COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

What a weekend!

I got a call at work on thursday afternoon instructing me to form the unit on Saturday at 0500, and get ready to move down to the lower keys, rolling out the gate not later than 0900, to support civil authorities in the wake of Hurricane Dennis.

I spent Friday at the unit with some of my key leaders, figuring out the logistical requirements of the move, when I got the word to push the next day's formation back to 1000 hours, and be ready to move at noon. I made a command decision to form the unit at 0800 rather than 1000, though, because we had just received a bunch of new vehicles back from languishing at Fort Stewart and Camp Blanding for more than a year, and it would take us some time to fuel them and pull a full maintenance inspection. With no external recovery assets between here and the Keys, I couldn't afford to take a dud vehicle. And between receiving the mission and conducting troop leading procedures, issuing weapons, dispatching and pulling maintenance on vehicles, and installing radios, it would just take some time to pull out the gate.

Just how much time, precisely, is nobody else's business but ours. And don't underestimate how much I can short circuit that process to come kick some terrorists' or rioters ass if I really needed to move in a hurry. But I wanted to afford myself the extra two hours to plan, brief soldiers, and pack correctly, and do this right. With a five hour drive separating the area of operations from the base of supply, you don't want to screw up the load-out. It's a ten-hour round trip if you forget something.

Meanwhile, I had also already committed with a vendor to contract breakfast for the company. She needed to buy food for the next days' breakfast by 3 pm or her wholesaler would shut down for the day, and she had already committed. This vendor has been good to the guard, and good to my soldiers in the past, and I wasn't going to cancel breakfast and leave her with hundreds of dollars of rotting eggs, ham, and sausage. We'd probably pay for it anyway. Which means I'd wind up getting run down and made to pay for it out of my own pocket, as the unit commander, if I didn't actually feed soldiers with it.

So we rescheduled the chow pickup and had the formation at 0800. We went right to work pulling maintenance on the vehicles. The fueler had aborted mission, so we were going to have to fuel at a civilian service station, using a government fuel card, which takes a long time and a good deal of organization, prior to a convoy.

Plus, some moron somewhere decided that the Florida Army National Guard spent too much money on fuel during the Summer Storm season, and decided that it would be a good idea to A.) Shut each fuel card off after two swipes unless and until we called for a reauthorization, and by the way, you're shit out of luck on weekends and after hours, and/or B.) No fuel card may be used to charge more than 1,000 dollars in a month.

Well, that might work ok for a line company with two vehicles. But I've got dozens of vehicles in the motor pool, and they all have to run on one or two fuel cards, and to put a headquarters company, separated from the support battalion by 180 miles, on the same footing with a light infantry company when it comes to fuel purchases, is beyond insane. Sheer fucking idiocy. Only a REMF bean-counter moron could come up with that one. And the predictable result is that you will eventually have a convoy of troops pulled over on the side of the road immobilized for lack of fuel, and the governor will have some esplaining to do.

Yeah, I might get in trouble for typing that, but I've already told my battalion headquarters several times that it's madness.

Fortunately, though, it was not a factor in this storm because at about 0830, I got the word to stand my troops down, and dismiss by 1200 hours. Just keep a 24 manning on unit phones in case we got called back up again as the storm made its way toward the gulf coast.

So we finished PMCSing the new vehicles, so I could get needed parts on order for them (seriously, Active Army...you sat on our vehicles for a year and didn't do a damn thing to fix them before shipping them down? Rather, you sat there and watched our tires go flat???? What's up with that???), formed the company, thanked the troops, told them to stay by their phones, and sent the Joes home, while I spent some time with the leaders going over the next drill.

On Sunday afternoon, I got a call again from the Battalion commander, ordering me to form the unit at 0600, and be prepared to move for the Panhandle not later than 0900 on Monday. Long-assed drive in these bumpy, un-airconditioned trucks at 45mph. So moving out on time was critical. Even then we'd have to remain overnight somewhere.

And the fuel card issue could have been critical, too (although it was solved by arranging to have military fuelers meet the column en route to the staging area...something which is easy to do northbound but next to impossible southbound.) But if those fuelers were there, we'd have no trouble at all. Plus, with organizational maintenance shops scattered around the length of Florida, I knew I'd have somewhere to leave a broken-down vehicle.

This helps, because I don't have to commit a contact team for a day at a time towing a vehicle up and down the keys, but also because it means I can actually take more vehicles. I'm more willing to take a chance on an iffy or unfamiliar vehicle if I know I'm supported with external maintenance assets.

