Charleston.

"Though I will always be a visitor to Charleston, I will always remain one with a passionate belief that it is the most beautiful city in America and to walk the old section of the city at night is to step into the bloodstream of a history extravagantly lived by a people born to a fierce and unshakable advocacy of their past. To walk in the spire-proud shade of Church Street is to experience the chronicle of a mythology that is particular to this city and this city alone, a trinitarian mythology with equal parts of the sublime, the mysterious, and the grotesque." 

-Pat Conroy, "The Lords of Discipline"

Though I will always be a son of the Old North State, I sometimes remind myself that I spent all of my adult life thus far in Charleston. I spent eighteen years growing up on a farm in Tobacco Road, and I spent twenty-two years in Charleston, if you don't count the year in Baghdad. Like Pat Conroy I will always be a visitor there, I never really became a Charlestonian in over two decades of living and working as an employee of the city. I was in good company though, I am not sure that I ever met more than fifty "true" Charlestonians while I was living in the city. I received my introduction to Charleston the same way Conroy did- with a screaming First Sergeant and a shaved head. I had never really experienced the steam of a Lowcountry August before those first weeks, and barracks at The Citadel were not air conditioned. It was not pleasant, even at night. How ironic it is that the dank smells of Charleston during a summer night with the tree frogs singing their million songs would bring me back to those days, without the fear and the homesickness, but with fondness and not a small desire for younger, simpler days. Maybe time has a way of smoothing out the rough edges of old memories, but time also gave me a chance to learn the Lowcountry. If you learn Charleston, you love it.

Just about every important life landmark that occurs to every young man happened to me in Charleston. My whole adult experience is there. The full spectrum of my memory, from the joy of birth and love, to the sadness and tragedy of violence and death are rooted there. When I think of happy times they are draped in Spanish moss. When I recall sadness there are live oaks and sweetgrass in the background. 

Shortly after I knew that I would be leaving Charleston, my wife took Tater out to Folly Beach with a photographer to get some pictures of her before we moved. We got the pictures back a few days ago. As I looked at the pictures, one in particular stuck out. Tater was standing on the beach with the horizon broken only by the Morris Island light. That was when the gravity of the move hit me. That one picture signified a coda for the passage that began in 1986. It occurred to me that to her, Charleston will just be where she was born. I'll take her back there surely, but she'll be a visitor. 

Like her Dad.

Jury duty.

It only took me two months of being an ex-cop before they found me. "They" being the City of Charleston Municipal Court. Some people go almost their entire lives without ever being called. I essentially got the call after being in the pool for two months. In a way, it sort of makes me wonder if someone down at 180 Lockwood Boulevard didn't make sure my name wound up at the top of the stack. As much as I would love a week down in Charleston with nothing to do but catch up on my reading, it would throw a major monkey wrench into my training schedule here in DC.

Oh, and by the way, catching up on my reading is about all I would be able to do on jury duty, since I would NEVER actually be seated on a jury in ten million years. Even if every lawyer died suddenly, leaving behind only idiots and poltroons to be lawyers, I would NEVER be seated on a jury. (I know the inherent joke in the last sentence, I figured I'd just leave it out there....)

The U.S. State Department does not ask that its employees be excused from what is their solemn duty as citizens. (No, not taxes....) Therefore, all I could do was send a letter to the court asking a little leniency and explaining the hardship that would befall me should I miss a week of consular training. My CDO (Career Development Officer- a real stand up guy) enclosed a little letter explaning the impact my absence would have on my scheduled deployment to Vietnam. So, the fingers are crossed, awaiting the verdict.

In the meantime, I am trying to think of how I could answer questions about my fitness to be a juror, if my humble plea goes unheard.

"I'd make a great juror, Your Honor, I can spot a guilty bastard a mile away!"

Newly minted diplomats.

The ceremonial swearing-in ceremony for my A-100 class happened last Friday. Quite frankly, the last two weeks have been a blur and I have finally depressurized to the point that I feel like writing anything. At the ceremony, our keynote speaker was Under Secretary Burns (U/S for Political Affairs). I got to speak to him briefly a couple weeks ago when he gave a presentation to our class over at the Truman Building. I mentioned to him that my old band director from The Citadel tried to encourage me to go into the Navy or Marine Corps as a musician, but since I ultimately wound up in the Foreign Service, I could be considered one less military musician at DoD and one additional diplomat at DoS. (There is an old joke about the comparative sizes of the Departments of Defense and State. It is said that DoD has more musicians than DoS has employees.)

