A brief intro is in order here. I referenced this in my autobiography, so I thought it merited its own post. It is edited slightly from the original. Indeed, this rant became the foundation for my autobiography.
counselings = forms with written feedback given to subordinates
BLC = Basic Leader Course
DLI = Defense Language Institute
NCO = non-commissioned officer (AKA sergeant)
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5,000 words on monthly counselings or, the Bible of Harty
Today, 27 August 2020, I went to the O-room to share my thoughts on ATP 6-22.1, the Army regulation regarding counselings, as I had been ordered. I was able to make a few points before I was interrupted, yelled at, and ordered to write 5,000 words, in spite of the fact that monthly counselings are usually about 300 words.
Today’s outburst was the culmination of being criticized by 5 different people on as many occasions for writing counselings that contained 80 words or less, as well as having 3 hours of my time wasted on a question (how many words do you want me to put in a counseling?) that could have been answered in 30 seconds and was by another NCO I asked. I hope this document will shed some light on why I write the way I do.
According to the aforementioned regulation, counseling is one of the most important responsibilities. This was one of the many bald assertions presented without evidence in that regulation. If it were in my power, everyone responsible for that worthless gibberish would be court-martialed for incompetence and fired out of cannon into a brick wall while junior enlisted soldiers in TRADOC watched from bleachers, where they would eat popcorn and cheer with every bang, splat, and thud.
It is also worth noting that there is nothing in the regulation about a minimum number of words in a counseling, or a minimum amount of time that must be spent counseling, or a minimum number of questions that must be asked. In fact, aside from the page numbers and references, it contains no numbers in the text at all. I will note that the largest part of a counseling is called Summary of the Counseling Session.
To prove to myself that I’m not crazy, I looked up the definition of the word summary and found: a brief statement or account of the main points of something. In a sane world, that would be in the end of the argument, and I would not need to write this. Let us for a moment consider the logistics of writing 5,000 words per soldier counseled every month. Over the course of a year, that would be 120,000 words, the length of an average novel.
For comparison the notoriously long novel War and Peace is about 600,000 words. Here is as good a place as any for a brief digression on numbers. I like them because I used to be a math teacher and an engineer. It’s how I make sense of the world. It’s the reason I am able to write this on a computer, a machine that operates on mathematical principles.
I’ve heard in the Army and outside of it that perception is reality. Suppose that’s true. If I perceive that counselings are a waste of time, then the reality is that they are a waste of time. Of course, I don’t believe this at all, the part about perception and reality being the same, I mean. Perception and reality are different. That’s why we use different words for each of them. Those words are not synonyms. There is a reason we have concepts such as optical illusions and magic tricks.
During today’s meeting, I spoke a bit about the quarterly counselings students at DLI get. They were very cut and dry, if I remember correctly. We’d verify our phone numbers and GPAs, sign them, and hand them back. I came to associate counseling with pointless paperwork we do because we must. I have an obligation to obey lawful orders so I try to. I do not have an obligation to enjoy it or agree with the rationale behind it.
If I am ordered to stand on my head and gargle peanut butter, I will do everything in my power to accomplish that task. I will however, not have much respect left for the one who gave that order. Also in the meeting I was told the story of a soldier who received many good counselings but later had 2 DUIs. That’s not open and shut, but it is a dramatic counterexample to the notion that good counselings lead to good behavior.
In my view, as soon as the soldier was noticed being drunk in public, there at a minimum should have been a face-to-face meeting as well as non-judicial punishment. Had it been my soldier, I would have ordered him to spend 2 hours every Friday and Saturday night for a year picking up litter around the barracks. That would have been a double whammy – cleaner barracks and a greatly reduced chance that another soldier would make the same poor decision.
My soldiers are squared away. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be going to BLC, which is a topic I will discuss later in this piece. What do you tell a person who is doing a good job aside from things like: keep up the good work, set new goals, keep me informed, etc? Do I have to write them love notes and put happy face stickers on the counselings like they are kids in elementary school?
Let me talk some about brevity. It is good. There is not much of it in this paper, but it is good none the less. The most famous and esteemed speech in US history is the Gettysburg Address. It’s only 187 words long. It’s shorter than the NCO Creed, which is 288 words. The Gettysburg Address is so good that it’s been chiseled in marble on monuments. School children memorize it. I have read a number of counselings from other NCOs, and I have to say they were not exactly page turners.
