KMAC...I've been meaning to ask you what you thought of that worthless goddamn yama SUCKura exercise....
Don't get me started... Night shift Cat NEO Cell @USFJ HQ. 12 hour shifts that completely wasted my life. I was so busy looking at the screen that when I would fall asleep at night, I would see Excel on the backside of my eyelids. It was quite frightening. I have to admire one of the JSO major's commitment though. Every 15 minutes he would come buy and ask "uhhh.... sooo telllll meeee..... haw many japanese america send by plane?" I won't go into classified material here, but the answer really wasn't something he was looking for. And of course, by day 3 I started to pick up some discrepancies between my number tracking and what we were expecting from the control group. Fortunately a dude I had cruised with was playing one of my control group counterparts. We would e-mail back and forth (read: back-channel) to straighten out what other control group guys screwed up. Overall we were quite successful, and everyone loved us. Yay.
On the better side, I did get to drink a lot of Japanese beer and even managed to sing karaoke with a submariner, a SWO chich, an Army major, and a Marine. Fun times; that's joint operations for you.
EDIT: Oh and another thing... the sad part is that my O-4 SWO boss (who was actually a pretty cool guy) wrote in his recommendations that a naval aviator should fulfill the role that I played ("air ops officer"). I must have looked like a ghost when I heard that. Never should a naval aviator sit behind a desk and enter numbers into an Excel spreadsheet for 12 hours at a time. The only semi-reasonable explanation was because there was at one-time an "ATO" to read. Ugh!
