She hasn’t been able to figure out how to maul anybody yet. I stand there next to her and it looks like she’s sending me messages that say /MAUL DOUGHMAO and stuff like that, but nothing happens.
The bloodbath was cool, though.
On the flight from Seoul to Seattle last Sunday, I sat next to a person who seemed a little different from the usual people I find myself next to on these flights. It’s usually a fellow Microsoft employee on the trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific business-class flights. But when I asked this guy what he did for a living, he said “oh, I’m basically a tent salesman.”
After a while it became clear that was a self-deprecating way of avoiding the kind of pestering questions that people would ask if they knew what he really did for a living. He works for a major supplier of hi-tech equipment to military markets, after a 20-year career as a sergeant in the Army paratrooper ranks. (The 82nd Airborne division.) I won’t say his name or the company name — let’s call him “Joe” — but he was gracious enough to talk to me at length about many aspects of the military and his view of events in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Joe’s view of Iraq and Afghanistan was different from that of other people I’ve talked to, because he has been there, several times in each place, as a soldier. So when we talked about the Green Zone, which is just an abstract concept to me, to him we were talking about a specific place with specific buildings and entrances and so on. When we talked about the caves of Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden slipped away from US forces, Joe showed me photos he had taken of caves in that area. When we talked about Gunatanamo, he showed me pictures of him guarding captured and handcuffed Afghanis who are now in Guantanamo. To Joe, all of these things were tangible and real, not just stuff you read about in the paper.
He is also a pretty well-connected person. As one of several examples, when I asked him what he thought of General Petraeus, who is now in charge in Iraq, Joe said “I’ve known Dave a long time, and he’s a great guy, but there’s no one person who can clean that up.”
Here are a few of the things he talked about that I found most interesting …
How the US will get out of Iraq. He said he feels there’s no way to avoid a disgraceful withdrawal that looks like a defeat, other than staying there for decades to build the kinds of relationships it would take to “win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.” But that’s not a politically viable option, so the only question now is when we leave. His theory: Bush will succeed in avoiding dealing with it, but the next president will withdraw remaining US forces as soon as he or she is in office, because they will have been elected in part on their promise to do so.
Why we don’t have Osama Bin Laden. When Osama and his buddies were trapped in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he felt there should have been a low-tech operation involving large numbers of troops to scour that valley and find him. Instead, a reliance on high-tech options (”and Rumsfeld’s general disdain for the army”) led to a needlessly clever strategy that didn’t get the job done.
What went wrong in Iraq. I was very pleased to hear a military guy talk about the tragedy of the looting of the museums right after the occupation, since I’ve read things that make it clear some in the military didn’t think that was any big deal. Joe thought there were two big mistakes: not enough boots on the ground right after the occupation, and disbanding the Iraqi army. Of the two, he said the former is the worst mistake, because it could easily have been avoided “if somebody other than Rumsfeld were calling the shots — he was always trying to replace soldiers with technology, and that’s more about theory than reality.” Disbanding the Iraqi army, he said, was a mistake in hindsight but it made sense at the time. “We did that because of bad intel — same reason we went to Iraq in the first place.”
Why he carries a 50-year old rifle. In all the pictures Joe showed me, he’s carrying an M14 from the 1950’s, instead of the newer M16 models. The older rifle has a much larger and slower bullet, “which is much more effective against those guys who are all hopped up on kat over there, the smaller slug doesn’t really stop them unless you get a well-centered hit.” When Joe was in Afghanistan, he managed to get approval for an M14 to be included in each unit, and he felt those guns saved lives. “That’s a detail I’m pretty proud of, getting those older rifles deployed.”
The most important technology in the military today: GPS. “Friendly fire has always been a huge issue, and these days you can realistically know the relative positions of yourself and all your buddies. That saves a lot of lives.”
Another exciting mission: Panama. Joe was a jump leader on one of the first planes into Panama’s airport when Operation Just Cause was launched to take out Noriega. He told of the ping-ping-ping of bullets hitting the fuselage, and sticking his head out the door to check their position before telling his crew to jump. “The pilot puts on the green light, of course, but when you’re taking fire the younger pilots sometimes just hit the light because they’re freaking out, so you gotta look out and make sure we’re really over the drop zone, make sure there’s no planes behind and below us, stuff like that, before telling your guys to jump. Basic common-sense stuff, really.”
Blackwater and contractors. Joe told me that the story of what happened to those four Blackwater employees in Fallujah wasn’t publicized and the public story leaves out the most important fact: that some uppity young Marines had disarmed them shortly before they were ambushed. I told him I’d read Scahill’s “Blackwater” book, and it sounded like corporate profit motives had led to bad decisions there. “No way,” Joe said, “Blackwater doesn’t cut corners like that, or guys like me wouldn’t go to work for them.” He said Blackwater and others have offered him jobs many times.
