That was then, this is now.
Sep. 13th, 2012 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumThere are break-points in your life. Moments which divide it into periods of “before” and “after”
Tuesday I went to work. It was a day like any other, until I got off the train at WTC. When I came out into the light there were protesters, of some sort; but that’s not unknown. There were, however, tons of cops. Not just the regular flatfeet, but the Sergeants and Lieutenants, in their white shirts. As I walked up Broadway I saw more, and motorcycles and scooters, in NYPD colors.
There were firefighters in their dress blues. And I was reminded it was 11 years go the World Trade Center was buried in rubble. This Tuesday was, as I am told That Tuesday was, a beautiful day. But I’m not thinking of that anniversary. I am rather remembering what I was doing a year later.
In Sept. of 2002 I was teaching a class of soldiers how to be interrogators, and counter-intelligence agents. I’d done it lots of times before; this one was probably my tenth; so something between 300-400 students, mostly interrogators, had been subject to my lectures; and suffered through my sessions, one on one, in “the booth”. MSG Jorgensen, with whom I’d been doing this training since 1994, had done about half again that many. Tom, and Glenn, and Russ, and Sal, and Jose-Luis, and couple of others ,and I had been knocking about the country, teaching on one schoolhouse or another for eight years. We’d probably spent something close to a year together; taking in baseball games, or cooking in our hotel rooms, whalewatching off Nantucket, and trying to pass along our experience.
Because Interrogation has little in the way of institutional knowledge; it’s all tucked inside the heads of the people who do it.
But this class was different. For these “kids” it wasn’t theoretical. They were, in theory, going to be shipped out to Afghanistan. We all knew, however, that the ostensible reason was a lie. This class was almost all going to be sent to Iraq. It lent a certain poignant intensity to things. In “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” Heinlein has his protagonist say that he was too young the first time he was a drill sergeant; that he probably got some of those kids killed.
We weren’t so much worried about that, as we were that they would get other people killed; because being a bad interrogator isn’t a direct threat to the person doing the job. Yeah, we were aware that some of them might get killed; but we knew that about everyone in the Army. It goes with the job (in the 16 years I was in I was, personally, acquainted with 6 people who died. One of my students was wounded on his tour in Iraq, and I have some other friends who were injured in some way. That’s without counting the soldiers I was responsible for when I was in hospitals, or a squad leader in a medical holding company, of those six, three died in theater, the others in training).
And none of us, even the vets from Vietnam, or the guy who had been running covert agents in the Near East for seven years, had ever done the job for ourselves. We had feedback (Chris Mackie, who set up the interrogation facilities in Afghanistan, before the Regular Army took it over, had been an instructor in the past, so was one of the NCOs who built Camp Delta, at GitMo. They told us it worked, “just like it does in the schoolhouse”), so we knew the doctrine was sound.
But one still has doubts. And we knew, because it was an open secret, that the mission wasn’t Afghanistan. That was just to get the funding. Iraq was going to happen.
That colored everything. It made things more intense. It made it harder to keep a distance from the students. It made us less forgiving, “in the booth”. These guys were going to be taken from the schoolhouse, and get tossed right into the fire. They wouldn’t have time to work out the kinks, or play with the toolset, before they were looking at someone who wasn’t playing along to make the training better.
And it felt like the last days of summer. In some brief chunk of time all the theoretical aspects of the job, which most of us had been doing for about a decade, were going to be actual. It was an Indian Summer, the last days of, for want of a better word, innocence.
Walking from downtown, to Soho brought it all back, the sense of purpose, the angst, the frustration, the fears, and the questions. A vague wonder; what would life be like if I’d not been deployed? What would the world be like if we’d not invaded Iraq? There’s a situational pride too. Our students did the job, and they did it well. No one has ever complained they weren’t competent.
They didn’t get sent to Iraq, not exactly. We did. Not all of us, some were; as we expected all to be, kept stateside to train others, but that group was reassigned, and about 1/3rd of them were sent, with my unit, to be attached to the 525 MI Bn, and deployed to Iraq, five months later.
