My brother an I once figured out between myself and my seven brothers, our wives and kids, we have over 200 years combined service.

Ya think we scared everybody off with all our scary military talk? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif" alt="" />

HOLY SMOKE! Your family must bleed Red White and Blue! Congratulations Man!

The only time I regret is my last 3 years in. Military Politics and (having to brown nose to get ahead) just turned my stomach.

I'll tell ya, there were more than a few really, really scary moments in my career.

I can only imagine.

Luckily, I didn't have that worry, but I know what you mean. The TALCE was under the Mobility Air Command or as it's now named, the Air Mobility Command. We never chopped to other theater commands even in wartime. And the 4-Star Generals gave us absolutely top notch support.

Out of all my 20 years my best time was the 4 years I spent in Japan, when I worked in the Reconnaissance Operations center. We dealt with real world, news making stuff (If we screwed up) and we were exempt from ALL "Games" that the Military is so famous for playing. As I said, we dealt with real world matters and couldn't take a chance of a "Game message" being taken as the real thing. Planes could get shot down and people killed. Those 4 years are the only time I felt as if I was truly contributing something really useful and could see that I was making a difference.

I've actually been on a deployment were we where having a problem with a Special Forces unit, we called our 4-star, got him out of bed, explained the situation to him, and he quickly straightened the problem out with one call to another 4-star.

While I was in Japan I filled a Majors billet and as only an E6, that made feel pretty good. But what made me feel even better is that I never had a mission recalled because I screwed up. AND if (the Navy mostly) called I always was able to figure out a way to get them to where and when they needed to be there (I'm talking aircraft).

YUP, it's nice to actually be able to get things done. Not because of ourselves, but our position, workcenter.

I was just the only one available at the time and it worked out nice for me. got a Really nice citation, but unfortunately the UNcensored version was classified TS and couldn't leave the facility. And man did that burn the backside of my last stateside NCOIC. Man did she hate me.

Another time I was scheduled to justify a lot of money (tens of millions) before a murder board. The board consisted of a 5 Colonels that were just merciless. They actually ripped into a Captain so hard the guy had tears in his eyes. Anyways, the were going program by program in alphabetical order, so I got to sit through a long series before the got to TALCE. But I was prepped, ready for any question, could pull tons of data from memory to show the cost advantage of every dollar spent. So they call "TALCE is next...any questions?" Silence. Then they voted for full funding for all of out programs. Later I talked to one of the board member and he said the 4-star said he would be disappointed if the TALCE received anything less that full funding.

Luckily, in my career, I've only had to steamroll a few of what we called REMF's. The first two letters of the acronym stand for "Rear Echelon" and I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what MF stands for. Every time I had someone higher in the chain of command give me their full support and in two cases, the problem child were removed from command.