Standards and Discipline

The prime responsibility of the Command Sergeant Major is Standards and Discipline. Over the next 35 pages of comics, we’ll explore a couple examples of what that means, or doesn’t. It’s nuanced. IF YOU KNOW WHO THIS IS BASED ON don’t tell him. This means you, SPC Kelly.

This is the last truly LONG comic story that’s going into this book. There are a couple of ten pagers, and a couple of short 1-2 page ones, and then that’s it. No more Army comics, because I’ll probably be retired by that point. BUT, over the next decade, look forward to a traditional media comic book about legendary sailor / grifter Donald Crowhurst, and an historical fiction graphic novel about some people in the Spanish Civil War and World War Two.

Short Comics

Busy Summer this year, so I’m going to wait to start my next long story, which is written and ready to go - it shows a more nuanced picture, for better or worse, of a Command Sergeant Major, relative to the humorous background character thrown into Back to the Army Again. 35 pages. In the meantime, I’ve got a few shorter comics that are basically one-liners or bits of dialogue that I wasn’t able to work into a larger story, and which I’ll use to break up the larger ones when it’s finally time to lay out the book.

The first one of these is “Too Much Pot,” and is, as is often the case with my writing, an entire conversation verbatim, which took place in Iraq between two of my NCOs back in 2009. Obviously the subject’s name has been changed. The individual was indeed chaptered on redeployment, for the drug use that was caught in a piss test before he deployed. Everyone in the Battalion who was in the same boat got the same treatment - welcome back from Iraq, thanks for your service, here’s your general discharge, get the fuck out.

Now, as a Company and later Battalion Commander I did continue to enforce the Army’s drug testing policies and ban on marijuana use: them’s the rules, I don’t make ‘em. You’ve come to the wrong shop for anarchy, and so forth. With that being said, I’ve certainly seen testing for marijuana, in particular, treated less as a safety and discipline issue and as more of a force-shaping tool, where, with the exception of people like pilots, using it is an instant discharge if the economy’s bad and the recruiters are doing fine, but it’s a bust down to E1 and a stern warning not to do it again if the Army’s hurting for warm bodies. This has been increasingly true since it was legalized almost everywhere in the country, which was not the case in 2009. Certainly, at this point, “Schmuckatelli pissed hot” now elicits the question, “for pot, or something serious?” Our Canadian allies have of course stopped testing for marijuana entirely, except for pilots and if the individual appears intoxicated on duty, and they have apparently avoided disaster therefrom. It will probably take one more cycle of “hurting for warm bodies” before the United States follows suit.

Back to the Army

Today I published the last three pages - total of 39 - of my most recent story, Back to the Army Again. I might get one more one-pager in next weekend before I have to spend a few weeks in Europe for work, and then I’ll start on another long one, which will be one of two more long ones that will go into the final book once it’s finished in 2027-8 or so. There are a couple of short ones that I’ll throw in there, and of course there will be the interminable process of laying it all out for publication. Overall it’ll be about 250 pages, though in retrospect the layout for these is not that efficient and I could have made it a lot shorter with some thought. It’s a lot easier, given my limited time, to just write these as “one panel page” and “two panel page” (saved as templates on my computer) and not worry about laying each one out like I’m Bill Waterson or something, but it does lead to inefficient use of space where I’m spending half a page showing one part of a conversation, where it could just as easily be two heads on a little panel. My next work is going to be done, as an experiment, in traditional media, which means that I’m going to have to thumbnail it out anyway instead of just having a general vision in my head and going to town in the knowledge that I can just CTRL+Z it if it sucks.

Jimmy Deans - BTAA Page 20

I feel like anyone who's been in the military in the past, what, 40 years, will know about the Jimmy Deans without any explanation, but it will be a mystery from anyone who served before that, or not at all.

