Category: Army News

Bobo sends us a link to the Army Times which tells the story of Colonel Glenda Lock, who in the words of her sergeant major, was a “borderline toxic leader”. She had a habit of taking her Physical Fitness test out of sight from her soldiers, but she couldn’t hide when she failed her body composition measurement which determined that she was too big for her weight (that means she’s fat). The colonel tried to find ways around being placed in the Army Body Composition Program which would make Lock ineligible for promotion, assumption of a command, bonuses, and advance or excess leave, you know, like it would any other soldier in the program.

Lock tried a workaround to avoid getting in trouble, the investigation found. The medical center’s chief of HR said in a sworn statement that Lock gave her a call later that day.

“She asked me if I could remove the flag or somehow fix it because it could not go forward,” the HR chief’s statement said.

Later, the HR chief called Lock back to confirm that the flag could not be removed unless it was erroneous, and said Lock told her, “I wasn’t asking you that; I was only trying to find out the procedures.”

The HR chief said in the clarifying statement that Lock did not explicitly order the flag’s removal, “but her intent was that the flag be removed….I perfectly understood what she was saying.” The HR chief added: “An O6 in my rating chain was asking me to do something unethical and I don’t think I should be put in that position.”

Well, eventually, Lock was relieved of her position for “poor command climate”. Now she’s the Senior Nurse Staff Officer in San Antonio. The Army won’t boot her, though, she doesn’t have to worry about that – there’s always a shortage of nurses and they’ll always make adjustments to keep a nurse in uniform.

We had a correspondent at the ceremony yesterday in the Arkansas Capital for the award of the Purple Heart Medals to (former) Private Quinton L. Ezeagwula and the family of the late Private William A. Long. Both of the men were gunned down by admitted terrorist Carlos Bledsoe six years ago while they were on hometown recruiter duty in Little Rock. Bledsoe admitted that he trained in Yemen for his terrorist attack in support of al Qaeda and he was looking for a target of opportunity when he saw the two soldiers on a smoke break outside of the recruiting station. According to Stu, our correspondent;

Major General Jeffrey Snow, CG, US Army Recruiting Command, presented the Purple Heart posthumously to Mr. And Mrs. Daris Long, parents of Private William A. Long, who was murdered in a terrorist attack at the Little Rock Recruiting Station in 2009; and to (former) Private Quinton L. Ezeagwula, who was wounded in the attack. Present for the ceremony were Arkansas Senators John Boozman and Tom Cotton, 2nd District Congressman French Hill, Governor Asa Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Tim Griffin. Tim Griffin was previously the 2nd District Congressman and introduced the legislation to enable the award. French Hill continued the effort.

Shown in the accompanying photo are Griffin, Ezeagwula and Hill. In the other photo Congressman Hill presented Exeagwula’s mother with a flag that flew over the US capitol. Private Long’s parents, sister and brother, were presented a Gold Star lapel button.

Stu says that he’ll have more photos for us later.

Six years after they were shot by jihadist Carlos Bledsoe, Army Privates William Andrew Long and Quiton Ezeagwula will be awarded Purple Heart medals on Wednesday, July 1st at 10AM in the Arkansas state capitol rotunda. Long was killed by the encounter when Bledsoe went out to kill soldiers and found the two who were on temporary recruiter duty in Little Rock and taking a smoke break. From THV;

Initially, police called it a drive-by shooting, but the Longs argued that it was a terrorist attack.

“To us it was never political. It’s about doing the right thing,” said [the father of Private Andy Long, Daris] Long.

They lead the effort to change the federal law, so acts of violence on U.S. soil can be recognized as combat.

“You’re fighting an enemy on a global basis, not just overseas. You’re not fighting a traditional enemy that recognizes geographical boundaries,” said Long.

Bledsoe admitted that he was on a terrorist-style mission years ago. An injustice has been corrected.

Bobo sends us a link to the Army Times which reports that Army Private Kyle M. Swain passed out during the six-mile road march for the Air Assault School due to a heat-related injury;

Air Assault School students are required to complete the six-mile march in 90 minutes while carrying 35 pounds on their backs, DeSantis said. Swain passed out during the march and never regained consciousness, the Times-News reported; he was declared dead that night in a Nashville hospital.

Training is for war and sometimes just as deadly.

The Washington Post does another article on the recent failure of 19 women to complete successfully the first phase of Ranger School. If you’re just catching up the issue, 16 of the 19 women made it through the first week, of those eight made through “Ranger Assessment Phase”, but then fell short in the patrolling phase. The Post quote some anonymous fellow as saying that no RI wants to be the first to “pass” a woman. Those eight failed at least two patrols, along with 101 of their male peers.

Brig. Gen. James E. Rainey, the commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, disputed that any Ranger instructor maliciously intended to hold female students back.

“The women did worse than men at patrolling,” he said. “That’s a fact.”

It’s really not surprising, they had the crap beat out of them worse than they ever had in their lives and then had to function as leaders and followers, alternately. Of course, the social engineers had to get their licks in;

Ellen Haring, a reserve Army colonel, expressed disbelief that none of the 19 women who originally qualified to try Ranger School has succeeded. She’s a leader of No Exceptions, a campaign organized by the non-partisan Truman Project and Center for National Policy that calls for all jobs in the military to be opened to women who qualify.

Haring said that the longer that Ranger School is left open to women, the more accepted it will be in the ranks and the more likely it is that a woman will graduate. She questioned how men who do not come from a combat arms background can pass Ranger School after attending a preliminary courses at Fort Benning, but no woman has.

