I am a former Army Officer. I recently left the Army for a number of reasons, most of them dealing with the amount of staff time ahead of me, the amount of PowerPoint slides that I would be required to create, and the general avalanche of BS that I would be deluged with. Being a civilian has been a great opportunity to reflect upon that experience, to finally reacquaint myself with family and friends whom I saw very little of over the past ten years, and to get back in shape after years of withering away in training areas and the desert.
This may come as a surprise, but Schmedlap is not my real name. I have an interest in military affairs and like to participate in online discussions, but I have no interest in spreading my name all over the internet and no interest in being a public figure. More importantly, by using a pseudonym I can speak more freely. For example, not every Commander whom I worked with was perfect. If I were to use my real name and say something negative about a chain of command’s decision-making during a particular deployment, then someone would be able to put two and two together. As another example, not every unit that I deployed with did everything perfectly. If I were to point out something that we did wrong, then people could identify the unit and unfairly point fingers at the men in the arena.
Given this concern about levying criticism, one option could be to simply not criticize anyone or any unit. But we learn by making mistakes and critiquing them. I learned more from the mistakes of my unit, my chain of command, and especially my own mistakes, than I did in any classroom or at any training center. I would prefer to discuss those mistakes on occasion in a constructively critical way. The pseudonym is just a safeguard to help guard against inadvertently badmouthing – or giving the appearance of badmouthing – anyone whom I worked with. Thus, I am Schmedlap.
All of that being said, I will now incur a significant risk of identifying myself by pointing out that the platoons that I led were, at the times that I led them, the best platoons of any branch or type in the Army or Marines, hands down, period, end of story. So, obviously, I was very fortunate in my career.
One last note: there are many Schmedlaps on the internet. I am the one true Schmedlap. After all, I have the domain name (at least until I forget to renew it).