So, sometimes you're in basic training or Airborne School or whatnot and you're out training so you can't go back to the DFAC to eat, and the Army can't be bothered to bring out hot food in sawdust boxes called Mermites. So what do you get? Not MREs - those cost the government like eight bucks, and have frankly too many calories for almost anything short of filling sandbags 16 hours a day. No, you get a shrink-wrapped tray with a can of sausage or tuna or meat paste, a can of Pringles, a juice box and some other similar shit, none of it remotely edible, and at least at one time made by the Jimmy Dean Sausage Company, a division of Tyson Foods, who were the low bidder.

One time in Iraq, we were out in the field for like a week building a combat outpost in Tal Abdah, which is in the middle of nowhere, even for Iraq. The BSB came out with some PLS flat racks full of HESCOs and concertina wire and whatnot and one flat rack full of pallets of hot bottled water ... and Jimmy Deans. We rat fucked them for the Pringles, ate nothing but crispy salted potato paste for a week, and left the rest for the cavalry that came out after we were done to occupy the place, and for the mice. The previous COP build hadn't gone well, and I think it was the Brigade Commander's way of punishing us.

COP Tal Abdah: https://www.dvidshub.net/image/214680/desert-outpost

Truth, Reality and Trip Tickets

Most of the stories here are either based on something that happened to me, personally, or else based on something that was told to me by someone I know which, accounting for fallable human memory, I consider to be just as accurate. Like many authors, I move incidents around and put things together that took place years apart, for narrative purposes, but it’s not total fiction for the most part. Like, 50th MRBC really did a raid with Bridge Erection Boats where an Iraqi soldier helped an American down who’s drag handle had got caught on a door frame, then got shot in the face the same night. Really happened - simplified for the story.

These next handful of pages - starting from Page 16 - are an exception. Full disclosure: I am not aware of any specific incident in which a MITT Team Commander took off into the desert in PTs for nine hours hunting mortar POO sites. I doubt it ever happened and I made it up. It’s PLAUSIBLE, barely. If you’d done that kind of thing all the time, you’d have gotten killed as the insurgents would have caught on to the pattern VERY fast and blown your soft-skinned GAZ-69 up, or shot you. First time you did it, you’d have had the element of surprise and it would have been perfectly safe. If you had some kind of death wish, you might have tried it.

By 2008, when I got to Iraq and about three years after this story takes place, the distinction between “inside the wire” and “outside the wire” was very great. Inside the wire was Salsa Night, Steak and Lobster Tails every week, Korean cigarettes for $5 a carton, rip off DVD and cheap tailored suits sold by Turks, PT belts enforced by Sergeants Major &c. We had a nice little war, and then an garrison broke out. In contrast, every movement outside the wire, even by a couple hundred feet, was treated as a combat patrol, with full combat equipment, armored vehicles, electronic warfare, machine guns test-fired, trip ticket filled out, CONOP painstakingly filled out in MS PowerPoint and paired with a risk assessment to be approved by the first LTC in the chain of command no later than 24 hours before SP, the whole works. I did that 144 times - I counted the trip tickets before we redeployed.

That was all well and good, but sometimes it got silly and we ignored it. Not to the extreme and exaggerated extent that the guy in the comic is, but a bit. One time, after a VBIED attack that killed a bunch of people very close to COS Marez, we got the mission to build a HESCO wall right on MSR TAMPA on the Western boundary of the base, to increase standoff, which was, to be clear, tactically sound. It was literally spitting distance from the ice cream side of the wall, and equally close to thousands of Iraqi cars on a four-lane urban highway. In theory, to recon the site prior to building the wall would have been a mission in and of itself, taking a dozen or so men and at least three gun trucks all night. In reality, what happened was my Platoon Sergeant and I locked and loaded one magazine into our M4s, climbed over the T-walls, and walked down MSR Tampa in our shirt sleeves pacing off distances and kicking the dirt. Anyone in the hundreds of cars right next to us could have shot us dead, or even just run us over, but they didn’t. Regular Iraqis didn’t want to, and the insurgents didn’t expect it and so weren’t ready to take advantage of our recklessness. We climbed back over the wall when we were done, which was disturbingly easy, and no one above the rank of 1LT/SFC was ever tracking it.

