Christmas thoughts 2014

Today, I am reminded of the Christmas Eve of 1990. Of course, 3d ACR was already deep in the desert of Saudi Arabia, but several of my troop mates and I were detached on a detail to off-load the new M1A1HA tanks that were coming for The Regiment, and had been living in a warehouse in Dammam (King Abdulaziz port). We'd been there for about a week,  I believe, and since all we were really there for was the off-loading of the new tanks we didn't have much else to do (the ship hadn't arrived yet, so there was really, truly nothing going on). We must have played Spades or Hearts or other card games about a thousand times, trying to keep busy, and of course there was always sweeping and keeping things tidy (this was the Army, after all), but you can only clean things so many times.

By Christmas Eve, the ship with our new tanks had still not yet arrived in port but the 1st Infantry Division had, and they were also sleeping in the warehouse space as they were awaiting their equipment, just as we had when we arrived in-country in late September/early October. It was not always peaches and cream (tankers--particularly Cav tankers--get along with infantry about like lion sires get along with baby male lions, and there were a couple of minor incidents of tankers getting the better of grunts ... which, of course, the grunts couldn't let stand, and that led to a little bit of a fracas), but on Christmas Eve we were all just soldiers a long way from home, and one of the 1st ID chaplains came by and did an impromptu service.

I've always been fascinated by the Christmas eve service. Even as a child, what I remember (and remember liking) best about Christmas was the singing, the lights, the spectacle of the service. It was always quite magical, and the one celebrated by a dozen or so soldiers in a warehouse in Dammam, Saudi Arabia in 1990 was no different. We sang (mostly on-key) some traditional Christmas songs, the chaplain did a couple of readings, and we lit candles and sang some more. Afterward, we went back to our cots and tried to forget that we were 8,000 miles from home--and a million miles from safety--and just reflect on our continued generally good fortune.

The lights. The candles. That's what I recall most vividly about many Christmases. Regardless of your particular religious proclivities, and whether you are a practicing Jew at Hanukkah or a Christian at Christmas or a Hindi at Diwali (yeah, wrong time of year but whatever) or a Pagan at midwinter/Yule--and, even atheist, since the torch of knowledge is still a thing--the lights all mean the same essential thing: Light overpowers dark, and the flame of life gives us hope.

I hope you all have a magnificent holiday season, be it Christmas or otherwise.

Free download day for Hooray for Pain! book on 14 SEP 2014

As many of you may already be aware, my chap book of poetry (titled Hooray for Pain!) has been published by Quixotic Raindrop Publishing, and is available in the Kindle store, on Amazon.

On the 14th of September, it will be available as a free download (normally $3.99), for anyone who wishes to download it!

Have fun, and I hope you enjoy it!

White cloud, survivor guilt, and Memorial Day

White Cloud: (adj, coll.): In EMS, a provider who, when on shift, seems to be followed by an aura of calm, attracting simple & straightforward EMS calls such as uncomplicated psych transports, stubbed toes, and limited numbers of calls per shift. (contrast "Black Cloud", a provider who seems to attract whirling chaos, sometimes seemingly attracting multiple-person-ejected motor vehicle collisions, cardiac arrests, and assorted other complicated, brink-of-death EMS calls while on shift; sometimes called a "crap magnet" or other, more scandalous, phrases).

Survivor guilt: (syndrome): The guilt felt by survivors of a tragic event (combat, hostage situations, natural disasters, etc.), often manifesting as a miasma of "why me? why did I survive when _blank_ did not?" thoughts.

Memorial Day, in the United States, is a holiday set aside to memorialize the lives of those who gave "the last full measure of devotion" to preserve the rights and privileges of all Americans. As a veteran, I find Memorial Day a particularly sobering day, partly due to an acute understanding of the sacrifice made by the fallen. As with many of my brothers and sisters in arms, I also feel a deep regret about having lived while others did not. Survivor's guilt, they call it. A manifestation of PTSD, according to the DSM IV. I don't know about all that, but what I do know is that it's very real, and sometimes disabling.

I have not, myself, been disabled by it I don't believe, although there have been Memorial Days in the past when I certainly tried to drink away the guilt.

I have not, myself, tried (or even really ever thought about) harming myself due to a sinking disgust with being alive when many others died, but I know there are some who have.

