Ugh

[badseed1980]

An interesting story on a sucky policy. It includes the POV of a soldier wwho thinks it's terrible treatment of the men and women affected.

Stop-Loss policy

Comments

[leenah.livejournal.com]

i saw this yesterday. it is EVIL and WRONG.

but, what can we expect from the current administration? evil. and hey, we got it. grrrrrrr.

[book-of-pain.livejournal.com]

There's never an end to the frustrating evil of war. It's never a good thing.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

What kills me is that the SOLDIERS are the ones getting fucked over, all because the higher-ups decided to do structural reorganization IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR. Idiots. Couldn't they have done that during peacetime?

I can only imagine how many soldiers are going to die, and their families will say, "It's such a pity...he was only a couple of months from getting out of the Army, but then they sent him to Iraq for a year, and look what happened!"

[leenah.livejournal.com]

or the guys (male or female) who were supposed to be out, and are kept in, and are then wounded or killed - "oh, if they had let her come home my janie would be alive today". *that's* gonna do wonders for morale, oh yeah.
wrong, wrong, wrong. yes, war is evil. but this policy compounds it.
oh, and military benefits are being cut as well. get them coming and going. it is WRONG.
(guess you know how i feel about it.)

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm talking about. People who were close to getting out, but then got sent over and died in combat.

oh, and military benefits are being cut as well. get them coming and going. it is WRONG.
(guess you know how i feel about it.)

Yup. I agree.

[book-of-pain.livejournal.com]

I know. I know personally what the debt of war is because I am a war orphan. My dad had just a short time before he could have retired.

The cost of war is ammortized out over the generations. While the dead just sleep.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I know. I know personally what the debt of war is because I am a war orphan. My dad had just a short time before he could have retired.

Damn, I'm so sorry to hear that. A soldier's death is always a sad thing, but when someone's done their duty for a long time and is getting ready to retire, it's even worse.

[book-of-pain.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. It's hard for me to even explain the hole in my soul that I have from never knowing my dad. It's something I deal with every day of my life. I am doomed to forever refight in my mind and dreams the battle in which he died. It's my own private Vietnam, and Charlie is the faceless boogieman of my nightmares.

remember, the military is monolithic

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

It takes time for change to occur, and this change that we are going through was occurring, and was planned, well before the war. transformations was a buzz word about 6 years ago. While I was in the boz, these plans we taking shape.

This is a lie that the transformation is causing this: The fact that the administration ignored the Chief of Staff, General Erik Shinseki, a VietNam vet, and veteran of many other conflicts, when he said it would take 200-300 thousadn or more troops to hold Iraq.

They called him stupid, they called him a pessimist they even tried to blame it on politics.

Well, here we are. We never put our country, or our military, on a true wartime footing.

Now people get what has always been possible.
Stop Loss
and stop movement.

SL means you can't get out. SM means you can't leave a unit.

it's how they prevent units from getting decimated by people not re-upping when their contract was up one month before the war. The units WOULD suffer great losses of personnel who are trained, because SOME people would see the writing on the wall, and get out before they had to go. We had a few cowards like that in our unit. They knew we were going to go, but we hadn't been stop lossed yet, and one of them resigned his commission.

Sure. Take the money, but when you get asked to pay it back, you run and hide.

that's one of the many reasons we have stop loss.
It's a dark truth, but it is true.

The other side is it becomes a draft.
By forcing people to stay in past their contract, you basically draft them,even though they volunteered.

Re: remember, the military is monolithic

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

The other side is it becomes a draft.
By forcing people to stay in past their contract, you basically draft them,even though they volunteered.

Yes, that's a way of looking at it that really shows the problems.