How I got here PT II

Well in reality, this manager had me nailed to the wall or so he thought. The reality is that I am someone who documents everything. My nature demands that emprical evidence needs to be present in all things. So while he rambled, insseantly about the fact that I wasn't a team player I was sending detailed documentation with sources back to my true stateside managmement chain.

Had I not done that I probably would have been screwed. The lesson learned there is that as an employee you should always take notes of your challenges and accomplishments. It's not someone else's job to make you look good. So my managment knew that I was on point but, they knew that they lost me as an Iraqi asset on this project which was fine by me. However, my job wanted to still use me as an asset on the project. While I was pesona non grata in Iraq, there was a loophole in this "ban" I was not banned from stateside support. The Iraqi manager's thought process was that if you were kept out of Iraq then you were denied the fat bonus checks. What he didn't realize is that my interest in the project was not primarally financial but, philosophical.

Right now the US military is going throught a remarkable pardigim shift on how they think about warfare. This is an amazing challenge for the military which is until recently been trained wholesale on the thought of symetric warfare (i.e. fighting battles with roughly equally equipped emenies) well the battle that we fight today are asymetric (i.e. battles where the emenies do not have a equal capability set in this case our emenies have a reduced capability set). In the long view this is changing how the military traditionally is thought to operate (and more importantally how the US population needs to look at war). This process is going to take a while but it is exciting to be a part of.


Back to the issue of this blog. My company found a loophole to this ban clause so as a result over the past year I was sent to seveal training centers around the world. For there I was able to ply my trade and work with all different types of military orgnizations. I have spent the past year milling of military field manuals, I voratiouly consumed any and all books and news articles I could find on Iraq, Iraqi policy, US forgien policy as well as learning military techniques from the operaters. I took (I'm still taking) all of this information and appling them with the training I supplied. I am somewhat of a Johnny Appleseed if you will. I am a natural storyteller so captivating people is fairly easy to do and for the most part I make sense. The more I trained the more that military leaders wanted me to train. Word of mouth about the "trainer guy" got out in some circles and it has gotten to the point now where I am requested by name to support operations this is a huge and a humbling honor for me. So the manager that thought he would be rid of me acutally made me bigger assest to the customer.

The bottomline is this, in life your heart can't pump kool-aid. You have to have a conviction somewhere and stick to it. You should always be mindful of fear but, don't let it take you over. You are going to have haters in anything you do, that's a haters job to hate. But, like Kat Willams said if you don't have haters that means you aren't doing it.


So at this time I'd like thank all of my haters.