Why I Didn't Join the State Department...

Though I once considered a career as a diplomat a noble one, I never seriously considered joining the State Department. Here is one reason why. Foreign Service people complaining about service in Iraq as a "potential death sentence" and wondering aloud to the media who will take care of their children should they die.

Just a message to our State Department complainees: Every American Soldier and Marine sent to Iraq has far greater and more legitimate cause to ask him or herself the same questions - yet they don't cry and complain to the media. They do their duty quietly and proudly. When you sign up for the Foreign Service, you know that you can be sent anywhere to serve your nation and you don't whine about it and embarrass your nation in the process.

Comments

[daveinboca]

I am a former FSO Arabist who served in Vietnam in the early '70s and Beirut in the mid-70s, where a pistol was held to my head outside the [soon-to-be-bombed] US Embassy.

I can almost remember when diplomats signed their reports "your humble and obedient servant" and served at the pleasure of the Secretary of State.

The problem with lifers like Croddy lies in the incrustations of entitlements and a careerist mentality and a dumbed-down entrance exam seeking diversity rather than language skills or genuine academic qualifications.

Just for starters......

The whole Boomer Generation is infected with a sicko "what about me?" mentality.

If you want to be a petty functionary, join the consular corps or USIS. Foreign Service Officers have lost more than their esprit de corps. They've lost their collective soul.

As for diplomacy, these freaks represent a lost generation....

[Consul-At-Arms]

Everybody’s read the articles based on the same AP article by Matthew Lee.

What should have been news every day since the Iraq War started was that all the Foreign Service jobs had been filled by volunteers. More than 2,000 of them, out of a total corps of 6,500. Not one directed assignment in the lot, for a period of years, during wartime.

When a “Town Hall” meeting is called, anybody at the Harry S Truman building (i.e., “Main State”, a.ka. “Foggy Bottom”) can attend.

Thousands of federal employees, including civil service, foreign service officers, foreign service specialists, and contractors, can attend.

Most people stay at their desks and get on with their work.

Only those disgruntled enough to leave their offices attend these things in the first place.

Some numbers: there are reports that around 300 people attended the meeting. To put that in perspective, there around 11,500 people in the Foreign Service. That includes 6,500 Foreign Service officers, also known as “generalists,” and another 5,000 Foreign Service specialists (such as couriers, security agents, nurses, office managers, &tc.). Roughly a little more than two-thirds of the Foreign Service is serving overseas at any given time, so perhaps 2,000 or so FS generalists were in the U.S. at the time of the meeting. Which starts to put that audience of 300 into perspective, nicht wahr?

There are about 252 FS generalist vacancies that have to be filled in Baghdad and on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT). All but 48 of the Iraq vacancies have already been filled with qualified FS volunteers.

There’s no way to tell how many of the 300 present at the Town Hall meeting were actually FS generalists, although one of those quoted is identified as being a “senior foreign service officer.” So that’s one.

State’s personnel assignment process is too complicated to go into in a short comment here. However I can safely say that “directed assignments” haven’t been used generally since the Vietnam War (there were some made in the 80’s and 90’s in West Africa and elsewhere, but it’s very exceptional).

Also note that the Foreign Service is shrinking. New hiring is falling behind natural (retirements, &tc.) attrition. So new positions, new requirements, are coming out of hide, not out of any surplus embassy staffs being held in readiness at bases in the U.S. It’s a completely different force paradigm from the military, the majority of whose overseas military assignments are indeed in places like Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K. Only a relative handful of Foreign Service assignments are at the dozen or so posts (out of 267 total) in countries like that.

[Buckeye Abroad]

@ Consul-At-Arms

"Also note that the Foreign Service is shrinking. New hiring is falling behind natural (retirements, &tc.) attrition. So new positions, new requirements, are coming out of hide, not out of any surplus embassy staffs being held in readiness at bases in the U.S."

Would you say that the new hiring, for current and newly created positions, is held up due to federal guidelines?

"It’s a completely different force paradigm from the military, the majority of whose overseas military assignments are indeed in places like Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K. Only a relative handful of Foreign Service assignments are at the dozen or so posts (out of 267 total) in countries like that."

The military is also has loads of assignments in places like Korea, Guam, Johnsons Island, Alaska, former Yugolslavia, Turkey, ME, etc... places you wouldn't neccessarily would want to be spending a foreign tour in.

@ daveinboca

I agree with you post and want to say, "Thank you!" for your service sir.

[Consul-At-Arms]

@Buckeye Abroad,

If you're going to list Alaska as being "overseas," then don't leave out Hawaii too.

Bottom line on hiring: New hiring is held up by Congressional appropriations. OTOH, if the administration doesn't ask for the money, Congress generally won't step and make them take more than they ask for.

