I don’t like Greg Jaffe, the Washington Post reporter. At the last Milblog conference, Jaffe was a panel “expert” and he told the assemblage that milblogs had outlived their usefulness because he knows more about the military than former members of the uniformed services. I guess that’s why the Post has hired at least three of my friends who served in the GWOT as reporters in the last few months.
Anyway, Jaffe writes about one member of the uniformed services in his latest piece for the Post; The watchers: Airmen who surveil the Islamic State never get to look away. His subject is Courtney, 29, an Air Force staff sergeant and intelligence analyst who is involved with the drone program where she works at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia.
Jaffe expects us to feel sorry for the airman because she has been at this job for three years without a break – that she takes the war home every night when she gets off her shift.
For more than three years, this has been Courtney’s war — 10 hours a day, four days a week, thousands upon thousands of hours of live video footage from Iraq and Syria.
[…]
“Our airmen never get to unplug,” said Lt. Col. Alison Kamataris, the deputy commander of the 497th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group here.
Infantrymen typically serve nine- to 12-month combat tours; pilots deploy for four months. Even U.S.-based drone pilots rotate off war duty every three or four years.
“We don’t have the same ability to give breaks to train or innovate,” Kamataris said of her analysts.
The article continues and Courtney tells about the time she she had to do bomb damage assessment on a bunch of God-less heathens who had just murdered a number of their prisoners. The scene was “gruesome” she said, so gruesome that she had to talk to a counselor at the end of her shift. I’m sure she did, but can you imagine one of your infantrymen asking to talk to a counselor after a patrol?
The toughest part of the job, she says, has been forgetting about it when she goes home and not second-guessing decisions.
The key part of that phrase here is “she goes home”. Jaffe tells us that she doesn’t have the luxury “to look away”, yet while she’s at work, she “looks away” long enough to check if she’s been selected for OCS, she discusses the fact that she wasn’t selected with her colleagues and then the first thing that she does at the end of her shift, is call her parents. All things an infantryman in the combat theater can’t do “to look away”.
I understand that being on these drone crews is grueling, tedious and necessary work, but please don’t make it sound like it’s more grueling than that of the people who are actually in the theater of war, face-to-face with the people they kill.
I know Jaffe likes drone crews, because he take a short drive from his office and pretend like he’s “at war” while sitting in an air conditioned cubicle deep inside the guarded gates of an airbase – he can never take the place of someone who has stood inside the borders of Iraq, chewed the sand and stood toe-to-toe with the enemy.
Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.
