Jessica Scott

The very best resource I’ve found since become a writer is Psychology Today. Not only does this magazine help with fictional characterizations, but I’ve also taken a good hard look at some issues and been able to apply lessons to real life in the Army.
This month, there was an article in there about a book called The Invisible Gorilla. The premise of the book revolves around expectations and when people are directed to look for one thing in a room, in over half the cases, they completely miss the fact that there’s a gorilla there.

This has huge implications, both for fiction and for real life. When have you read a book with a major plot element plain to see to everyone but the characters and when they finally do figure out that what they needed was right in front of them, you feel cheated? Or when a story arc builds around a miscommunication? Have you ever been involved in a massive fight that could have been avoided had one party simply been able to say wait, we’re miscommunicating here?

Exactly. It’s easy to spot these problems in other people’s fiction but damn near impossible to see in our own. When it comes to real life, we’re just as blind sided by these illusions. But the blind spot isn’t just when dealing with an inability to really see.
I read a quote somewhere that most people aren’t ever actively engaged in listening, they’re planning what they’re going to say next. How much do we miss by not tuning in to what people are truly saying. When we aren’t actively listening, we miss key body language cues, voice inflection and all these other elements that tune us in to what others truly mean.

The blind spot also, however comes into play in the military in a HUGE way. We base most of our assumptions about individuals based on 3 things: rank, race and gender. A male major is assumed to have base of knowledge that a male lieutenant is not. A female private is going to be stereotyped first, assessed on performance second. This is in part due to stereotypes and bias that we all carry within us but also based on our expectations. The expectation that a major is a person of authority.

Why else would Nidal Hasan have been able to walk right up to a gathering of soldiers and start shooting. We never expected an officer, a field grade to do something like that. In our military, our expectations are that young gangbangers cause the problems and these individuals are almost always in the lower enlisted ranks. Before anyone accuses me of using a race based term, I’m not. There is growing evidence to suggest that white power gangs are sending young members in to learn military training.

But it is our expectations most days that prevent us from seeing the truth that walks among us. If there is a staff sergeant who walks around hugging all the E4 and below, but he does so with a smile on his face, does that make him a potential sexual harassment offender. But he’s so nice, the argument may go. What about the quiet guy in the corner? Is he just quiet or is he hiding some dark secret in his basement? What about the weirdo who believes he has a cloak of invisibility that keeps him from being shot on guard duty?

In describing all of these people, my expectations of them have colored how I describe them. As you read this, your expectations are colored by my words so that if you ever met them, you would be looking for the weirdo or the creepy guy. You might never see the true person because of these expectations.

In the end of it all, it is very hard to see what we most times don’t know we can’t see. It’s critical, both as a writer and a leader, to seek a trusted second opinion. Almost always, they will see something that you did not. Once they mention it, it may seem glaringly obvious.

But you’d never have seen it – whatever ‘it’ is- without asking for a second opinion and actively looking for the gorilla in the room.

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Somehow this weekend, I was roped into throwing a birthday party for Jerry. You know, as in Tom and Jerry. Tom wasn’t invited.

Anyway, the mystery of how I ended up doing this was soon solved when my dearest husband came home with yellow cake mix and chocolate frosting in a can. I have to admit, while those things are good, I was planning on making everything from scratch. I enjoy baking with my girls and somehow, it seems wrong for me to pour things out of a box, add a few eggs and presto, instant desert. Part of this come from remembering baking with my own mom when I was a kid and it’s a memory I want my kids to share.

Anyway, we made the cake out of the box. Originally, it was going to be cupcakes, except that I realized I had no cupcake liners. So, a double layer yellow cake was poured into two pans. After much negotiation and laying out of the plan, it was agreed that we would frost the cake after room clean up the next morning.

Room clean up was accomplished with only marginally smaller amounts of berating and nagging. We rearranged and actually came out with more space.

Then, I could no longer avoid my fate. It was time to frost the dreaded cake. I thought I’d seen somewhere where you trim the cake so that its all the same size. This was my first mistake. As I sawed through the edges, I revealed a crumbly moist inside that was very much not in the mood to have frosting stick to it. So I figure I’ll layer it on a little thicker and it won’t crumble all around me.

Half the tub went in the middle of the cake. Then I got the brilliant idea to nuke the frosting to make it just a smackerel easier to spread. Except of course, my domestically challenged self made it too thin. So I kind of smear it around the sides, hoping the thin frosting will act like glue for the rest of the new tub of frosting I had to run to Walmart and buy.

