{"id":55723,"date":"2014-10-09T17:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-10-09T21:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=55723"},"modified":"2014-10-09T17:24:07","modified_gmt":"2014-10-09T21:24:07","slug":"on-getting-over-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=55723","title":{"rendered":"On “getting over ourselves”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Beacon article<\/a> about an employee at a Public Radio station in Binghamton, NY who was fired because that employee sent an email to the campaign of Rep. Chris Gibson (R., N.Y.) who also happens to be a retired Army colonel with four tours of Iraq under his belt. The email supposedly reads; <\/p>\n

A WIOX employee used the press release to express his annoyance with Gibson\u2019s career as a member of the military.<\/p>\n

\u201cCool,\u201d a WIOX staffer wrote in response. \u201cSomeday maybe he will find a real job like the rest of us and not live off the taxpayers [sic] money as he has done his whole life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll admit that it was a pretty crappy thing to say and the writer is probably an illiterate asshole, but, what concerns me is the underlying issue here. That issue being that members and former members of the armed services are above criticism, and that it will cost your job to criticize them. Yeah, we have taken a lot of shit from the 99%, but a politician who runs on his military career shouldn’t be above criticism. Apparently, the Gibson campaign released the email to the media and that’s how we found out about all of this.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, I republished a link from our buddy, Commander Salamander last night on our Facebook page to some acclaim, that blog post was entitled “Really, some of us really need to get over ourselves<\/a>” some of us referring to veterans. He quotes from Carl Forsling at Task & Purpose<\/a> and so will I;<\/p>\n

Many veterans pull the vet card anytime a civilian upsets them, be that at a government office, a bar, or a traffic stop. But the worst examples are at retail establishments. If Home Depot doesn\u2019t give a non-active-duty veteran 10% off every single day, or Sears has a hard time processing your free gift card, guess what? They didn\u2019t have to give special treatment to vets in the first place. So when the minimum-wage ticket clerk at an amusement park doesn\u2019t allow you to take a fourth family member in for free admission, don\u2019t lecture her about your extensive deployment experience.<\/p>\n

If you have a legitimate gripe about a store\u2019s discount policy, politely ask to see a copy. If it doesn\u2019t include your service status or the type of ID you have, then stop. Just stop there. If you think it should include you, then calmly ask to speak to a manager. If that doesn\u2019t work, then write a simple, concise e-mail to their corporate headquarters. No one, including other veterans, wants to hear an angry vet venting about an imaginary slight, whether in person or in a poorly-conceived YouTube or Facebook post. You\u2019re spoiling it for everyone else. That advice goes double for spouses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Afghanistan\/Iraq\/wherever\u201d is not an answer to anything other than, \u201cSo where did you serve?\u201d Also, no one, in or out of the military, wants to hear your story about indirect fire at the forward operating base. Let it go.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo how will everyone know that I\u2019m a badass soldier\/Marine\/sailor\/airman?\u201d Well, if you really are such a force to be reckoned with, people will know. Regaling them with unsolicited tales of bravado isn\u2019t helping anybody. If you want to prove you\u2019re a stand-up guy, do it with your actions, not your words.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, we’re all proud of our service and probably the only place we talk about it is here amongst ourselves and no one here shoves their war stories down everyone else’s throat because we’ve had the same experiences, we’ve all done things that the civilians can’t even imagine, but I really hate it when some of those among us use their service as a shield. <\/p>\n

A certain Reverend Doctor comes to mind. If you watched his dumbass video, when the cops were knocking on the door of the car in which he was sleeping, at night, in a public park, the first words out of his mouth were “I’m a veteran and I have PTSD”. Honestly, I hate that.<\/p>\n

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an asshole, and the Army made me the best asshole I can be, but, that’s what I am, I’m not going to hide behind my service in the Army to escape criticism. I’m certainly not going to get someone fired because they criticized me. <\/p>\n

Yet, it’s better now than it was during the post-Vietnam Era when veterans of that war were shamed into silence about their careers – that ended when the Vietnam Wall was erected in DC, and the idiots came out of the woodwork. And we see it everyday here – those who did the least are the loudest about how they should be treated better by the civilians.<\/p>\n

Many of the people here suffer from PTS, but you’d never know it. Some of you have written to us in private emails and told us how being a member of this small community have helped them deal with their problems. We have members here who have served in every US combat action since the Korean War, because, to some degree, we’ve all experienced the same things. Separately, but equally. But, we’re not shoving it down the throats of non-veterans, and yes, we have some of them among us, too.<\/p>\n

But there are others, you can all name one, who begin every sentence with the fact that they’re “100% disabled combat Purple Heart trail assassin”. As CDR Salamander and Mr Forsling (a Marine MV-22B instructor pilot, by the way) that should only be the answer to an appropriate question, not the way to shield yourself from the realities of the world.<\/p>\n

In summation, Mr. Gibson should announce that the inappropriate email to his campaign should not be the cause for that public radio employee’s firing. I’d hate that we live up (or down) to the expectations of the general public and bully them with our service. Over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Beacon article about an employee at a … On “getting over ourselves”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}