It is endlessly amusing to me that there are NCOs who think they are Shakespeare because they can fill up the whole box with words. On a side note, the first sentence of the NCO creed contains a grammatical error. It should be “no one is more professional than me” not “no one is more professional than I”. The word "than" is a preposition, so the word following is an object of a preposition and should therefore be in the objective case. I know this because I paid attention to grammar in school and the person who wrote the NCO creed did not and was making a feeble and inept attempt to write something decent.
Now let us consider BLC. Perhaps the course has changed since I was a student in it a year and a half ago. Perhaps even at some point in the past, it was a course worth taking. I can assure you that the course I took was far and away the worst class I’ve taken in my entire life. It’s easily the worst class in the Army and it might even be the worst class theoretically possible. It’s 23 days in a row of 5 AM wake ups, standing in line for meals, shouting slogans in unison, and watching PowerPoint 8 hours a day.
It teaches about as much about leadership as watching paint dry and is about as mentally stimulating. I’d say the most memorable part was when I got counseled for getting annoyed during a lesson about counseling. If this was a novel, that would be called “foreshadowing”. During a supremely asinine lesson, we broke into groups wrote words on the board related to counseling and took turns describing them. Well, in my group, I suggested nothing and when it was time to present, my group immediately ran away, most likely because they expected me to have some choice words on the matter.
I did. I pointed at the board and said: so they wrote these words on the board. Does anyone not know what they mean? The teacher demanded I elaborate. I said it was all elementary school vocabulary, and I see no point in explaining that to a room full of high school graduates. He did not take that well, so we went into another room where I asked him if he thought I was a stupid man, because there could not possibly be any other reason to spend that much time on so basic a subject.
He decided he didn’t like my attitude, so he gave me a negative counseling, which destroyed any incentive I had to do more than the bare minimum to graduate. BLC was far and away the worst experience of my time in the Army. It was a concentrated form of everything I don’t like about it.
It appears that a lot of 35P soldiers also didn’t like BLC. Of the dozen or so I knew from DLI, not a single one of them plans on re-enlisting. And the big picture is even worse – only about 9% of 35P soldiers re-enlist vs 40% for their USAF and Navy equivalents. You don’t need to be the Brahmin of Baker Street to figure that one out. Back in the van, Scooby, this mystery is solved.
I was proud of the post course eval I wrote for BLC. It was one of my finest rants. I said that after 20 years of school, civilian and military, that BLC was the worst class I’ve ever taken and that it will cause catastrophic damage to the Army if it continues. Everyone with a brain or a spine is going to leave and the only ones left will be people who are scared of getting yelled at and have a high tolerance for PowerPoint.
I distinctly remember being told bring a long list of things to BLC and almost all of them never left my duffel bag. The only minor victory was when I contacted the packing list creator beforehand and asked him if I really needed to bring my ASU. He said I did not, so at least I did not have to pack that. It felt less than wonderful to do that lay out for the stuff I didn’t need for the class that shouldn’t exist.
I would like to write some about some of the colorful characters I met at BLC, by which I mean they were the most appallingly obnoxious people I’ve ever met, and the fact that I did no violence to them should be a testament to my superhuman patience and restraint. The first was a morbidly obese National Guardsman who later distinguished himself by being caught cheating on a walking test, which is just about the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard. He fell behind, so he tried to run when he though no one could see him.
I also learned from him that some Guard units do not bother enforcing height and weight standards. The other decided it would be fun to annoy me relentlessly. When I very gently pushed him away from my computer he was using without my permission after I told him to step aside, he was how dare you this and I’m gonna beat you up, etc. Well, threats of violence are one of the things that provoke white hot homicidal rage in me, and when those words left his lips, I gave him such a fearsome scowl that he whimpered in fright and never said a single word to me for the last 3 days of the course.
The other one, the fat one, upon seeing this, decided it was in the best interest of his survival not to annoy me again. Which I was fine with, because the most useful thing those 2 could ever do would be to get shot so more competent soldiers could use their corpses as sandbags.
I suppose this is a good a time as any to recount some of the various times people tried to bully me and how I made them stop. At DLI, my platoon sergeant annoyed and insulted me constantly. I never had a single positive or constructive interaction with him. Not a single one. I sent an email to another NCO which he took great offense to, for you see I referred to the receiving NCO as merely Sgt, as though I were speaking to him.
