During my years in the Army, I always carried around a little green book and wrote notes, minutes from meetings, observations, briefing notes, other military stuff and administrivia. Some of the notes -- sometimes called SNOWFLAKES (because their importance or clarity could melt away in an instant) or GOBIs (General Officer's Bright Ideas) -- seemed pretty important at the time and I thought they some day just might keep me out of jail (or at least off the cover of TIME Magazine). Keeping these notebooks is a time-honored military tradition and every officer and senior NCO I ever knew kept them if for no other reason than as a CYA measure.
However, not everything in there was necessarily related to the war effort of the moment. Sometimes in the middle of the most inconsequential meeting you could ever imagine or perhaps at the point of getting way too keyed up by something one of the lawyers or administrative aides would bring up , these gems would allow my mind to wander just enough to get reoriented and refocused, as it were. To me they were certainly no less important than some of the really significant things in there. If you were ever an officer or NCO, you know what I am talking about. There were a lot of times when people would look over at me and wonder what I was smiling about. While they may need some personal interpretation or interjection, the ones below dealt with me keeping things in perspective.
* Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful. (Ann Landers)
* If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. (Will Rogers)
* There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. (Ben Williams)
* A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself. (Josh Billings)
* The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue. (Anon)
* If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man. (Mark Twain)
* My goal in life is to be as good a person as my dog already thinks I am. (Anon)
I know some would think these are pretty foolish things for an Army officer to be thinking about -- or at least way too simplistic. But you know, sometimes when I would look around at my work, at what my Soldiers and I were doing, and what the implications of of a job done poorly could be, I welcomed these little thoughts that were randomly scattered throughout the book's pages. They helped me keep things on an even plane. I've got lots more of them that I will share in this space later.
HOOAH
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