Tuesday, June 29, 2004

I ship out tomorrow

So I got a call this morning from Sergant something-or-other at Fort Hamilton asking me where I was. I told him that I was asleep. He then informed me that I was scheduled to ship out four hours ago. I told him that "there is no way in hell I am shipping out today". So after about a million phone calls between my unit, the enlistment people, (Military Enlistment Processing Center) MEPS in Brooklyn, Administration at Fort Totten in Queens, and myself, we decided that I am shipping out tomorrow.

There was a massive screw up, and I still do not have orders. Nor do I have any idea where my instructions are actually coming from.

Mind you, I was scheduled to ship out in 10 days from now, so this is not a big surprise. I will be gone for about 2 months on training. But I would have liked more than 20 hours notice of a schedule chage.

The scene was straight out of Catch-22. "I don't know who told you it was today, but you are not leaving for another 10 days", and then "I don't know who told you you are leaing in 10 days, but you are leaving today." So no one knows who told who what, but I leave at 0500 tomorrow morning.

I have a zillion things to do that I thought I would be doing over the next 10 days. Arrrggghh.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

aaaaahhh....the pleasures of being uncle Sam's b-tch. :) One of the purposes of the army is to make you borg and this is one of the ways they do it. You probably won't have time to get to the library but a great and relevant read is "On Killing: the psychological effects of learning to kill in war and society" by a guy called Dave Grossman. He's an ex-soldier and a PhD psychologist. A little naive politically and I'm not sure about some of his statistics but at it's best it's a psychologically piercing book and would be good to take along with you if you get downtime. Good luck and be safe. And thanks, btw, because somebody's got to do it.

Anonymous said...

As long as you're not stuck with Major Major Major, let's hope all should be OK.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the read Josie. I have read a bit about the psychology of killing. It is pretty interesting. I'll see if I can get hold of the book. I wonder if Amazon.com ships to Army bases?

Anonymous said...

Best regards.

Anonymous said...

Thanks.