I should have just searched how to write an Army email beforehand, but as I was busy studying Arabic at the time, it slipped my mind. Well anyway, the insufferable NCO decided to chime in and scold me for not using the proper rank and gave his rank as something like Supreme Lord High Commander Staff Sergeant [his name], esquire. So I replied to his email and I addressed him by the rank he had just then bestowed upon himself.
And that was the last time he ever wrote me an email or spoke unkindly to me. When I was out processing, he asked me how did on the test. Without looking up, I said: I passed, sergeant. Then I turned around and left.
At Goodfellow AFB, another platoon sergeant also decided it was her mission in life to annoy, insult, and criticize me non-stop. I had about a dozen interactions with her in 11 weeks and the only positive one was when she told me I dropped my wallet. The last thing I said to her was during a breathalyzer test. She angrily asked me why I stopped blowing, and I answered by saying very slowly in a clear voice: I. ran. out. of. breath. I said it as though I were speaking to dumb person who was also half-deaf.
After I made it abundantly clear how little I thought of her, she changed her ways. I saw here one more time before I left Goodfellow, at she didn’t even look at me. She was looking at the ground and had the mannerisms of a beaten dog. Her body language was a glowing neon sign that said: please forgive me, please don’t hate me.
I’ve crossed a bit over the 2,000 word mark now after about 2 hours of writing. So you can see now, hopefully, that I can write a lot when I want to. I can be verbose, rambling, long-winded. I can lead you down a magnificent and winding garden path of the most exquisite nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I could also write the Army counseling equivalent of Eugene Onegin, but I won’t because that’s stupid.
Back on topic. The last job I had before the Army, I was working at a plastic bag factory in Texas, which is about as exciting as it sounds. There was a minor mishap. Something was supposed to get shipped and wasn’t because of someone else’s mistake. I went to my boss for help. He decided the wisest course of action was to spend the next hour giving me a lecture that began with him bragging about is very high IQ and ended with him threatening that the world would chew me up and spit me out.
I tried to make patch things up, but I ended getting fired about 6 months later. I do not regret making fun of his business writing which was horrid. I never thought a college-educated, native speaker of English could write so badly until I met that man. High IQ, my foot. Bad writing goes together with bad thinking.
On the subject of intelligence, I’ll say this much. Whatever my other faults, I’m pretty sure I’m not stupid. I got a perfect score on the ASVAB, which is I guess is not super impressive as it is designed for high school graduates. I have a degree in chemical engineering. I speak Swahili and understand 7 dialects of Arabic. I made it through one of longest and hardest courses in the Army at the age of 32. So I tend to take a dim view of people who try to condescend to me in matters of intellect. I take a dim view of people who condescend to me on any basis. One of my favorite sayings is: people who try to drag you down are already beneath you.
I’d like to talk a bit more about DLI here. DLI probably flunks out more students than any school in the world. There were about 400 soldiers studying Arabic while I was there. 200 of them graduated, 100 were active duty, and minus the ones who got chaptered or med-boarded or later flunked a DLPT and reclassed or separated, most of them are now here. This base is one big DLI reunion.
Let’s lighten up the tone a bit. Perhaps you’ve wondered about how I got into the Army. It is an indeed an epic tale. I decided to join the Army in January of 2015 after being fired from the plastic bag factory. At the time, I weighed 207 pounds because I ate and drank away my sorrows with beer and Texas BBQ. I had to lose 49 pounds to get into the Army. That took about 6 months during which time I walked 10 to 15 miles on a treadmill every. single. day. I went the recruiters once a week where they checked my progress and gave me more PT to do. One of them said he had seen me with my shirt off more than his wife.
So then off to basic where I had fun with the drill sergeants. You know you’ve broken a drill sergeant’s spirit when they stop yelling at you and start saying please. Achievement unlocked. I’d say my best exchange happened when I was standing in line to throw practice grenades. As the shortest male, I was always at the front, and so I became the one who gathered the mail and put it in the mailbox as we marched past. On this day, while waiting in line, a soldier asked: did you get the mail? I said yes. He asked: did you put it in the mailbox?
