serverandenforcer

Ok, that big hand popping out for the high five in Jackass 3D has got to be funny to see with those glasses on.

Almost a month ago, I posted about a messed up week with the loss of two guys that used to be with my unit. Today we finally laid to rest the recent of the two, SSgt. Mike Leo. This is the first military funeral I've attended, and I have to say, it is very moving. I hope it's the last, but I know I will more than likely be attending others in the future knowing the risks and dangers involved in this carreer field.

Well, the reason why most of the movies are going 3D is to curb piracy. You can't get good quality off of a 3D movie if you're recordig it with a camcorder or worse yet... your cell phone. So if the quality is obviously going to be crappy as hell since it's a 3D movie, nobody is going to waste their time and money in buying a bootleg copy taken from the theaters. However, I have faith that technology will advance again in favor of the general public where you can record a 3D image on a camcorder or cell phone. It's just a matter of time.

Well, they didn't necessarily pull him over, but they went after him and spotted his truck parked somewhere and spoke with the guy. I don't know if local PD showed up or not. I just heard what was going down on the radio and heard the story when they got back on base. The deal with the gang bangers was that we were doing and ORI and we have patrols posted off base (this is in co-operation and co-ordination with local PD so that they know that we have our guys armed up and posted off base, and that we might deal with stuff that's not within the federal fence line). Well, one of our off base patrols noticed a car blacked out near one of the auxilary entrance gates to the base. So he rolls up on it and runs the plate. The plate came back to a felony warrant, two guys were in the car with a girl... who was conducting try-outs for their prostitution ring. Anyways, we notify him of how the plates came back, so he backs off a bit. Local PD is notifed, but two of our patrols are dispatched to respond as back-up, and I think they went code off base. Our back shows up with local PD and from there we go guns drawn on the guys. They hook 'em and bagg 'em and that's as much as I know of what happened.

Like Crapformer: Revenge of the Fail

Not entirely true. I can think of several incidents where we've had some interactions with off base situations. Infact, there was one incident we had where one of our patrols was doing an off base perimeter check (because we have locations off base that we have to check) and while doing this check, some dumbass tried to run our guys off the road. So we "followed" the individual until the local PD can handle the call. Hell, we've even assisted local PD off base before on a high risk incident, having to draw down on gang-bangers off base.

There will be a sequal. The ending pretty much hinted to that in a big way.

MPs take care of him and the city cops can't enter the base untill pre-announced or they "could" be treated just like the bad guy by the MPs. However, almost always they come pre-announced that they will be arriving on base or that there could be a chance that they maybe entering the installation.

Yeah, I'm sure every SF squadron has heard of the incident at MacDill. We've had one similar to your base. We had a gate runner where some guy who was drunk as hell made a wrong turn and entered our base at the main gate - thought he was turning onto the freeway. Once he realizes his mistake, he guns it and takes off down the main road of our base (this was before we had pop-up barriers). The guy somehow makes it 4 miles down the road and crashes into a fence line. Jumps out and makes a run for it. Hasn't been found since.

Well, I had to do my PT test again today. Been 6 months since the last one. Overall score was 95.7%... was aiming for 100, but oh well. Knocked out the 1.5 mile run in 10'59". 100 would have been a 9'34" run. So now that I got over a 90% score, I don't have to do this for another year.

Well, I got selected to do the safety briefing today during our guardmount, so I touched on this a bit and why it's important to be anal as hell at the gate for ID cards.

Hm, you would think something like this might hit the BOLO sheets. Hell, we've gotten BOLO's on far lesser stuff than this that happens on the other side of the country. Perhaps a youtube montage of this fool might help spread the word around a bit more.

If he was really in the Army, he would be on violation of Posse Commitatus, plus a whole slew of regs, and I would just like to say... Special Forces my ass Mr. Butter Ball! Falsely claiming to be a military member and on top of that providing a horrible image of our military!?... please give this guy an ass kicking! However, this encounter was done properly. A perfect example of how to out someone.