Sadly, my little cake was more of a fiasco. My dearest husband, who put me up the whole predicament proceeded to harangue me mercilessly in the cat’s voice and then could not actually believe how much frosting I managed to put on the darn thing. I actually got upset and both girls immediately started saying stuff like, “it’s okay mommy, jerry will still eat it.” – this from the 3 year old.

So we’re standing in the kitchen and both girls have mashed 2 pink candles into the cake. We light the disaster and the four of us sing happy birthday to a cartoon mouse.

It was one of those moments that hurt my heart because it was so achingly normal. I just stood there for a second and watched my kids and couldn’t believe that we’ve been together for 5 months now. At that moment, I loved my kids and all the fighting and the crying and the yelling was gone. For one moment, we were a normal family, with parents who weren’t tired and stressed out and partially crazy.

My family doesn’t have a normal baseline. One of us has been deployed or across the country or both for the last five years. You read about those dual military couples that have only gone through 1 or 2 deployments? We’ve gone through 3 in 5 years and I know there are families out there that have even more under their belts. Granted, I haven’t been gone the whole time but I can’t help but wonder what the cumulative effect of all this upheaval in my kids lives will have.
I can’t dwell on it. I have to just take the moments like the one yesterday and hang onto them but at the end of it all, I think that’s all any of us can do, whether or not you’re in the military.

So happy birthday, Jerry. Thanks for giving me one of those bright, shining moments that has been all too rare since redeployment and for liking the cake even though it looked like crap.

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While I was still in Iraq, I had an interesting conversation with one of
the leaders in my chain of command. I asked why some females were
allowed to get away with murder and why others, like myself, were held
to the same standard at the males.

The response was nothing short of shocking. I was told that they were
easier on me as a female. This completely turned my world upside down,
because I’d been wire brushed in front of the entire brigade leadership
and pushed to make the mission happen. I truly believed I was being held
to the same standard.

This caused me to do a significant amount of soul searching. Was I truly
performing on par with my peers or was it simply because I was a girl
that my performance stood out among mediocre females. I asked trusted
confidants if they thought this was the case: was I being let off the
hook b/c I was a female.

My mentors said no. They said I busted my ass and it was visible to
everyone. There was a reason the brigade commander came to me when there
were coms issues at NTC. There were reasons why people on the staff
sought me out when they needed something done. No, I was not simply a
girl who got things done: I got things done and that, at the end of it
all was what mattered.

Despite these reassurances, the remark still stings to this day. I’m
conscious of the fact that my gender does make me stand out among a room
full of males and I am always worried that when I perform, even a little
above the low expectations that I’m given a huge pat on the back when
I’m simply doing my job.

Here’s the ultimate problem with mandating that women be allowed to
serve in the combat arms: affirmative action plans such as gender
norming physical requirements would lead to disproportionate reward for
doing the same tasks with lower results. So a female would only have to
ruck 8 miles instead of 10.

Affirmative action plans that were meant to correct historical wrongs
have created a significant problem for people like me: the lowered
expectations means that I stand out against my female peers but I am
still not performing at a level of my male peers. My friends and mentors
tell me this is not the case, but that single comment has left a mark on
me but also the way I see things.

Another problem I have is the perception that certain ranks require
certain levels of award. The argument I heard in Iraq when I had kittens
about some people receiving Bronze Stars (and I still maintain that I
did nothing to warrant the award I received) is the scope of influence.
A warrant officer on the brigade staff is going to have significantly
more influence over the ability of the brigade to accomplish its mission
than a sergeant out pounding the streets. Granted, one is significantly
more dangerous but the other has significantly more impact.

But what about the perception that awards are supposed to be for doing
above and beyond your job? So if that sergeant who travels the roads in
Iraq is responsible for returning 15 COPs to fully operational
communications while that officer advances the next slide, is that truly
fair? The perception of rank equaling greater influence is only accurate
if the person at that rank truly exceeds the expectations for that rank.
Just because someone filled a slot does not mean they earned an
equivalent award.

I find myself being highly disgruntled by the fact that my male
counterparts continually shy away from correcting female soldiers or
worse, expecting the bare minimum from then versus challenging them to
the same standards, we run the risk of creating a cadre of mid level
female NCOs, Warrant officers and officers who lack the skills to enable
our army to succeed at what we do: win wars.