Too bad State doesn't send people to Korea, former Yugoslavia, Turkey or the Middle East. But wait a minute.... thanks for making my point!

[Phil]

Hi, I'm just curious about what you guys think about the 35383 civilians murdered by GIs at Sinchon?

[Consul-At-Arms]

Seems like an awful lot of civilians to have been killed. Was there, by any chance, a war going on at the time?

[Phil]

"Seems like an awful lot of civilians to have been killed. Was there, by any chance, a war going on at the time?"

Yeah, during My Lai a war was going on as well, that's why the US soldiers were forced to gang-rape a 14-year old Vietnamese girl in front of her mother there, before murdering her as well as her mother. The picture of the mother (after her daughter was raped, but before she was murdered by US troops) has famously been kept:
http://cache.eb.com/eb/image?id=90081&rendTypeId=4

A picture of the Vietcong soldiers killed in battle with US soldiers:
http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/june2006/my_lai.jpg

Somehow the behaviour of US troops hasn't changed since:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6384781.stm

[Tropby]

1)

Alleged atrocities of the US Army are somewhat off-topic. There is too little factual evidence about the Sinchon incident IMHO.

2)

Assuming that the State Department has been taken over by cowards and/or commie mutant traitors, then US patriots should join it to clear these Augean stables, especially pupils of "an elite school of Foreign Service".

But patriotic talk is cheap; the private sector offer more money for qualified people.

Broad attacks on the US Civil Service sound somewhat Anti-American ...

[Jay Crawford]

Hi, Phil!
Judging by the numbers as well as claim, you're obviously repeating North Korean propaganda. Regretably, you're also so ignorant about the American character (and the NKPA character) that you accept such ridiculously large numbers as true.
You foolishly cite My Lai. I said "foolishly" because the scope of My Lai was less than 1% of what the North Korean propagandists claim for Sinchon. The alleged scope of Sinchon was so vastly greater than the isolated incident which was the My Lai Massacre that any "Sinchon Massacre" would have had to be a deliberate series of actions by thousands of American soldiers. In ALL of American history, there is no precedent for such a scale of deliberate concentrated slaughter. Hey, who do you think we are: Nazis, Communists, or the Imperial Japanese Army?*
I also said "foolishly" because though 100-350 civilians were murdered by several dozen American soldiers, those Americans were stopped by...wait for it...other American soldiers! Americans who threatened to shoot their fellow American soldiers in order to stop the killing of non-Americans!
35,383 civilians barbarously killed by Americans?
Nope. That type of atrocity, beyond an isolated incident, requires the rationalizing force of a messianic and cohesive ideology that casts out normal human morality. You know, like the juche Communist ideology/morality. The type of morality that encourages conscienceless killing, as seen in the communist massacres in Soeul, Hue, the Katyn Forest, throughout the U.S.S.R. during "collectivization" and in innumerable places in China. Not to mention "conscienceless social engineering" which created gulags after slave labor was outlawed throughout the West (but still used in North Korea), and mass exterminations of "class enemies" with famine used as a means of execution, along with bullets and nooses.
My bet is you also don't know much about Korea or the Korean War (beyond what you think you learned on M.A.S.H.).
You've really got to work at the self-delusion to be so unaware of the obvious unbelievability of this story. Or, maybe, you love your dictator/mass-murderers like the Great and Dear Leaders of North Korea?
(By the way, how are your knee pads working out?)
Have a nice day! You can...because you doubtless live in a country where you're free to maintain your delusions...a country freed or kept free by "GIs".
-Jay Crawford

*In case you don't know, we're the guys who killed the Nazis, Communists, and Imperial Japanese Army. You're welcome!

[Phil]

"35,383 civilians barbarously killed by Americans?
Nope. That type of atrocity, beyond an isolated incident, requires the rationalizing force of a messianic and cohesive ideology that casts out normal human morality."

Yeah, like the Dresden or Hamburg bombings, while all the men were at the front, you Americans chose to bomb the women and children left back home. According to eye-witness reports the American pilots were laughing while looking down at the dying kids and at the corpses. What about when Americans murdered 100,000 civilians in one night in Tokyo, only Japs, right? What about 35000+ murdered at Sinchon? What about hundreds of thousands killed in the American-Philipino War? What about the Rheinwiesenlager starvation of thousands of German POWs? What about killing 500000 Iraqi children through starvation in the 1990s?

[icarus]

Dear One Track Mind Phil:

In case some of us missed it, please remind of us of your country of origin, and/or the ideological brethren with whom you sympathize so that we may each take our own turns pissing all over them no matter how utterly irrelevant it may be to the topic at hand.

In my experience with wingnuts, the ratio between "dishing it out" and "taking it" is usually of the inversely proportionate type.

