...Papier-Mâché...

24 JUNE 2010

Two men from our company were awarded the Combat Infantry Badge this afternoon. An IED had detonated at what could be considered a relative close distance to their gun truck. No one was injured. The damage to the truck, they say, was limited to what we call ‘peppered’ by shrapnel. They had not been directly exposed to the blast. They saw no enemy, and returned no fire.

By deduction of ‘Combat’ and ‘Infantry’, one would suspect the awarded would have performed their duties as an Infantryman under terms of combat. This may have been the case, once upon a time, during a war with a known and visible enemy—as I, and many others, believe to have been so during the course and aftermath of the invasion. But no more. This war has become silly, and the army with it.

Until this morning, when I heard of the award ceremony, I had only noticed the small changes, ones that would irritate on the scale of a fly in my soup. Nine years ago, when I enlisted, a helmet was a ‘K-pot’—a pot made of kevlar for wearing on your head—but now it’s an ‘ACH’—an Advanced Combat Helmet—and other silliness of the sort. I had gone on pretending to be grandfathered in, and I was one of the Good-ole-boys set in his ways—an old dog refusing to learn new tricks. And this was the same shrug of shoulder I gave the first time I read the 3-21.8, cover-to-cover. It is the army’s new field manual for Infantry tactics and applications.

Back when chinstraps still dangled from K-pots, the Infantry took its guidance out of the 7-8; or, the Infantryman’s bible. It was a short read. It began by explaining a battle drill: A collective action rapidly executed without a deliberate decision making process—that’s a paraphrase but I’m close to the money on it. The next eight chapters are each a direct focus on one of the eight answer-alls to combat—react to contact, enter and clear building and so on. The 7-8 was a coach’s playbook on how to take the fight to the enemy. This new text is some kind of lame excuse for the philosophy of gunfights, but without the philosophy. Fire suppression weighed against fire control. The table of contents reads off what has remained or been removed in the translation of tactics. The battle drills fall under the removed.

The concept of our ‘new army’ was on everyone’s mind during the ceremony; even the Commander hesitated for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to make a crack at the depreciated value of this once respected honor. He did not, it would have lacked a certain amount of class he thought, at least I imagined he thought. Luckily however, I have limited and sometimes even no class.

When the dog-and-pony show ended, Nigel asked me what he missed—he never goes to that kind of nonsense. So I told him, “Well, they blindfolded two Joes and spun them around in tiny circles until they were good and dizzy. Then they gave each of them a stick and had them swing away at a jackass shaped piñata. When the papier-mâché broke open, badges fell from the sky, and there were free CIBs for everyone.” So it goes.

- The Exodus