Likewise, once you were past the gate, the supervision level necessarily went way down. Anyone in theatre could see where each gun truck was on BFT, and sometimes you’d get someone who thought he’d used the magic of satellites to find a better vehicle fighting position from ten miles away than you could from the driver’s seat, but a man on foot has no BFT transceiver and needs no permission to start walking.

Mediocre Careerists - You Know, Captain Queeg Types

Page 14. This story is partially a look at the fact that there were a surprising number of Vietnam vets in the Army even at this late date - mostly National Guard CW5 helicopter pilots. It's partially a story about the wartime volunteer Army's desperation for manpower drawing in people who wouldn't ordinarily be there at all, and some of the situations that creates. It's ALSO a sort of thought experiment about someone who (a) really does want to be there and (b) can't be coerced by the Army short of a firing squad.

Military leaders in the United States are, as a whole and taking one with the other, on average, by far the most risk-averse, ticket-punching, block-checking, what-does-the-regulation-say, slide-turns-green group of ostensibly armed killers in human history. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and the system is designed to breed them and to winnow out anyone else. The best civilian analogy that I've heard is: imagine if a law firm made you wait 20 years to make partner, fired half of prospective partners 18 years in, and handed each new partner a one-time million-dollar check on top of his or her salary. You can imagine the kind of people that does and doesn't retain. In some ways, that's a good thing - Napoleon and Caesar were dynamic risk-takers, and we don't want any of those.

It's also the source of the very valid criticism that the Iraq and ESPECIALLY the Afghan wars were fought one year at a time, over and over, with the intention of avoiding defeat just long enough to repeat the cycle. This is the story of a guy who's not playing that game.

Page 12 or, 186.

Today I posted page 12 of my current story, Back to the Army Again, after a break due to real job work commitments. Interestingly, if I were to put this and everything else into a book now, this would be page 186, plus front matter and so on, which is more than I'd given myself credit for. About 28 more pages of this story puts me at 214, which makes for a pretty good-sized book and makes me feel better about hitting my arbitrary 250-page goal for this one. For reference, 7 Nissan - my first/practice full-length book from 2014, was only 119 pages, which about the limit below which you can't print the title on the spine.

MITT Teams - Al Kasik

The background photo really is of the IA base at Al Kasik, although I seem to have spelled it “Al Kisik” every time I had to label a photo. It was overrun and extensively wrecked up by ISIS back in 2014, then by us again in 2016, so I doubt if this shows anything really relevant. Comic text notwithstanding, it wasn’t actually that much of a shithole by Iraq standards in as much as it had prewar hard stand buildings with hot running water, heat and electricity, and if really was far enough from the flagpole that, while you didn’t get USO shows, you also didn’t get visiting brass.

MITT Team stands, of course, for MIlitary Transition Team Team, whereas SFAB is Security Forces Assistance Brigade, which does indeed have the same mission only better organized and with slightly more in the way of institutional support. MITT Teams were a flawed execution of a good idea, and were example #2,196 of the U.S. Army self-sabotaging in wartime in furtherance of institutionally entrenched and inflexible management practices that have nothing to do with victory*. Of course, the flaws in the way the advisor system was run had little to do with why the ISF collapsed in 2014, making the whole thing somewhat academic, and the Army, in restructuring it into the SFAB framework, belatedly learned the lesson; at least, until someone realizes that for the annual cost of six SFABs you can put green paint on over half the armored vehicles earmarked for deployment to Europe, and they scrap the whole thing. I give it ten years.

