Generality 2

Before anything else, you must trust in your training! The words haunted and taunted us. They forced us to question what exactly was going on. They shone the light of reality into our eyes and brought back a simple concept we’d forgotten. In other words, having a general, even a low level Brigadier General tell you to trust in your training really served to remind you just how little training you had, and just how little you actually trusted in it.

“So…If we’re supposed to trust in our training, why are they forcing us to re-train everything while we’re here?” The words rang true, and the problems pointed out in the question were glaring. But Blue, Old White Man, Thin Mints, and Sausage Fingers bringing to light the idiocy of the situation did nothing to alleviate the overwhelming sense of rehashed repetition. Kuwait, for my unit at least, is filled with what seems at the lower level as last minute shotgun fixes – load up everything that one day might be needed, and blast everyone in the face with it all at once.

So, following this method (cynical me would say, “I’m sure it is a time tested Army standard”) we were stuck sitting through briefing after briefing coupled with mostly impractical training exercises while other companies were doing what they were supposed to do in Kuwait – acclimating themselves to the environment and relaxing before a year in Iraq. But this is a double standard we’ve gotten used to. You walk around with weapon in hand long enough back home and you’ll constantly see everyone else relaxing. But we’re the exception to the rule; we’re what happens when those in charge were formerly in charge of brand new soldiers.

So you question the decisions of those in charge of you when they question your intelligence and ability to retain the simplest of information. And then, when in all their brilliance they force you to repeat what you’ve already done, what you’ve spent countless hours going over, then its back to business as usual. And these aren’t tasks which you become more proficient at with practice; these are simple classes on Iraqi culture, or how to clear a room. The former is useful, but not in a repetitive sense, and the latter is useful only if you repeat it in the hundreds of times, not once by listening to someone tell it to you.

But knowing that everything you do is being done over, and everything you did should have been done already...It destroys your confidence in your training. General So-and-So, Point 1 and our training is moot. And sadly, so is our trust in it now.