Backdoor Draft
Rumsfeld to the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team: instead of going home after a year in Iraq, I’m sending you to Baghdad for four months.
Lurch at Main and Central and DJH Lights at Exit Stage Left cover the basics that can be found in the MSNBC article.
Saturday’s All Things Considered checks with the families in: Home Base Weighs In on Extended Iraq Stay for Brigade .
I was stationed at Eielson AFB outside of Fairbanks, so I’m familiar with Fort Wainwright. We had to go over to pick things up that didn’t seem to make it to Eielson. The buildings are pretty much the same, especially the quarters: small, concrete and steam heated.
The families with children were locked in during the long winter while the Brigade was getting shot at in a desert. At lot of things you take for granted in the “lower 48” are not available in Fairbanks, and those that are, are expensive. There isn’t a lot of civilian housing around Fairbanks, most people homestead, so post housing is the only option for the “lower ranks” and it was built to conserve heat.
The wives that were interviewed were angry. They found out about the extended tour from the news media, not the Army. That should never happen, and wouldn’t have happened if the Pentagon understood the military and its traditions. “Bad news is private and good news is public”, has a long history. The wife of the Brigade Commander would have been notified and she and the wife of the Brigade Sergeant Major would have notified the spouses of the troops with the assistance of the wives clubs. The uniformed military would have waited, so as not to scare the hell out of people, as uniformed officers only show up for death announcements. This is a courtesy and a tradition.
Rumsfeld is a barbarian, in every sense of the word.
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And now, at Raw Story – “A group of national security experts formed by Democratic leadership has reported to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) that, “there is not a single non-deployed Army Brigade Combat Team in the United States that is ready to deploy,” RAW STORY has learned.
“The bottom line,” the group concludes in a letter to Democratic leadership, “is that our Army currently has no ready, strategic reserve.”
I note on your sidebar there are 902 days left before the Shrubbery gets uprooted.
I honestly don’t see how the armed forces can remain more than minimally functional for that long.
Things are getting really testy down here. There was the damage from the hurricane, which spouses weren’t around to deal with and now the 16th Special Ops Wing is being transferred to New Mexico. Get out or get a divorce is a choice being made too often locally.
The other thing they have done is trapped people in units. If you can’t stand someone you work with, you can’t get away from them with a change of station because they are moving units, not people.
They are playing with finance and pay is getting screwed up royally. You are being held in service, but your pay stops at the end of your duty date. It’s madness.
People are breaking, units are breaking, the military is breaking.