I digress. This matters for the story because probably the number one flaw in the MITT Team execution was that - and this is key - no matter how good an advisor you were, it didn’t count much for promotion because it was considered a Broadening Assignment and not a Key Developmental Assignment, and (if you're an officer, especially) you HAVE to punch your ticket at a KD assignment AND do well at it, ideally (in the height of GWOT) while deployed, in order to get promoted. So, if you’re an ambitious, highly motivated young Captain, say, serving on a MITT team meant that you’d be doing a year-long deployment, probably under pretty austere conditions and with lots of violence, followed by (or just following) your KD assignment in Company Command, which almost certainly meant ANOTHER deployment, back to back, the later of which you'd be totally burnt out for and probably not performing at your best. This meant that MITT teams had a hard time attracting the high flyers.

This is not to say that these were not brave, competent patriots. Many were. But you did have a tendency to get the JV team: guys with prior enlisted service who didn’t have to worry about getting promoted again before retirement; mediocre LTCs who weren’t going to command battalions; LOTS of reservists on IMA orders; guys who got tasked with it because they didn’t know the right people; guys in unhappy marriages who were happier in Iraq &c. Plus whatever lower enlisted were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got tagged with it.

Which is all relevant to the story, as we shall soon see.

*But, then, why not overhaul our outdated and inflexible personnel management practices? HERESY! Why would we change the way we do things, when it’s worked so well? **

** Worked so well = got the G1 promoted to his current rank and position. And his predecessor.

BTAA Page Two Notes

It’s important, when the plot calls for you to draw a large, angry Black man, not to make him look too much like Uncle Ruckus. At the same time, if ever anyone deserved to be drawn with a dash of hyperbole, it’s a Command Sergeant Major in the midst of calling some hapless SFC on the carpet over what exact shade of white the extra duty section painted his rocks or some shit. It’s also worth noting that he is in fact chewing out a white man, from a position of unquestioned authority. 20 years ago or so, when people were looking at the military with rose-colored glasses more so than today, some Republican — Colin Powell or Charles Krauthammer or someone — pointed out that the military was one of the few places in American life, even at that late date, where Black people routinely were in charge of large numbers of white people. Obviously those rose-colored glasses covered a lot, but there you have it. Pretty sure this is a realistic scene, at any rate, because this guy ticks all of the Command Sergeant Major boxes, viz:

o Is gigantic.*

o** Veteran of six wars.

o Mustard stain from Granada. Yes, Granada.

o Spent his whole career in 82nd ABD / 25th ID because HOOAH, now assigned to an ABCT and does not know what boresighting is, never mind that, look how many bricks I have in my ruck.

o Once broke three of Mike Tyson’s teeth in a bar fight in Mexico City in 1992.

o Promoted beyond his skill set, unsure of his role and unfireable except for gross misconduct, he chooses to focus his efforts on a handful of trivial pet peeves well within his understanding but irrelevant to unit performance.

o Photos on wall of him in LRS sniper section.

o Photo on desk of his estranged daughter from second marriage, taken ten years ago; she is now majoring in Gender and Women’s Studies at Oberlin.

o Does not swear because was brought up in podunk Southern town where cussin’ meant whoopin’.

o Therefore uses an extreme variety of minced oaths that are just as effective if not more so.

o Wants to know why the rocks are painted two different shades of white, and needs them fixed fast because in an hour the whole chain of command of everyone who missed a dental appointment is going to be in this office, too, and it’s not that big.

*OR is 95 lbs soaking wet and composed entirely of sinew.

** Command Sergeants Major will note that I correctly started my bullets with a lower-case “o.” I did not, however, start them with a lower case letter and a verb, because I graduated from high school. Fight me.

Back to the Army Again - Page One Notes

This is page one of the actual comic. You can tell it's the beginning of the 24-hour Staff Duty shift, because the Soldier is eagerly reading the entire phone answering spiel that's in the instruction book, and hasn't yet lost the will to live. More subtle cues set this in the present day: female Soldier in cavalry unit, which wouldn't have happened at all before about 2014 and not in any numbers until the last couple of years; and the fact that she can have her hair in a pony tail and not in what I've been assured is an uncomfortable tight bun. I tried to do the uniforms slightly different, too, to make it OCP vs UCP, but it's not like I ever did anything besides throw some squiggles in to communicate that it's camouflage anyway.

