I inquired about a WTU position and the reply e-mail from the Captain in charge of filling positions was not very helpful nor encouraging. I am amazed that the e-mail was even answered Examples like this may be reasons the positions are not yet filled or at 100%?
Finally someone is actually SAYING that 15 month deployments ARE TOO LONG!! Being out here and having the Navy, Marines and Air Force go thru two, three, four rotations during our ONE is very apparent and frustrating. Soldiers ARE tired; just wish our leadership would actually take care of us.
Seriously. I'd rather be here for shorter tours, and spend even shorter time back in the States. There's only two reasons they are not allowing this, first because longer deployments mean more Stop-Loss soldiers which means more total strength. Secondly, they cannot get equipment and training back up to standard in much less than a year. We are playing shell games with our national security. Either draft people involuntarily, or draw down troops in country. With an all-volunteer military you really can only push things so far before the volunteers quit volunteering. We have to fix things before it comes to that!
And many of the volunteers are voting with their feet. Not to mention the damage done when these guys tell potential recruits what they went through and what the Army is really like. When I got deployed for my second year, I was one of a handful of guys in the battalion who were supposed to ETS before the deployment even started. Now, my old company had 2-3 squads worth of guys who were clearing CIF, clearing battalion even, orders in hand, household goods shipped, wife in the U-Haul, when told they were stop-lossed. One guy even punched through the glass doors at In/Out Processing when they told him. As my NCOs have said before, there's only so much you can suck up and drive on about.
Now do you think the other services have this problem, or disgust and anger toward being stop-lossed? Perhaps a few individuals, but they're not looking at 15 months abroad either. It is definetly deployment length that affects the mindset. Seeing airmen at the beginning of your "tour" rotate out and come back before you can even think about packing for home leaves the worst taste in your mouth, not to mention ratchet up the animosity between the services.