The big treat at our ceremony was the appearance of Ambassador Lawrence Eagleburger. Ambassador Eagleburger is the only FSO to serve as Secretary of State (under George H.W. Bush). I am a relative newcomer to State, and was not all that familiar with him prior to the announcement that he would be swearing us in, but he is quite the rock star amongst the more senior crowd at State. All the ambassadors and Under Secretary Burns seemed thrilled to see him. He was quite the character, too. As it turns out, we have an Eagleburger in our A-100 class who wrote him a letter a few weeks prior to the ceremony, mentioning that she had just learned about him and was intrigued at their shared surname. Apparently Ambassador Eagleburger was intrigued too, because he decided to come swear us in.

Now here I am almost a week later, studying to become a Consular Officer. It seems like a month ago that I was in the sheltering nest of A-100 even though it was just a few days. So many of us have gone our separate ways. Some will be leaving for post this June. Some of us will wait as long as April and May 2010 to depart after language training and other courses. I'll be heading out in February 2010. There are happy hours and outings planned in the near future, but I think it is safe to say that swearing in was the last time we would all be together in one place.

And the winner is....

We got our high bid. Ho Chi Minh City, here we come!

(After learning to speak Vietnamese first, of course.)

Shut Up.

I guess all that talk about dissent being the highest form of patriotism doesn't count any more.

Suspense and torture.

Suspense because Friday is Flag Day. This is when we have a ceremony at the George Schultz Foreign Affairs training Center and everyone finds out where they are going for their first assignments. It is called Flag Day because each new FSO is presented with a small flag of the country where they will be going.

Torture because apparently folks in the know at Main State (the Harry S. Truman building) seem to already know that we mostly got our high bids and are dropping hints to that effect. Now I am looking back at all my high bids trying to figure out where I might be sent. We are not supposed to publicize the bid list, and since stating my high bids would be revealing a portion of the list, I'll just stay mum.

Until Friday.

Reason #2974 for getting out of police work

Confederate Yankee wonders if more people died because of the police response in Binghamton, NY.

This is a dangerous speculative road to go down. The post itself didn't bug me, but some of the replies did. There seems to be a notion that there is a duty to protect in police work. Let provide a clue to those of you who do not already know this: THERE IS NO DUTY TO PROTECT on the part of police officers. Before you conjure up mental images of coward cops who would rather stay at the doughnut shop rather than charge into a shooting scene with guns blazing, consider what things would look like if police officers were bound by law to insert themselves into life threatening situations. The implications on the force continuum alone would be enough to make most people think twice about making this a requirement.

The bottom line here is that if you are looking for the police to save you from every situation, then you are in big trouble. The fact that there is no duty to protect is what gives the police the discretion to act on information available to them at the time of an incident. If you take discretion away, you create many more problems than you solve. Mandatory arrest laws (which I still believe to be unconstitutional) have proven this time and time again. Police making arrests for VERY trivial matters invariably make the news and create indignation, but those situations are almost always the result of discretion being removed from a officer's toolbox.

My old department has conducted a lot of training in active shooter situations. If we arrived at a shooting where the shooter is still doing his thing, then we would put together a small tactical group from the officers on scene and we would go in looking for the bad guy. However, even this response is not immediate, and the chance of successfully eliminating the threat is only slightly elevated in exchange for the greatly heightened risk to both innocent civilians and officers alike. I know what I would personally do, given an active shooter situation. I also know that most of the officers I worked with would go in with me. However, I know enough to know that there is no substitute for being there on scene, seeing and hearing what is happening, and that there ARE situations where I would not go in immediately. I would like to say that my department would hae moved in on the Binghamton shooter immediately, but then again, I wasn't there, and neither were the commenters on Confederate Yankee's blog entry.

Ironically, active shooter response requires that there actually be an active shooter present. If officers present do not hear gunfire (either the shooter has left, capped himself, etc) then protocol is to set up a perimeter and wait for a dedicated entry team. I think that Confederate Yankee's post insinuated that some injured people may have bled out and died while waiting for the police to get inside to them. Again, I don't know because I wasn't there. Neither were you.

If you expect perfect performance from the police during critical incidents and shootings, then try applying that standard to your own profession and see how it goes. Critical incidents are dynamic and very difficult to control. The police cannot read minds and they cannot see through walls. If our public is moving towards the point where the police are required to take foolish risks as a condition of their employment, then I say be prepared to take the law into your own hands, because only fools will be police officers.