Healthy Influence Blog

This is an outstanding illustration of persuasion Cues.

This cartoon sweetly mocks soldiers for their Peripheral Route gear choices in a combat zone.  It certainly is not a damning criticism of soldiers, the military, or war.  It is an inside joke, a takedown, a basket of raspberries.  Don’t get bent out of shape on the tangentials.  Focus on the Main Points:  Cues and WATTage.

Consider first the Cues.

“This thing was designed by a S.E.A.L. so it must be great!”

“All the Spec Ops guys have a dump pouch . . .”

Lots of examples of Comparison (If Others Are Doing It), Liking (When The Source Is Cool), and Authority (S.E.A.L., baby!) in this cartoon.  The artist, Sergeant Albert Merrifield, worked up a series of these cartoons called “Bob on the FOB” based on his own military service in Iraq during his tour from October 2005 through July 2006.  You can find a PDF here of an entire series.  Bob on the FOB is clearly meant as a joke, but even within the humor we see the persuasion angles.

What strikes me most is the obvious inference in this cartoon that people in a combat zone where they could possibly get killed or maimed are depicted as ambling along the Peripheral Route.  You’d think that if any situation would always make everyone extremely  high WATT, it would be a combat zone.  Yet, Merrifield offers this as an ironic example that must have some basis in truth.  We are always human wherever we are and to be human is to ride the ebb and flow of WATTage.

I appreciate these cartoons for their persuasion commentary, but more importantly, Sergeant Merrifield, thanks for your service to our country.

Footnotes on Military Lingo

Here’s Brad’s definition of an FOB: “a Forward Operating Base, which is a smallish, self-contained base in a forward area. It is what most of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan live on and work out of.”

ACU is Army Combat Uniform.

S.A.W. is Squad Automatic Weapon which is a machine gun that a single person can carry and employ.  If you’ve seen the movie, “Blackhawk Down,” you’ve seen S.A.W.s in action.

9mm is . . . come on, you know this.  Rap music, CSI, virtually every cop movie features it – a cool handgun that looks like the World War II Colt .45 my father-in-law, Clif, carried; it uses a 9mm round rather than the .45.

An M4 is the newest evolution of the AR-15 carbine while a .50 cal is shorthand for the Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun which is a crewed weapon unless used by a Hollywood actor for effect.  Thus, if your rifle, the M4, weighs more than a weapon carried by two men, you’ve got a lot of options installed.

Spec Ops, Ranger, Delta, and S.E.A.L. are terms describing Special Forces personnel.  There are also crucial distinctions among and between these four terms and you’d better get them right in a bar, but hopefully in a blog post, I’ve got some slack. All serve with honor and distinction.

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