Butt end of the Army -- a good thing

You can always tell the Army's priorities by the following criteria:

• Who has the latest uniform
• Who has the toys on their weapons
• Who's got the coolest armor
• Who gets stuck with the nasty jobs, and
• Who gets treated nicely by their battalion.

Based on this, I think that somewhere along the line my company drew the short straw. We don't get anything special.

The obvious reason, of course, is "We're logistics," but it's more than that. It's because we're not part of a Brigade Combat Team -- we're independent.

Ten years ago, the central unit for the U.S. Army was the division. If the 4th Infantry Divsion deployed, they brought an entire brigade of support with them -- including an entire battalion of just transportation units.

Nowadays, though, the Army is organized into smaller, more mobile units called Brigade Combat Teams. The divisions are still there -- First Cavalry, 101st Airborne, etc -- but they rotate their three or four brigades in and out rather than all at once. Proportionately, a transportation company -- called a Forward Support Company -- is all that's needed.

So if a brigade gets issued cool, new stuff, it's a matter of pride for their transportation people to look the same as everyone else. There's still going to be differences, but the truck drivers wouldn't be stuck running around with M16s with iron sights while the rest of the brigade has M4s, close combat optics, and maglites on the side. It would be embarrassing for the commanding colonel.

Seeing as how we're outside of this system, we therefore don't have a "patron" that sticks up for us.

As a result, we get stuck with rotten details. For example, why were my truck drivers responsible for providing gate security for Kandahar? What in our training would make someone think we would be well suited for that task?

And why were we stuck doing it for 12 hour shifts? Why couldn't we allocate another half-dozen people to the task and make 8 hour shifts? Because we had so many other things we had to do we couldn't spare the personnel. Unlike other, more influential units, we didn't have the option of deploying with a full complement.

Because our battalion, a National Guard unit, had no lasting relationship to us, they have no interest in trying to fight the tasking. Good luck trying to get a special award for a soldier's job well done -- they consider everything covered by the end of tour awards and won't even process it.

Despite all this, being independent has provided us with unique opportunities, most notably (for me) my job with the Australians. Apparently, I've been doing a decent job -- yesterday I was able to get a letter of recommendation from the commanding officer up here for an international program I'd like to do next year.

I imagine getting a reommendation from an officer of a foreign army would be pretty convincing for a program that involves going overseas.

What a strange paradox -- only by working in a low-priority field do I get a better chance to pursue my goals. I'd call that the hand of Providence.