I have noticed that on the other forum, some persons are not what they seem. How may of you noticed this?

-- ET (bneville@zebra.net), August 26, 2000

Answers

I have noticed this too. I suspect that Ceemeister is actually a '48 Packard, and that Chuck 'DA Night Driver is actually a black woman.

-- TE (ten@arbez.ellbenb), August 26, 2000.

Look over some of the threads I will not name them. If You can't find the govs or maybe others you might need glasses.

-- ET (bneville@zebra.net), August 26, 2000.

I know that some of you already know this; but I AM a CIA operative, about to embark on a no secret mission.

-- FutureShockUncloaked (gray@matter.think), August 26, 2000.

...{but then we'd hafta ---- ya}...

-- flora (***@__._), August 27, 2000.

Who in the heck said cia I didn't. I said agencies.

-- et (bneville@zebra.net), August 27, 2000.

Yeah, there is some schizophrenic dude that goes by the name of henrietta, as well as ET. Weird.

-- (male@or.female?), August 27, 2000.

Chuck 'DA Night Driver is the guy who the cartoon "Porky the Pig" was based on. If you've ever seen his picture, I think you'll see the resemblance.

-- (da.da.da.da.da@dats.all.folks!), August 27, 2000.

Pssst...yeah you...come here...closer...yeah, ok, I work for the Office of ***** ********. Keep it quiet, ok? What? No, sorry, but if I tell you, then I would have to...well, you know.

-- Spindoc' (spindoc@something.orother), August 27, 2000.

I guess it is true you are dumb asses.

-- ET (bneville@zebra.net), August 27, 2000.

where there's smoke--there's-fire!! why all the=anon's?? the-age of =deception--tracking-tracking 123.

coming-soon-a-line-in-the-sand!!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), August 27, 2000.

I think cpr is really Janet Reno.

-- seems to me (there is@ resembl.ance), August 27, 2000.

I think Andy Ray is really Diane Squires.

-- I think (I@am.right), August 27, 2000.

ET phone home - OUCH

-- mailman moe (u@s.ps), August 27, 2000.

The Big Blast

-- The Big Blast (The@Big.Blast), August 27, 2000.

What does the Bib Blast have to do with this thread. Take it to another internet forum (unless I decide to have your internet service suspended).

-- ceemooster (ceemooster@big.boy), August 27, 2000.

FYI...the CIA is indeed a gov. agency.

So how would you suspend my internet service...

would you use wires or strings? It's pretty heavy, just so you know...

-- cin (cin@=0).cin), August 27, 2000.

LOL, Cin!

-- (n&l@big.time), August 27, 2000.

U.S. Army Psychological Operations Specialist -------------------------------------------------------

Catherine Knigge Interviewed by Kael Alford

I've been in the Army for almost three years. I signed up when I was nineteen years old because--it was like I wanted to do something that, you know, felt important. I don't know if that makes sense. But I wanted to do something that just meant something. I see a lot of people that I knew back home in Spokane doing--it's not that they are not important jobs you know, like office jobs and regular jobs--but to me, it wasn't very--it didn't seem like something that would be worthwhile in life.

I told my recruiter I wanted to be a spy. (Laughs.) That's funny, huh? He thought it was pretty funny. I wanted to do, like, undercover stuff. Like top secret squirrel stuff. He said Psych Ops was about as close as I could get, so he gave me this job and I was like, all right!

Now I'm an E-4 Psych Ops Specialist, stationed at Camp Bondsteel in Ferizaji, Kosovo. We're here with the NATO force. Psych Ops is, well, what we do depends on the mission. Sometimes it's like information operations and sometimes it's like psychological warfare. Basically what we're trying to do when we go out is we gotta change people--we have to get people's behavior to be what we want it to be.

In wartime, we want people to surrender, so it's our job to go out and convince them to do that. In like what we have now here with the NATO occupying force, we're more trying to like keep the peace, make everything stable, you know, tell people that criminal activities need to stop and you know, if you have weapons and you are on the street after curfew and stuff you are out shooting and stuff, that's considered hostile to NATO.

