Improving Our Positions
There’s an old saying back from my Marine Corps days that’s ended up having far more influence on my life than I ever would have expected. Improving our positions. It doesn’t seem like much. It doesn’t seem like it would have much prevalence outside of the ground-side Marine Corps. It doesn’t seem like it would have much use outside preparations for ground warfare. It does, but it took a lot of years and a lot of reflection for the true meaning of that casual phrase to really hit home.
I started out in the Marine Corps working in the airwing as an electrician on fighter jets, but after 9/11 I wanted to do more and have a bigger part in what our nation was up against. I did a lateral move into Human Intelligence/Counterintelligence and almost instantly I found myself moving away from turning wrenches on airplanes to humping a pack through the bush in Okinawa with the grunts. From there it went to the jungles of Southeast Asia to the battlefields of the Middle East to the mountains of Afghanistan. Running and gunning as they say.
Due to the nature of what I did I was always in close connection with infantry and special operations company headquarters, and privy to countless daily reports. Daily Reports are what company commanders send up to higher headquarters at the end of each day to keep their commanders informed of what occurred throughout the day and what was planned for the next. When the meat of the report was complete there was usually the tagline, almost like an involuntary reaction, “and improving our positions.”
To the grunt Marine, “improving our positions” means filling some more sandbags, digging your fighting hole deeper, building up the parapet, adding grenade sumps, clarifying your firing field boundaries, and just getting better prepared to repel an enemy assault. It also means busy work because for some reason you can’t understand why your platoon sergeant just won’t let you kick back and relax for a day and take it easy.
They won’t do that because “improving our positions” has purpose. One being that it does prepare you to better repel an enemy assault. The 2nd being that idle hands are not only a tool of the Devil, but also because complacency is something the enemy needs you to fall into to make their job easier. Keep the minds of your Marines occupied so they don’t obsess over the general crappiness of the situation they’re in. Perspective like that isn’t something readily apparent to young Marines, or young people in general, and it takes some maturity and wisdom to really grasp the entirety of the concept.
Fast forward a decade and a half to the daily grind of the civilian life; paying bills, getting up and going to work every day like the average Joe, raising kids, cooking dinner, and thinking everyday just seems like the last and bleeds into the next. Occasionally in the evening when you get the time to drink a beer and stroll down the driveway after the sunset, you have a few moments of reflection and find yourself thinking about the old days and some of that stuff. It was during one of those moments that it really hit me, it hit me that I’ve lived my adult life by that saying, “improving my position.”
No, I’m not digging fighting holes in my front yard and establishing fields of fire. Now that might not be a bad idea given the current climate of corruption and political targeting the FIB is carrying out every day against enemies of the regime, but I’m not doing that. It’s more far-reaching than that. Going back all the way to life just after exiting the Marine Corps, I can see I’ve been improving my position all along. Starting with enrolling in college, buying a home, pursuing job promotions, doing home improvements, and even starting a family and building a farm from scratch. It’s been an ongoing process of improving my position the entire time.
There’s a really good chance that if you’re reading this its because you too are someone who’s maybe unwittingly been doing the same. Maybe you did realize it all along, maybe you just never attached a phrase to it or reflected on why you do it. It doesn’t really matter how you got here, it matters that you did, it matters that you continue doing it. Improving our position might seem completely detached from what’s going on in the world, or the despair and social malady growing like weeds in an empty lot, but it absolutely is not.
Improving our positions will better prepare us to meet the challenges coming down the pipe. We don’t live on a cultural island, immune from the troubles in the world. They’re affecting you now, maybe just in little bits here and there, but they’re here. They’re here and its going to get a whole lot worse. Sooner or later the evil and despair in the world is going to make a full frontal assault on your life, and you need to keep improving your position in every way that you can.
Continually improving our positions will help us meet this attack head-on and repel the assault successfully. It’s going to be a long war so all your preparations will matter. It will be attack after attack, as you can already see in the daily headlines. Improving your position will also ensure you don’t have an idle mind to fall into complacency and become a target to the psychological attacks being thrown at us already. From your improved position you already occupy, you can see these attacks clearly. They’re attacking your traditional values, your family values, the traditions of society, our national history, the learning institutions your children attend, all the way to the safety and security of your community.
From our improved positions we have right now we can see the attacks and we know the enemy is here. Thankfully our constructive minds and our continually working hands allow us to keep pushing back. Just don’t stop. Never stop improving your position and never stop moving your lines forward. Happy hunting friends. Semper Fidelis.