Quiet time while on exercises...

A good bit of the time I spent in the Army was centered around desert operations, but the vast majority of it was focused on MP operations in a wooded environment.  In that time following the Vietnam war, I think everyone in the Army doctrine circles was just taking a long breather.  For the next 10-15 years, not much came out of the "schools" partly because the nation as a whole was standing pretty much at arms length from anything military.  And as is the case following all wars, even the wars we are fighting today, the national administration, Republican or Democratic, can't wait to just get away from all that stuff and back to their domestic agenda.  Never mind that there are still bad guys out there who want to do us harm and are just waiting for us to draw down.  They read our history books and know how we operate -- probably better than we do.  And now we are getting ready to be thrown back to Army troop levels not seen since pre-WWII days.  The cycle is completed yet again, and it's back to the trees and foxholes.

So when this picture was taken, we were in heavily into wooded areas, undertaking opns. more closely aligned with the last war than looking over the horizon at the skills and training needed for the next one. And that was a little bit OK as it reinforced our soldier craft and gave us training in these skills that we couldn't get in a drill hall.  And I guess you have to know this stuff in order to build and grow into what is next.

Some of us, at least those in the EPW arena in general, and specifically in our battalion, tried to look down the road and project our capabilities and requirements into what we thought,  what we knew would come next.  We looked at training in urban situations, in built-up areas, not always doing those things outlined in the so-called doctrinal format.  When we could we tried to avoid training in wooded areas where we were forced to concentrate on digging proper foxholes and fighting positions.  This training philosophy didn't always endear us to those high ranking doctrine writers at the MP school. And if you didn't do it every once in a while to get the proper boxes checked, your unit was labeled as unfit for duty and new blood needed to be brought in.  So we played the game, but not always by their rules.

And if the facts are examined carefully, my predecessor and I, as well as succeeding commanders and staffs and certainly the troops who followed all got it.  When it came time for us/them to be thrust into leadership roles in future wars at high level positions in brigades, the Pentagon, deployment training centers, and such, the train-up was not so extensive or painful because some of the lessons and training had already been done.  It was not such a tremendous paradigm shift from tree bark to sand dunes.

This picture brought back some good memories of those times when I was a battalion commander. And I know you have read this before, but the soldiers I served with during that time were the absolute best people.  They cared about what they were doing, were serious about it, professional about it, and very much on the cutting edge.  What a privilege.

One more dance along the razor's edge finished. Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today. (Robert Jordan)

Hooah