If Haring’s name sounds familiar to you, she’s the female colonel who is suing the Army for not giving her the same leadership opportunities as men that we wrote about two years ago. Earlier this year, she chastised us for busting phonies because she has no valor and so we don’t have valor worth stealing. Last year, she complained that the military isn’t killing women at the same rate men are dying.

I’m all for women graduating from Ranger School as long as they have to meet the current standard. But, the Harings of the world want a graduate now, regardless of the standard, because the politics of the issue are more important than the soldiers. Watering down the standard will only cost lives down the road, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Haring.

Several folks sent us a link this morning to the Washington Post article about Major General Dana Pittard who was the deputy commander of operations in the Middle East – a year ago we wrote how he was to lead the US effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Well, this year, he’s accused of steering federal contracts to one of his West Point classmates while he commanded Fort Bliss;

Pittard was not accused of financial gain but was reprimanded by the Army for his “excessive involvement” in awarding the $492,000 contract and for “creating the perception of preferential treatment,” according to his reprimand. The contract was an initial step in a $250 million project to make Fort Bliss, one of the Army’s largest installations, self-sufficient in energy usage.

[…]

The Army declined to comment in detail. In a statement, Cynthia O. Smith, an Army spokeswoman, said the misconduct findings and Pittard’s reprimand “called into question his suitability for continued service and resulted in his request for retirement, effectively ending his career in the Army.”

Pittard is a decorated combat veteran who served multiple tours in Iraq. As a military aide to President Bill Clinton, he was entrusted with the “nuclear football,” the briefcase containing codes for launching a nuclear attack.

In 2012, we wrote about his poor choice of words in regards to the suicide problem among his soldiers.

I thought this was a Duffel Blog thing, but apparently not, it’s in the Colorado Springs Gazette. This Commander of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat TEAM (caps are mine), 4th Infantry Division, Colonel David Hodne wants new soldiers to feel included when they arrive at the unit, so he is stripping away his soldiers’ badges and combat patches on their uniform while on duty, so that everyone will only have name tags, rank, 4th ID patch and an American flag on their uniform.

First, I’ll start out with this; That’s all I ever wore on my uniform, but that was my choice. I always said that “what you did isn’t as important as what you do”. Until my company commander told me to sew my CIB and my combat patch on – and I always do what I’m told. But, like I said, it was my choice. This colonel fellow is way off base if this is the reason he wants this to happen;

The colonel said he made the switch for a couple of reasons. One was to welcome new blood.

Hodne’s unit, which has seen a radical reorganization over the past year from tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles to eight-wheeled Strykers, is loaded with brand-new privates whose uniforms are bare of insignia. Instead of standing out, the new guys look like everyone else in training.

“It’s about the collective, it’s not about the individual,” Hodne explained.

Yeah, that’s horseshit. That’s kindergarten-grade horseshit. I know the colonel thinks that he’s helping, but, really, he’s not. Yeah, the younger guys will feel included but you’re completely disregarding the guys who’ve been doing the heavy lifting for the past 15 years. They earned that stuff, they earned the right to wear it or not wear it. From the Army Times;

“Combat patches aren’t worn to say ‘look I’ve deployed’ or ‘I love this unit’,” wrote Tom Simpkins on the Army Times Facebook page in an answer to a request for comment. “I wear mine as a scar, I wear it for every single person who deployed with me and every minute of rough times we went through.”

“It seems ridiculous, especially in an infantry or other combat MOSs,” Joseph Crescitelli wrote on Facebook. “It lets newer guys (such as myself) know who to look to for guidance for first person experience as well as demands that extra bit of respect.”

It seems to me that colonel would feel perfectly at home handing out smiley-face stickers to his class of first-graders for their self-esteem. The younger guys need something to shoot for, they need role models more than they need to feel included.

Bobo sends us a link to the story of Chaplain John McDougall, who just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan with the 75th Ranger Regiment. According to USAToday, he wrote a book entitled “Jesus was an Airborne Ranger”, that, of course, was taken from the old cadence call that began with that line. He wrote the book because “the Jesus of many churches is a weakling — someone our Rangers cannot relate to.”

So, he wrote about the warrior Jesus, but he made a mistake and appeared in a promotional video for the book while wearing his uniform. That video has since been removed from the web, but that doesn’t satisfy the militant anti-Christ voices;

McDougall should face court martial for promoting his book in uniform, said Mikey Weinstein, who leads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group. Beyond violating military regulations, the video is a propaganda coup for Islamic State militants and other religious zealots, he said.

ISIS will use the video to convince followers that the United States is waging a Christian war against Muslims, he said.

“This is propaganda of unparalleled proportions for ISIS,” Weinstein said. “This message is going to kill Americans and kill innocents.”

Mikey Weinstein and his little band of donors don’t want religious freedom, they want the military to be absolutely Christ-free. I’m curious about which sins Mikey has committed that he doesn’t want to be judged by Christian standards. Chaplain McDougall cleared his book with the Army, but not the video, and, yes he made a mistake. But a court martial? Really?

If Mikey was really about religious freedom, he’d be defending the chaplain for expressing his views in the book – that’s actual religious freedom. A book about Christ isn’t going to kill US troops – ISIS and al Qaeda will and they really don’t need a book as an excuse. If you haven’t noticed, Mikey, Christians were already being murdered gruesomely before the chaplain wrote the first word of his book just because their prophet wasn’t Muhammad.