My challenge to my peers: hold me to the same standard that you hold male lieutenants to. Hold these young
female lieutenants and warrant officer ones and specialists to the same
standard. Don’t shy away because you’re afraid of EO complaints.
And
damn it, stop rewarding us for showing up when you expect men to

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I’m thrilled to announce that Richard Curtis has offered representation for my nonfiction book about on military mothers.

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I’m sitting here tonight full of emotions that I’m not sure what to do with. My husband and I just got back from farewelling Greywolf 6, the first brigade commander I’ve served under since becoming an officer. They showed a slide show of everything that the brigade had gone through in the last twenty four months and its hard to believe that much time has actually passed.

The DCO tonight spoke of the mission we had. We were the main effort in Iraq, there to subdue Ninewah province. It had not been done and yet, we accomplished the mission. We were there to set conditions to pull out of Mosul by June 30th. We did that. But we were more than the main effort in Iraq. We were the tip of the spear for our nation.

But tonight wasn’t about the mission. It was about saying goodbye to the people I served with on my tour in Iraq. To the brigade commander who will always be Greywolf 6 to me.

I’m not sure what the source is but it started with the slide show. It started when I looked back on that week in July 2008, when I was Greywolf 6 aide de camp for one hellish week. A week where I learned more about the army and being an officer than I’d learned in my last 14 years in service. A week where I learned about what happened in 2004 to Greywolf 6 and why the things he focused on were important to him.

Everything I did, I did because his priorities were the soldiers on the ground and I never wanted to hear “MEDEVAC follows…” followed by static. Communications were what he tasked me to provide for the brigade. He looked at me the first day he met me and said “you’re prior service, right? How long?” I told him 13 year (at the time). He said “I expect you to perform as a major.” And I said yes sir. And held on for dear life. Half the time I was making it up as I went along, the other half the time, I was stepping on people’s necks trying to get things done.

The emotions always seem to surprise me. They hit me when I least expect it and in the oddest of times. Tonight was a time for laughs but also for tears. In bidding farewell to Greywolf 6, it was also a farewell to the battalion commanders that I worked for as the brigade S6. It was a farewell to the S3s who jumped up and down on my desk and demanded to know why they couldn’t talk (another story for another time). But in seeing everyone tonight, I realize that I have not fully come home from Iraq. That a part of me that I have locked away surfaces every now and again. I am not the same person I was before I deployed. I don’t know that any of us ever truly are the same again but perhaps, the unexpected emotions are part of my new normal.

Looking back on the last 2 years in the Greywolf Brigade, I am incredibly proud of my time here. They say that once Cav, always Cav. For me, that will be true, but I will always be Greywolf. Something changed in me this last two years and tonight, in wishing the brigade commander farewell, I can only hope that I will be a better officer for having served in his command.

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My latest post is up over at PBS POV Regarding War. I’d love to hear what you think.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/regardingwar/conversations/women-and-war/mothers-in-the-military-punishing-mothers-who-serve.php

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It’s hard to believe but its been four months now since I first stepped off that plane from Iraq. So much has changed and yet, so much still remains.

January and February will go down as the worst months. Lots of crying and screaming and yelling as the kids tried to figure out where they fit and what they could get away with. Lots of tears on my part as guilt ate away at my soul, part for leaving and the other part for coming home and uprooting them once more. There was the panic over my oldest going from loving school to hating it. The daily battles to get her up in the morning and the ever present food battles where my oldest proved just how stubborn she truly was.

But February ushered in March, where things got a little better. There were still bad days. Really bad ones but the distance between them grew a little longer. But we as we moved forward, each night I fell asleep hoping that tomorrow would be better, that the stress and guilt eating away at me would ease back and we could enjoy being a family for a little while, however long that might be.

I’ve focused on my oldest because, at 5, she is more like a little person. She is more articulate and significantly more vocal than my youngest on so many issues. But lately, my youngest is starting to show signs of stress. She’s always cried when we drop her off at daycare in the morning, but now, she cries as soon as she wakes up.
She’s crying for Grammy, something she has not done in the last four months. I admit to being stunned the day she stood in a crowded rest stop in New Jersey and told me she didn’t think I loved her. I didn’t know what to say or do. As I’ve written before, I was prepared for I don’t love you, not you don’t love me.

But now when she gets upset with us, she says she wants to go back to Grammy’s because ‘hers always nice to me’ and ‘her loves me’. I think my 3 year old is confused. She doesn’t know where she fits and I worry more about her adjustment than my oldest’s simply because she is so little and she was so young (just over six months old) when I first left her.

