We Left the Lights On: NAMBLA

Just one quick story to lighten the mood of this rather weepy blog.

So there I was harassing the production supervisor out on the flight line trying to track down COPIOUS amounts of information for the evening meeting.  In hindsight, this entire sequence of events, repeated daily, is laughable because regardless of how much information I had going into the briefing, I was going to get beat up and screamed at and chewed out.  Uh, the waste!

But there I was.  Interrupting operations.  Asking questions.  Being driven to problematic aircraft.  Bothering technicians.

I still have no idea why or how the supervisors were all so patient with me and my little clipboard, but they were.  Bless their hearts.

Only one time did they attempt to play a joke on me and I think they only stopped it from going forward because I took the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Photo:  Yes, yes I did.

One evening, during my usual Q&A in the flight line truck, the production supervisor explains that we had a very, very bad day.  

"We had some issues," he says,"and we're out a NAMBLA adaptor."

Oh Christ, I think.  Then I ask the inevitable, "What's a NAMBLA adaptor?  Can we go look at one on an aircraft?"

He goes on, "It's a key component and probably won't come in for weeks.  We might even lose the alert commitment again."

OH MAN AND I HAVE TO BRIEF THIS!?  OH SHIT...OH SHIT...OH SHIT!!!

But just before I hit full-on panic mode he starts laughing and explains that NAMBLA stands for North American Man-Boy Love Association.  It's all a joke.

Video clip:  NAMBLA

While I should've taken the following bet to use "NAMBLA adaptor" during the brief (for a $20 payout), I was just thankful that I had good leaders around me willing to make jokes (potentially at my expense) in order to help me see the bigger picture.

Cheers!

We Left the Lights On: Well, on paper...

So how did we, as a unit, inherit Captain Cockeyes?

Video clip:  I wasn't talking to you Deeds, I was talking to that squirrel (mountain goat) over there!

I blamed at lot of it on the internal promotion system of large institutions in my last post since it is far easier to pass someone up the chain rather than deal with them outright (even though that's the most humane thing to do for both the individual as well as the organization).  We allow bad leaders to remain in positions of authority and jeopardize the careers of those in their charge because we fear conflict.  We avoid sitting someone down and saying, "You just don't have what it takes and probably never will, so try to find something more suitable to your skillset."

Photo:  This works too...

Now there is a kindler, gentler way to say all that, but at the end of the day we just need to stop wasting everyone's time and energy and fire the ineffective (and dangerous) leader.  Kick him out!  You're doing him a favor and letting everyone move on with their lives (HT to Jim Collins)!

Ok, now that we got the high-level reasons out of the way, how did we literally get stuck with someone so oblivious to his own behavior that he was shitcanned from his job in Afghanistan and sent all the way back to England on the taxpayer dime?

Simple:  

Four months before our deployment there was a series of opaque incidents that forced the (unfair and untimely) removal of our current supervisor, Captain Awesome.  Not only did Captain Awesome have a wealth of experience and knowledge, but he actually mentored me on how to be a decent, respectable maintenance officer.  

Like woah!  I know?  Crazy!  Right?

All I know is that there was a perception held by one individual, LtCol Tri-too-hard, that there was something going on between Captain Awesome (male, married) and another Captain (female, single).  All unfounded, but Captain Awesome still had to leave the unit and go to timeout (the Wing AFSO21 office, because that's how much we value innovation in the Air Force...it's the support section for officers AKA the innovation ghetto).

This left us without an officer for both pre-deployment training in Las Vegas as well as the actual deployment across EMEA to Afghanistan.  LtCol Tri-too-hard and his flunkies, in their infinite wisdom, did not see this as a problem and decided to replace Captain Awesome with the most "qualified" individual for the task:  Captain Cockeyes.

Now I bring attention to the word qualified since it is a relative term.  The Air Force, like most bureaucratic corporations, largely applies this word to someone based on their records.  And so we come to live and die by the phrase, "Well, on paper he looked like the best (whatever) for the (very important, no fail mission)."

In the case of Captain Cockeyes, it was his graduation from AMMOS that sealed the deal.

NOTE:  I will never understand why we, as an institution, value this school so much since the only thing it seems to produce is a bunch of douche bags who only went there to further their own careers and never share any of the secret-squirrel knowledge they learned over the course of eight months.  My apologies to the two officers who don't fit this assessment, but you are the .0001%.  Sorry.

So just as perceptions got us into this mess (i.e. no leadership just weeks before a transcontinental pre-deployment to Vegas), perceptions of Captain Cockeye's competence got us mired even deeper into an already irreversible death spiral just before a real-world deployment.

Video clip:  SMH...

So what exactly happened in Vegas?  

Well my friends, you're in luck, because what happened in Vegas didn't exactly stay there...

Video clip:  ...herpes and bad leadership.

We Left the Lights On: The Pistol

When you deploy to the desert, you get issued a gun.  For better or for worse, you are essentially married to this thing.  You must carry your weapon at all times and you must take it wherever you go.  This includes the chow hall and the bathroom.  The only exception is when President Obama visits and makes everyone either leave their guns outside the dining facility or vacate the premise.  Needless to say, I left.

Carrying a gun was a basic requirement and took place regardless of your specialty or job.  You simply had to take care of the weapon whether you felt comfortable around guns or not.

This is not a bad idea in theory considering that the only thing between you and the enemy is a chain-link fence and a poop ditch.  And that's if you're lucky.

Photo:  Of course the Afghans bedazzled their poop trucks...

