I had a similar situation with my Disability pay when I retired from the Army. Due to a snafu about a separation check when I was RIFed in 1986, I could not get my retirement pay until it was paid back. Basically 2 years’ retirement pay. Meanwhile, I was approved for a 70% VA Disability. I figured that would cover most of the delayed retirement. However, the checks did not show up. When I enquired, I was told that the Disability would be withheld until the separation pay was repaid. After careful examination of the paperwork they sent me, and finding that both checks were being put towards the settlement, the math said that the repayment had been completed six months earlier. When I contacted the VA I got the bureaucratic run around until I demanded to talk to a supervisor. You can’t, the drone said. Why not? I asked. “Its POLICY!”
So, I let them have their policy, and filed a Congressional complaint. Neither Bernie nor Lehey did any good, but amazingly, then-Congressman Welch lit a fire under someone’s ass and six weeks later I got not only my retirement and disability, but $36,000 in Disability backpay!
Keep fighting, Illegitimi non carborundum!
Been a long time coming. I saw the “Social Laboratory Syndrome” creeping through the military for over thirty years. The worst started with Obama’s purge of true warfighters and replacing them with careerist toadies who would rubber-stamp his social agenda. Then the loss of standards in dress, fitness, and appearance, and the transgender idiocy. When Biden came in with his policies and appointments of deviants to high office, I was glad I was retired. Now we have leadership that knows what the military’s job is and will enforce standards, performance and mission…at ALL levels. I admit I had put on weight in my later years, but I could still pass the PT tests, and I worked out every day, and could keep up or surpass the younger troops, even working for three hours in a Level-A HAZMAT suit in 90-degree heat.
I’m waiting to see how many of the perfumed princes at that meeting put in for retirement.
Updates and Comments
Chemist
“Full disclosure: I have never served.
But I have to believe that the PT standards are different for a logistics specialist than for a Special Forces operator.
So if you have some middle age spread but still can pass the PT test for your specification – that’s all Pete is asking for.
And I think that’s fair.
We’ve all seen the videos of the 110 pound female cop trying to control a 300 pound ‘roided up perp and they are not pretty. (The videos, not the cops. Or the perps.)
But I hope to never see the day when a 200 pound jihadi starts pounding on undersized US servicewomen.
If this makes me a misogynist – then the definition is wrong.”
Jess
“My brother was in the Air Force, looked good, not carrying any noticeable weight, achieved Staff Sargent, and was over ten years in service, but was worried because he was notified his weight, and waist size, need to lower or face being removed. That was in the eighties. Seeing some of those in the military over the last few years made me wonder what happened to the discipline, since many looked way beyond anything resembling an effective military member demanded thirty years ago.”
I have had two friends with daughters who went into the military.
(Small sample size, I know.)
Both young women were stronger than I am and may well have been physically stronger and in better health than I was at 18.
Neither woman saw combat.
Both washed out within a year of graduating basic training for “Medical” reasons.
Whatever medical issue they had was not obvious nor did it affect their ability to work post service. Both were able to carry to term and deliver healthy baby’s. They both get full VA benefits.
IMHO, for these women, military service was a scam to get benefits that will last them the rest of their lives without really earning them.
There are many well-qualified women in the military.
Alright, now with that said, in almost 30 years of active, reserve, and now civilian DoD experience, the parable of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” is probably the best metaphor regarding women in the armed forces. Every reasonable person who has looked at the requirements and conditions sees that it is not an enhancement to try and put women into every role performed in the armed services. Not one single deployment was enhanced with having females around. In fact, it usually presented unnecessary hindrances and complications to the mission at hand. Military service has one purpose — defense of the country and its national interests. To treat the institution as a grand laboratory for social sciences has been a complete detriment overall.
The Vegas bomber was active duty Spec Ops. Highly decorated. Even Tim McVeigh had a Bronze Star for Valor in battle.
