I discovered this a few days ago, when after my ninth Red Bull of the morning I was still groggy, semi-responsive and pretty much worthless. (It speaks volumes to what I do here, though, that I could be immune to caffeine. I freely point out that I do nothing here and, aside from my knack at Power Point I pretty much waste taxpayer money on the daily basis. So, as an aside, thank you.) Anyway, many people who know me will readily point out rare is the time when I do not have a cup of Starbucks in my hand. Maybe I'm thinking I brought this on myself? Maybe its like how when you take a prescription for some virus you have, only the mutant strand of whatever sickness you have, which is impervious to any man-made medicine and which, obviously, the medicine does not kill remains, so after time your body is filled with like, the X-Men of viruses which can only be killed by something not-of-this-world, so God help you if you get a cough because tuberculosis is just around the corner. Who knows? All I know is that I am like, irritable as hell pretty much every waking hour I do not spend running or eating. And when you combine irritability with a my own blend of sarcastic, condescending irony you are left with the attractive blend of "complete asshole" which, sadly, is my new moniker.
On this handy graph, I am perpetually somewhere between 2:00 pm and 4:55 pmGood segue to my main point here.
When you learn about the Iraqi culture, one of the main points you are taught is their predilection towards overt hospitality. If you have to interact with an Iraqi Soldier, you will more than likely be offered sweet, hot chai tea and maybe a cookie or biscuit. If you stay through lunch, they will offer to share theirs with you. It can become a good, reciprocal relationship because American GIs are widely known, too, for their love of flinging candy to Iraqi children, something I have done in the past. When it gets beyond the point of asinine, however, is when we leave a partnered unit and move on with our mission.
The American military loves tradition... generalization of the century. Got it. But we do. Among the more innocuous yet beloved traditions is "coining." When you belong to a unit, that unit has a special coin which has their distinctive unit insignia or maybe their specific mission for that coin (like, 1st Infantry Division, "Operation New Dawn"). Every general has a coin, ever post has a coin, every unit above and including a battalion has a coin. There are, for lack of a better term, a crap load of coins out there. When you get a bunch of old-school officers together, they will perform a coin check and everyone around them has to produce a coin from some unit. The person with the lowest ranking unit (ie, a battalion coin is worth less than a brigade coin) has to buy the group a round of drinks. Now, you're probably wondering "doesn't this lead to one guy getting a lot of free drinks?" The answer is an emphatic "hell yes" because after the first coining, some asshole always thinks "oh snap I have this coin with a general's star on it... free drinks for THIS GUY!" and proceeds to coin EVERYONE who walks in the bar. But the Army was built on hallowed traditions, like Indian killing, one-upping and binge drinking. And woe be unto you if you don't have a coin. People will just mock you mercilessly and buy you Smirnoff Ices the rest of the night.
Oh SNAP! You've just been coined.
Oh SNAP! You've just been coined. Some time during OIF I, maybe late 2003, there must have been a gathering of senior officers (sidebar: whenever senior officers are gathered together, the only make really good decisions) and someone must have said "hey, instead of a coin, lets give Iraqis something even cooler than a coin! Lets give them a piece of wood shaped like our coin, only slightly bigger" and then (probably) they awkwardly high-fived one another. So they did. The first units we partnered with Iraqis left them with small pieces of wood, engraved with their unit logo. The next units who partnered with that same Iraqi unit saw that piece of wood and said "No matter what we do here, we must leave this Iraqi Army unit a slightly larger piece of wood. With glitter." And so on. If you walk into the command room of any Iraqi general, you can trace his time line of partnership by looking at the ever-increasing, ever-outlandishly ornate pieces of wood which lead to his office. Seriously, I would not be surprised if I walked into an office tomorrow and found something like the altar Owen Wilson carved in Meet the Parents gracing the doorway. We love giving gifts, and we seem blind to the fact that Iraqis are bound by cultural customs to accept our gifts, no matter how stupid, as literally the coolest and most incredibly amazing thing they have ever seen. If you take that and add the generally competitive one-upping which goes along with anything in the military, things can get out of hand pretty quickly
72 man hours... pretty good considering I carved it from one existing piece of stoneBut there is something oddly paternalistic and condescending about the gift giving. We give Iraqis something which most of us would look at and say "wow that's a piece of crap" but when we give to them with such pomp and circumstance and couple it with their cultural leaning towards humble graciousness, we think we're kicking butt in the gift-giving department. When we left our last partnered unit, we had to give them a gift. Lacking the money to buy something, we decided to leave with a nice gift of baklava... which is sort of like an Iraqi coming to American and giving us a gift of an American flag and an apple pie. When we become so focused on giving them something which would leave a lasting impression we forget that the most lasting impression is a good, solidly trained and disciplined Army. I don't want to be preachy (it is SO unlike me...) but maybe directing efforts toward partnering and less toward making sure the next unit in our place would have to look at our gift and say "oh crap, well I guess that's par" might result in a more stable, but less ornate wood carving-filled, Iraq.
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