Reply #76: You're welcome .. [View All]

[gleaner]

I'm here to learn as well as to post. I get what you are saying about reservists, but I was thinking of my husband during Viet Nam. He enlisted when he was 18 near the end of the war so he was not deployed overseas. He went to Beale AF Base instead and fulfilled all of his active duty obligation as the war was winding down. Afterward he went into the Air Force reserve and worked for them full time as well as participating in the military exercises. I don't know if it is different now, that was a long time ago, but that was why he felt so strongly opposed to the stop loss policy. During Viet Nam the deployments were limited to one year unless the soldier requested to go back. He doesn't think that a Reservist who fulfilled his active duty obligation, plus his reserve obligation (as some of them have) should be taken involuntarily and posted endlessly. You have your opinion and I do respect that, but I tend to agree with my husband.

Please don't make me, uh dead, just say I'm wrong. That's a lot easier on my old bones.;) I don't think of the small army situation the same way that you do. They basically gave so much money to Halliburton and KBR for not as much service as they used to get by detailing the soldiers to supply, cook and build for themselves. I read about soldiers getting dysentery because KBR didn't purify the water sufficiently and Halliburton "lost" eight billion dollars which no one has ever made them account for. That would have paid for a lot of veterans benefits. The jobs that they created were not for the most part, given to Americans. It was like the corporations here outsourcing and cutting so far back on the civilian job pool that many more people are unemployed than ever before. It contributes greatly to the recession.

The federal employee stuff is all in the past for me, because I got MS and had to retire early, but they attempted to privatize us as well. It was much more expensive and usually devolved into a fiasco. Also they could not protect the confidentiality of the information the contractors were dealing with. I dealt with taxpayer information. If I had leaked information they could have stuck me in jail. Private contractors, no. One private contractor's employees shredded tax returns when their work loads got too heavy. We just worked the returns. It really did not work out well for them at all.

The military privatization may have been intended to stimulate the economy, though I remain jaded about actual motivations of those involved, but in the end it did not. People are losing their homes now. They can't find work. Inflation is here. We pay much more for less. I don't think any of it worked out well.

It wasn't only the families of the reservists who required financial help. I'm a Quaker and we routinely helped active duty families with food, clothing and other basic needs not just reservists. In the end it doesn't change anything. We're all human and we are here to help each other. You pick the way you can help the most and pursue it. If you don't, then what do you have really?