Replies

""The Air Force just in the last year forced out 20,000 airmen because they were over manned. Retention in the AF is at an all-time high.""

"They should have built more planes instead"

The USAF does not build aircraft.. they buy them with the blessing of congress in defense authorizations. So if you want more planes.. tell your congressman :_)

But I am in the Air Force.. and Force Shaping is a fact of life right now. But I only know about 20 or 30 airmen who have gotten out due to it.

Last Year I was in Qatar (A small Mid East country near Saudi Arabia) on a deployment. I use to read Free Republic on a daily basis but as I was there..

I found that I wanted to keep in touch with my home state.. and found Portland Indy Media for Oregon, kind of a mini freerepublic... So I would go there and see what they were saying.. it is basically a bastion of liberals and peace activists... But it was news to home.

I noticed one article from a mother who was angry that her son wished to join the US Army despite the fact that she opposed it. He was 17 and I gathered that her and him had many of arguments about his decision.

She was incensed that she answered the phone one day and found a Army recruiter who wished to talk to her son. When she found out that her Son was the one who asked for the recruiter to call.. she stated that she told the recruiter to never call that number again.

Then she went into a statement that she wanted the recruiters to be banned from calling anyone in the country because of her belief that the war was wrong. She also went into a statement that she believed that she could stop her son from joining the army because of her status as a mother.

I answered her post by giving a couple of suggestions of what she could do to halt the recruiter from bothering to talk to her son while he was 17. Stated that I was in the military and had volunteered to join and was on a deployment at the time. But after the boy turned 18.. then if he walked into a recruiters office on his own free will.. then that was the boys right under the law.

I could not believe the venom of posters who blasted me for even ID myself as a military member. But over the course of about three days I would reply calmly and try to get a discussion to see what the peacnik and passive folks believed about the war.

The mother was angry that her son wanted to join the Army at all.. and just had a opposite view from her son. The rest.. well it was simply a Anti-Bush/Anti-Violence rhetoric. But I found it interesting that the the next forum post was folks who were happy that a eco-terrorist beat up a logger. LOL