the lighter side of military bureaucracy

hi again, fandom. i know it's been a while. there is no excuse. but THIS! this is too good to pass up.

this morning i was searching furiously (and ultimately uselessly) for the harvard ph.d. of a former army special forces officer and current naval postgraduate school professor named kalev sepp, whose dissertation research consisted of advising the salvadoran military during its long campaign against the FMLN (and, as far as the salvadoran government was concerned, anyone who sort of vaguely resembled an FMLN sympathizer, plus the occasional entire village).

sepp makes appearances in several of the journalistic accounts of iraq i've zoomed through recently; today it's george packer's the assassin's gate, which is more interesting to read but less relevant to my work (dangit!) than thomas ricks' fiasco. his experiences in both central america and iraq make him a prime interview target for me. how better to show that i deserve an interview than to read his dissertation?! no one reads anyone's dissertation! tragically, he hasn't released it to UMI, so i may have to actually gather relevant knowledge before i drive down to monterey and camp at the gates (if indeed there are gates there).

anyway, after my disheartening trip to the thesis emporium i googled sepp's name and -- lo and behold! -- the fourth or fifth hit was this stunning piece of work, by a woman fetchingly titled "pentagon diva," on the blog known as "I LUV A MAN IN A UNIFORM!" unfortunately for all of us who love us some military intellectual men, it appears the site hasn't been updated since may and was relatively sparsely populated even before then.

now back to our regularly scheduled APSA paper, the one that ate my brain...