I Bless the Rains

For our exercises at JFSC, we are to pretend we're a joint planning staff at a made-up organization called "Africa Command" or AFCOM (currently most African nations fall under the purview of the military's European Command), and we've already had fictionalized wargames/scenarios centered around Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. For the Tunisia/Algeria wargame, they pulled three of us aside and asked us to plan the "Red Cell," or enemy war plan, so I was a little out of the loop about what the "blue" team was doing, though it was fun to get creative and pretend that we were Algerian badasses ready to defeat the Americans by any means necessary. I even built an eight-slide powerpoint information operations slide from their spiritual leader to be played on "MSAlgeria-JazeeraBC" (interrupting a broadcast of 'Algerian Idol') to encourage the good people of Tunisia to rise up against their government. After all, they had desecrated one of the holiest sites in all of Muslimdom (I showed a picture of a mosque with fake graffiti on it: "bin Logan is a doo-doo head").

For the Nigerian scenario, they split us up into different roles again, even assigning some to be liaison officers from other countries and encouraging folks to dress up in phone foreign uniforms. But that day I was asked to be the Public Affairs officer and prepare for a press conference, to be video taped in front of actual reporters and journalism students from the local area. So again, I was out of the loop of the actual planning process and the things I was actually supposed to be learning down here. A classmate joked that I should probably take it as a sign that they don't trust me and if I get a crummy job for the next scenario, I'd know for sure.

So yesterday I found out I'm in charge of the whole shootin' match. For a long, three-day exercise next week. Great. A little daunting, though since nothing's graded and everything's done in collaboration, we should do fine. It's also flattering to know the instructors think enough of me to put me in charge, but I still wish I'd had more input in the previous scenarios.

Perhaps I was too clever with my idea during the Nigeria scenario: we had a humanitarian crisis with 100,000 displaced persons getting set up in camps, and the Nigerian government had asked for our help in securing and feeding them, but we also wanted to relay the message to the public at large that we were there on a peaceful mission. So I came up with the perfect solution: edible leaflets.

By the second day we were calling them "LREs" (Leaflets Ready-to-Eat).