Kablooie

Another recurring theme on this blog is the friction between the individual and the bureaucracy. Especially as to how the nature of the bureaucracy is anathema to one trying to follow the warrior ethos.
I recently had a run in with the bureaucracy. I was in Iraq, minding my own business, and somehow got sideways of the bureaucracy. While the hit wasn't catastrophic, failure to resolve it appropriately would have mandated my separation from the service as a matter of conscience. As I've written before, the Military Departments are the best of our governmental bureaucracies. Not because we've cracked the code on organizational efficiency or efficacy, but because we take good, decent men and women and put them on the line for a number of years before making them transition to the functionary role of mid-level bureaucrats. These individuals are often imbued enough with the warrior spirit, and conscious enough of the linkage between their actions and effects on the troops, that they work until the job is done. A mid-level staff officer logs more hours by far than his counterpart anywhere else in the government. I've seen it. And yet still, when someone gets sideways of the machine, or doesn't quite fit within the cookie-cutter, the amount of work required to square away an individual at righteous odds with "the system" is daunting, sometimes even insurmountable, and always invidious. I owe a debt of gratitude to the multitudes of people, some who know me, many who don't, that put in the extra time and effort to get me unfucked. A significant reason for my recent dearth of posting has been that I was walking around ass-sore, and not sure that I was professional enough to keep it from bleeding over into my blogging.
I'm still going to endeavor to keep politics out of this blog, but I must admit that throughout my recent ordeal, I kept thinking "and this is how they want our health care run?"