Ten years have come and gone. I’ve probably lived two different lifetimes in there, maybe three. But that slice of time, that’s the one that; for me, divides “the past” from the present
Tuesday I went to work. It was a day like any other, until I got off the train at WTC. When I came out into the light there were protesters, of some sort; but that’s not unknown. There were, however, tons of cops. Not just the regular flatfeet, but the Sergeants and Lieutenants, in their white shirts. As I walked up Broadway I saw more, and motorcycles and scooters, in NYPD colors.
There were firefighters in their dress blues. And I was reminded it was 11 years go the World Trade Center was buried in rubble. This Tuesday was, as I am told That Tuesday was, a beautiful day. But I’m not thinking of that anniversary. I am rather remembering what I was doing a year later.
In Sept. of 2002 I was teaching a class of soldiers how to be interrogators, and counter-intelligence agents. I’d done it lots of times before; this one was probably my tenth; so something between 300-400 students, mostly interrogators, had been subject to my lectures; and suffered through my sessions, one on one, in “the booth”. MSG Jorgensen, with whom I’d been doing this training since 1994, had done about half again that many. Tom, and Glenn, and Russ, and Sal, and Jose-Luis, and couple of others ,and I had been knocking about the country, teaching on one schoolhouse or another for eight years. We’d probably spent something close to a year together; taking in baseball games, or cooking in our hotel rooms, whalewatching off Nantucket, and trying to pass along our experience.
Because Interrogation has little in the way of institutional knowledge; it’s all tucked inside the heads of the people who do it.
But this class was different. For these “kids” it wasn’t theoretical. They were, in theory, going to be shipped out to Afghanistan. We all knew, however, that the ostensible reason was a lie. This class was almost all going to be sent to Iraq. It lent a certain poignant intensity to things. In “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” Heinlein has his protagonist say that he was too young the first time he was a drill sergeant; that he probably got some of those kids killed.
We weren’t so much worried about that, as we were that they would get other people killed; because being a bad interrogator isn’t a direct threat to the person doing the job. Yeah, we were aware that some of them might get killed; but we knew that about everyone in the Army. It goes with the job (in the 16 years I was in I was, personally, acquainted with 6 people who died. One of my students was wounded on his tour in Iraq, and I have some other friends who were injured in some way. That’s without counting the soldiers I was responsible for when I was in hospitals, or a squad leader in a medical holding company, of those six, three died in theater, the others in training).
And none of us, even the vets from Vietnam, or the guy who had been running covert agents in the Near East for seven years, had ever done the job for ourselves. We had feedback (Chris Mackie, who set up the interrogation facilities in Afghanistan, before the Regular Army took it over, had been an instructor in the past, so was one of the NCOs who built Camp Delta, at GitMo. They told us it worked, “just like it does in the schoolhouse”), so we knew the doctrine was sound.
But one still has doubts. And we knew, because it was an open secret, that the mission wasn’t Afghanistan. That was just to get the funding. Iraq was going to happen.
That colored everything. It made things more intense. It made it harder to keep a distance from the students. It made us less forgiving, “in the booth”. These guys were going to be taken from the schoolhouse, and get tossed right into the fire. They wouldn’t have time to work out the kinks, or play with the toolset, before they were looking at someone who wasn’t playing along to make the training better.
And it felt like the last days of summer. In some brief chunk of time all the theoretical aspects of the job, which most of us had been doing for about a decade, were going to be actual. It was an Indian Summer, the last days of, for want of a better word, innocence.
Walking from downtown, to Soho brought it all back, the sense of purpose, the angst, the frustration, the fears, and the questions. A vague wonder; what would life be like if I’d not been deployed? What would the world be like if we’d not invaded Iraq? There’s a situational pride too. Our students did the job, and they did it well. No one has ever complained they weren’t competent.
They didn’t get sent to Iraq, not exactly. We did. Not all of us, some were; as we expected all to be, kept stateside to train others, but that group was reassigned, and about 1/3rd of them were sent, with my unit, to be attached to the 525 MI Bn, and deployed to Iraq, five months later.
Ten years have come and gone. I’ve probably lived two different lifetimes in there, maybe three. But that slice of time, that’s the one that; for me, divides “the past” from the present
