(no subject)
Twelve days and counting...
Let's see if I can manage a longer entry this time. Doggone being responsible anyway....
Ahhh, who am I kidding. You all know me better than that. You all know that I tend to be better at being responsible for other people than myself...
So, how;s it been going here...well, I haven't killed anyone yet and no one has talked bout killing me, so I'll take that as good.
Had an interesting mission the other day. Given to me by a Battalion Staff Officer, the S-7, that makes him they guy responsible for Public Affairs, I think. Anyway, I receive a call the night prior to the mission from my Company Commander telling me that my scheduled mission has changed and I'll be leaving at 0900 instead of 0800, and that the S7 will be getting me the mission details. Looking back, I SHOULD have called the S7 directly, but I know staff pukes. There is no way they would be in the office after 1700, so I wait for the actual mission details to come down to me in a FRAGO so I can plan my part of it.
Okay, something I learned my first year of ROTC in college that is a basic of Army Leadership. When you change a mission, like my commander did to me, that is called a Warning Order, or WARNO, for short. It preceeds an Operations Order (OPORD) or, if there is already an OPORD you are working under, then a change to that OPORD is called a Fragmentary Order, or FRAGO. Also, there is the "one thirds, two thirds" rule that runs from the top down in any organization. That is, you take one third of the time until mission to generate your plan and give your subordinates two thirds of the time until mission to get ready for the mission. When implemented, this actually DOES work and work well. I've seen it happen.
Well, 0900 rolls around and my two trucks are lined up and ready to go. All my guys are there and we have no idea what we are doing or where we are going. 0905 rolls around, meaning that we are now late for our SP (Start Point, or the time a mission kicks off. NOT a good thing!) and we still have no plan, direction, or anything. 0910, the S2 (Intelligence Officer) comes up to me and passes off a squad of Polish soldiers, who are accompanying us on our mission! Now, I have to explein to them through a soldier (theirs) who barely speaks english, that we have no mission yet! (Between broken English and fragmentary German, we managed. It was interesting, let me tell you.) 0915, the S7 shows up and hands me a bag of CD's, a roll of duct tape, and some flyers and says we're leaving in 15 minutes and he will be following us in his truck, an NTV. (That's non-tactical vehicle. We get HMMWV's and he's in his Toyota High-Lux.)
"Where are we going Sir, and what the fuck are we doing? I never got an OPORD or FRAGO."
"Didn't your Company tell you?"
"No Sir. They didn't have anything to tell me. You were supposed to tell me."
"Oh. I guess I forgot. You are taking me to all the radio stations in our sector and delivering these PSA'a to them."
So, I finally manage to get the locations of all the radio stations from him - initially he just gave me town names and I had to remind him that 5 out of the 7 towns he has us going to we are not familiar with because they are out of our area of responsibility and we have yet to be allowed to go to any of them. So he gives me grid coordinates and says we have five minutes. Much cursing and swearing on my part ensues as I pull out a huge map of the area and proceed to plot the seven grid coordinates. My own OPORD to my squad - oops, squads, gotta include the Polish, consists of this...
"Okay, here it is. We're going to the radio station in Pasjan, two in Gnjilane, one in Silovo, two in Kamenice, and one in Nova Brdo. That's basically the route. We may gat a bit of a break between Gnjilane and Silovo, maybe. Other than handing out a few CD's, I have no idea what we will be doing when we get to the stations. Questions?" No one voiced any, but I could see the looks on their faces and it was universal - even the Polish guys had it and it was the same look I had when I got the mission from the S7. How did I end up with this chicken-shit mission?
So, from there we made it out the gate, only a half hour late. Six hours later, the mission was over with only one missed turn in a town we'd never been to and a large number of very bored soldiers who did nothing while the S7 delivered his PSA's with my help. Why did we do this? It was a training exercise to see if in the case of an emergency one of the line units could deliver the PSA's without making the S7 go out and do it himself. Would have been nice to know beforehand. You see, there is this little thing in every military mission that is kind of a mandatory thing, it's called "Commanders Intent." With that, even if everything goes to complete shit, we know what the ultimate end-state is supposed to be and we can reach it however we can. Essentially, without that, any mission can be summed up as simply being told "go paint the house." Just from that statement, I'm sure you can come up with a myriad of questions that need to be answered before you start, right? Well, that's essentially what I got for a mission - Go paint the house.
*sigh* I guess that's what I'm paid for. Okay, dinner time. Enough preaching for now...
Hopefully everyone is having a good Valentines Day. See you all soon.