The Epiphany

The last week of coursework has been a fairly intensive (for many) introduction to the Joint Operation Planning Process.  Having done this for a large chunk of the last decade and given that I've been employed as a training aid by the instructors here, I have done a lot of teaching of the process to my classmates.

Through this week I realized I have gotten more and more short-fuzed as we have progressed through the exercise work in class.  Some of that rage has been tamped because I was the student group leader.

I was realizing what it was that made me so angry.  It was the same reason why I'd ripped off the students' heads in the last exercise that I taught in my first year teaching at Fort Leavenworth.  Some of it was the fact that of the students I had in that exercise, some of them were incompetently stupid and unprofessionally lazy.  Some of it was the fact that it was the same thing I'd been doing in my last combat tour, every day, and I could not disassociate teaching it in peacetime from the human costs I'd associated with it.

I can't disassociate doing it again as a student, teaching it to my classmates, from the troops who died executing the campaign plan I wrote.

And yet, I have no illusions about my abilities to do this relative to almost anyone else I know.  I have become, by any reasonable standard, very, very good at something that is so unbelievably bad for my conscience that has become for me quite possibly the most personally destructive thing about my chosen profession.

It doesn't matter that there were layers of command between my former headquarters and those dead troops.  It doesn't matter that my plan wasn't the sole reason they died.  Regardless of the logic, good enough was never good enough.

I just can't let it go.

And that's why my intemperate rage continues unabated.