One of my best friends from Basic Training, a second-generation Greek-American by the name of John Alexiou, died in a training accident in Grafenwöhr when his tank's loader forgot one of the basic rules of being a loader for an M1A1 tank: never hot-seat rounds. The 120 mm round used in the M1A1 is a combustible case cartridge, designed to mostly disintegrate when the round is fired leaving behind only the base end (and in the sabot round, part of the primer containment section), which drastically reduces the amount of space a spent round takes up after firing. One of the side effects of having a combustible case cartridge is that if handled improperly, it can be set off prematurely. When fired, the 120 mm main gun gets incredibly hot, and the base end (called the aft cap) is often a couple of hundred degrees Fahrenheit when it pops out of the breech; hot enough to ignite the combustible case of the round. The story is that the loader was hot-seating rounds—that is, keeping a round in his lap after loading the first round in the main gun, to cut down how much time it takes to load the second round—and then the aft cap of the first round got stuck in the deflector. The training standard is for the loader to call "AFT CAP AFT CAP" and begin an immediate action drill (IAD) to fix the stuck aft cap by disarming the main gun, and using a (GLOVED!) hand to pull up on the deflector while simultaneously adjusting the aft cap to clear the obstruction. To perform this IAD, the loader must stand, and if you have something in your lap it has to go on the floor of the turret. If that something is a main gun round, and when you dislodge the hot aft cap it bounces into said main gun round, said main gun rounds can cook off.

In this case, that's exactly what happened. The aft cap ignited the case cartridge, and killed the Tank Commander (SSG Carlos Williams) as well as SPC John Alexiou who was in the gunner's seat at the time (I seem to recall the driver was also killed, but that the loader survived and was badly burned, but another source seems to indicate the loader was killed which makes more sense to me).

I did not lose any of my fellow 1st "Tiger" Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment troopers in Desert Storm. One—I believe it was Kelly Ouderkirk, the platoon leader of the scout platoon my tank platoon supported—was injured in a Bradley rollover on the first night of the ground war. That night, one of our approach roads was very narrow, with a sharply sloped shoulder leading down an approximately 15' embankment on both sides, and his driver misjudged the location of the shoulder. Fortunately, he returned to lead his scouts before our major assaults began, and did a fantastic job.

Two hundred ninety-four US service members died during the first Gulf War; one hundred thirteen of them by enemy action. Thousands more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since, and hundreds of thousands more before. That I survived, and many did not, pops up from time to time in my head, and colors the things I do; what I believe I can do to best assuage my own guilt, and honor the memories of those who have not returned, is to do what I can to make this America one to which they would have been proud to come home.

So this Memorial Day I again resolve to do—in my small way—what I can to keep America a strong nation, one compassionate toward those who are beset by misfortune ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses") yet relentless toward those who would seek to destroy it. And for John, my friend who awaits me at Fiddler's Green, I hope you will approve of what we've done here in your absence.

New post up at MilPages.COM

My third blog in the "veterans going to school" series for MilPages.COM is now live, covering the final preparatory steps to graduating from college.

Second post at MilPages.COM

The second of four blog entries I wrote for MilPages.COM is up, this one about how to plan the rest of your college career. Hope you enjoy it!

Guest Blogging

I have been working with the excellent people at http://www.milpages.com/ to put together a small series of blogs for veterans going to college after their military service. The first of those blogs, Using Military Planning for your first year of college, is now live on their site, with three more to come over the next few weeks. The entry is not just for military veterans, I believe the advice in the article is relevant for any students, but veterans may find it more helpful than other students.

In any event, I hope you find it useful and if you do, tell your friends!

Update on Sasha the Shape Shifting Cat

Any of my blog readers who have been around for a bit will remember that earlier this year I'd tried to fund illustration and publishing costs for my children's book Sasha the Shape Shifting Cat through Kickstarter. While that was ultimately unsuccessful in being funded, I did note that I would continue to find other ways to get it illustrated and published.

I just received word from the awesome people at The Story Shack that they've accepted my story, and are going to pair me with an illustrator, as well as put up the resulting story on their website. While this does not involve any sales, payments, or publication in any of the traditional senses, what's most important at this time is the combination of illustration and marketing that this represents. After going through the process, I will have more information about when and where it will be available, and also possibly other publication avenues that may open as a result of this excellent opportunity.

So, you think you want to write a book ...

