18 September 2010
 
Legionnaires

(Centurion with campaign and Imperial medals. Image courtesy Ermine Street Guard, Copywrite 2010)
 
“…a Centurion Pilus Prior (First Spear) in command of a cohort would hold a rank equivalent to that of a Lieutenant Colonel, since the number of soldiers under their command is similar. On the other hand, the vast majority of Centurions rose from the ranks and are often compared to a Sergeant Major. The best way to look at it is to think of a Centurion as both a field-grade officer and a senior Non-Commissioned Officer. In addition to being its commander, the Centurion was known to be the bravest and most tactically sound man within the Century.”
-James M. Mace
 
I have been up for a while, but not real early. I can't get focused and the morning is bleary. It is Saturday, and all the prospect of the day has not leaked out yet, but it is going fast. The chores call, and there are things that need to be done.
 
I think I know the confluence of my unease. My professional life in the Legion was metered out in three-year increments, and this last week was the third anniversary of my current job. I may be a pensioner, but the rhythm of the Legion never fades.
 
The rhyme of a military life, the one I led for nearly three decades, is composed of stanzas of one or two or three years. It is different than a civilian career, though perhaps shares something with the uncertainty that our children face in this strange and uncertain economy.
 
The one-year military assignments are awful, by design. They are in awkward or unpleasant places, and sometimes they come with the prospect of sudden and violent death. The deployments now are annealing the small percentage of those that serve in ways we cannot measure yet.
 
We talked yesterday about the process by which our devices are changing the way we think, and the path we are on toward a sort of hybrid human, thinking differently than the way our species was evolved to see the world.
 
We are growing a small cadre of Legionnaires, young adults who have spent more time in stress and combat than anyone since the Centurions of Rome.
 
I don’t know the consequences of that either. I have a pal who is doing one of those one-year bursts of awfulness, in real conflict in Kabul. I hope the election goes well for him today, and that sometime the fighting will stop.
 
I am under no illusions about victory. There is a tough road ahead, even to get to disengagement on terms we can stomach. The public lost that desire years ago, paradoxically because of the military success against the assholes.
 
And it has become self-perpetuating, the success in the field against the insurgents fueling more young men and women to take up the sword against us.
 
This will not end, though the terms of reference will change.
 
We cannot spend into infinity any more than Rome could. I guess we will just see how things go. The Taliban can wait. When you live somewhere, you have all the time in the world, marked only by the change of the seasons, from winter to fighting.
 
That is not the same for the Legionnaires. Time was, two years was the measurement of a sea-tour, with a year of training and a year of it gone somewhere. Some of my pals have been commenting that I am getting in a rut. I realized why this morning.
 
It is three years this last week since I took my current job. It had challenge and a certain excitement in the uncertainty. I have nailed it pretty well- hundreds of millions of dollars of business done. I know it inside and out, which for the Legionnaire means it is time to go and do something new, something unknown in terra incognita.
 
I realized it was three years just this week. Like my fellow Legionnaires, I wonder if I can ever really learn to be a civilian. Or if I want to.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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