Here, dear reader, is a wonderful proof that stupid questions do indeed exist. They’re the ones stupid people ask. They don’t get smart enough just in time to ask the question. I said to him, in a somewhat firmer tone: yes, I put the mail in the mailbox. That’s why when you asked ‘did you get the mail’ I said YES!
Well, that got the attention of the Drill Sergeant. I forget the entire exchange, but the last thing I said to him was: I haven’t called you anything except Drill Sergeant, Drill Sergeant. I was tempted to work a few more instances of drill sergeant in my response, but I figured I made my point.
Now as for the Swahili part, surely you’re wondering, how the hell did that happen? Well, in 2006, my brother joined the Army to fly Blackhawk helicopters. I figured it would be too much for my parents if we both joined, so I did the Peace Corps instead. Yes, the Peace Corps, fighting fire with marshmallows since 1961. I spent 27 months in Tanzania where I taught math to guys ranging in age from 17 to 21. I also climbed Mt Kilimanjaro, survived malaria, and wrote a science book in Swahili. If you want copy, let me know.
There is an English translation after each section. Starting to believe now that I can write a lot if I want to? Fun fact: there’s a part of Africa called the Sahel which is the border between the Sahara desert and the grassland. Sahel means coast in Arabic. The plural is Sawahil, which is where the name for Swahili comes from. I guess you could translate it literally as Coastish. When Arabs and Africans met to trade, they needed a common language, so that’s how it started. Knowing it made it way easier to learn Arabic because I knew about 1,000 words of it already from Swahili words that are the same.
Anyway, much to my chagrin, when I got back and pondered joining the Army, I was told there was a 5 year cool off period between Peace Corps and being an Army linguist. I forget the reg for that, but I have read it. So it was 5 years of working in engineering and tutoring math on the side while I tried the civilian life. Back when I was getting ready to graduate high school in 2003, I wanted to be a Marine linguist, but reconsidered when I got a college scholarship to study engineering. Hmm. Get paid to get a valuable degree or join the Marines and maybe get blown up in Iraq? I don’t regret my decision except that that had I joined then, I’d be 3 years away from retirement now.
Well gee whiz, 3300 words in 3 hours. I’m making great time. Let’s talk some more numbers. I’ve spent about 2,400 hours studying Arabic in class and a similar amount on the job and on my own. I’ve read that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, and I do feel about halfway there. On the job, I’ve listened to about 1,000 hours of audio and found things that went into dozens of reports. I’m pretty sure I’m not less effective than others with the same training and time in service. So perhaps you can imagine why I do not appreciate being chewed out over routine paperwork.
What’s really sad are the guys that make it through the language training, which is the longest and hardest part and never get to do the job. I know at least 2 cases of that and one was my room mate at Goodfellow. We were in the same class at DLI and knew each other pretty well. He had a family emergency and had to go back to DLI. While there, he injured himself during an APFT, got surgery, and ended up getting med boarded.
Very smart guy, went on immersion overseas, never spent a second working a mission. Seeing things like that made me feel very lucky about having the job I do. The other guy I met at DLI. He made it through the language course and then went to airborne school. When he jumped, his line didn’t release at first, he banged into the plane a bunch of times which caused many neck and back injuries, and barely recovered consciousness before he hit the ground. So he got to hang around DLI for a year or so while he got med-boarded. There but for the grace of God, go I.
How about a funny DLI story instead? I had the room to myself most of the time. When I got a room mate, he didn’t say a word to me for a month. I found out later that somebody told him that I had been a mercenary in Africa, which is why I was old as hell and could speak Swahili. I never thought I would have to say “no, I was not a mercenary in Africa”, but there it is. While we’re on funny, I did stand-up comedy for about 3 years before I joined the Army. Pretty much all open mic nights, but still.
I performed about 500 times. I’m pretty sure the only reason I got promoted was because I made the Sergeant Major laugh during a board. He asked me to do some rifle flipping, and since I had forgotten many of the moves, I ended up doing an impromptu Buster Keaton routine. Back to my DLI room mate for a bit. He nearly flunked out and the reason they put him in my room was that they thought somehow, I could save him. I did my best to tutor him and he made it to the end of the course. He flunked the DLPT the first time around but last I heard, is now at Fort Meade. All’s well that ends well. Let it not be said that I do not try to help other people.
