impervious to logic on anything that remotely approached politics.  Brian picked up where I left off being an econ major, I put in my headphones and finished watching my movie.

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