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Old January 2, 2013, 09:05 PM   #32
Aguila Blanca
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Join Date: September 25, 2008
Location: CONUS
Posts: 18,434
Quote:
Originally Posted by lamarw
We Nam Vets can not compare to the number of tours served by today's Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen. Thanks for your sacrifice to our Nation.
We also didn't have to contend with stop loss. At least in 1968, when I was in Vietnam, when a GI's year in country was up, he went home. PERIOD. If a soldier was in country one day beyond 365, it was A ... BIG ... DEAL.

I was attached to 4th Infantry Division HQ for awhile. Every once in awhile a unit's personnel NCO would show up at base camp with a name of a GI who had gotten lost in the system. Typically, what happened was a guy was wounded and medivacced either to a field hospital or, perhaps, even out of country. If the wound(s) was(were) serious, the unit dropped him from their roles and he was assigned to whatever medical facility he was being treated at. And every once in awhile, one of these guys would recover and get sent back to his unit, arriving just a few weeks (or even a few days) before his DEROS date.

The problem was that DEROS assignments had to be requested well in advance. If these guys were assigned to a medical facility at the time when their personnel NCO would normally have been submitting their name for a stateside assignment, no request was submitted, so no assignment was forthcoming.

For awhile we worked around that by calling a cooperative contact in some office in Saigon, but that was eventually stopped because the telephone lines were only supposed to be used for high priority calls of strategic importance. Sending a GI home so as to avoid a Congressional Inquiry wasn't sufficiently strategic. So we had to resort to Plan B: We'd scan the computer printout of reassignments, and find any assignments that had come through for guys of the same rank and MOS who had been KIA. Usually we'd find at least two or three, so we'd have the personnel NCO ask the soldier which of those locations he'd prefer.

As a product of that system, the very concept of stop loss is anathema to me. As long as stop loss exists, I would never recommend to anyone I cared about that they enlist, and I'm from a family in which almost every adult male has served in some war or another. (Heck, one cousin served in three wars. He was a pilot in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam.) A contract should be a contract.
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