Fingers on the Jugular

 jug·u·lar

(jŭg'yə-lər)    adj.  Of, relating to, or located in the region of the neck or throat. n. A jugular vein. The most vital part: a strategic attack aimed at the enemy's jugular.

The other day, we were visited by two very important people. The first, was RADM John W. Miller, the Commander of Carrier Strike Group Eleven, which DESRON 23 is a part of. Basically, my boss' boss. He was visiting from the Nimitz to see what the other half of the Little Beavers was doing while the ship's did their ship thing. He said that they missed us very much and were proud of the job we were doing.

The second person was Ambassador J. Adam Ereli, the US Ambassador to Bahrain. He came to visit as NAVCENT is headquartered in Bahrain and the CTG-IM mission is really big in the area.  He told us a story about how he was friends with Japan's Ambassador to Bahrain and he asked the Japanese Ambassador what strategic interest his country had to Bahrain when they were at some sort of Gulf conference. The Japanese Ambassador responded that his country gets a majority of their oil from Iraq and how important the security of ABOT is to them. The Japanese ambassador said that their relationship with Bahrain is vitally connected to their well-being as NAVCENT, the agency responsible for the security of the platforms is in Bahrain, and keeping a good working relationship with the Bahrainians, to allow the US to continue operating from there is of utmost concern to them.

According to Ambassador Ereli, we (CTG-IM) here on ABOT have our fingers on the jugular of the world economy and protecting it is essential to make any forward progress on the stability in not only Iraq, but the entire Middle East.

It should also be noted that Ambassador Ereli was a 1989 graduate of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, where with any luck at all, I will hopefully be a member of Fletcher's Class of 2014. Guess I'd better get cracking on those GRE books soon!

So, thanks to Ambassador Ereli, our unit's motto has gone from "we're just moving boats" (since that is what we really do- safely control the movements of every boat, tanker, tug, and dhow arond the platform) to "fingers on the jugular", which we think sounds WAY more cool and tough than a glorified air traffic controller for boats.