How Did I Get Here?

Quote of the Day: “We’re from the nuke shop, sir. We’re the crazy aunt in the closet that nobody likes to talk about …”

Yesterday I described the basic procedures for the investigation I’m doing.

I turned it in today and because there is really no FORMAL format for a preliminary inquiry, I followed the requirements for a Command Investigation, thinking that it would be useful if and when my PI was turned over to a Command Investigator.

You’ve heard the old adage “No good deed goes unpunished,” right?

Well, I guess they were so impressed with my PI that they decided to skip the Command Investigation and go right to the charging phase. They said that my PI was in essence a Command Investigation (and a good one at that) so they will have no need for the CI step.

Now I wait.

Not on this particular situation because I was done with it the second I handed it in but I just know that I will be hearing from them again when they need an investigation done right.

You see, investigations are given to ANY officer. I didn’t get this one because of anything other than it was my turn and it really has nothing to do with my “real” job. But I got a feeling that “my turn” will be coming up a lot more often now.

Free Advice for Today: “When staying at a hotel or motel, don’t accept a room nextto the ice or vending machines.”

Quote of the Day: “None of us is as dumb as all of us.”

Here’s what I can explain about the legal procedure.

Say a guy does something wrong. Or really, is just suspected of doing something wrong. The first step is to start a request for legal services (RLS). What this means is that the command gathers a bunch of evidence and writes up a package to send to legal who then takes over and sees if there is enough there to start the ball rolling.

In my case, the RLS was sent from a command at another base up the chain of command which is HQ up here at Quantico. Once we receive it, we do a preliminary inquiry (PI). All this is is a semi-formal gathering of facts and statements which are used to determine if there is enough evidence that wrong-doing took place. Based on the outcome of the PI, the HQ decides if they want to do a full-blown Command Investigation.

Now stay with me here. The Command Investigation takes the information gathered in the PI and formalizes it, fills in the holes, and from that, the decision is made what to do. The command can either decide that there is not enough evidence to do anything about it or they can decide to take action on it, usually in the form of a court martial.

Here is a summary of what I’m talking about:

RLS: “Hey, we think this guy did something wrong, here is what we know. Can you help us?”

PI: “OK, we got the info and now we make calls, get formal statements, and decide if there is enough evidence to move it onto a full-blown Command Investigation.”

CI: “We got the PI and feel that we got something here so we will cross the t’s and dot the I’s on the PI and come up with some formal charges.”

More tomorrow.

Free Advice for Today: “Enjoy the satisfaction that comes from doing little things well.”

Quote of the Day: “”I am so far down the food chain that I’ve got plankton bites on my butt.”

When I was an Adjutant and Legal Officer (1998-2001) I was exempt from investigations. The reason was because I was the command representative and really kind of represented the “prosecution” side so it was a conflict of interest for me to perform an impartial investigation.

For this reason, I only had to assign the investigator and make sure all the elements were covered in the final product.

Boy, it’s a whole different world when you actually have to perform one. And a little embarrassing if you are unsure about the procedures that others would deem “obvious” for a former Adj/LegO.

But I’m doing a bang-up job and getting this thing figured out.

Free Advice for Today: “When you learned that a good friend is ill, don’t ask him about it. Let him tell you first.”

Quote of the Day: “Leaning forward’ is really just the first phase of ‘falling on your face.’”

Today I was given an investigation.

No, no I’M not under investigation. They haven’t picked up on my nefarious existence yet so for now, I’m just CONDUCTING the investigations for now. (It occurs to me that someone might take that seriously so just to clear the air, I WAS JOKING!!!)

Anyway, I was given an investigation today that will be due Friday. The shitty thing about it is that I will not be able to fill you in on the details because, well, then the tables would get turned and I’d be in deep kimshee.

But what I can tell you is that it will be taking up every waking moment of my life for the next 4 days. So excuse me if I’m a little “off” for a few days. I mean, more than usual.

Free Advice for Today: “Never be ashamed of laughter that’s too loud or singing that’s too joyful.”

Quote of the Day: “At this Command, we have written in large, black letters: DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on the back of our security badges.”

I consider myself a reasonably smart guy. But set me loose on the thermostat in my house and it’s like a monkey playing with a Rubik’s Cube.

No, I didn’t throw the thermostat across the room and then eat my own shit, just so the record is clear.

One time last summer when we went on vacation, we turned the A/C down but not off, with the thought that it would take more energy to cool off a completely broiling house than to leave the A/C on just a little bit.

I got home before my wife so it was up to me to readjust the thermostat to a comfortable level, a realm usually reserved for Carrie. (Her house, I just pay for it and live there).

I figure out that there are different settings for different times of the day and even days of the week. Silly me, I thought I could just turn it to A/C and get that sucker pumping out the frigid air of life (I really don’t care about the cost. It’s all about comfort, baby.)

But it’s more complicated that that so I do the NASA shuttle launch button dance to scroll through all the menus and I THINK I got it set to like 68 all the time. My logic was that it was warm in the house and setting it cold would get the temp down to the 72 faster if I set it at 68. I would readjust in the morning. I like to sleep COOOOOOLD while wrapped in 17 blankets and a dog.