Back to the Army Again

This is going to be upwards of 40 pages i.e. two years’ worth of work. My goal is to get all of my Army stories into about a 200-page book, which should be ready just about the time I retire late this decade, at which point I can move onto other things both professionally and artistically.

The title for this is lifted from a Rudyard Kipling poem, which I thought about referencing directly but ultimately chose not to as the poem describes a different type of situation than I am going with here. The background image on this page, if you look closely, is from the Vietnam War, which should be a hint as to where this is actually headed.

Stress, Dog - complete.

One of these days, I'll go through and crop my whole back catalog for Instagram and post them in groups of ten pages. This is the 13th and final page of Stress, Dog. Expect a delay (unlike usual) while I finish writing the next one, which will be long at about 40 pages. So, that's my 2024.

I should probably get better at drawing faces up close, instead of just avoiding it and making a bunch of comic people who all look the same.

On Vladimir Putin's Invasion of Ukraine

I visited Ukraine in 2012 as a tourist, and spent time in many of the same areas that are being fought over right now.  Kyiv was and remains among the most beautiful cities that I have ever been to – fully the equal of Paris – and the Ukrainian countryside had the same sort of sylvian, wholesome fecundity as Ohio or Indiana.  It’s distressing to imagine that rolling countryside covered in obscenely mangled bodies and burned out tanks, or that city turning into a garbage heap of organized murder like Mosul – for the record, one of the least beautiful cities that I have ever been to, fully the equal of Phoenix.  It’s not so much distressing as it is bonkers, for lack of a better term, to watch the magnificent chaos and mayhem of two modern armies doing their best to kill each other on a continental scale – something that I’ve trained to take part in, in theory, for most of my adult life – play out in real time.

It's possible that historians, working with the benefit of hindsight, will identify a point where this human catastrophe could have been avoided.  As one of the greatest Americans, Ulysses S. Grant, once said: “Though I have been trained as a soldier, and participated in many battles, there never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.”  Sadly, that time is past now, and the only thing to do is to help the Ukrainian people to kill as many Russians as possible, and to put the thumb screws to the Russian economy to an extent that hopefully, with any luck, the wheels fall off the whole stupid enterprise.  The best that can happen at this sorry stage is that Kyiv is defended like Stalingrad in 1942, and not like Paris in 1940.  If that happens, then we as Americans may be able to avoid spending the 21st Century as we spent much of the 20th, absorbed in foreign wars and rumors of wars.

Story Update.

Hey, here it is in February 2022 and in the past five months I’ve finished … three comics. A long way from the times when I was bored and single and did two a week, but then, this never will be my full-time job.

Anyway, the first part of this story, “Stress Dog,” which sets up the rest of it, deals with a slight fictionalization of a real RKG-3 attack that happened to, if memory serves, 3-8 CAV in mid-2009, jn West Mosul. I don’t think it was actually on MSR Tampa. The RKG-3 was a real threat around this time, and our battalion had a man wounded by one. It’s not as well known as the more common RPG series of weapons, not least because it’s much more likely to kill the person employing it, being a roughly wine bottle-sized thrown antitank round with a little streamer on the back to make sure it hits with the dangerous end towards the enemy. We had a whole list of things to look out for that supposedly marked a potential thrower, which I won’t get into because OPSEC, but a lot of the time they were teenagers, and not 19 1/2 year-olds either. The original script for this one read “kid” instead of “fucker.” The gunner really did shoot him over his shoulder after seeing him in the rear-view mirror. Fantastic presence of mind plus utter dumb luck. As depicted here, it was the talk of the brigade for at least 24 hours.

