When the Smoke Clears

Taking a few moments to breathe and bring a few folks up to date:

Once again, I say, “One weekend a month my @$$.”

In our last episode we encountered buxomly women at the grocery store. In the meantime I’ve had my annual visit to the Lumberjack competition in West Virginia with my friend the Butterbar and his big little-brother, the professional.

And there’s one of the rubs: He’s no longer a butterbar (second lieutenant). In fact, he’s a first lieutenant and gets promoted to captain in a few weeks. I’m the butterbar. I’ll have to call him “sir” again soon. He HATES that, since he thinks of me as his big brother.

The boss at civilian work has made an interesting decision: I am the one in charge of our 3, soon to be 4, major construction projects. I’m the single point of contact for all questions. Great challenge, a lot of fun and I love architecture. But this on top of the rest of the work and presentations… hmmm.

Last weekend was another drill weekend (yes, two in three weeks), but my weekend started on Friday. The man and friend who, a year ago next week, walked me into this Army thing was made a Battalion commander on Friday. I awoke dark and early, joined him and we drove together for hours talking about his plans, next steps, leadership, and his plans for me. Mostly I was there to support him, almost be his aid in gathering his family and friends together, while his wife let me know I was also there to keep him on track as he is easily distracted in the process of getting to know more about his soldiers. Home by midnight, just to catch a little sleep then get out to weekend drill early in the morning ahead of everyone else. (and a class reunion later that evening.)

But now that I am being passed around to help units, I’m in another interesting situation: That little bar on my chest means I’m supposed to receive some respect, but at the same time I’m surrounded by people much higher rank than I. So I’m basically the gopher, but at the same time the go-to guy.

The unit I was most recently loaned to is just now forming up. We have 4 officers right now including me, but will get a full complement of over 400 soldiers and officers in the very near term. They are moving into a facility soon that has to be retrofitted into a temporary armory.

The CO and XO were bent over some floor plans in a big conference room I had found and set up for them. As I was passing by, the XO called out to me: “Hey, LT, come on over here.”

“Sir?”

“We need to get moved into this new place, but we also need some space for teaching, need to make sure we have connectivity, and this thing is an old pharmacy.” An impish grin grew across his face. “You know a little bit about looking at blueprints, don’t you, LT?”

Reluctantly, “Um, yes, sir.”

“That’s right,” the XO offered to the CO, “the old LT here does this type of stuff every single day. That huge building they are working on over there as you walk in, yeah, that’s one of his projects.”

“Just the nerd stuff, sir.”

“You busy next week, LT?” the CO asked.

“Well, sir, I should be making contact with my new battalion towards the end of the week and I do have my regular job…”

“Well see if you can carve out some time here. We need you. We don’t have time to wait for consultants to go through this.”

Sighing. “Will Thursday afternoon work, colonel? I have a meeting on another building project down that way that morning, sir.”

“What can I bring?” the XO asked, triumphantly.

Handing him a pencil and piece of paper, “The existing structure plans are fine but I also need an electrical/data plan to be sure we have the power we need, a partition plan, reflected ceiling, and elevations of the offset room over in here. And I need the plans in scale, not an unscaled copy. Budget would be nice, too, but I imagine this is an Army project so we define it and they just tell us ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

I’m now at five buildings to work on. I still just want to go into medicine.

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