anti-auctor's Journal: Sympathy for the locals and transients by military personnel

And, what have I noticed about military personnel of a certain maturity level, usually corresponding to sort of minimum threshold of service time? That they are the first ones - before the expatriate contractors over there to make money, many of them as individual contractors well-intentioned, and also before the corporate raiders who are never well-intentioned - to sympathize with the locals and the regional transient-poor with whom they must to some degree cohabitate and also, since it is actually the case, patrol.

One Navy Captain that I meet was Captain of a patrol boat that could reach high speeds and carry it on for very long distances - e.g. from Bahrain to the Euphrates running through Baghdad - without refueling, on diesel petrol. It could carry about a max of 15 boat personnel even in high-speed rough waters, due to the hull, and due to the seats which were - as far as I could see - almost identical seats to the ones I had seen in the Schnooks helicopters.

After I spoke and shot-the-breeze with the Captain for a little while as they were refueling where we were about to depart for a dive, the soldier on guard off deck with an automatic weapon in guard/patrol position (the Captain stayed on the boat, even when we talked to him) saw that I was alright, and we talked a bit. He said that they had a job to do, namely monitor the Gulf for contraband-oil. Usually this contraband-oil was carried on small boats by pretty much the poorest of the poor - they were paid a pittance by the actual runners who of course were never on board, and unreachable. The Navy man told me that is was often sad to have to make these raids - and that they were almost always completely peaceful - because he knew (they knew, he said) that by confiscating the contraband they were depriving these very poor men running the boat of their livelihood, a livelihood that was always on the brink of survival - unlike the runners who controlled them.

And I have numerous other examples of military people - at a certain threshold of maturity and service time - being the first to sympathize and understand the locals, and probably the only at least amongst Westerners in the region or elsewhere. What an irony.

For sure

[anti-auctor]

For sure. But first, you had an encounter with the USMC. They are a different breed from the Navy. They are really trained to be killers, and in many cases it is not a matter of the antisocial tendencies being filtered out of them when they get in and then start living the life of the USMC, but antisocial tendencies that filtered into them. And well, yes I think many of the USMC 'grunts' come into the USMC with antisocial tendencies - that's the Marines want them, it is easier to train them as killers. So t