30 April 2023
I was reminiscing recently about the people who had done so much to help build my faith. One fellow in particular I met in the Army via the Men of the Chapel program; call him Jeff. He was an intel officer, and I wish I could be so wise.
He couldn't wait to retire and get away from the madness of intel work. The longer he walked in faith, the more defiled he felt from what he experienced in uniform. His last assignment was in a NATO coordination office, and he said it was the worst of all his experiences. I was familiar with a few other folks who worked in the same specialty. Most of them suffered from various troubles. They weren't as stable and committed to a life purpose the way Jeff was.
I'll probably never understand how I managed to attract friendships from people who worked in intel, but there were several. One I helped through an NCO academy; I had received a lot of solid land navigation training before that and it was his biggest weakness. I taught him how to correlate what was on the topographical maps with what he could see on the ground. We were friends from that day on, though our paths seldom crossed.
Over the years working with those people, I learned a lot of things that they couldn't tell me directly. While some of them told me I would have done well in their field, Jeff told me to stay away from it. He said flatly that there was so very much pointless nonsense and truculent stupidity built into the system that it drove him nuts.
You should understand that the military was crazy enough, nothing like it's portrayed in entertainment. But the intel mission was simply perverse through and through. They lie to each other; it's their job. They lie internally and the various agencies lie between themselves. The staff hides things from the directors and vice-versa. No investigation can possibly find what they are looking for, because no one trusts anyone else. An awful lot is never documented.
Your clearance has little to do with what you can find out. It's more a matter of whether you are in with the right people, and that's always by invitation. Do you realize that the US President doesn't even know but a small percentage of anything he asks about? The intel people have stuff tied up in clearances that have nothing to do with the official labels. And whether any of them knows anything that is actually useful is dubious.
One of the things they hide is just how wacko it makes them personally. You would be stunned at the vices these people engage. The single biggest one is wild sexual perversions -- you cannot imagine. I learned because I had to help clean up after some of their miscalculations. Their families were emotionally shredded.
The other nasty that attracts intel types is secretive pagan cults. From what I have heard recently, this stuff has only gotten worse. You can never tell when their intel work is just a means to some darker agenda. This is why you hear rumors and conspiracy theories about government officials involved in things like pizza and pedophilia. What you hear is not the worst of it, and is likely to miss the point.
The whole field of intel is so perverse we simply have no words for it. I'm glad Jeff was able to retire safely without getting wrapped up in that stuff. His personal life was transparent and quite clean. He knew that stuff, couldn't talk about it, and how he carried it all with grace is beyond me. I can only aspire to be that strong.
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