To quote Jeff Daniels from Newsroom "I wasn't there" and since the entire thing got moving along while I was the acting commodore, it was a very good moment in American military jurisprudence. Did I mention that I wasn't there? Nobody called me until she and her legal team engaged in a long drawn out effort to dismiss and set aside and ignore the verdict, sentence and crime. Oh my yes, it was the tour de force.
I found the transcript online the night before last and read through it because I did wonder why the genesis of the case (me) had never been summoned to appear. It was as I read the defendant's very own words that I got some idea why perhaps I had been overlooked since I was gone before the case actually, finally, went to trial. Throughout her testimony she got my name mangled beyond recognition. Srsly mangled. She didn't know my name and enclosure 20 of the trial case was of no help to her at all in figuring it out even though it was all neatly typed out by the JAG or her LN1 on the MPO.
Now that's something I'm familiar with. More than one or a thousand people have asked me how to spell out names for places in the middle east or Korea. For decades I told them to simply write it out the way they heard it. Our alphabets don't correlate letter for letter and just use phonetics and you'll be all right unless you're driving to Chinhea from Mokpo or from Aleppo to Baghdad. They all like to think it matters but squiggles isn't an alphabet.
As I read the transcript of the trial and saw me referred to half a dozen times it finally dawned on me that acting commodore of 3000 sailors or not, and with my name literally sewn onto the uniform I wore to work every single day for 4 years at this place she and I worked, she still had no idea what my name really was.
Her appeal lawyer gave me a call at the 11th hour of the last day of her appeal telling me he wanted me to testify.................sadly, I didn't get his message until much later.
Thanks Verizon!!!
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