Weekend Warriors? Not anymore.
Back when I was a lowly seaman, going to “drill” once a month in the Navy Reserves meant showing up on time, wearing the uniform sharply, standing very still at attention and saluting at the right time.
How things have changed.
Back then most of us spent our drill weekends shuffling paperwork and chatting up a shipmate or two in the halls. We tried to look important, arming ourselves with some documents or a clipboard in accordance with the orders of one lieutenant commander: “Mill about smartly when you mill about!” (He never was promoted further, by the way.)
And when the weekends were was over, it really was true — we wouldn’t see our fellow reservists until the next month, and sometimes not until the next year.
I know I spent a good chunk of my drill time shopping for my annual two-week “training” in the summer. Where should I go this year — Hawaii? Italy? France — yeah, baby!
“This isn’t a travel agency,” a lieutenant once told me. She coulda fooled me!
Then came then Persian Gulf war in 1991. That’s when a lot of reservists like me had to make the decision about whether the college money was worth the possibility of going to war.
Some bailed. In fact, many bailed.
I had told myself that I would stay in the reserves until it was no longer fun, and back then, it still was.
But by the time the peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia came along, and then the debacle in Somalia, another factor really built up our workload — the Internet. We no longer talked just once a month but pretty much every week — sometimes most nights and weekends — getting work done and creating more work.
The military also started taking physical exercise far more seriously (and still does). They really got pickier on who they brought in, and in a matter of a few years, they were a lot fewer Deadwood Joes with zero motivation and a lot more college grads with buns of steel — even among the enlisted ranks.
Still, we hadn’t yet gained what we reservists wanted most — the respect of the active duty. We still didn’t work directly with them and they still looked at us as a bunch of yahoos who played with their guns and equipment every other weekend — and left crumbs on their desks.
Boy have times changed.
This time around more reservists were initially called to war than active duty. There was no whining, no grousing. We reservists took the motto “Be Ready” seriously. We got ready. Congress gave us money for training, equipment, and the time to gain experience with real-time exercises that closely mimicked the real deal.
It was quite a change from waving passengers through at Fleet Week in New York, though that was fun!
And the active duty watched and begrudgingly had to acknowledge that not only were we pretty sharp on the draw, we looked pretty good in uniform, too.
We kept pace with them, ever so aware of a judgmental eye or two, and earned their appreciation of the skills we brought from our civilian lives.
More joint exercises led to more real-time joint war-fighting.
A couple years ago when I was serving on the Talisman Saber exercise in Rockhampton, Australia, a whole bunch of us were working in the same tent camp, surrounded by environmentalists protesting. Toward the end of this, the largest biennial joint exercise in the Pacific, we traded stories with the Aussies and with our own about how our missions were going, what challenges we had, and how many protesters we’d dealt with that day.
Only toward the end of the exercise — if at all — was the question asked: Are you a reservist? And when we told them we were, they exclained, “Hey mate! Your’re kidding, right — never would’ve guessed!”
In other words, status was last thing on their minds. We’d finally become one big fighting team, not only as U.S. troops — reservists and active duty alike — but allies working in tandem.
As the wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, we hope in this respect the U.S. military and its allies will be recognized simply as one mean fighting team. And darn proud.
To the fellow reservists out there, tell me how it’s going for you — are you having the same kinds of experiences with the active duty? Are you feeling “ready and fully integrated,” as the Navy likes to say? Tell us your experiences, for better or worse.
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mp3 downloads…
Do you have a list or archive that shows of all the downloads that are available? Thx, Mike…