A recent issue of The New Yorker (June 29, 2009) included a short piece on a City College professor who has studied “the role of music in military recruiting, combat, interrogations, and morale” during the ongoing conflict in Iraq.

Of course, even Garry Trudeau has caught on to this. The Doonesbury character “Toggle”–a trooper in Iraq–routinely “got crunked” on heavy metal not only before, but during missions. (By the way, the current story arc that has him coping with Traumatic Brain Injury or TBI incurred in a roadside bomb blast is one of the best the strip has run in a long time).

Of necessity, the profile only scratched the surface, but it prompts the following scattered reflections.

Historically, there are lots of precedents for soldiers psyching themselves for operations with music. Cromwell’s Ironsides sang hymns as they went to into battle. French Revolutionary armies roared the sanguinary lyrics of the Marseillaise as they defended France and poured across its borders in the name of liberte, egalite, fraternite. Union troops marched to “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the Civil War.

Besides the fictional Air Cav unit in “Apocalypse Now” that flew into battle to the strains of  “Ride of the Valkyries,” Michael Herr reported in his classic Dispatches how Vietnam grunts kept Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane high up on their personal playlists.

In my own experience, soldiers frequently prepared themselves before high stress operations by pumping up the volume. “Guns ‘n Roses” and Metallica were particular faves then, as apparently they are today.

Mordant parodies also abound. Long before the Jimmy Buffet take-off (“Mortaritaville”) described in the New Yorker article, Vietnam-era soldiers crooned a variant of the Lennon-McCartney ballad “Yesterday” that included the lyric “Blown away/I’m not half the man I used to be/A Claymore [type of mine] just got through with me…” It was still around when I went on active duty in the 1970s.

The piece also describes soldier-created music videos coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq that marry lurid images with angry, loud music. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, I recall seeing a soldier-produced and circulated bootleg video that combined the track to Lynyrd Skynryd’s “That Smell” (“Ooooh that smell/The smell of death surrounds you”) with raw footage of the so-called “Highway of Death’ leading out of Kuwait City–miles of burned out vehicles and charred corpses created by our airpower as the terrified Iraqis fled north.

And an analog, of course, exists in just about every weight room and locker room where young men with elevated testosterone levels prepare themselves for violent sport by listening to ear-splitting music.

My friend Jon recently honored me by asking if I would occasionally contribute to this forum.  I have never blogged before, so as I peck away I feel a bit like the Moliere character who was pleased to learn that he was speaking prose.

For my maiden entry, I offer up some thoughts on training, based upon 25 years of active duty military service–things that I have seen, heard, read, or done.  It occurs to me that, with some modification, what follows might be applicable to training in many other fields as well.   This hardly represents  the last word on the subject and I don’t necessarily expect everyone to agree with everything here, but I hope people might think about this and even attempt to capture their own thoughts on the subject.

1. The best form of welfare for the troops is first class training–Rommel

2. All training must be assessment-based.

3.  It thus follows that evaluation is a critical step in training management.  Unevaluated or poorly evaluated training is worthless–a waste of time at best and positively harmful at worst if it reinforces bad habits.

4. Hard work and enthusiasm don’t automatically equal great training.  They are necessary but not sufficient conditions.  Trainers must know their stuff.

5.  Leader training should be an organization’s top training priority.  Good leaders can carry less than well-trained organizations; weak leaders will bring down the best units.

6.  Senior leaders must be prepared to underwrite mistakes in order to encourage prudent risk taking; however, never send unprepared leaders out to practice on live subordinates.  Rule of thumb–four days of trainer prep and one day of good training is better than five days of lousy training where unprepared trainers flounder.

7.  In other words, quality over quantity.

8. Good after action reviews/critiques are essential.  However, no organization ever improved simply because it conducted a good critique.  Go back and do it over.

9. Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Perfect practice makes perfect.

10.  Build progressivity into training: Crawl, Walk, Run.  No football team scrimmages on the first day of practice.

11.  Safety and realistic training are not antithetical.  There is nothing safe about going into combat untrained.  Train realistically and safely.

12.  Most soldiers/students/people forget what they hear, remember what they see, and know what they do.  Try to make your training “hands-on.”