The Five P’s

When I was a private, I was instructed to memorize several phrases or bits of information that I should know. I wrote this information on a piece of paper, laminated it, and carried this list in the cargo pocket of my right pants leg until my ETS date.  Some of these bits of information on my list might include the maximum effective range of my rifle for both a point and an area target, or the five paragraphs of an Op Order.  The phrase that this post is about was called The Five P’s.  The Five P’s is an acronym which stood for Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.  Failure to have this phrase or any of the other information on the list memorized would result in corrective training, more affectionately known as being smoked.

Getting smoked usually involved alternating between several exercises including, but not limited to, inclined pushups, flutter kicks, motorcycle riding, and the peeping tom.   If your leader was in a who wants to quit mood the exercises were alternated when your body could no longer perform the exercise correctly or your leader was tired of it.  Inclined pushups are the same as normal pushups except you have your feet resting on your sink, your bed, or any other available object. If you’re in formation this object might be your ruck sack or a fellow Ranger might hold up your legs while you’re getting smoked.  These types of pushups were a favorite and if the leader was not in a who wants to quit mood, you would only have to do twenty-five of them plus one for the Army, one for the 75^th Ranger Regiment, one for 1^st battalion, one for Alpha company, and finally one for the Airborne Ranger in the Sky for a total of thirty pushups.  In my time and squad, my Airborne Ranger in the Sky was PFC Maynard; a young man who died during the invasion of Grenada who was in my antitank squad.  If I was in 3^rd battalion my Airborne Ranger in the Sky would have been one of the Rangers who died in Somalia. 

If my leader trying to find out if I wanted to quit, I might be busy until he got tired and entail alternating between the other exercises. Doing flutter kicks was usually next and was an exercise where you would lay on your back, place your hands under your rear end, extend your legs, and move them up and down, between six and twelve inches away from the floor, at a set cadence (1, 2, 3, 1; 1, 2, 3, 2; 1,2,3, 4…).  The motorcycle is a more imaginative exercise where you sit with your back against the wall, with nothing under your rear end.  To make it interesting, the person in charge of smoking you has you extend your arms so it looks like you are riding a motorcycle and tells you to make motorcycle sounds (vroom, vroom).   The person may even ask you to give it more throttle or change gears. At this point you are supposed to twist your hand to give the motorcycle more throttle or pull in the clutch with your left hand and make appropriate adjustments to your sound effects.  My personal favorite exercise was the peeping tom.  In this exercise you are playing the part of a peeping tom and the person smoking you is playing the look out.  For the start position you hang from your foot locker, door, or anything which may act as a pull up bar.  You stay in the start position with your arms extended until the lookout says “she doesn’t see you”.  When this phrase is said you perform a pull up and hold yourself up until he says “she sees you”.   This pattern alternates until the smoker gets tired.

All this is done to motivate you to memorize The Five P’s: proper planning prevents poor performance.  To this day I still remember The Five P’s, maximum effective range of my M-4, and quite a bit of information on the list I carried in my right cargo pocket.  I guess the teaching technique worked and had the side effect of getting me in shape.  When it comes to the information on that list, most of it I can’t use in my current life.  The type of rounds available for an M-3 Carl Gustav is not useful, but The Five P’s are.

I would like to implement The Five P’s when it comes to planning our move to Cape Town.  Unfortunately, I don’t have enough information to do the proper planning so I could prevent poor performance from occurring.  I can’t believe that I still don’t know when my move date is.  Every time I ask my contact in South Africa about the move date, the person replies with something like “I can’t know that until you have your work permit in hand.”  Once that is complete I ask the question again and the person replies with “That can’t be known until they have all the movers’ estimates.”  At this point, timing seems very important.  For example, in order to move our pets, we need to pay for blood tests which take weeks to complete and are only good for thirty days from the day of their blood draw.  This leaves both a narrow time-frame, two weeks, and weeks of prior planning.  In addition, these blood tests are expensive, costing us approximately $1,500.   Any misstep in planning will force us to waste this amount of money and pay for the same blood tests a second time, plus their pain and suffering.

This isn’t the first time that I have felt that there is a lack of communication about the move.  I spent the last few weeks of December stressing out, thinking I had to be ready to teach on February 8^th.  The following questions were racing through my head.  Were we going to make it to Africa in time?  What will happen if we don’t make it?  Will I be violating my contract?  Will this negate my contract?  Did my wife quit her job for nothing?  I tried asking these questions and the only answer they gave me was something such as “most administrators will be off until mid-January so we can’t answer that question.”  This answer was not reassuring.   I finally just wrote the head of my department and was told that he didn’t expect me to get there until sometime mid-semester.  That information would have been nice to know when I was having mini heart attacks back in December.