There is a dual dynamic. Some units do not care to pass along lessons. Some do not care to learn. It sucks when both occur simultaneously. I have never seen in instance where the incoming unit is ready to learn and the outgoing unit is ready to teach.

On my 2nd tour to Iraq, my counterpart in the outgoing unit seemed more interested in getting the hell out of Iraq than on passing anything along. His commander required him to create a continuity book, but it was lacking and he did not have many answers about those areas where it lacked. On my 3rd tour, it was even worse. My counterpart acted as though I was an inconvenience and a distraction whenever I asked him about something. Had I not hunted him down everyday, I doubt that we even would have spoken. As it turned out, he did not do all that much, so maybe he simply had no lessons to pass along.

After each occasion, having dealt with the BS of not having a good handoff, I decided that my replacement would not have a similarly crappy experience. Unfortunately, in both occasions, I had about 24 hours to do the handoff (so much for the one- to two-week RIP/TOA timeline). The guy at the trail end of my 2nd tour seemed pretty uninterested. The guy at the trail end of my 3rd tour had lots of questions and was geniunely interested, but he got there so late - I caught the last bird out with my battalion commander, so that I could do somewhat of a handoff, and it was clearly not enough. We had to email back and forth for another two weeks after I got back home (and throw in a week-long delay between leaving there and getting here).