Also, having a soldier manning the phones 24-7 was a Godsend. I was home, and technically off orders for Sunday, but having a couple of experienced soldiers at the Armory enabled me to delegate away most of my routine communications requests and saved me from having to call every section leader and platoon leader personally, plus full-time staff, plus supply, everytime something changed. It also saved my cell phone from ringing off the hook everytime someone had a minor question.

Which was invaluable, because it gave me time to sit home and THINK!!!!

How will my soldiers in Key West make it back in time? Should I even require it? Some of them had not even made it home to check on their own homes before getting the alert to come back to Miami by 0600 the next day.

Should I have soldiers who live in central florida report to the Armory? Or meet us en route? Normally, I'd just have them meet up with us on route, but some of them are hand receipt holders, and are therefore signed for gear that other people would be packing (and potentially losing.)

How many vehicles, exactly, shall I plan on taking? Do I need to request bus transportation in addition to organic vehicles? What time should the busses arrive?

Normally, I offload a lot of that movement planning to the unit executive officer. But he lives on the other side of the state, and will have to go to bed early in order to drive.

Who should I have command the convoy? Who is capable? Who needs the experience?

So and so ships off to Ranger School in a week. Do I mobilize and deploy him? Well, I'd lose a very scarce (and expensive!) Ranger School slot. But he's a hand receipt holder, and a key leader. (I finally had him show for the load-out, sign his property over, but decided not to deploy him. I had no way to transport him back from the Panhandle to Miami, unless he took his own car, and I couldn't pay him mileage.

Do I have enough vehicles to haul troops? Do I have enough additional vehicles, and the right KIND of vehicles, AFTER I take into account trucks and humvees transferred to other companies, to be transferred, vehicles which are broken, vehicles I just don't trust for long trips, and the number of licensed drivers available, to haul my water trailers and generators? How about my mobile kitchen setup? If not, then I need to give the S4 a heads-up.

So I did what any responsible commander would do:

I took my cell phone, went to an all-you-can-eat sushi dive, spread my vehicle listings and unit roster before me, and went to work, trying to resolve all these issues, and still make it to bed early. I only had to make a few phone calls, and was only moderately interrupted by minutiae that someone else could easily handle. (I'm a big believer in delegation!)

Got home, checked in with a couple of key personnel, and got ready for bed, when I got a call from the Battalion commander a little after 10.

"Listen, Jason...the formation time has been pushed back to 1000 hours. Everything got pushed back four hours. They're going to make another assessment in the morning to see if they need us. The damage isn't so bad as they thought."

No problem. I hate getting up early, anyway. The only thing is, a later departure time would change the spot I want to remain overnight. I don't want to keep truckers on the road too late. It's hard enough to stay awake in those things in 95 degree weather in 100 percent humidity after adequate rest. I didn't want to be pulling into a staging area at 1 am only to get up at 0500 and move at 0600 to pull 24 hour ops the next day and for who knows how long?

So I brought that up, and was told we'd figure out a new RON spot in the morning.

With that I called my 24 guys and had them help me out calling platoon sergeants, who would call their squad leaders, who would in turn call their team leaders, who would in turn call their soldiers. I would call my first sergeant, my XO, and my officer platoon leaders personally.

Made the call not to have my first sergeant drive up from the keys until I got a green light that we would actually be rolling. He had his own home to see to, and the Navy wouldn't let him onto the naval base where he lived yet. So he hadn't been home yet. Turned out to be the right call:

The next morning, at five minutes after eight, as I was already on the turnpike driving to Miami, I got a phone call to stand down the whole unit. They didn't need us. Better to keep us in reserve for Tropical Depression #5 and following storms we're already tracking.

Whew!

It was the right call, though. We weren't really needed, and it would take us two days to get there in force, anyway. It's still very early in hurricane season, and we have a long storm season ahead of us. If you disrupt Guardsmen's lives too often, without an overwhemling reason, you won't have a Guard for very long. Most of these soldiers had already gone to Iraq and deployed for three or more storms last year. We've had people on and off pulling other missions as well, in support of deploying troops.

I was already committed to taking off work, though, so I stayed at the unit catching up on paperwork, and signing dozens of those inane little labels that say "This container contains no classified documents."

I told my full-timers I wanted them on all my mermite containers and juice jugs, too.

Splash, out

Jason