The standards and selection process for Spec Ops is high. He (Vegas bomber) made Master Sergeant. He had seen a lot of combat. But being the best means you get more than your share of work/grief. Eventually it adds up. PTSD is cumulative. It can be sneaky. Each day we lose 44 active duty and veterans to suicide. Actually likely more as several can be called “accidents”. After the various 20th century wars, GIs would self medicate with booze.
When I returned from Vietnam I was called a baby killer and spat upon by a hippy. I had to spend the night in a holding cell until the judge, a veteran, turned me loose for self defense. If I had instead been jailed and discharged less than honorably, no telling what I may have become or done to myself.
This Vegas guy was with 10th SF I believe they said, in Germany. That means he has likely seen “advisory” roles in Ukraine. It also means he has likely seen close combat, been a throat stabber.
Eventually it all adds up. Some of the stuff I have seen and done still keeps me up at night occasionally. I don’t drink much, hardly at all. No drugs. I’m known as either Coke Zero or coffee at the VFW hall. But we do talk, drunk or sober, and talk among equals helps.
What to write about tonight? Well, how about thinking about, “How did we get here?”
I know all about the deep dives where everything traces back to the Enlightenment and the loss of faith. Or there’s the Abolitionists and the Civil War enshrining social justice in our government. But I don’t want to go back that far. I’ll settle for Woodrow Wilson and FDR as the source of the runaway bureaucracy that Washington DC has become. Sure, in between, there were others but I think Wilson set the stage with the WW I expansion and FDR metastasized the problem with the New Deal and the WW II expansions.
Now, I’m not denying that by creating the Leviathan FDR assured the defeat of Hitler and Japan. He did. And by funding the Manhattan Project he created the American Empire and eventually destroyed the Soviet Union. But at what cost? As one of his successors (Eisenhower) warned, the melding of the US war machine with corporate interests fueled by almost limitless investment from the Federal Reserve has swallowed up our democracy. And with it, has enveloped us in a police state that dictates to us in a way that is in line with what the Stasi did in East Germany and what China does with its people today.
The final nail in the coffin was 9/11/2001. The reaction to that attack assured that the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts could treat American citizens like Stalin’s victims that we read about in the Gulag Archipelago. You can be arrested, convicted, sentenced and buried in the gulag for annoying the bureaucrats or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Freedom of speech, unreasonable search and seizure and the right to an open and fair trial are all stripped away with the wave of a magic wand when the FISA Court and the Patriot Act declare that national security is threatened. And all kinds of other atrocities are possible when the intelligence agencies can convince banks, airlines and social media companies that you are a dangerous person because you don’t agree with the bureaucracy’s priorities.
And all of this is because a bunch of rag tag Islamic extremists hijacked four airliners. Well, as I’ve confessed innumerable times, I was one of the fools who agreed to this nonsense back in 2001. I allowed myself to be swayed by anger to allow George W Bush and his geniuses to put in place the very laws that would plague Americans ever since. All of us who agreed with these measures put on our chains voluntarily. More the fool me.
Well now it’s time to start undoing all of this. And I mean all of it. First to go must be the FISA Courts and the Patriot Act. Ending the ability of the CIA and FBI to target American citizens and sweep away their constitutional rights is the primary goal. That must go.
But after that, the military industrial complex must be examined and the practices that allow it to bribe elected officials and collude with contractors to bleed the American taxpayers must be changed. Sure, we need up to date weapons to assure the security of this country. But we’re not even getting that anymore. We have bloated weapons programs that produce expensive but unimpressive results. Our state-of-the-art Abrams tanks are being decimated on the battlefields of Ukraine by $500 drones. Our next-up super-fighter jet is a vaporware project that is so poorly defined that despite a price tag rumored to be close to a trillion dollars we don’t know why we should build it, other than it will enrich the contractors beyond their wildest dreams.
Getting this done will be a battle royale. Both Democrats and Republicans will defend the military industrial complex with every fiber of their beings. People like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have amassed huge fortunes and incredible influence by serving the interests of the defense contractors in everything they do in the Congress. It’s not too much to say that Donald Trump and his cabinet appointees in the Department of Defense will be risking their lives when they defy the vested interests there. There is probably no limit to what they might do to prevent reform of the present situation.