[Don Miguel]

"According to eye-witness reports the American pilots were laughing while looking down at the dying kids and at the corpses."

LOL! Obviously Phil has never been in an airplane. How exactly can a pilot be "looking down at the dying kids and at the corpses" from high altitude at a speed of 250+ km/hr? Of course no need to let facts and common sense get in the way of your ideology.

[Mir]

There it is, for all to see: The kind of America Derangement Syndrome that's sadly become so common in Germany.

[Tropby]

"The kind of America Derangement Syndrome that's sadly become so common in Germany."

Sorry, wrong usage of Krauthammmer´s term "Derangement Syndrome".

The original Bush Derangement Syndrome was about people allegedly blaming Bush for virtually every ill in the world.

But atrocities committed by the US Army, even largely fictional ones like Sinchon, are clearly linked to the US. Sorry, no America Derangement Syndrome.

To summarize: It only applies if there is no logical connection; e.g. blaming the US/Bush for the declining quality of Czech Beer might be subsumed under said syndrome.

Quite amusing: One conservative proudly refuses to serve his nation, another one fails at using conservative insults.

[Pamela]

Tropby
One conservative proudly refuses to serve his nation,

Sorry Tropby, you lost me there. What conservative is refusing to serve?

[Mir]

@ Tropby

That wasn't an insult, but a description of the displayed mindset.

[Tropby]

"Sorry Tropby, you lost me there. What conservative is refusing to serve?"

The original poster of

"Why I Didn't Join the State Department...
Even though I went to an elite school of Foreign Service,"

Publicly attacking a large group of Civil Servants, who serve their nation at relatively low wages, but refusing to join said service to correct possible problems despite being highly qualified, seems hypocritical to me.

There is nothing wrong with working in the private sector and making more money. I prefer the higher income and greater liberties as a lawyer to working at some DA´s office, too.

But whining about Civil Servants while earning good money is ... not OK, to be polite.

[wc]

This got way off subject. Anyway, Phil is correct. American always kill lots of civilians. There were eye witness to the Dresden bombings that actually saw the pilots laughing and enjoying the death of women and children. They were on their patios looking up in to the windows of the cockpits and saw all the laughter and celebration. And right now, Bush is making a list of everybody that has ever said anything that shows the US in a bad light. He is going to invite them to a party where he will personally go around and give them poison.

Oh, how stupid can I be, that is Cheney is going to do that. Bush is busy in the back room with the Saudis and Osama planning the next 9/11.

And the massacare in North Korea is true. We are planning another one just like it, but this time in Germany to shot all the little commie pinkos that disagree with us, after the soliders rape everybody first. I heard once that 3 soliders wiped out a village of 62 trillion people once just for their cookies....

I could go on with all these TRUTHS, but I don't want to seem like I enjoy this bad news about the terrible barbious amis...

[Consul-At-Arms]

@tropby,
If our host doesn't care for public service in the foreign affairs arena, it's still a free country. He's probably got student loans to pay off, after all.

[RayD]

@ tropby,

Just so you don't jump to any further unsubstantiated conclusions - I do work in the public sector and am every bit the civil servant (earning not so much money) - just not with the State Department.

By the way - are you saying we no longer have the right to criticize the United States government or segments thereof without it being unpatriotic?

And - oh yes - those Americans are so very dangerous. That is why millions in the United States and around the world have made a global sport of bashing the United States - with little fear of repercussion.

@ Consul

You are correct - my student loan repayments to Georgetown (which houses the oldest and highest ranking School of Foreign Service in the United States) begin this month as a matter of fact.

[Doug]

Newsbusters had some remarks on the coverage of this as well, pointing out this link to the State Department Careers website.

Worldwide availability is both an affirmed willingness to serve anywhere in the world and a matter of being medically qualified to do so. Both the willingness and being medically qualified are essential requirements for appointment to the Foreign Service. Worldwide availability also means that members of the Foreign Service are expected to serve anywhere in the world, even in cases where family members cannot go to post due to political instability and/or other concerns, or when family members must leave post as conditions deteriorate (evacuations).

Candidates should also bear in mind that Foreign Service Officers are expected to take assignments that can involve extremely difficult work, hardship, and even danger. We are looking for capable, healthy, dedicated candidates who are prepared to step up to the challenges the Foreign Service faces in today’s world.

[Ambrose Wolfinger]

Reading this brought back an ancient personnel memory. In 1977, I took the Foreign Service examination and passed the first, written section. I was then ordered to appear at the Federal building in Boston for the second phase, which was an oral examination. This examination was much closer to an interrogation, as the four Four Service Officers conducting the examination gave the distinct impression that they found sharing this planet with me to be highly offensive. I failed this examination, which ended my attempt to join the Foreign Service. I do remember at one point being advised that I could be sent any anywhere at any time to very dangerous and unpleasant places (Iran, among other places, being specifically mentioned, as things were starting to deteriorate there). I was further advised that as a young, single man, the probability of this happening was quite high. I replied that I would not have bothered to apply if I were not able to accept this. My response generated the one and only smile (from one FSO) that I received during the entire examination. It appears things have changed somewhat the Foreign Service in 30 years.