So we go and talk to the people in the villages--usually the village elder--and figure out, you know, what the problems are. Then we write up a sheet that says what we think should be done, and we pass it on. Our product development detachment actually makes the products, like the "No looting and no burning" signs. And then they give them back to us and we go out to disseminate them. Everything you see around here--all the checkpoint signs, all the peace fliers, don't play with guns stuff, all the mine awareness stuff--that's ours.

We had one operation where we dropped leaflets during the bombings, basically to play on the emotions of the Serb soldiers. We told them, "You are fighting for a wrongful cause!" You know? Or like, "Your family is not getting food because you are out here fighting for something that's not right!" "Your family misses you." We played on stuff like that. We just kept telling them it over and over and over: "Hey, all this stuff is screwed up, you might as well just quit. If you surrender, we'll treat you better, you'll go home." Stuff like that. And we just bombarded them with it over and over and over.

That's psychological warfare right there. Then there's Information Ops, where you tell people where to go for help, to get food, to find out about families. Some of what we've been doing is curfew, telling people about curfews in towns so they don't get in trouble. Also, weapons turn-in. We tell people to turn in weapons or stolen property and stuff like that. Some people don't really like that, but (laughs) we're not fooling around.

We usually go out in sets of two teams. Each team rides around in a Humvee, a big green monster. A big, huge turtle is what it really is. It's got giant tires and they can go just about anywhere. I wish it was air-conditioned, but no. The windows open, though--they slide up and down on the sides and the doors kind of "click" open. There's a big hole in the top that's got a turret in it, where the gunner rides. Five of us can fit into a Humvee, including the gunner. And every team that goes out has at least one interpreter--most of them speak both Serb and Albanian. (Laughs.) I only speak English, so I'd have a pretty hard time if it wasn't for them.

On a typical day we get out about seven-thirty and go to whatever town we are going to. When we get there, it depends on whether we are doing loudspeaker or whether we are doing handbills, or just talking to people. Generally we do a little bit of all of 'em every day. We go in, stop, talk to some people. Everybody wants to shake your hand. Everybody wants to, you know, look inside the truck and see all the neat gadgets, and everybody wants to talk to you. We answer a lot of questions. "Why is this happening? Why isn't this happening?" We try and answer forthrightly. As best we can.

And then sometimes we just drive around really, really slow, playing scripts over our loudspeaker.

Everything that we do is based on the town, you know, the needs of the town. So if it's an all-Albanian town, then we are not going to work Serb stuff in there, we are not going to go in and talk to them about giving back stolen property from the war or something.

We always try to be sensitive to the people we're dealing with. In our training, the Army taught us a little bit about, you know, cultural sensitivity. How to figure out--without offending people or pissing them off--how to figure out what is going through their heads, and how to use it to our advantage, basically. Advanced Individual Training, it's called. AIT. It's classroom training, eleven weeks long. It's not really culturally specific--just general things to watch out for, things we're going to have to do. We went out into the field at the very end, and we had a week-long exercise where people had to play the role of foreign civilians, and we had to do all kinds of crazy stuff. Like they made up these concoctions that we had to drink, and if we didn't drink it, you would offend your host, right? I mean, this stuff was nasty, but it really helped.

Like I was in Malawi before I got sent here. It's this little itty bitty tiny country in Africa, pretty peaceful--not wacked out, like some of the other ones. I was down there for a month and a half, teaching the army officers peacekeeping skills. And they fed us this gruel goat stuff, I don't know what it was, and you had to eat it with your hands. It was meat and cornmeal and gravy and beans--just a big slosh of stuff. I looked at it and I was like, okay, smile, nod, eat. This is ummmm... And everything from training just came back to me about never offending them--doing exactly what they do.