Let’s pray for their success. Nothing less than the freedom and prosperity of our children hangs in the balance over the next few years.
This ship, the JS De Alcano, is owned and operated by the Escuela De Guardias Marinas, the Spanish equivalent of the US Naval Academy. Each summer, the ship makes what is essentially a world tour stopping at various ports, using the Midshipmen from the Academy as the sailors. Florida, including Pensacola, was a Spanish possession until 1822. Pensacola reflects the Spanish influence in a number of ways including some of the major street names, like Palafox, Cervantes, Cordova, Texar and a bunch of others.
The ship is one of the largest remaining sailing vessels in existence. It was built in Britain (some irony there) in the early 1920’s and has been in continuous operation since. It docks in Pensacola every 5 years or so for a several day stay. It was last here in May 2023 though, several of these pictures were taken in 2009
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I think the subject of each shot is obvious and doesn’t need individual descriptions. Though I was amused at the labeling on the engine control.
The Spanish obviously have a loooong history of Maritime Tradition.
TomD
Here’s a shot of a much smaller sailing vessel, a replica of a Spanish Galleon. I’m convinced that a true sailing master of a large sailing vessel needed to be a genuine genius.
There also had to be a designer.
Also, the sailors in the rigging had to be mentally quite a bit above the near retarded levels pictured in historical descriptions of the ships crew. Actually, that’s depressing. We like/need to think of the people subjected to such horrific circumstances/privations/dangers as brutes.
I just noticed two very unusual elements of this galleon design: the sail and an observation platform on the bow sprint. I’ve not seen that before and definitely not on Dutch, British or French designs of the time.
I kicked this to the top of the site because I want it to get more views. Tom has collected some wonderful photos of an iconic old military facility. I especially like the shots of the interior masonry. His use of HDR (high dynamic range) technique produces fascinating images.
Ft Pickens is the site of a US National Park located at the mouth of Pensacola Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. Historically it has been the site of military defences to protect said bay from foreign intervention. Other than altercations between Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War, I’m not aware of any military confrontations between US and hostile foreign forces since the original fort was established in 1830. At least in one instance, WWII, I’m fairly sure that was because of the deterrence of the fort. Especially in the 1st couple of years of WWII, the Gulf was lousy with German submarines, and absent the fort there would have been little to deter the Germans from coming into the bay and shelling the deep water port facilities.
Fort Pickens was active as a military base from 1830 to its closing in 1947 and it has abandoned facilities and gun emplacements from all along that time frame. This is just a few pictures and doesn’t begin to encompass the buildings, emplacements and facilities there.
Photos:
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Light at the End of the Tunnel: This is one portion of one wing from the 1st facilities constructed, in 1830, completed just 8 years after Florida was ceded to the US by Spain. It was constructed of brick using slave labor.
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This is a spotting tower used to spot and correct the shell fire from the two 6” shield guns featured in later picts.
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Another location in another wing of the 1830 fortress.
One of the 6”. These guns were 6” shield guns in use from before to through WWII. These guns threw a shell weighing probably around 90 pounds to a distance of around 17,000 yards. There’s a picture of the interior of the shield further down.
Here’s a “disappearing” gun from the WWI era. Seems to me that would be an effective defense strategy since, any adversary unless at an extreme range, would have a flat trajectory to its shell fire.
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This is the 2nd shield gun at that emplacement. This picture doesn’t reveal differences from the 1st but I just like the photo as a photo.
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A 3rd shot of another location from in the 1830 building
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One wing of the 1830 building. It connects to the remainder of the building on the left but not the right side due to a “little” hurricane some time in the past.
View from behind one of the shield guns showing the interior. These turrets were fully powered, as they would be on a ship. You’ll notice that the breech block has been removed. Spoil sports! They never let us have any fun, pot shots at fishing boats 10 miles out would be great sport.
You can see that the breech design is of the interrupted screw type (no jokes please). This design is prevalent with American canon types of the time as opposed to the falling block favored by many other nations. Since, the US Army at least seems to use the falling block.