OK, about 1,000 words to go. The home stretch! What else should I rant about? How about wacky hijinks in the barracks here? My first taste of that was the spring of 2018 a few months after I got here. A guy in a room the floor below me had a big, loud party going full steam at 2 AM. In every room of the barracks, there is a policy letter, and in one section, it states explicitly that noise is to be kept to a minimum at all times. I went to the party host and simply said: It’s 2 AM. A lot of people seem to think that no curfew means they can be loud as hell whenever they want.
A few months later and a few similar parties later, a 1SG came through the barracks and woke me up. He was looking for a 16 year old girl who had gone missing. Now, you might be wondering, why would he be looking for a 16 year old girl in the barracks? And then it hit me. At some of those parties, there were a lot of people that looked very young, like high school age. Why, one might suspect that perhaps there was even underage drinking! So a few months later, another party by the same guy in same room is going at 2 AM. My room mate at the time was on funeral detail, so he worked most weekends. Hence he needs to sleep.
So I go down there, barge in the room, unplug what I thought was for the stereo (it was actually for the lamp) and inform them that this isn’t night club, the barracks are for sleeping, that’s why there are beds in the rooms. One guy threatens me, the host pushed me out. I told them that the bars on base close at midnight and the bars off base close at 2 AM, so enough. Party’s over. The host tried to convince me that he had connections to the MPs, like he’s the boss of the E4 Mafia or something.
Anyway, he said they’d wrap it up. 30 minutes, still going, still loud, still yelling. I call the MPs and tell them that this is a noise complaint, not an emergency. I didn’t even mention being shoved. The guy came later with our 1SG and though he didn’t mention it, it was clear that was the end of the loud partying. Another victory for Hardcore Harty vs the Forces of Nuisance.
In November of last year, there was an influx of guys with extra loud exhaust systems, a concept I always found curious. It’s called a muffler because it muffles sound, or at least that’s what it would do unless some drooling imbecile haphazardly replaces it so he can pretend he’s driving a race car as he goes back and forth from PT on a road with a 25 mph speed limit.
I can’t say I particularly enjoyed being woken up over and over and over by the same miscreants who decided that a lame re-enactment of Fast and Furious was their highest calling in life. The day I had to go to that NCO meeting after the rash of speeding tickets gave me a reason to pursue the matter more vigorously. I went to the MPs, told them where and when people were stricken with sudden cases of lead feet, and hoped for the best.
Alas, it was not to be. One Saturday night in December, I heard somebody gunning their engine in the parking lot. I went out to investigate. I’m 35. I’m an NCO. I have the rules on my side. This nuisance ends to night. There were 2 of them. I told them to stop and then to go to bed. One of them decided he didn’t have to listen to me and went Wrestlemania on me. He shoved me into a car, I shoved back, that went on for a bit. We grappled, I lost my balance, fell. and when I got up, he had wisely decided to back off about 20 feet.
So what am I to do? Go berserk and give him the beating he richly deserves? No, I don’t want to lose the job I worked so hard for or make trouble for my unit. Another soldier had without me asking, taken my Xmas staff duty slot, which was great because then I was free to spend the day with family and friends.
I also appreciated the fact that it was about at that time that my pride and joy, the new company mascot and theme was unveiled. It would be ungrateful to make trouble after that. I found out the guy’s name because his very stupid friend said it during the fight. It was an uncommon name, so I went to staff duty, got the roster, and matched the name to the pictures he very stupidly posted of himself online. Checkmate. Not quite, as it turned out.
When I went to his old unit and explained what happened, they said he left the Army recently so the only option left was to make a statement with the MPs. I did that, never heard anything back. I told a few other people, while I have no proof of it, I’m pretty sure my assailant got punished, because when I was walking to the gym one day, some guy in a hot rod gunned his engine extra loud as soon as he saw me.
There was blue smoke and I could smell a head gasket burning. I haven’t seen or heard that car since, nor have I seen either of those 2 guys. So you see, I do stick my neck out to do the right thing, help people, maintain order and discipline, etc. It would sure be great if the other NCOs could find it in their hearts not to hassle me because my counselings are not quite as long as theirs. That would be wonderful. I’m almost at the 5,000 word mark after 3 hours of writing, so here are a few closing thoughts:
If paperwork killed enemy, there wouldn’t be any left.
If PowerPoint made people smarter, everyone in the Army would be a genius.
And lastly,
There is no point in tiptoeing through life just to arrive safely at death.
v/r
SGT Harty
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