But that's the problem with theory:  reality.  Because in reality we had a bunch of gun-toking maintainers who would consistently leave their weapons on buses (driven by third country nationals) or in the chow halls (manned by third country nationals) or in the bathroom (serviced by third country nationals).  Now third country nationals are, in theory, vetted and considered safe to work on the installation.  That doesn't mean they won't take the opportunity to kill you if they find a gun by the urinal though.

So, unfortunately, we had to issue paperwork to folks who left guns at bus stops or around the compound.  I didn't like doing it, but the alternative (being dead) was much worse.

Then one evening when I stumbled into work (my hours were roughly 1600 until 0400) I found my immediate supervisor (who we'll affectionally call Captain Cockeyes) already gone.  No turnover.  No heads-up as to what had happened that day.  Just gone.

Except for one thing:  his gun.

Photo:  Seriously?!

Now he had left like this before and forgotten his coat (which I filled with rocks) and his notes (which I shredded) and his care packages (which I distributed to the guys) and his identification card (which I ransomed for food), but never his gun.

Before you judge me, just know there was a long/short (or perhaps a brief/intense) history with this individual that I will dive into later; right or wrong I felt justified in my previous behaviors.  This time, however, I had hit the jackpot.

Video clip:  I couldn't have set my situation up any better than these guys!

I debated and discussed the potential courses of action with my Senior and Chief, because no matter the situation they have the experience and have seen it all (both maintenance and mischief).

They persuaded me not to rat him out to the commander (Major Tormentor) or the operations officer (Major Panties), but instead helped me hatch a plan to hide the gun in the ceiling tiles and draw a map.

I just want to take a moment to let everyone know that I now realize this entire sequence of events was a horrible idea and I take full responsibility for being a dumb and immature lieutenant.

So at the end of my shift I hid the gun and told one of my other supervisors where the gun was (four tiles west and three tiles north) so that Captain Cockeyes would learn his lesson, but not doom everyone to a day of his unreasonable mood swings.

Despite my best intentions, he ended up blowing his stack and acting even more irrationally than he normally did throughout that day.

So when turnover came around you bet your bippy he was there.  But he didn't lay into me, he laid into my Senior.

He took this grown man away from the turnover meeting (which took place near the turd vaporization trucks) and proceeded to yell at him.  When I approached to take the blame he told me to leave and continued to berate the Senior.

To this day I still feel awful that I did not more forcefully say it was me.  Fortunately, I didn't lose any friends over the incident and Captain Cockeyes proceeded to screw up even more monumentally than anyone could have ever predicted, which left me feeling even more justified for acting like an immature brat.

So at the end of the day I made out pretty okay and learned a really important lesson:  sheer incompetence gets you promoted.

Oh sorry, did I forget to mention that Major Cockeyes is currently a squadron commander?

Well I don't want to get too ahead of myself; more stories are in order to prove the above point.

We Left the Lights On: The Untold Stories of Bagram Airfield

Just to be clear, I was given the rights to that title by a true patriot.  I was lucky enough to go to Squadron Officer School (AKA Cynical Captain Finishing School) with this individual and could not agree more with his insights from multiple deployments at Bagram.

He came to the title We Left the Lights On after a series of daytime missions where he consistently noticed that the stadium lights that lined the roughly two-mile stretch of runway were left blazing full-bore despite the time of day being the one most closely associated with natural light.

 Photo:  Great at night...kind of dumb during the day...

To the point, anyone who knows anything about military logistics, or logistics in general, recognizes the egregious waste this standard operating procedure represents.  

Foremost, the US military had to first get the lights to a landlocked country in the middle of the Hindu Kush and then continuously ship diesel to the strategic hub in order to power the generators that fueled the lighting infrastructure.  While the outright cost of running the lights is obvious, the secondary costs and knock-on effects are the real crux of my friend's insight.

Photo:  Will we ever learn the lessons of history and geography?

In our attempt to tame the untamable (AKA the artificial country of Afghanistan), we tried to control a geographical region with a history of sending empires to their graves.  Thus, the overall costs should also include countless lives, our credibility, further destabilization in the region, a revitalized Russia, and...should I keep going?

Video clip:  Oh I love the irony of this clip (Ukrainian report on the US leaving another unstable, former Soviet region; PS I LOVE YOU CENTRAL ASIA, JUST NOT THAT MUCH, <3 THE US)

Background:  We initially attempted to leverage volume and mass shipping in the form of boats porting and offloading materiel at Karachi.  Unfortunately, this meant that we had to set up overland routes through a finicky Pakistan that drove us to rely on costly contractors to navigate dangerous mountain crossings through the NWFP.  The full costs of corruption and reliance on civilian employees will no doubt never be known.

The US military then pivoted away from Pakistan and toward overland routes via the steppes of Central Asia, which resulted in our having to strike deals with the dictators that continue to call the former Soviet Union home.

Photo and report:  OMG I AM GOING TO DROWN IN IRONY AND STUPIDITY IF I KEEP GOING.

Bottom-line?  My friend is a genius.  Ok, but seriously, if these tactical mistakes routinely compound into operational oversights that have irreversible strategic impacts on multiple countries, then why do they only seem obvious to young company grade officers?

Correction.  I think young junior military officers and general officers get it.  Something happens in middle management though.

And that's where I'll turn to next as I chronicle the untold stories of Bagram Airfield.

PS.  To my friend who lent me this title, I know that I owe you 10% in royalties if I ever make any money!

PSS.  To Eastern Europe and Central Asia, I love you. XOXO