If you are a President, Cabinet Secretary, General or Commanding Officer of some military unit you are used to being “briefed.” It’s the lazy man’s way to get the news. We get a briefing if we watch the nightly news anchor distill and summarize the day’s events. I appreciate a good briefing and am always on the lookout for one. And, I have a good one to recommend. I used to be a briefer. When I was a brand new intel officer fresh off the boat in the Philippines I was tabbed to brief the Base Commander. Colonel Hill, a regular asshole of a fellow. In those days before PowerPoint and laptops the viewgraph and rear view projector were the media we used to present information to our briefing audience. We made slides on 8” X 11” pieces of acetate bordered with a cardboard frame. There was a large supply of stock viewgraphs sent down by higher headquarters. In bigger intelligence shops you might have a competent NCO on staff who could crank out first class material. If we were in a hurry we would write the information on a slide with a grease pencil and project it on the the screen with the good ones. The briefer normally spoke from a small podium in front of the room and used note cards or stood next to the screen with a pointer and used the viewgraphs for notes. To get the airman or NCO who was behind the screen to change slides we used the sophistocated method of saying, “Next.” In a typical briefing for someone like Colonel Hill, I would give the highlights of missions flown in South Vietnam and North Vietnam. A slide would appear with a colored map of South Vietnam showing the major cities of Saigon, Bien Hoa, Natrang, Danang and Pleiku with little explosions marking the main target areas. I would say something like, “Yesterday, eighty four missions were flown by A1E’s and T-28s in South Vietnam. Targets hit included a supply depot, a truck park, and a bridge. Two secondary explosions were noted. In addition, close air support was flown on behalf of the Special Forces Camp in the Ia Drang Valley. Ground fire was light. No aircraft were hit.” Then I would move on to the North and report on other news from the theater. When I got a bit more experience I realized that what I had actually told the Colonel was that we had bombed a hooch, took a shot at what some forward air controller thought was a truck and hurled bombs at a bamboo bridge across some jungle stream. We spun ourselves to make us feel better about how much money we were spending chasing little guys in rubber shoes.
All military “talks” were referred to as “briefings.” The object of the briefing was to keep the Commander (often known as the “old man”) and his key staff informed. There would be a series of briefings at the wing staff meeting organized according to the preference of the old man but most often with weather and intelligence coming first. I probably listened to a thousand weather briefings during my four years in the Air Force and they all sounded the same to me. “Cumulus, ciro-nimbus, high overcast, winds aloft, thunderstorm activity, icing probably above 15,000 feet.”
After weather and intelligence would come operations, maintenance and the other departments. Each briefer would have his own list of abreviations and jargon that was understood by all, except me. I could never understand the maintenance acronyms used to describe the status of the airplanes. My favorite was NORSG pronounced “nors-gee” and which meant, I think, “Not Operationally Ready For Service—Grounded.” This was a fancy way of saying, “It’s broke, Colonel.” These other divisions would normally send at least a captain and very often it would be a major or lieutenant colonel. Thus, at Colonel Hill’s party I was the lowest of the low. I was so low that Colonel Hill didn’t like wasting his scathing sarcasm on me and my greenhorn analysis of events as they developed in Vietnam, but saved them for bigger fish. However, I quickly learned how dangerous a Colonel could be. There were two types of Colonels—nice guys and and nasty guys. Colonel Hill was a nasty. Most Colonels were nasties. Occassionally he would respond to something I said with the non-sequiter, “I don’t think so.” And I would reply, “Yes sir!” It’s best to agree with nasty little Colonels who are trying to impress their staff with their “toughness.” We had so little hot off the press material that I would add in some Order of Battle information like where the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) might have some radar controlled anti-aircraft such as the dreaded 57mm or where SA-2 missiles might be located. The fact is, they could have done without the intel briefing, read Time Magazine instead, but it was good live fire experience for me staying cool with a table full of colonels staring at me. I was young Peter Jennings with the news...But I digress, don’t I? I wanted to recommend an excellent daily news briefing which analyses what’s going on at the White House. It’s called “White House Briefing” by Dan Froomkin, a columnist for the Washington Post. Go to Washington Post.com. Look on the left side of the home page for OPINIONS. Then scroll down until you find “Dan Froomkin: White House Briefing." He’s always good. But if you don’t agree with him you can say, “I don’t think so.”
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