BunkBlog

This is kind of geek news, but more interesting to me is that I used to work for this guy. He wasn’t a Mac-head then, though.

Wired News: Army’s Apple Shines in the Desert

The army has patches for every major unit, but the clipart collections that are out in the retail market only have some of them. Shoot, the 1st Cav patch in Corel Gallery is in greyscale! Like it would have taken any extra effort to slap in some yellow? Anyway, in my efforts to do many things in the army, including an awful lot of off-duty graphic design work, I’ve made a few patches and scrounged others together. So, click on a patch below to get the WMF file for it, or click here for the ZIP file containing all of them. The big image, by the way, is painted on my office door. No, I didn’t paint anything myself. I’m more a computer geek. 🙂

And, of course, there’s the Army seal, since the one that gets passed around the most has some Yen symbols in the middle of the words!

Thursday –

I’m a pretty patriotic person (12 years of army service, honorable discharge and all that), and I’m completely tired of the memorialization of last year. I do believe it should be remembered, much as Pearl Harbor is remembered every December 7th. But, let’s not make a holiday out of it – that just cheapens the whole thing, adding a celebratory aspect that shouldn’t be involved.

Meanwhile, the media have been memorializing September 11th ever since September 12th, so I think we’re all a bit numb from the onslaught. If they’d have let it rest for a few months, maybe I could get up some energy to give a shit about anything other than, “This is gonna foul up traffic on Wednesday.”

There are obviously serious deepseated root causes for the anger toward the US felt by many people. That’s something for politicians to deal with by changing our rather arrogant approach to other countries. The amazing intolerance of some cultures, though, is not our fault and I refuse to believe that we are at fault for the muslim extremists being extremist.

The proximate cause of the attack, though, is certainly knowable. I spent 12 years in the intelligence community, and I trust that the information the country is using to justify Bin Laden as the main bad guy is correct. His own statements and actions have more than removed any lingering doubts. Since the root causes are primarily cultural, and since the President is unwilling to change our unilateral approach to foreign policy, the only thing left to deal with is the proximate cause.

I think we’ve done a good job of taking care of Al Qaeda’s near-term ability to do any harm, and hurt their power base considerably by showing that we are willing to react to force with force. Those who claim violence never solved anything should really study history in more detail. We spent many years rattling sabers without any intent to follow through; we became caricatures of a world power. We’re back to being a world power, but I don’t think our current administration has the right path.

The Kyoto Accord should be signed. The International Criminal Court is a good idea. And, for the short-term, we definitely should not ignore Afghanistan. We promised them we would rebuild their country if they didn’t object to us bombing the piss out of it. Well, I don’t see a lot of cash flowing to Afghanistan right now, and that’s just amazingly poor policy. It shows the world that we don’t keep promises to our allies.

So, we’ve now shown the world that we will react with overwhelming force once we’ve been provoked repeatedly. This contrasts with Israel’s method of overwhelming force when laughed at too loudly. And, we’ve shown that we can’t be trusted to keep promises to friends and we don’t want to play well with others.

Damn, I hope we become isolationist. At least that would be consistent with the President’s views on things. I don’t know how he can think we can be a world power but not be part of the world community. We can’t be first among equals and have anyone take us seriously. We have to actually submit to being one of equals, and that’s something that the right-wing nuts won’t stand for quietly. Meanwhile, the left-wing nuts just want us to self-destruct, since we’re so evil. To them, I say, “find another country.”

Yep, I love America, warts and all. We really need to fix some major flaws, but it’s one of the best places to live.

Back to 9-11, I avoided network TV last night, since every channel was a pandering smarmy 9-11 memorial. Too much sacharine for me. 🙂

Monday –

This is a favorite anecdote that I share with folks I know. Back in 1992, I was in the Army at Fort Ord, based in lovely Monterey California. There was a junior enlisted fellow that worked in the supply room, and he had been working there before I arrived at the unit. After a few months, I found out his story, and it was a doozy.

This soldier, PV2 Gardner, was not a supply specialist, but a communications specialist. Since we had no commo section in the battalion (they had been moved to higher headquarters two years or so earlier), I inquired as to why Private Gardner was here, issuing paper tablets and computer disks, rather than assigned to a unit where he might have the chance to connect up some radios and telephones.

Well, he had been on assignment to Korea a couple years earlier, leaving at the same time as the rest of the commo folks that had been assigned to the battalion. As he outprocessed the battalion, division, and post, he did everything as normally expected. Then SPC(P) Gardner got to the housing office, and they were in the middle of a big inspection. The housing folks, looking at his ship date, realized he could stand to wait, while the bigwigs that were breathing down their necks would not wait. “Go home and we’ll call you,” he was told. Ever obedient, he went home and waited.

After his report date had passed without incident and he was still at home waiting, he decided he’d been forgotten. Normally, a soldier would be forthright and get back to the offending party as soon as possible, and certainly before he was late for his next assignment. This is referred to as being Absent Without Leave, or AWOL, and is not a good thing. Well, Gardner just stayed home and collected his Army pay for a while, then went out and got a civilian job as well. With his two paychecks, he was doing pretty well for his family. One day he got a phone call.

The Housing Office needed to speak to him. They had some news for him that he’d been waiting on for a while: his new government quarters were ready for occupancy. Yes, this soldier moved from off-post housing to on-post housing while still AWOL from his unit.

After two years or so, the commander wondered why he kept getting Leave and Earning Statements for some guy he’d never heard of named Gardner. He started a low-key investigation, and after 4 months got the answer. Now it gets really weird.

CPT Isham was hoping to get picked up for Major that year, and was doing everything possible to maintain a spotless record of command until the board convened. Obviously, having someone AWOL for 2 years without reporting it would be a bit of a smudge on one’s record. So, when CPT Isham finally caught up with SPC Gardner, he brought him back to the unit and charged him under non-judicial punishment for Failure to Repair. This is the military equivalent of not showing up for work on time, hardly the same thing as being a deserter. Desertion is defined as being AWOL for more than 30 days under normal circumstances (it’s immediate for those in special security positions), and 29 months was certainly more than 30 days by any calendar.

Gardner received a particularly harsh punishment for his actual charge, and was reduced in rank from a promotable Specialist (nearly a Sergeant) down to a Private-2. He was also fined a month’s pay and kept on restriction for 14 days. Since his job had been erased long prior, he was put in the Supply Room to give him gainful employment while he lost weight. You see, he’d put on so much tonnage while he was AWOL that he no longer was anywhere near the weight standards, and you can’t transfer to a new unit when you’re overweight. Or at least, you couldn’t then.

All would have been relatively normal at that point, if Gardner wanted to resume his military career. He didn’t. If a soldier who has been in more than 6 years gets kicked out of the army for being overweight, he gets severance pay. Our intrepid hero just kept that weight on until they had no choice but to send him back to civilian life, a few grand richer even.

All this seems to explain the reason for the title of this essay, but I’m not done yet. His attentive wife, upon looking back on the accumulated earning statements, realized the army had screwed up somewhere back in the beginning of this adventure. While living in an off-post apartment, a soldier is given a set amount of money for his pay grade and an additional amount for the area where he lives. Monterey is an expensive area, and Gardner had not received all the Variable Housing Allowance he was “owed” for his time off-post. Yes, that’s right folks: while spending 2 years sucking up unearned military pay, the boy actually had the gall to ask for some extra money. Since the commander had not charged Gardner with desertion, he was considered to have been on active duty in good standing the entire 2+ years he was playing basketball with his sons all day. The man actually got back pay for the time he was not at work!

Now, if that isn’t a gigantic pair, I don’t know what is.