Lawman

I went to Flight School with a few Utah/Arizona guard guys at do Border Patrol as their civ job. From what hey describe talking about being on an island. Think two dudes in a blazer or Tahoe driving around with just enough Ammo to start a fight and being sometimes hours from anyone that could be considered friendly. Dudes talked about rolling across groups of armed individuals at night and just letting it go because starting that fight was a guaranteed lose for them.

True but this is Army Aviation we are taking about. Most of us in the Warrant corps are already spending half our base pay keeping 1-2 dependapotamus harpy monsters happy and fed. Now that I think about it that would be a good discriminator on who we send.

That and Alimony payments are the two things I would be most worried about

Army is sending a small aviation task force of Lift and Attack on what is supposedly to be a rotational basis. First units are slated to head here around September of this year. TDY in the Philippines.... What could possibly go wrong.

Remembers in the 90s when people were making awful websites on Geocities and Tripod.... Those people work for the DOD now. Which is why it takes 9 months to get a SIPR token in he Army.

Ft Carson has spots for Housing mayors and family members of POWs.... And they are closer to it than the "expectant mother" spots which is just funny.

Weird, the Army is working on the opposite idea. They got tired of people cheese dicking it through the C course after spending money on basic and advanced aircraft training and having to either boot them or give them a pass. But our SERE course is also at Ft Rucker so no TDY just 3 weeks in a sequestered barracks with no phone and occasional trips to the "woods."

You can get some ridiculous good deals on display model stuff like outdoor furniture/grills. I bought a 500 dollar weber grill for a little over 100 when they were clearing out the PX to move in the Xmas shit.

I don't think you've got to much to worry about being the only service sitting in front of congress looking foolish when it comes to acquisitions. Everybody has their big pile of fail to fall on. Navy has the LCS debacle. Army has ######ed up Comanche and the future ground combat vehicle not to mention Crusader. Marines have the expeditionary fighting vehicle and it's gonna take 30 years to pay off the Osprey Karma no matter how well the thing performs now. We as a military are ######ed when it comes to getting new stuff, just uniforms are a bridge too far now days. Billion dollar development programs are just a bigger circus of fail.

Did a lot of support missions with the Poles in RC east. They are some ballsy sons of bitches who are not afraid of a fight.

I think the bigger point is if only there weren't just 6 NATO members meeting the prescribed budget for military spending they agreed to. Gotta pay for all that socialized bullshit first.

Ron Pearlman and Charlie Day made that movie for me.

One more going I was thinking about, watch your bill vigilantly. Every so often some scam will come around and they've been known to go dipping into weird fees and scams on Servicemen with contracts. The big one that went through a couple years ago they were selling your info to 3rd parties outside of Germany and those parties were sending you adds via text... Telekom was then fining you for whatever didn't count as free in their contract. It took JAG action to get the notification to knock that shit off for a few of our guys.

There are literally 2 phone company's to get a cell phone through in German, T mobile.... And whoever the hell else the other one was because nobody had it. Euro cell phone policies are stuck in e early 90s states phase where somehow the whole of Europe is one big batch of roaming zones by country borders. Sucks ass when you take leave and go to say Italy because you either shit off your phone and do it old school with a map and a guidebook, or pay ridiculous fees. Know some guys who forgot to turn off before crossing borders or making drunk calls... Cost serious cash like hundreds of dollars. I wouldn't worry on unlocking your old phones, whatever TKS store on post is selling phones hey will have a contract special on either the new hotness iPhone or droid for as cheap as buying the SIM card to work on the euro grid. You can do internet through TKS as well, makes bills easier. One thing you will need to do is set up with the on post bank because Germans want an in country bank to set up payments from. Internet is interesting dependent on village. A lot of smaller villages have limited port numbers for their population so it's not nearly as fast as it should be in the 21st century. Then again you'll also find lots of dead spots for cell service the same way. 4g is non existent and lots of areas just drop out especially on the train to either low 3G or Edge which is butt ass slow.

I'm thinking somebody found some stock photo of one and just ran with it. I don't remember seeing anything on Syria getting Flankers.

Somewhere on F-16.net.... A thousand Flanker fanboys cried out and then were suddenly silenced.

This is where your tax money goes.

Fulda Gap in the era of Power Point.... Russians will be having Crepes in Paris before we get the damn slides for the counter attack AMB revised for the 7th time. The XO says we didn't use the Brigade standard format.

In a good number of places, especially those without open carry laws, wearing a real gun in that manner could be construed as brandishing a firearm or public menacing depending on local and state statutes. Other element to this is we have no idea what the 911 dispatcher actually relayed from the original report. Look I get 2nd amendment shall not be infringed and all that but seriously it's not like this guy was arrested and charged. Officers went on e side of caution as is trained and standard when a firearm is suspected in any call these days. Would you rather some dispatcher question the report and say "nah doesn't sound valid we don't need to roll a unit." And seriously the guy got a tattoo of a gun so it would look like he had one tucked into his pants. Bitching about this is like being the guy that gets the Hindu symbol that just happen to look like something else at a glance and wondering why everybody assumes your a Neo Nazi.

Yeah one is handed out to every First Sergeant who spends his deployment driving around the FOB in his own truck and doing no observed work.... He other is pretty much never approved or automatically downgraded....

That's kinda why I'm focused more to the guard aspect of it. I'm not sitting around trying to leave the Active Army like some guys, I'm just not ready to sell the whole ship yet on this if I can do a job in a useful capacity and not have to spend it living the dirt poor Army way just because I refused to look at other options. Don't get me wrong moving doesn't bother me, but no different than the guys that go Active to Guard/Reserve whether AF pure or some other combination, there is a definite bullet in the plus column if knowing your kids can grow up in the same schools district and wife have a job etc.

Wait me or him? My reasons are mostly family oriented. I've still got enough time till retirement (13 years) to be useful to any service whether I stay where I'm at or reset elsewhere. Plus the way Warrant promotions are going it's getting very difficult to retire in this job without having had 6-8 years of enlisted time to eat up some of that clock. I have to make CW4 to retire, and now days promotion rates for that are approaching the teens and not looking to get better any time soon. Biggest thing for me is being able to buy a house in my 30s and actually live in the damn thing. Or telling my wife we aren't moving in 2.8-3.5 years just because the Army says so. And allow her to use all those degrees we paid for her to get so now she can get an actual career and not some job just to keep her busy.

When you say criteria for Guard UPT, any idea what those are? All honesty the idea of staying in Colorado is looking very tempting.

Out of morbid curiosity.... Would CV-22 count as Rotory wing to the Air Force

In all fairness it's not just you guys in Blue. The Doner stand in Bad Windsheim has a whole wall of awards from every Brigade and Battalion commander going back 15 years..... But it is a really fuckin good Doner.