The Replacements

The story of our adventures at Al Asad isn’t divided easily into segments. It is not a event inspired tale, rather the days and nights themselves blended into a solid block which I can only think of as Al Asad. I began training for a marathon in this time, a singular task on a list of random life goals I compiled while sitting around idle in Speicher. My days were filled with running, small easily obtained goals at first, then suddenly a spike up to 8 miles. Then 10. Then 12. Then 14. And back down in-between; 2 or 3 miles became just a quick warm up sprint for me. 5 and 7 mile runs? Just a normal day. Funny how after only a couple of weeks of something different and already you can adjust to it.

And then the Replacements showed up, rearing their ugly heads. At one point, a resident Marine officer said to me that he was certain they would speak poorly about us after we left, just as we had been speaking poorly about them while we were around. I agreed that they would, and reminded him that L-Word and I weren’t the ones who were in the wrong however, our complaints were valid.

Our replacements finally made me understand for years what I had referred to as a “Cowboy MOS”. Counter-Intelligence Agents had been known in the Army, known and hated, for years as hot-headed, cowboy, power tripping idiots running around unleashed. With the exception of cowboy, I had seen it all before. But the Three Stooges, as I came to think of our three replacements, were easily identified with a cowboy attitude. Cavalier, dangerous, immature, foolish, and above all irrational yet self-justified. Within the first hour of landing in Al Asad they spoke of acquiring other elements of intelligence under their “dominion”, of getting outside “the wire” (the perimeter), and how they thought that running sources – our entire objective – wasn’t the real work that needed to be done. I was frustrated from the start.

Things only got harder with the Three Stooges; the senior in rank (withered in visage and mean in age) had foolish notions of non-practical tasks to be done by his team. His main concern was with the internet, and connectivity, and getting some high speed action in his computer so that the denizens of World of Warcraft wouldn’t miss his mage or troll lord or whatever for very long.

The lowest of the three in seniority was six feet tall and 100 pounds wet – every other word out of him was “fuck” in regard to some minor event or activity which had unintentionally offended him. The copier was out of paper? Someone was a fucking asshole. A report written months ago used the term “aboard” instead of “on”? Clearly I was a fucking idiot and the Marines were fucking jerks. My eyes and demeanor begged him to try and strike out against me as he often threatened, but no such luck. I would have sent him to the hospital with a smile on my face, but the chance never arose.

The middle rank (and middle sized) stooge was loud and obnoxious, often running off at the slightest hint of action. He pulled the car over, leaping out into the road, simply to collect bits of paper he deemed suspicious and possibly part of a larger plot. I deemed them trash, and said as much, but he skipped around snatching them from dust devils and wind storms. He dejectedly returned to the car to inform me that they were blank. Massive terrorist plan avoided, clearly.

These were the individuals we were forced to offer up our friendly, kind, and well mannered sources to. The Stooges took control of two months of effort, and with a cringe on my face I let it all go to them. Because that is the Army way, you cannot control anything in a bigger picture. At all.