It unnerved me every time I had to go over to the Air Liaison Officer’s (ALO) tent. He had a sleeping tent tall enough to walk into, a cot, four camping chairs, a table, a miniature TV and a small refrigerator. Outside he had an electric generator, a gas grill, an aluminum picnic table and a partridge in a pear tree for all I knew. I had never seen anyone come to the field with so much stuff, not even a general. He was a lowly butter-bar — a second lieutenant. I outranked that punk by two promotions.

One evening I heard the beckoning call of beers being opened, “pssst, pssst, pssst,” from the ALO’s tent. I walked over and said, “Dammit lieutenant. We’re training for a full on, no holds barred, toe-to-toe shoot out with the Rooskis. If you can’t pack up your shizzle in a hurry, then you will be left behind and if you are lucky to survive being captured then one thing is for sure, you won’t be able to bring all your creature comforts to a Rooski POW camp.” As I walked back to my sleeping pup tent I thought about writing him up, but since he did not belong to my unit or even my branch of the military I thought the paperwork and hassle would be outrageous. Besides, I was being transferred soon.

As I self-righteously crawled into my sleeping bag for the night, it dawned on me that the problem wasn’t that the ALO and I came from two different branches of the U.S. military. The problem was that we came from two different worldviews. The principle of KISS guided my role in the military and life in general. KISS, by the way, stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Don’t let anyone tell you differently. That’s what it meant back in the day, 

and that’s what it should stay meaning from now on. The last word,“stupid,” is there for a good reason.

When I got back home from that particular field training exercise, my wife said she didn’t want to be in the Army anymore. Half joking, I said, “I didn’t know you were in the Army.” That attempt to lighten the mood bombed so badly I quickly shifted over to a strategy right out of the KISS playbook — active listening. In less time than it took for us to share a bottle of wine, I discovered we were in agreement. Why should I sleep on the ground when a butter-bar from the Air Force gets to sleep on a cot in an enormous, air-conditioned tent and drink beer? Believe it or not, it wasn’t that hard to transfer to the Air Force.

It wasn’t all wine and roses, though. There were anti-KISSers everywhere in the Air Force. I thought my new boss would make an excellent candidate for rehabilitation to the simpler virtues of KISS. Not getting the point of his horrendous slog through a PowerPoint presentation, I suggested to him that we could make our staff meetings more efficient by incorporating the 10/20/30 Rule: use no more than 10 slides, talk no longer than 20 minutes and use no font smaller than 30-point. My boss hissed that the 10/20/30 Rule did not fit his “ethos.”


In spite of my heartfelt plea to him to think about the average person’s attention span as well as his own staff’s need to get back to work, my boss continued to use his bizzarro, painful 100/200/300 PowerPoint technique. As best as I could tell, he had to show at least 100 slides, talk at least 200 minutes and then suppress any hope of anyone pushing back with a barrage of at least 300 bullet points.

After that, I started calling my boss the “Chairman of the Bored.” He mistakenly thought that I meant “Board.” I never bothered telling him otherwise. I kept that little gold nugget to myself. Being word-boarded by him at staff meetings every week made me realize that “Death by PowerPoint” is not some jokey office jargon. It’s real. Or at least it felt real enough to make me daydream about accidentally-on-purpose tipping over the projector and breaking it.

Now that I’m retired from the military and in my golden grandfatherly years, the last S in KISS reminds me to laugh at myself. That last S stands for Stupid, in case you had forgotten. Laughter is my superpower against all the anti-KISSers of the world. I know I can’t convert all of them. I can spot them a mile away. They are so encumbered with their own grandiosity they can barely move, much less have a full-bodied, side-splitting, tear-drenched laugh at themselves. My soul-cleansing bouts of laughter at myself strip away everything that is not worth worrying about. I am at one with the cosmos, no less than the trees and the stars — and certainly no less than the ALOs and the Chairman of the Boreds of this world.