Her difficulty is also painful because she’s always just gone with the flow. She’s never been a fussy kid, always kind of rolling with whatever. The fact that four months into our transition home and she’s suddenly having issues is extra tough to deal with because she’s been so resilient up to this point.

My little girl has been through a lot. She’s three and a half and she’s been without me for half her life. The guilt I keep thinking I’ve dealt with is like an insurgent, sneaking up when I’m least prepared to deal with it, like the middle of a rest stop. I hope she’ll be okay in the long run, but the simple lack of information about long term impacts means that my husband and I are simply going in blind and doing the best we can.

For now, I try to get my mom on the phone as much as I can so my kids can hear her voice. My youngest seems to need this contact more than my oldest. I’m trying to be as understanding and accommodating as I can, but really, how many times can you overlook a roll of toilet paper thrown in the toilet before someone needs to instill some discipline.

I think she’s doing fine, over all. But its those moments when she says how much she misses her Grammy that I feel my own heart breaking. She has no other words to express her confusion about where she fits in the world.

And I have no way to really pierce through the bubble of my own guilt.

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For that matter, just put them on for a while before you condemn our soldiers. Twitter is all abuzz today about the killing of two journalists by pilots in 2007. The incident is not new. We’ve known about the death of those Reuters reporters since it happened. It was also mentioned in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers.

It is unfortunate that innocents are killed in war. It is tragic when our soldiers turn to rape and murder like in the Stephen Green case from Mahmoudiya.

This incident in July 2007 was not another Mahmoudiya. It was not another Haditha. This was combat pilots in the air, providing air support soldiers on the ground during the surge. They believed the men in their sites were a threat, if not to them, then to the soldiers they were defending.
I have not flown in the cockpit of an Apache. I have not walked the streets during the surge.

But I have deployed and I do know the suspicion, the stress and the judgment calls that are made in battle cannot be second guessed by Monday morning quarter backs who have never worn the boots, let alone walked a mile in combat in them.

I watched the video.

Yes, we dehumanize the enemy. Yes, we make crude jokes about the people around us. Yes, we use black humor to get through what is arguably the darkest situation you can put a human being in. Killing another human being is not easy and it is not nice and the men and women who have gone to war come back changed forever. How each soldier copes with what they have done during war is not for us to judge.

As an Army, we do our bests to fight within the laws of war. Most of our soldiers go out with the intention of coming back. What they have to do to accomplish that, to bring their buddies home is not for those who have never served to question.

Soldiers come home and question what they’ve done during war. When battle is over and you’re back in the States, you have time to really think about what you’ve done. You can not change it. As an Army, we train by putting our soldiers in these situations before they deploy. We train to try and avoid things like this where innocents were killed. We conduct AARs to learn what we can do better. But you don’t get a do over. Once you pull that trigger, it’s an irrevocable choice.

It is unfortunate that these reporters were mistaken for insurgents. Was it a reasonable mistake? Yes. Because insurgents had decoyed themselves as media, as medics, as women in order to get closer to our soldiers. We do our best not to violate the laws of war. The same cannot be said about the enemy, who blatantly use mosques, schools and hospitals as staging areas for their weapons caches. And yet, we condemn our soldiers when we put them in impossible situations.

Those pilots made the best decision they could. The fact that later reports were different does not surprise me. An initial assessment of what’s going on often changes when the fog clears and people have time to really sift through what happened. I’ve stood in the TOC and listened to initial reports only to read later that what originally came through was not, indeed what happened. Does that mean someone lied? No, it doesn’t.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again until I’m blue in the face. Don’t you dare condemn us as dishonorable until you have worn the uniform and gone through combat. Each individual is responsible for his or her actions, even in a time of war. But war means death and destruction and unfortunately, innocents are caught in that.

War is not pretty. It never has been. So don’t pretend to sit there and say how horrible these pilots were because they were making wise ass remarks and smarting off. They were in combat and they were mentally in a place that allowed them to take another human life in defense of their brothers, under the orders of a nation that sent them there.

If they are to be judged, let it be by their peers. Men and women who have sat in that cockpit, who have flown in combat and who have had to make the same decisions they have. Those are their peers. Not some media group leaking classified information in the name of transparency when all they want to do is find another excuse to complain about Iraq and in doing so, paint the actions of our soldiers as murderers and thugs.

True atrocities have taken place in the conduct of this war.
This is not one of them.

