These things I know are true...

[TN al]

...but will leave you to judge the significance of them.

When the Berlin Wall came down I was in an army aviation unit. It was really a good time to be in the army because we had about 1.5 people for every job that needed to be done. That meant that helicopter maintenance was quickly completed and we usually had extra time on our hands. This is certainly not the way one would want to run a business but when your business was to be prepared for a Soviet invasion it worked pretty well.

After the wall came down a guy named Bush and another named Cheney decided that we had too many soldiers in the army and made moves to draw the numbers down. This draw down was disproportionately geared towrd the enlisted soldier. This meant that while the number of soldiers declined the number of units stayed the same. The remaining soldiers had to be dispersed throughout the same number of units and the number of soldiers available to do each job was reduced to about 0.8. This didn't bother the officers. They knew that in their competition for promotion a major attribute was how well they kept their fleet flying instead of grounded for repair. They were not the ones who had to put in the 18 hour days doing repairs. They only reaped the benefits on their officer evaluation reports. It got to the point that if they reported it working to me at 1 in the morning I would disregard any evidence that it might not be working(such as not actually being able to see it work) to let the soldiers get some sleep. We would be working on it again at 7 am anyway, long before it would be flown but the helicopter would technically be "up" for the six intervening hours. We were not allowed to repair things the way the manual said to do it anyway because it would take too many man hours. This meant that nearly everything was jury-rigged anyway. As an aviation unit I know we were a ton more careful than any unit that didn't have to worry about their equipment falling out of the sky. All of this was done in the name of getting officers promoted.

Just as an aside I was curious during the 2000 campaign about why a different man named Bush and the same man named Cheney were saying that some units would have to report not ready for duty. Especially when it was a Bush and a Cheney that made it that way. I guess they were kind of anxious to use it.

[Bouncy Ball]

1. I read this out loud to my husband

who, when the wall fell, had just come back from Germany and was stationed at Ft. Hood with the 1st Cav. He verified what you said from his unit's point of view, as well.

It's....interesting.....isn't it?

What exactly do the bushes and cheneys have against the military? Do they hate them from the days when bush was going AWOL and cheney was getting deferrment after deferrment?