I wake up in the middle of the night like I’m in a sauna. But I’m too tired to get out and check it out and suffer through the night because

1: I’m lazy and
2. I’m just stupid enough to rip it off the wall in a rage.

I get up the next morning to a warm house and go to the thermostat which reads 86. What the hell?

I recheck the settings and sure enough, it’s set to 68. But then I notice two things that answers the questions:

1. I had forgotten to adjust the weekend settings and the 68 was for the weekdays. But this should not have mattered since it was a weekday.

2. The date was wrong on the thermostat so it THOUGHT it was a weekend.

So you KNOW what I did.

I set all those suckers to 68 so it didn’t matter when it THOUGHT it was. I was a-chillin’ until the wife got home and freaked that I had winterized our home in the summer. THIS is why I’m not supposed to touch it.

The bill came in and it wasn’t pretty. But I lived in a winter wonderland in the middle of summer for a week.

Rock!!!!

Free Advice for Today: “Truth is serious business. When criticizing others, remember that a little goes a long way.”

Quote of the Day: “The ‘L’ in CENTCOM stands for leadership….”

For the last couple of years we’ve bought season passes to King’s Dominion and for those of you that have been consistent readers (even when I haven’t been a consistent blogger), you will remember some of the posts about the few times I partake in the amusement park festivities.

There’s the “scare dad until he’s real quiet” situations and then there is the pass ID picture that will never see the light of day since I look like… we won’t get into that.

The kids convinced me that I should join them at “Fear Fest” which is when King’s Dominion adopts the whole Halloween theme and we get to walk around with thousands of other families to see our kids go out of their minds.

We had Killjoy and Claire joining us this year but since Claire wasn’t up for the whole “scare kids silly” thing, her and her mom decided to leave as it was getting dark while we stayed to enjoy the nighttime antics.

But I was not feeling all that great myself and Carrie knew I was probably not up to walking around in the cold so she suggested that Killjoy drop me by my house on the way home. Other than having to spend 45 minutes locked up in a car with Killjoy listening to her lame music selection, I was glad to get home and relax.

I should have probably stayed but after yesterday’s long run, walking around a corn maze, and spending most of the day walking around an amusement park, I needed some deflation time before I headed to work tomorrow.

Yeah, I know, I should have stayed. You don’t have to rub it in.

Free Advice for Today: “Become a tourist for a day in your own hometown. Take a tour. See the sights.”

Quote of the Day: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Because I have the marathon coming up, I had to drag my ass out to run 16 miles this morning. That’s two TBS loops and I was not looking forward to it. My running has been, um, less than consistent or optimal lately so getting to ball rolling was an exercise in physics laws that I thought it was going to be. A body at rest tends to want to stay at rest. And a body sitting its fat ass in front of the computer tends to get fatter. Or something like that.

So I got out there and it wasn’t great but it wasn’t the horrific shit-fest that I anticipated.

I got home in time to clean up, take a little nap, and then it was off the Belvedere Plantation again. You will recall that we went there last week but got there too late to hit all the bustling excitement of the corn maze so we met up with Killjoy and Claire today to finish what we started.

Back in Monterey, Carrie, the kids, and the Garzas (really just kids too) went through a corn maze that put this one to shame. The California version had big huge stalks so that you couldn’t see around or above them. It was a truly enclosed maze.

Now I’m not here to complain but the field at Belvedere looked trashed, as though thousands of people had already had their way with the maze and it was looking like it had seen better days. The stalks were so short you could see above them and in places, people had given up the “maze” concept and just trampled through the to the next path.

Claire and Stephanie took off on their own armed with a little flag pole and cell phone while I was left wandering around with Carrie and Killjoy. With my legs being sore, we didn’t try too hard to find all of the various waypoints in order to “win” and were satisfied to just wander. Actually, I just followed the clucking women like some lame man-servant wondering how my mojo had evaporated to the point that I was following around my wife and her friend like a puppy.

After the girls had their fill of the cornfield, Carrie had the great idea to “wander” over to the swings and stuff for the kids. BREAKIN’ THE LAW, BREAKIN’ THE LAW!!!!

So we hit the swings again and when we went into the face-painting tent, it seemed that they had everything there except the person who… paints the faces. So Killjoy took brush in hand and made such a good Halloween cat on Claire’s cheek, other people thought she worked there and wanted her to paint up their kids. But then she slapped some little boy and we all had to run.

Alex had decided not to go with us so we went home, picked him up, and had dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant: Poncho Villas. But everyone except me agreed that the food was not up to it’s usual standards. Me, I just ate like there was no tomorrow and refilled my 16-mile depleted body full of the essentials: fat and carbs.

Free Advice for Today: “Set aside your dreams for your children and help them attain their own dreams.”

Quote of the Day: “Nobody dislikes war more than warriors, but we value the causes of peace so highly that we will not duck a war in an effort to get a lasting peace.”

We got invited to a party and it was nice since we’ve been out of the social scene for quite awhile. Carrie has made contact with her friend Paula who we knew in 29 Palms and I worked with her husband way back when I had only a few grey hairs (yes, THAT long ago!).