Who do you respect? I asked Joe which countries have military that he respected the most. He said every country has winners and losers, “but in general the paratrooper units and special forces are top-notch pros in every country. Those guys are always good, no exceptions.”
The future of the US military. Joe was bummed about what Iraq will do to the military long-term. “Colin Powell was right about one thing, the army is broken. We have a whole generation of NCOs who are going to leave and not come back, and they’ll tell their sons not to sign up too. So we now have 19% non-high-school grads coming in, the highest since Vietnam, and those less capable guys will be the leaders in 10 years. So after we get out of this mess, and it’s time to rebuild and remotivate the army, we’ll have the weakest leaders we’ve ever had, so I can’t get real optimistic about how they’ll handle all the tough decisions that will need to be made.”
A heart-warming CIA story. Joe showed me a picture of himself next to a box full of bundles of opium that they had found in a sweep of a village. “We found that stuff, and they said that the guy who owned it is gone to Pakistan — they always say that when we find drugs or weapons, the owner is always gone to Pakistan.” The CIA told Joe and his team that they had to give the opium back to the village, because it would be a financial disaster for the whole village if they took it away, and that would just make more enemies in the area. Now, Joe was disappointed in that decision, but I really liked hearing about it. It’s nice to know we have people there who are thinking that way, in my opinion.
Getting married on the run. Joe got married a few years ago, in a country I won’t mention. “I had been whacking a lot of Muslim bad boys from their country, so I was a bit worried about whether anyone would recognize me. So we just stayed at a different place every night. Most people won’t actually track you down if you do that — they see you, think maybe they should do something, but if you’re not there the next day they forget about it.” I told Joe that the week of my wedding had a different tone to it.
After a few hours of these sorts of conversations, we fired up Office 2007 and Joe asked me some questions about it. We swapped business cards, and agreed to stay in touch. It’s nice to have a friend like Joe — I don’t run into many guys like that.
As we arrived at Sea-Tac, we were among the first few passengers to walk off the plane. At the end of the offramp, there were two uniformed security guards yelling “passports out, be ready to show your passport photo” and they were quickly checking every passport that went past. I commented that I’ve never seen that before, and Joe said matter-of-factly “they’re looking for somebody specific, somebody they have reason to believe will arrive at Sea-Tac today.”
Murgatroyd and Orcmid out dancing on Dr. Dobbs Island in Second Life. It’s nice to see Megan already has SL friends she can go out dancing with when I’m busy on the road and don’t have time to meet up with her in cyberspace.
I must spend some time on SL this week, because Megan is rapidly moving far beyond me. She has a small army of avatars running around doing all sorts of things, and I’m still trying to figure out to get mine to sit down at a table or walk in a straight line.
Megan tells me Orcmid has a Nikon he wears around his neck in SL just like in real life. Cool — I need to get a D70 I can carry on my right hand on SL like I do in real life. Time to head for a camera store, I’ve got a bunch of Lindens burning a hole in my pocket …
Sitting here at the airport in Seoul, there isn’t much to do. I can’t find an English-language news magazine in the whole place, and I don’t have the right kind of adapter for the power outlets in the business lounge. Sure, I could go back downstairs and buy an adapter somewhere, but I only have 30 minutes until my flight to Seattle boards, so I’ll just sit here at the free internet connections for a while and type in a news article for everyone’s entertainment, and to help alleviate the trade imbalance in copyright infringement that our government claims is currently occuring between the US and China.
I’m just trying to do what I can to help. This is the lead story in this morning’s CHINA DAILY, which I picked up in Beijing before the flight to Seoul this morning …
Gambling and porn targeted
The government will soon assign “virtual cops” to monitor and wipe out pornography, gambling and other illicit activities on the Internet, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said.
By the end of June, the virtual cops will monitor all major portals and online forums across China, the ministry said.
Nine other ministerial level government departments and the MPS will take part in the campaign to weed out “harmful material and information” and “illicit activities” on the Internet, starting this month.
Online gambling, vulgarity and fraud are among the top priorities, the ministry said.
“The existence of these problems has affected the healthy development of the Internet, brought harm to the youths’ minds, contaminated the social ethos and disrupted the social order,” Zhang Xinfeng, vice-minister of the MPS was quoted by the Xinhua News Agency as saying.
Zhang said the infiltration and spread of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic management of the internet are a problem.
