Reserve Life Part II

As I mentioned in my last post I wanted to talk about how we reservists do our jobs. Despite our obvious failings in certain areas we tend to make up for them by doing our job and doing it well. There are several key reasons why I think reservists accomplish their job well, at least well enough to keep people off of our back. Now its time for a disclaimer: I can only speak for those reservists that I have come in contact with and know, I don’t want to speak for all the jacked up people out there who joined the army just for college money.

The first reason why I believe reservists accomplish their jobs is that despite jacked up equipment, tons of paper work, and too many rules, they are used to making things work in the civilian world. In the army you can screw up as much as you want and still get paid and keep your job (obviously there are things that will get you kicked out). In the civilian world if you don’t produce then you either A.) Get Fired, or B.) Lose your business. Reservists, as I highlighted before, still have a civilian frame of mind and bring that frame of mind to their army job and as a result they do their job the most efficient way they can. If we are told that we have to do a job that usually takes a full day and we find a way to complete it in three hours and then watch movies the rest of the time then that is what we do. Of course some reservists are better at doing this then others but it seems to be the general goal of all reservists.

The problem with this attitude is that it sometimes gets us into trouble with active duty. In the army there is a certain way to do things. There is a technical manual and a field manual for everything. The army can tell you how to survive a nuclear bomb and also how to go to the bathroom in a chemical environment. The army tells you how and when to cut your hair, eat, and workout. The army basically takes individual thinking out of living, if you so choose to follow it that way. If in the civilian business world an employee finds a more effective way to do a job then their ideas are rewarded and implemented, in the army new ideas are entertained a lot less. If someone in command didn’t think about the idea themselves then it probably will not be implemented. Okay I know this sounds like a lot of complaining but I merely want to explain the differences between the reserves and active duty as I see them.

I do see the benefits to how the army is run. If there were a bunch of independent thinking soldiers running around then controlling them would be hard and everyone would do things a different way. My friends and I often joke that if the army wasn’t a government sustained organization then it would have gone out of business 200 years ago. No civilian business could suffer loss like the army does and still run. As a civilian soldier this problem bothers me to no end. I want to see things run efficiently and when they don’t it irks me.

The other reason we do our job well is simply because the one thought that is on every reserve soldier’s mind (as I am sure most soldiers) is that they want to get the job done and return home safely to their family and friends. We don’t want to mess around and try to get fancy with what we are doing, we just want to do what we have to do with the least effort required and go back to our normal lives.

With these sentiments in mind we do our job the best that we can without breaking the rules. Of course there are always reserve soldiers who want so desperately to show the active duty soldiers that they can do everything just the same and win praise from them while doing so. These types of soldiers are a pet peeve of mine. If you want to please the active duty guys so bad then go active duty otherwise shut your mouth and be a reservist.

Without reservists then active duty soldiers would not be able to get the job done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reservists and National Guardsmen have played such a pivotal role in the war on terror that we are an indispensable resource. We leave our lives back home and are deployed anywhere from 12 to 18 months at a time, and it is rare to meet a reservist or guardsmen that hasn’t been deployed in some fashion or another. Lots of us have been deployed more then once and face a possible third deployment. All of this as a part time job. I have spent more time training to come to the desert then some active duty soldiers spend in the desert for a single deployment. The only difference these days between reservists and active duty soldiers is how we spend the few months in between deployments.