The problem was that when we got there, we knew exactly two people: Paula and Jim, the hosts. It didn’t take long before we got to know some of the people, mostly their neighbors. The strange thing was that most of them were not even military, although one guy I talked to had been a fireman on base for over a decade. He also happened to be the brother of a secretary who worked in my branch.

It’s always enlightening to see how you come across in other people’s eyes. Carrie mentioned my marathons early on and then that’s what I was branded for the rest of the night. I don’t usually bring the subject up because I don’t want to appear that I’m bragging and unless they are marathoners, people just don’t understand why we would do such a thing. And it’s normally painful to try to explain it to them.

I also confirmed that I’m not very open to new foods. They had a lot of it but other than the egg rolls Carrie brought, I stayed away from most of the other stuff, mostly because I had a long run tomorrow.

The night ended with Jim dancing around and then crashing. You have to understand that Jim is a very reserved, muscle-bound man who I’ve never seen “let his hair down.”

Well, after no sleep for two days (he had duty last night) and some beer, he was jamming out to some disco, dancing around to everyone’s general amusement. Then we saw him in the kitchen, nodding off while still standing. We would watch him do the old head bob, catch himself, frown, and then start all over again. Pretty soon he just headed upstairs without comment, houseful of guests and all, and we never saw him again.

Good on him, reminds me of what I would have done.

Free Advice for Today: “Never discuss money with people who have much more or much less than you.”

Quote of the Day: “Get fired. If you’re not pushing hard enough to get fired you’re not pushing hard enough. More than once is OK.”

Sometimes you come into work and the sun shines on the dog’s ass.

I found out that today’s was our local Master Sergeant’s retirement party and I didn’t even know until I got to work. The best part was that it started at NOON!!! Yes, NOON!!! Which meant half day because retirement party and work afterwards just don’t mix.

So at about 1100, I found myself driving north to some sportsbar. Yep, that’s Top through and through. No uniforms, no formations, no official ceremony. He wanted to go out just the way he came in: drunk in civilian clothes.

We did have a small presentation to give him his plaque but most of the night was spent talking, laughing, and throwing darts.

But of course, being in a bar scene, I just couldn’t let certain things slide. If you read my TBS story, you will know that I take offense to women who play the queen bee role at bars. Tonight was no different.

I ended up pissing off the queen bee because I was the only one who wasn’t sniffing her ass. It was funny but she seemed to take offense that I wasn’t bowing down like everyone else. That, and I informed her that she’s supposed to retrieve her own darts and not expect her male teammate to do it for her. She asked why I was being so mean to her and I said “you’re not on my team.” I didn’t really want to tell her the real reason basically because I had not even really met her or talked to her.

When she started getting her own darts (making a display of herself as she bent over to get the ones that didn’t even stick), she came up to me, waved them in my face dramatically and I said “I know how hard that was for you.”

“What is your problem?”

Finally, I said “I’m just the only one here that’s NOT kissing your ass” as I turned and talked to someone else.

A few minutes later, she says “Jason, your turn.”

I have no idea how she knew my name. I turned to her and said “Thanks…uh… what was your name?”

Man, you talked about pissing her off. The look on her face! How DARE I not know her name (every male in the group absolutely knew it). The final blow was when I walked right past her before she could even answer me and I started throwing darts.

At 7:00 PM, the TOP invited me to go back to his house with the group but I didn’t want to go. I asked who was going and sure enough, Queen Bee was going to be there.

“No thanks, Top, I gotta get home to see my kids before they go to bed.”

Free Advice for Today: “When dining with clients or business associates, never order more than one cocktail or one glass of wine. If no one else is drinking, don’t drink at all.”

Quote of the Day: “Pursue failure. Failure is success’ only launching pad. The bigger the goof the better.”

Last in a series. And a total waste of time.

I was supposed to visit the doctor in order to discuss my results of the ultrasound last week. Call it karma but I knew this would be a waste of time and this kind of waste is the all-day variety since I have to travel for a couple of hours just to get to the hospital.

Sure enough, when I finally got to see the doctor, I had to remind her of EVERYTHING we had talked about last time and I had to give her a play by play of everything. The doctor she just “had to get me in to see” was not around which didn’t matter because she couldn’t remember which doctor it was anyway.

Looking over my ultrasound (which she couldn’t find at first), she determined there was nothing much wrong.

Could it be that it took a month to get in to see them, another month to get an ultrasound, and a week more just to talk about the results? I didn’t go to medical school but could it be that in the intervening time, the pain and swelling might have gone down due to the antibiotics they gave me?

So I made the radical suggestion that I get in WHEN THE SYMPTOMS ARE PRESENT. I know, I know, but I’m crazy like that.

She agreed and gave me a number to call where I could get a walk-in appointment next time it happened. And then she went on to tell me to remind her or the person I talk to that she said it was OK because she would, in fact, forget all about this conversation. She wrote herself a note but assured me she would forget.

I feel just fit as a fiddle now.

Free Advice for Today: “Even if you’re financially well-to-do, have your children earn and pay for all their automobile insurance.”