Virtual cops first appeared last year in Shenzen, where the police inserted a floating cartoon icon of a policeman on major websites. The sites are linked to the local police station and have an alarm system. The success of that program prompted the MPS to take it nationwide.
Lu Benfu, an Internet expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the move would help maintain a clean cyber environment and deter online crime.
“The simple appearance of these floating icons will remind people these websites are under surveillance,” he said.
In the next six months, the ministries will crack down on illegal online activities such as distributing pornographic materials and organizing cyber strip shows. they intend to purge the web of sexually explicit images, stories, and audio and video clips. The campaign will also target illegal online lotteries, contraband trade and fraud, said Zhang.
Last November, police cracked the largest pornographic website in the country and arrested its creator, Chen Hui, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment. The website Chen started contained more than 9 million pornographic images and articles and had more than 600,000 registered users.
China has about 137 million Internet users, most of whom are young people.
After mentioning all those huge numbers at the end, there’s a sidebar entitled “Major cases” that starts with this item: “In March, police in Changchun, Jilin Province, arrested four suspects accused of sending emails containing explicit sexual information.” With a major case like that under their belts, surely Chinese authorities are encouraged that they’ll soon succeed in their mission.
OK, I have to find me one of those floating cartoon policeman icons and make it into a nice painting we can hang on the wall in our Second Life home. But first, I have to catch a plane.
After three weeks on the road, I’m finally headed for home, in about 12 hours. I need to pack and get some sleep, but the work is all done and my limited sightseeing is all done. I made it over to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square this afternoon; here are a few pictures:
Beijing is a place I need to come back and explore. Megan, put it on the list. I feel like I saw exactly the right amount of it: enough to be intrigued, but I only scratched the surface and haven’t seen even the main tourist attractions other than the above and the Great Wall on the day I arrived. And when we come back, I now have several friends here who have graciously offered to be our tour guide.
I’ll be going through Seoul in the morning, another place we probably need to put on the list. Maybe we should just have a list of where not to go, that might be easier. Baghdad’s not looking too good this decade. But Bogota’s not as dangerous as it used to be; I’ll be there four weeks from today, after Sao Paulo and Santiago.
This job is a pretty good way to see the world, if you can survive the occasional string of 16-hour work days. Speaking of work, I have a few photos of what I’ve been up to the last two days over on the work blog.
I’m working with my Beijing colleagues to put on an Open XML workshop at Beihang University this week, and the building you walk through to get to the classroom is simply unbelievable in its size and scale. Pictures can’t do it justice, because there’s no place to get far enough back to put it in any kind of perspective. (The photo above is looking through the opening shown in the first photo below.)
The last photo below is me working in China NTO (National Technology Officer) Joe Lee’s office on Tuesday, when he was gone to Hong Kong for the day. Thanks for the use of your office, Joe!
I’ve been planning to go to Tiananmen Square to snap some pictures this week. Maybe after the workshop one of the next three days.
So I thought I’d search YouTube this evening to see some videos of the area, just to check out what it will be like and start anticipating some of the photos I’d like to take. I have a high-speed reliable internet connection here at the hotel, but when I search for Tiananmen it suddenly doesn’t work. I get the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” error on this link, for example:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tiananmen
So just for fun, I tried some other searches to see what works and what doesn’t. This works just fine:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=teen+sex
Hmm .. it’s not exactly clear to me what kind of behavior they’re trying to enforce.
By the way, I have no trouble posting content like this, although I suppose if I do enough of it this blog may become unreachable. So, just to be safe, I’m going to bed. good night from Beijing!
Let’s take a brief break from my earthly travels.
Charles Simonyi, the inventor of hungarian notation (of which I am a big fan, although most developers these days are not), has realized his dreams of space travel and he’s up in the space station right now. And he has hand-delivered a gourmet dinner selected by his friend Martha Stewart, who was last seen riding a camel in Kazakhstan. No, that is not a joke.
His web site, CharlesInSpace.com, is quite well done. Well, he’s a billionaire, that probably helps.
Here are the pictures I took at the Great Wall on Sunday. It was mid-day and the light was extremely harsh, so I’m hoping to get back out there at the end of the day Friday for some shots in better light.
These pictures are all at Badaling, the first place you can visit the wall on the way out of Beijing. It’s a good workout to walk up and down all the steep steps. Here’s a tip: get some bottled water before you head up the hill! I was pretty dehydrated by the time I got back down to the shops that sold soft drinks.
I’d like to also check out another location next time — there’s another spot a few miles further up the road that looked less-traveled when we drove past it. Maybe Friday, we’ll see. Between now and then, it’s all work this week.
