Reality

I sit here and wonder if what I am doing here is the right thing to do. Am I the right guy for the job?  Kinda late to think about that now, huh? Sometimes I feel so comfortable here. I can be so spot on and in control. At other times I am so far out of my comfort zone I want to cash in my chips and go home. Sometimes I look around and just shake my head in disbelief.

I guess most of us have our moments of doubt. I am frustrated by things out my control and, in retrospect, how I deal with them. Rarely in my real life do I fail. Here, failure can reach up bite at any time. It is so frustrating for me to know that I am 100% fully in control and then, a moment later, something appears out of the blue (purple?) and because of my inexperience or pig headedness I peer into the black abyss of failure. I think that I have fallen in on at least one occasion. Certainly the edge has crumbled underfoot. Nothing has become of it yet. Time will tell.

I have become stubbornly rigid and somewhat apathetically complacent. A dangerous and complex oxymoron if there ever was one. I want to do well. It is my duty, after all. I look around me and I have nothing but contempt for some of the people and most of the country around me. They say this is a joint command. There is no jointness. We’re a hodgepodge of DOD officers, civilians and contractors, all of which speak a different dialect of DoDese (or no military dialect at all), looking to get in, get out, and move up. Am I any better? No. I guess I just have a conscious.

After saying all this there are a precious few shining lights of hope here. Most are retired U.S. military, some are contractors and some are DoD civilians. These “old” guys have seen it before and are not keen on reworking or reliving the stupid stuff. Their voices are not always heard, however.

Despite my feelings I will soldier on. I will work to overcome my challenges. It is important to me to support the soldier in the mud. It is my job to ensure they have the ammunition they need when they need it and plenty (but not too much) of it. This is what I do best. To paraphrase a comrade in the ammo world “A soldier without ammunition is just a tourist.” The challenging part I have is pleasing faceless bureaucrats and staff members trying to justify their existence. Some of whom are looking for penny ante governmental waste in my AO  while a few hundred feet from where I sit decisions are made, though done in good faith, which will result in BILLIONS of wasted U.S. dollars. I will soldier on. Yes. I guess I just have a conscious.