I used to laugh when hearing or reading about whatever the witchfindergeneral was up to but that has pretty much stopped although I strongly encourage everyone I know to read "Good Omens" which does field a wichfinder Sargent. CNN though takes the biscuit. Here is their story so far as they investigate why some USAF/USANG crew slept at a place in Scotland with Trump's name on it and they treat it like President Trump is raising scorpions to slip into their pants.
I'm pretty sure President Trump didn't call them and tell them to land in Scotland and stay at a resort there. Mostly because everyone knows that is just what the Air Force does. Srsly, only the Air Force could come up with air conditioned tents in Egypt for Bright Star 95. I'm not mocking or complaining. It's just something that never would have occurred to an Army, Marine or Navy officer. We in Bahrain used to joke that the Air Force had an 'Expeditionary Air Pool' in the Banz warehouse where they stored their Harvest Falcon stuff. I think, as it turns out, the joke was on us because there was a pool in there.
I could wish that the media would find at least some former military members to keep their idiocy down but then they hire the idiots as soon as they retire and pop up their heads thinking someone just asked who wanted a steak.
2 comments:
There were Temper tents at Desert Shield. CENTCOM had them back in '88 at Riotous Cause in Panama. Everybody had them in 95 at Bright Star.
The most memorable part of Bright Star 95 was beating the fire department for the volleyball championship. The E9 Fire Chief showed up the next day with the fire truck and crew to shut down our BBQ grill an dressed down our guy cooking. Our grill master told the AF Chief he didn't have a grip on reality as we were going to have a BBQ. He grabbed his blouse and hat and went outside to talk one-on-one with the Chief. When our grill master exited our compound the Chief popped a salute and told our full bird Colonel to enjoy the BBQ and he hoped he hadn't inconvenienced him. In JCSE we were a little rank heavy.
For me the best part of Bright Star 95 was that our people kept getting detained by the MPs ARCENT assigned to make sure nobody at all had a beer or drink in Cairo. They would nab them at the gate to Cairo West and then bring them to us and we'd literally sign for them and tell them to go to bed and the log would reflect that the Admiral was notified. He was a 1 star admiral and actually Deputy Commander of NAVCENT back in Tampa and ran things for the 3 star admiral in Bahrain. I think at that time NAVCENT was Redd and the next was Fargo.
For the army, violating the utterly stupid general order #1 was career ending. For us, the Admiral would line up the defaulters about once a week at and slap them gently on the back of their wrists. I don't think COMARCENT saw the humor. I worked in the JOC as the Battle Watch captain the whole damned time working for a very fine Army colonel and I had the night shift. Literally all night in the JOC and the hard part for me were the almost endless notifications that we got out of Altanta and Tampa to inform servicemen with us that their wives or children had been killed or assaulted back at home station. There was just a MAST, 7 sailors with it, half a dozen or so other Navy people in the exercise. None of them had to suffer through that kind of horrible wake up call.
Sharing my air conditioned tent with all the navy transients and the army major was interesting. Long before I saw Newsroom with Jeff Daniels and saw the episode where Sloan found her rage, I shared some conversation with a female LCDR utterly lost after being flogged and branded by staff for not flying. She kept telling me as she kept telling them, all they had to do put her in the seat and grab the throttle was tell her that flying pax over water at night in her helo was an OPERATIONAL NECESSITY and not one of them had the balls to do it.
Now that was an ancient rule and probably obsolete given TACAN and the destination was a CVN but she was forced to play by the rules and it got ugly almost instantly....and yeah some army asshole told her how unprofessional she was for refusing a direct order in the absence of some jackass simply stating, as she kept saying, that the flight over water at night was an operationl necessity.
Which reminds me of the one solitary class we had in Department Head School on Leadership.
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