The Broken Soldier

It’s the Saturday.  I leave for Fort Knox on Monday to make a Tuesday morning appointment.  I don’t have readable, usable orders.  I don’t have an itinerary.  I don’t know what to bring (copious civilian medical records, for example).  I don’t have instructions regarding where to go.  Where I’m to stay overnight.  To whom I report.  When I’m to report.  But the orders did have the wrong home address.  That much I could make out.

I was paid yesterday (I assume), but it was less than expected.  Any amount is welcomed and helpful at this point, but when actions are based on information, and that information is wrong, problems are created.  I’m referring to having been told my orders, and therefore my pay, would be backdated to the day the State submitted their request that I be placed on ADME.  That’s June 5th.  Typically I receive about $2800/month after taxes.  I received a little over $4k.  $4k is not 3.5 months of pay at $2800/month.

I looked at my Leave and Earnings Statement.  1.5 months of pay, and an equal amount of allowances.  Though the allowances were rated BAH Type II rather than regular BAH.  BAH Type II, I learned, is given to soldiers on orders less than 30 days in transition (as in a PCS or returning from remote deployment) to a location with no previously established BAH rate.  These conditions do not apply to me.  That they paid me 1.5 months (45 days) of BAH Type II suggests this.  As well, my area has an established BAH rate.

The difference is approximately $900/month.  $900/month multiplied by 3.5 is hardly an insignificant amount of money.  When I asked for help addressing these matters, I was reunited with an old friend: “The Learning Curve.”  I’m a bit too bothered about this to construct some anthropomorphic representation of the Army Learning Curve.  Though if I were so inclined, he or she would be a negatively accelerating blunt object, with limp wrists, a sloped forehead, some form of dwarfism, full frontal lobotomized, multiple trisomic, myopic or possibly blind, pathologically lazy and stupid, and stuck in a bear trap.  Think Ringo Starr in “Caveman” wearing ACUs rather than dead animal skins and you’re pretty close.  Our little friend has been used many times to justify dereliction of duties by various members of the Army for as long as I’ve been a part of the organization.

Something is wrong here.  The wrongness is deep.  “I’m new here” is something one expects of a teenager working the register at Taco Bell.  Not of a officers, commissioned and non, responsible for addressing important issues.  Issues that affect the lives of those appointed under them.  This is the same excuse others within this organization have used to justify having crippled me with their neglect and incompetence.