Here in the Balkans, it's not so extreme, the culture shock. But still, there's plenty of it. People here are all about sitting down to have Turkish coffee, and giving you food and stuff. And some of it is weird. Like we ate with the Russians, and I don't eat seafood at all--whatsoever--and they brought out bowls of seafood soup something or other and it had scales floating in it. And I'm just looking at it and I knew I was going to throw up if I ate it, but the last thing I wanted to do was offend somebody, so I just sat there and pretended I was eating it. When they weren't looking, I traded my bowl with the guy across from me who had finished. He wanted more, so I traded bowls and he hurried up and ate it.

And with the coffee, have you had it? Turkish coffee. It's got like a half an inch of grounds on the bottom. Well I didn't know if I was supposed to eat the grounds or not, and there's all these village people sitting there watching me drink the coffee. And the coffee itself was great. I'd never had it before and I was like, wow, it's really sweet, it's pretty good, you know? And I get to the bottom and I'm looking at all these grounds and I'm like, oh crap, what am I supposed to do now? And I asked one of our guys, "What do I do with the bottom of this? Do they eat it, do they, you know?" And he thought it would be really funny to tell me to eat the coffee grounds. So of course I'm thinking I can't offend them and leave half a cup of coffee grounds, so I eat the freaking coffee grounds. I'm sitting there trying to smile and swallow these grounds and he starts laughing and I was just like, oh, I knew it. (Laughs.)

But our training, you know, it's not all just about not offending people. They also taught us how to watch people and how to do what other people, the natives, I guess, what they do. So, like, we're running our mine awareness campaign right now. They taught us that if the locals don't walk down that road, you don't walk down that road. So we watch where people drive, where people go. We'll ask people, "Do a lot of you drive down this road? Have you seen anyone walk down this road?" So that we can figure out where mines are so we don't get into trouble ourselves. It's very good training.

I'm not much of a soapbox person, but I love this. I don't know how to pick it apart and say what's more fun than the other. I know it sucks to sleep in the mud, but that's for everybody. It's just part of the job. And maybe it's just I haven't gotten into any seriously bad stuff yet, but I love it. I would never want to do anything else in the Army. Because there's limited stuff that females can do that can actually get them out into things and this is one of them. I've gone on just about everything the guys have gone on, you know? Half the people on this hill don't get to go out in towns and do stuff and I get to go out every single day, you know? I've gone and done a whole lot more than most people I know, so it makes me feel like I'm doing something. Which is why I got into this. So I feel satisfied.

If I didn't have a family, I could see myself all over the place in the Army, doing this for rest of my life, working my way up the ranks. But I'm single--and I have a kid back home. A baby, really. When I last saw him, he was four and a half months old and now he's eight months, a little over eight. My mom is watching him. It's tough. I don't get any special treatment or anything like that. I get deployed just like everybody else. And I'm not sure how well all that is going to work out. My son doesn't have a father, and I kind of want him to have at least one parent, you know? He's got me seriously thinking about whether it's important for me to go all over the world. Is it worth it--missing the things that my son is doing right now, that I am never, ever going to see again? Like his first steps? I don't know.

But I can't imagine myself doing anything else, either, though. I just don't see myself in another job. So really, I have no idea. I'm just living through this situation here and in two months, or whenever, I'll start thinking about the future. But now, I mean right now, I love this. Like when people come up to us and tell us how grateful they are that we came here and they give you hugs and kisses and stuff. I'm just like wow, you know, somebody is glad that I am around. Maybe not me specifically, but us. It makes me feel so good when we go out and people are just happy to see us. Like sometimes the kids just line the streets and cheer, like when we first got here. I just thought that was the coolest thing, you know. The day we drove in, on our way through Macedonia, kids would come out of the refugee camps right on the border--tons of them. They would line the streets just going, "Hi, hi, hello, hello, NATO, NATO!" Giving us the peace sign and everything. I loved that. It was crazy. Like you know they had never seen anything so good in their lives as an army truck going by.

-- (urbanlegends@re.us), August 27, 2000.

Watching You

-- 160th (We Rule@The.Night), August 27, 2000.