Words mean things

In Korea I led an Avenger PLT that, in event of war, would be attached to an MLRS BN to provide protection from fixed and rotary wing air threats so that the BN could execute its counter-fires mission unimpeded. We were all under the command of the 210th Fires BDE.

OR

In Korea I led a platoon that operated Avengers, a short range anti-aircraft system that used a combination of heat-seeking missiles and a machine gun to engage enemy planes and heliocopters. Our job was to provide protection to an artillery battalion that operated the Multiple Launch Rocket System – basically a very large rocket launcher mounted on a tracked vehicle similar to a tank. We did this so that they could do their job of destroying or defeating North Korean artillery in the event of an attack by the North. Both my unit and the artillery battalion fell underneath the same brigade.

Big difference, huh?

There are a lot of things that make the military hard to understand. Even if you served it can be difficult to understand what someone in another service branch did. If I was talking to someone who had been in the Navy or Air Force I’d need them to go slow and explain a good deal to me. Marines always seemed to be very similar to the Army in many ways so they were easier to talk to, but there were still odd differences. Simple things like job designations could confuse. The Army has Military Occupational Specialties for enlisted soldiers. This is an alpha-numeric designator such as 14S (Avenger crew member). The Marines have a different term than MOS (I never remember it) and use 4-digit identifiers. Why a difference in such a basic thing that could be more universal? Who the hell knows?

With so many challenges to communicate just from one service branch to another it shouldn’t shock anyone that we have a hard time communicating with people that haven’t served or worked as a DoD civilian employee. All the cultural divides aside, our civil/military gap starts with a matter of language.

Words mean things. It’s something that my OBC instructor Captain Tooke would always harp on us young lieutenants. Many of the students would snicker at this seemingly obvious statement and at the instructor who was animated and red-faced. Some of us understood the joke was on them. This mantra of doctrine, three simple words, meant so much. CPT Tooke – the Tookie Monster – was trying to drive home the basics of effective communication to us. Something that is a foundational skill for an officer. When a major facet of your job  is writing orders, issuing  formal policies, drafting standard operating procedures, speaking to groups, briefing young soldiers and senior leaders, coordinating complex efforts via radio, then you better be on your game with communicating. All of these things are critical to you being effective or you a being a dud of an officer. You must be careful in your choice of words. You need to understand very subtle differences in jargon and technical meanings. You have to pick your words with great thought and you need to rehearse them as much as possible before they leave your mouth.

Do you want to Defeat a threat or Destroy it? There is a big difference, especially when it comes to air defense planning. You can Destroy an incoming ballistic missile or aircraft only by actually destroying it – blowing it up before it can cause harm. To Defeat the same threat you can destroy it, or you can simply cause it to fail it’s mission of killing the forces under your protection. That can mean that you knock a missile off course so that it strikes nothing but empty desert. It can mean that the threat you pose by your presence, by your effective placement of anti-air systems, causes enemy aircraft to turn back or not even try to attack the assets you’re protecting. So you don’t always need to destroy, to kill, to win. Pretty sure Sun Tzu had something to say about that (III, 6).

You see what the difference in two little words makes? Learning Army doctrine and terminology is a fantastic way to refine your communication skills. It’s highly technical and the slightest oversight can lead to mass confusion. To be good at it takes practice, patience, and a methodical mind. To be poor at it is easy and results in an officer causing unnecessary death. Military movies love the trope of the incompetent officer getting his people killed. Next time you watch a movie with this story line ask yourself what role sloppy communication played.

So what’s the point of all this? It isn’t to bore you to death about Army doctrinal terminology. I wanted to share a story that never fails to make me smile (as the image of CPT Tooke berating my OBC class always does) and to drive home the point that we cause so many problems through a lack of thoughtfulness in our communication. When you can’t talk to someone or another group, you avoid them. We do it with our spouses, families, in our offices, with younger/older people, with people from a different part of the country, with other countries, and within so many different segments of our own society. These difficulties grate on our patience and cause us to run back to our safe zones, our echo chambers.

For the purpose of this blog and my story, this issue of communication is central to America’s civil/military divide. Really thought, this is just one piece of a problem that America has been struggling with in terms of understanding itself and creating a unified society. You can’t always reach someone, there will be failures to communicate. We have to make every effort though. We can’t just hide.

I hope that my efforts in trying to bridge the civil/military gap here can serve as an example of bridging any number of social gaps we have. This is a major problem in America, but I’ll go out on a limb and say other countries experience this as well. I’ve noticed some readers in Ireland, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, and even Russia and China. I’ve no idea of these are US service members stationed abroad or if they are nationals of those countries. I’d love to know what the international take on my writing is (HINT – please leave comments or send emails). Also, I’m glad you’re here.

Words mean things. It’s a lesson that will always stick with me. It’s a mantra that forces me to be hyper-critical of each word written here. There’s always room for improvement. With effort and thoughtfulness, I hope that what I write conveys something meaningful to you, that together we are bridging the gap.

Until we meet again.