Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
But for someone with such an aversion to taking what a Marine E-5 dreams up seriously, you did name yourself after a character he dreamed up to represent everything bad in self-serving, career oriented officers.
Like so many other things, it isn't the work itself, its what it has come to represent. For me, it represents the generation that just missed Vietnam, survived the draw down, got us into GWOT and fooled themselves into thinking they are Damons.

But more to the point, this is a website. Not to offend anyone, but I tend to take self-image over the internet with a large grain of self-depreciating salt. I understand and respect that many people tie SWJ to their professional career (be it military, historian, writer, etc), but my personal $0.02 here is more geared towards voicing my opinion. I tend to worry more about the folks who create an avatar that prefaces their comments with an air of credibility without revealing their qualifications. There are, obviously, other places for more nuanced professional discussions about what I have experience in and those are the places where I toss my resume behind my blabbering.


I've always said I've learned from everyone I ever worked for or with. Either how to do something, or how not to. Trick in life is to pick your role models wisely. As to once an eagle, I enjoyed the book and could empathize more with Damon, no more, no less.

This might be a very post-modern take, but for me, here was a large cognitive dissonance between what people believed Sam Damon stands for and what is actually written in the book. Especially as the first time I read it was in the mid-90s. Some of the most Damonesque aspects of Sam Damon seemed quaint (racial equality! OCS! lists of things your boy needs to learn!) while others seemed strangely out of touch with the newly minted Army Values and the direction the Army was moving in (tossing guys down stairs! screwing nurses in Australia! walking off malaria!). It doesn’t help that the dire predictions at the end of the novel did not come to pass (land war with China?) and the specter of Vietnam had mostly been erased by Desert Storm.

I might be on an island here, but I would wager that most of today’s junior officers don’t relate with Sam Damon OR Courtney Massengale. If anything, I think MORE people are able to emphasize with Courtney – they’re caught in a marriage that the military has sucked the love out of, they have to do unpleasant things to stay in their bosses good graces and they’re stuck advocating for a war that they know is bad for the country but is professionally developmental.

Although I would like to see HRC employ an alcoholic mother to give advice for career progression...