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While giving his briefing, the sneaker is often scrutinized by a superior officer, who will dress him down if he does not finish on time, loses eye contact with his audience, or uses slang. Strong men tapped to be briefers for top brass have been known to tremble or vomit before performing, as if they were going into combat. Had he lived to see them, Philosopher William James might have found a new moral equivalent of war in briefings. The same kind of detailed planning goes into them, the same energy; and casualties could be reckoned in terms of those briefed to death.
Military briefings are meant to be not only as dramatic as possible but redolent with knowing jargon. One of the more ingenious examples of the craft takes place on a windswept crag overlooking the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. For the benefit of important visitors, a demonstration of enemy tactics is staged by G.I.s. Playing the part of North Koreans, they slip up to some barbed wire surrounded by mock-up mines. One G.I. snips the wire with a captured enemy wire cutter, thus demonstrating how North Koreans make sneak attacks on U.S. and South Korean patrols. During the show, the briefing officer may say something like "Toe says a Katusa came to OP Mazie with a signal from Cincunc at Uncmac." Translation: "Tactical Operations Center says a Korean attached to the U.S. Army came to Observation Post Mazie with a message from the Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command at United Nations Command Military Assistance Commission."
How to Say It
Experience has shown that the best, meaning the most informative, briefings are delivered not by trained professionals in the art but by men who simply know their business. In Saigon this year, a group of visiting U.S. businessmen was growing visibly restless in the course of a lavish briefing. Sensing their discomfort, General Creighton Abrams broke in to start talking informally about the war; although he said nothing new, his familiarity with the reality of war brought the meeting to life. The lesson is that personal communication is better than canned chatter.
It is probably too much to expect that the military could return to the casual, off-the-cuff talk as a substitute for the prepared briefing. To begin with, the Army would no doubt have as much trouble disposing of all its audio-visual gadgets as it has dumping its excess nerve gas. More of them, unfortunately, are yet to come. The services have begun purchasing a new computer that briefs automatically without the aid of human voice or hand. At the push of a button, curtains part to reveal a screen, and the show goes on. When it ends, the computer closes the curtains and turns on the lights in the auditorium.
That kind of McLuhanesque gadget might seem to be the ultimate in efficiency, but its acceptance by the military epitomizes the failure of briefings. Even without benefit of computer, the armed-services style of communication has become a ritual recitation of memorized details, a reduction of experience to a set of quantifiable data. The supposedly hard fact has been glorified; the untidy, elusive concept has been smudged into a supposedly measurable statistic.