I've been doing a lot of hemming, and hawing, about writing a book. Some days I feel charged, and inspired, and I write a lot. Other days, I feel defeated, and it's hard to motivate on those days. Like a lot of my readers, I suspect, I have a thousand ideas floating in my head, and focusing enough to get them written down and polished to a high gloss shine is a real challenge.

To combat some of the pitfalls of writing, I do an awful lot of reading and research, not just about my writing topics but also about the art, craft, and science of writing. Today, I came across an article on Writer.ly about the 9 steps to self-publishing a book, and in that 9-step system is a link to six ways that a writer can get started. I read through it, and I think they forgot maybe the most important piece of advice ... READ!

It's a little bit of a forgotten step, I think, but if you are a writer and are stuck, or having a hard time motivating, I've always found it helps tremendously to go back and remind myself about what's possible. It's certainly a great idea to sit down with a book or three, in the same genre as is your writing, but don't forget to also read great books regardless of the genre. Grab Tolkien and Herbert and Dickens, sit down with Joyce and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, get a cup of coffee with Hemmingway and Heinlein and Nabakov. Sometimes, I realize, reading some of the great novels can feel intimidating ("I can't write like that!"), but it is still worthwhile. I can't write like Hemmingway, nor do I want to. I don't want critics and reviewers to pick up my book, read it, say to themselves "eh, just another Hemmingway knockoff," then never read another of my pieces again. Instead, I want them to read it, write things like "who is the next Bacil Donovan Warren? Is there another author like him out there?" and enjoy my writing for what I bring, not for how much it is like Nabakov's writing.

And that, dear readers, is often quite motivating. So if you find yourself stuck, having a tough day of writing, maybe try sitting down with your dog-eared copy of Dune or For Whom the Bell Tolls, and you might just find the spark that's been eluding you!

Replacement for RockMeIt?

For my daily social network interactions, I have for several years been using a Chromium-based browser called RockMeIt (no links from me, and I will tell you why in a moment). I open this browser every day, and use it for quite literally all of my social interactions from Google+ to Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and Tumblr. It's really quite a brilliant browser, built specifically for this role, and really does it quite well.

Today, RockMeIt deigned to finally post, in the "New Tab" page, an end-of-life announcement for the RockMeIt browser. I've known for several months that they'd stopped updating the browser, while they were working on some ridiculous web portal thing (um, guys, the whole Portal concept, which tied back into the Mosaic homepage and the Yahoo, Excite, and iGoogle thing, back in the late 90s? It's dead. Long dead. So far long dead that even Google has given up on it.), which really isn't the social networking thing I needed to have so I have mostly ignored their site.

I had posted a tumblr response to their initial announcement that the browser was no longer being updated, basically noting that most of their user base had revolted against that idea, and that by continuing with it they would likely watch their numbers drop off precipitously, the proverbial rock off a cliff. Time will still tell on that one, but what I'm mostly upset about is that RockMeIt announced the EOL for the browser as the 31st of July, then for more than a week after announcing it didn't actually make the people who USE the browser aware of it (it was posted on their website, which I don't use for any reason, and on their tumblr feed, which I don't follow) until less that two weeks were left on the EOL.

Yeah, you read that right. Though internally, the EOL was announced three weeks out (still too close for any reasonable person; Google, for example, announced their EOL of iGoogle about a year in advance, and notified users every time they opened iGoogle) there was not even a single notification in the browser (despite the fact that RockMeIt LOGS IN TO THEIR WEBSITE every time you open it up, if you have it so configured) until today, twelve days before they completely pull the plug. Completely, as in you can no longer log in at all, can't access or use any bookmarks, saved site information, feeds, edges, nothing.

I can't say I didn't expect that RockMeIt would flub the browser EOL—they've been making bad decisions ever since they decided to switch away from the browser to a web portal—but this really is quite poor customer service.

Now, I'm on a rapid hunt for a replacement for the browser, and if anyone has any input please let me know. For the moment, I'm shifting to Chrome with a small number of extensions that will help manage the flow of social networking on multiple networks, but it's not ideal and certainly is not a replacement for one browser that really, actually, does an outstanding job in this space. I will also share any additional insights I can come up with or find.

Contest entries

As some of you may know, I started as an author primarily by writing poetry. I have a fairly sizable collection of poems I've written over the years, and am in the process of putting some of the best of these into chapbooks for submission to several contests. I will certainly announce any results here!