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Show John Reed 2 R 2 09 Also when I came in my boss's deputy al o a Navy guy, my rank, he ort f bonded with me in a funny way. He was not particularly put off that I was an academic, that I'd been a college professor. Our boss thought that that made me homosexual, but he, the deputy, sort of helped me get my feet on the ground. Early on he said, "You know, John, everybody wants to get a Bronze Star when they leave this organization. About one guy out of four gets it and everybody else gets a lower end of tour award. You've got to go outside the wire. You've got leave the IZ in order to have a shot at getting that award." The way I interpreted that is to be a man among men you got to leave the IZ. Because my headquarters was within the IZ, you're working a twelve hour day, six and a half days a week at a computer in the IZ. So if you're terrified of going outside, if you don't want to go outside, you're probably going to be able to set up a career there where you don't have to. On the other hand, if somebody comes to you and says, "John, we want you to fly up to this other place and give a briefing" or "take a road convoy here and do that. .. " If you blink and step back, like a quarter of an inch, they're going to read that on your face and they're going to say, "ahhh, okay." So again I was lucky. Nobody asked me to go outside the wire until I was more or less oriented. Then suddenly I was getting so bored and so cabin fevered and rat on a maze inside this headquarters that I jumped at the opportunity to leave the IZ, which then came in the form of being an escort officer to one of these SIGIR, or Special Inspectors for Iraq Reconstruction. The guy that I was married up with or buddied up with was a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, a very knowledgeable construction inspector, knew a lot about materials, knew a lot about techniques. A very reasonable guy, he understood the Iraqi context really well. I went on two major inspection trips with him up into Kurdistan. 16 |