Yarmouk Traffic Circle

The first part of this story features Yarmouk Traffic Circle, a traffic feature in Mosul that survives to this day, and which was the bane of all who encountered it. Probably about a quarter-mile across and with five major roads, including two four-lane highways, and countless little alleys all leading into it, plus dozens of low-rise buildings all around and, during the day, typically no fewer than 100 Iraqi cars zooming in and out in all directions, it was and is essentially impossible to secure while you were moving through it. You’d have to permanently commit a company team to it. There was no real going around it since it lies on one of the only modern roads going through what was still, in 2008, at least a mostly intact medieval city. When we first got to Iraq, we tried various schemes to secure it on the fly while driving through, but it never really worked because you never had the numbers to cover everything at once. About all it had going for it was that you were never in the circle itself for very long, so you just sort of cinched up your seat belt, pulled on your gloves and hoped for the best. We never got hit there, but there were definitely a number of IEDs/VBIEDs/firefights over the years.

MSR Tampa is Iraq Highway 1, which runs up the West side of Mosul. Driving through in 2008-9 was a weird juxtaposition of cell phone stores with neon lights and air conditioners mixed in the same block with large buildings completely flattened, and car-sized craters. By 2018, of course, the whole place looked like Stalingrad, and for the same reason.

Stress, Dog.

Slow and steady finishes the book. New story starts now and continues ... eventually. In any case, now begins my next story: Stress, Dog.

Undoubtedly, the person with the best job in the Iraq War, other than observation balloon minder (yeah, she's still up there, boss ...) was the Corporal from C/215th BSB whose job it was to just take care of a golden retriever and lead it around to visit every company on COS Marez for 15 minutes at a time. Dog fucking loved it.

One slightly interesting thing about military working dogs, reflected in this drawing, is that they're nominally assigned a rank, which is always one higher than the one assigned to the handler, so that the handler is obliged to treat it with respect. This can lead to some counseling statements: "Then you forgot to take care of Sergeant First Class Bounce, and he shit in the day room. I am counseling you for the conduct noted above ..."

By and large, though, they take their duties very seriously. On one of my first missions outside the wire in Iraq, we had an explosive-sniffing dog team attached to clear the cloverleaf we were doing a half-assed job of reconstructing before we got down to work. One of the million or so corpse-eating mongrel dogs that roamed the streets of Mosul came up to investigate / spread disease to / bite our guy's dog, and he straight whipped out his M9 and shot it dead, no hesitation.

Elections.

Today’s comic - Page Three of Meet the New Boss - is a throwback to another election, 700 years ago now. When the news announced that Obama had won, I was sitting in the pax terminal at Hickam AFB (not AAS, as depicted in the comic) waiting to deploy. My Platoon Sergeant and one of our Squad Leaders had this same conversation - it was the happiest I’d ever seen either of them. Then we all filed out onto the tarmac and on our way to Iraq.

It’s hard to feel the same degree of elation after this most recent election - mostly I’m glad I didn’t find myself on the street in uniform with a gas mask and fixed bayonet. We must not, to quote one of history’s great anti-fascists, assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Still, if it is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, then it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Meet the New Boss

Here’s an election-focused comic, from a happier time. As you’ll see going forward, it’s still pretty relevant.

CNO

Today I posted the 8th and 9th pages - the final two - of my most recent story, “CNO.” CNO, of course, stands for Casualty Notification Officer.

Obviously, when I started this sad story, I didn’t realize just how far to shit things would have gone by the time I finished. I’ll try and do a less depressing one next.

As always, thanks for reading. Updates to follow, periodically.

Still in Business

For those few who noticed, I just posted my first new comic page in a number of months. It’s been a busy time lately, and without getting into the details, suffice it to say I’m still in the comics business, and still have a lot more to write. It’s not as if I ever updated according to a set schedule anyway. This is definitely a lifelong project rather than a current play for popularity driven by consistent updating. Anyway, more to follow.