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I’m a book person. I’m not biased against ebooks, but when it comes to reading, I prefer books. I like looking at my shelves and seeing Laura Kinsale books that I’ve had since I was a teenager. I like looking at my Anne McCaffrey collection that I’ve read every year since I was in 7th grade. I have memories tied into those physical books and when a book earns keep status, I like nothing more than seeing it on my shelf.

Don’t get me wrong. I want an iPad. I lusted for a Kindle but never broke down and bought one because I was deploying to Iraq when Kindle mania was going strong and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to download books on it while I was there. The lust passed.

I’ve since discovered the Kindle app on my iPhone. I’ve read a bunch of preview chapters and one book on it. I can see me buying more books if I had the iPad or even a Kindle, but shelling out 200-500$ for the pleasure of reading books is not something I can justify at the moment.

Then there’s the limitations of ebook readers. I can’t read a Kindle during take off and landing in an airplane. I wouldn’t want to take my shiny new iPad to Padre Island, where sand and wind nearly wrecked my iPhone a few weeks ago. And God forbid one of my kids get ahold of the files and delete them. It’s a heck of a lot easier to lose a file than a physical book.

I’m torn about digital media in general. In cleaning out my garage this weekend, my husband found 3 CDs that I’d bought in Germany. Seeing the covers brought me back to being 19 years old and living on my own for the first time in a foreign country. Hearing the songs took me all the way back. I would have had the same memories by just hearing the song, but holding the busted CD case and seeing the names of bands I’d long since forgotten gave it a little extra.

I’ve spent hours looking for a sone. It was a CD I’d had since Germany, some unknown techno compilation. I Googled the song. I searched my files. It was gone. Not on iTunes, not anywhere. Gone.

It happened to be on a blank CD compilation I’d made up over 10 years ago. How easy was it for me to find that? Had it not been for the physical CD, it would have been nothing but a fading memory.

So there’s something to the tangible. A real book inspires memories. A real CD holds forgotten songs. Kindles and iPads are great for the right now, but what about the memories. For me, a file will not hold the same sensory input as a physical book.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want an iPad. But for me, physical books are still the treasure I hold and smell and touch and absorb. And given the premium price for a Kindle and even more for an iPad, I believe those that sing the death knell of physical books are a tad premature.

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If you’ve never had to really consider what you’d take on a desert island with you, you’ve never deployed. Last year while I was in Iraq, there was nothing I loved more than getting care packages full of books (except when they had books, coffee and chocolate in them). I had incredible support from the RWA community and so it’s time to pass along a great message.

Author Laura Griffin was one author who spent the time to trudge to the post office, stand in line and send me all of the above with one added benefit: she sent me ARCs of her two books that came out last year: Untraceable and RITA nominated Whisper of Warning. So without delay, here’s Laura, asking for support on books for soldiers!

What’s better than chocolate? According to a friend of mine who just spent a year deployed overseas, a good book.

As a civilian, I’d never spent much time thinking about the reading material on most military bases. But I guess it isn’t surprising that it’s geared toward men. When my local Romance Writers of America chapter heard that female soldiers were finding the reading selection a little thin, we started sending care packages containing romance novels, chick lit, mysteries, women’s fiction—basically, whatever we thought women overseas might be missing. The effort continues today with a paperback book drive over on Murder She Writes: www.murdershewrites.com

“These packages mean a tiny space in time where a female soldier can feel like the woman she is rather than the weapon wielding warrior she also is,” says Monica, a soldier who helps get care packages to women in uniform. “These packages let the soldier escape from the sand and stress of a deployment and be somewhere else completely.”

The goal today is 100 books, one for every person who leaves a comment here or on Murder She Writes. Many author friends have generously donated books, and I’ve picked up some paperbacks from the bestseller section of my local book store. They’re all going into the box, along with a few other much-requested goodies, such as blank journals and chocolate!

Please leave a comment and help us reach our goal!

And if you have some books on your hands that you’d like to donate directly, you can contact Monica at: mojo09226@yahoo.com for details.

Laura Griffin started her career in journalism before venturing into the world of writing romantic suspense. Her articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and her fiction work has garnered awards from writing competitions throughout the country. Laura currently lives in Austin, where she is working on her next romantic suspense novel.

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As always, I’m over excited. I’m picking 2 winners instead of just one.

So without further delay will Barbara Elness and Sabrina drop me an email? I’ll get your books off to in the mail!

Thanks so much for showing up and supporting fellow authors. I’m sure the authors mentioned in your comments greatly appreciate your support and I hope that you’ll enjoy discovering some great new authors from our giveaway this week!

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