Would you believe... NaJoWriMo?

National Journal Writing Month!

Today's NaJoWriMo prompt is something along the lines of "What where you doing ten years ago?"

Hmmm.

Lots of folks would find that question entirely too easy to answer. School. Work. Mundane stuff. Others might have been going through a tumultuous period in their lives, putting various jobs and relationships behind them and whatnot. Moi, I have a LiveJournal entry tucked away, somewhere, to remind me that I was in Kazakhstan, near the start of the campaign to launch Hotbird 8.

The night before, I had joined members of the French team at the Proton Club to watch their national soccer team beat Portugal 1-0.

According to that entry, I had a tough day of interpreting later that day of July 6, ten years ago.

Maybe something more will occur to me as this day progresses, but for now, I will consider the prompt noted and responded to, and will cap off this post and "turn to" with today's translation and OCR.

Cheers...

Apropos, perhaps...

Many people who have not served in the armed forces sort of assume that most military training is directed at learning how to kill people.

This is not the case, in my experience.

My recollection from boot camp is that most training was directed at how best to keep yourself—and by extension, your buddies—alive.

In light of recent events, I recall attending a series of training sessions (several years after graduating from boot camp) that were intended to familiarize us with the various capabilities of the Soviet army, but... well... I get ahead of myself.

If memory serves, these sessions were typically led by a senior NCO, assisted by some junior NCOs. The subject of the session I am recalling here was supposed to be an overview of the Soviet inventory of tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and suchlike.

To be frank, I do not remember much from that session, except that at one point, the staff sergeant in charge of the session opened a rather thick notebook of classified information on such vehicles that lay on the desk in front of him, whereupon a slip of paper flew out from between the pages, and when it landed on the deck, it was apparent that the word SECRET had been stamped across the top and bottom.

Despite the fact that everyone in the room had been cleared to that level (something I do not feel is much of a revelation since the hack of the OPM basically let everyone in the world know who in the U.S. has ever applied for and been granted a security clearance), hilarity prevailed as a number of corporals assisting with the instruction piled onto onto that paper as if it were a live grenade and they were laying down their lives to save the rest of us by placing their bodies between us and it.

Eventually, when things quieted down, it turned out the loose piece of paper that had been stamped SECRET was... the instruction sheet to a Revell plastic model of the Soviet PT-76 tank, available at most toy stores in the area (that being Jacksonville, North Carolina, near Camp Swamp Lejeune).

Some joker, apparently piquéd that Revell apparently had better intelligence sources than the United States Government—the Revell data on the PT-76 was more detailed and more accurate—had taken the sheet out of a box bought at a toy store and classified it SECRET with several strokes of a rubber stamp.

That's all it took, really.

Everyone had a good laugh, but then one of us (not a member of my unit, I might add) asked, "Okay, so the instructions have no place in the book. Why keep them? Why not just throw them out?"

The room fell utterly silent. We trainees were silent because we had nothing to say. The NCOs running the session were silent because they were speechless in the face of our ignorance of the rules on handling classified documents. The rules might, at times, not make a whole lot of sense, but they were designed to ensure that classified information stayed that way.

To make a long story short, the staff sergeant in charge took personal initiative and changed the subject of the training session. Soviet arms and armor would wait—he felt it was more important for us to learn the rudiments of handing classified documents, and to this day I recall his reason for doing so: one innocent slip could land you in the brig for a long, long time.

Throw out something that had been classified as a joke? Without authorization? Sorry, Charlie... No way! There were procedures for handling and destroying classified documents, we were told, and though they might not always wholly jive with common sense, and might not make life as easy as it might otherwise be without them, everyone in the chain of command had to follow them—from the lowliest private to the Commander-in-Chief himself. Not to do so was—for us Marines—punishable by the UCMJ, while civilians were subject to equally strict laws applicable to their realm of existence.

Food for thought, in these times.

Cheers...