Barnacle Tactics
Our instructor, an Army Captain, is stuck to the wall of a classroom.
He's impersonating a barnacle.
To get there, he told us what he was going to do, and sprinted into the wall with a violent thud.
After pausing frozen on the wall for a few seconds, he dismounts and explains his point: "Offense is about violence and speed. You do not want to be what I just was. Barnacles just sit around, waiting for a fight to come to them. Don't be a barnacle during a fight."
The class laughs, but in the back of our minds we realize that he isn't injecting comedy to avoid the truth.
After lunch two weeks ago he showed us a video of a wounded and unarmed American contractor being killed by insurgents at point blank range.
The point was clear: if it takes comedy to learn the doctrine, use it. But there is no comedy in fighting a war against brutal enemies.
He's impersonating a barnacle.
To get there, he told us what he was going to do, and sprinted into the wall with a violent thud.
After pausing frozen on the wall for a few seconds, he dismounts and explains his point: "Offense is about violence and speed. You do not want to be what I just was. Barnacles just sit around, waiting for a fight to come to them. Don't be a barnacle during a fight."
The class laughs, but in the back of our minds we realize that he isn't injecting comedy to avoid the truth.
After lunch two weeks ago he showed us a video of a wounded and unarmed American contractor being killed by insurgents at point blank range.
The point was clear: if it takes comedy to learn the doctrine, use it. But there is no comedy in fighting a war against brutal enemies.
posted by Violent Traveler at 6:27 PM
1 Comments:
Why do I, living in Moldova, seem to have better access to the internet than you, in the military, for whom the internet was originally developed? At least I blog more often. What's that? You say you have actual work to do, as opposed to me? Yeah, that's a valid point. But still, don't let a peacenik like me dominate the blog debate.
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