[Tyranno]

Having worked with DOS security as a military augmentation I can say from personal experience that the vast majority of embassy employees are prettified college preppies who couldn't find their ass with both of their very pink and uncalloused hands. I have some other friends in the FS who are excellent and would agree with my assessment here.
Be that as it may I volunteered for a military "service," just as they have volunteered for the foreign "service." In my branch we considered it a privilege to "serve" and made sure nothing in our performance of duties would embarrass the organization, mine or the DOS.
Sadly these chuckleheads in shower shoes, infused with that adolescent (MTV age)self righteous sense of entitlement, seem to feel they should receive all the benefits and shoulder none of the responsibilities that come with "service."
There is much in our government these days that is broken and this is another sorry indication of just how badly broken it is. It isn't the system, which has served us well over the last 231 years. It is the lack of caliber of people within the system.
The question Condi needs to ask herself is, "Do I want the U.S.A. represented by people who don't think the important work they are doing is worth the risk?"

If it were my decision to make I would be making the directed assignments and firing anyone who didn't say "Thank You" and walk towards the light with a smile on their face. . . But that's just me.

Tyranno

[Consul-At-Arms]

@RayD.,

Public service is public service, after all. And despite what some think (http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/10/georgetowns-school-of-foreign-service.html#readfurther), the Georgetown School of Foreign Service isn't actually a federal diplomatic academy.

Do you get any student-loan-repayment from your employer? I believe the Foreign Service does have that benefit, so if you ever change your mind....

I don't know the details myself, all my tuition was "pay-as-you-go."

[Phil]

By the way, if you want to know more about the typical American mentality, read the reviews at Amazon.com of the book "Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills" by US Vietnam veteran Charles Henderson.

Basically this guy goes out and murders 93 people who don't get a chance to defend themselves, then revels in it by writing a book glorifying the killings. The reviews by ordinary American reviewers are nearly universally positive, with titles like "Awesome Book", "An American Hero", "C. Hathcock is one awesome man!", " A compelling account of a true American hero's exploits!" etc., etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Marine-Sniper-93-Confirmed-Kills/dp/0425181650

[Pat Patterson]

Or one could also consider the career of Capt. Vassili Zaitsev who had over 236 killls of Germans who "...d[idn]'t get a chance to defend themselves..." But then he was a Communist so must be above reproach because he was a representative of the New Soviet Man or rather the New Ukrainian Man. What next, proof positive that American infantrymen bayoneted peace loving kulaks in Archangel in 1919?

[Phil]

I was talking about the reactions of the American Amazon.com reviewers to this guy.

[Scout]

"...if you want to know more about the typical American mentality..."

Gee, thanks, One-Track Phil. I'm not sure what any of that has to do with the State Dept. Didn't you forget to mention that this is all Bush's fault?

For anyone else reading, if you want to know more about the typical _German_ mentality, just read Phil's posts. You can get a pretty good idea. Rabid, Ami-Hasser Socialists who don't let facts or reason get in the way of using any excuse to take potshots at the Americans.
Now, imagine if you will, intellectual giants like Phil as the typical schoolteacher in Germany. Or the typical civil servant. Or the typical ... well, for that matter, my experience has been that the country is filled with Phils, so to speak.

[icarus]

Although I'm still not sure whether Phil is serious or just another fun-loving flame bait caricature; I don't know why he's still allowed to continue posting here.

[MarkD]

"There were eye witness to the Dresden bombings that actually saw the pilots laughing and enjoying the death of women and children. They were on their patios looking up in to the windows of the cockpits and saw all the laughter and celebration."

Let's see, bombers flying at altitudes of 12,000-20,000 feet are obliterating a city. Germans must have exceptional eyesight to see an expression on a pilots face at that distance. That's 4 kilometers or more for my European readers. Maybe they ate lots of carrots and were watching the British bomb at night. No, it must have been the Americans. The British wouldn't laugh. Maybe the German civilians were very brave as well, sitting on a patio in the middle of a bombing raid. I mean those stupid Americans, they might not all hit what they were aiming at. Not to mention the risk of being killed by their own flack falling from the sky, but as I said, the Germans were brave. Meanwhile, the stupid allied pilots were laughing it up, ignoring the flack and fighters waiting to kill them on their way home.

Or this could all be Phil's lies. Make up your own mind. I have.

[raoul]

no way