So I decided to take a trip to my local T-Mobile store yesterday and came back with a brand new Samsung Vibrant. I have to say, it is one of the best phones I've ever had. Very quick with getting me what I need, it has a cool text feature called swype where you just drag your finger across the touch screen keyboard to write a message (which is what I'm doing for this post), it behaves exactly like an iPhone, battery life is probably the longest I've ever seen, and it's super light (I almost feel like I could break it). The only downside is that it comes with "Dances with Smurfs". However the color depth on the screen is amazing. I highly recommend this phone to anyone who doesn't want an iPhone. It's that freaken good. Oh, it also comes with a mobile TV... which I haven't tried yet, but you have to pay an additional $10 a month for that.

1.) You're not legally obligated to give them those special offers. That is a generosity on your part which can not be legally defended if taken advantage of. If they say they were in the military and are proud to advertise that fact, they had to spent at least more than 4 years in or got a medical discharge and should have a retired military ID card of some kind. If they don't, I would question it quite a bit. 2.) You always have the option of conducting a background check to confirm that they did indeed serve in the military branch - which is what I did on the civilian side to confirm that applicants did indeed serve, and we did get a few who didn't realy spend any time in service... hell, I remember one guy who went through part of boot camp and then got processed out... said he went in the Marines as Force Recon... that might have been what he wanted to do in the Marines, but it never happened - I think he got kicked out for something... definately bad behavior related. So please, don't do folks a favor just because they say that they are in the military and have no way of proving it. The simplest thing they can have to prove that they are/wre in the military is an ID card... which all military members (active and retired) would definately have on them and believe me, we are proud to show that. So please ask! Hell, I always show my military ID card at any business that asks to see my ID when I make a payment on something with my credit card or check.

Well, you can't make it a law that everybody must be honorable, or that it is illegal to tell a lie. That's not practical, and honestly, it's kind of disturbing to have such a law. So, yeah, in a sense, it is ok for a guy to wear a fake uniform and to claim a whole bunch of B.S. I don't like it, I find it dispicable. However, I'm not going to enforce honor upon someone if they don't want to practice it unless that individual is serving in the armed forces. If they want to be a real POS and claim they did this and that when they really didn't, fine, let them. Honestly, being a member of the armed forces, it doesn't hurt me, and I really doubt that this will make people skeptical of those who really did serve. Wanting to go for full force on this guy is a bit too radical... it actually sounds like something that the Taliban would do to their own. The guy has been found out, we know he's not a war hero. Let's just laugh at him, tell him what kind of a fool he is, and call it a day. To go on and make a federal case over it makes us look childish. If you really want to prevent something like this from ever happening again, then make those uniforms and medals unaccessible to the average joe... but good luck in trying to get that to happen.

Here's one thing to consider... untill this incident, I never heard of the "Stolen Valor Act". So if I had never heard of it untill now, who should expect some average joe to have heard of it. Making a law that's not very well known and then suddenly going full force in prosecuting somebody who is in violation of it and very likely not knowing that it was illegal is just wrong. I'm saying this because recently the same thing almost happened to me at my unit. I almost got paper work slamed on me because I apparently had violated a unit policy on something that I had no idea of. Fortunately for me, I put up a good fight on it to where they withdrew the paper work and just made it a verbal advisement. So if I'm going to take that position for myself, I am going to do the same for someone else. For a first time offense, I don't think a full court trial should be nescessary. Just a quick advisement to the guy to let him know that what he is doing is actually illegal and that he could be prosecuted. If he continues to violate that law, then I can understand prosecution on the matter and sentencing criminal penalties... unless that's what happened? BTW, right now I'm slightly intoxicated... jack and coke... mmmmmm..... so if any of you think I might be out of character to type any of this... or this post here... or if I'm not making any sense... or whatever... just hold off on sending me a PM till the morning. Right now I think I'm glad I'm home and not having to drive back from somewhere... been a rough couple of days. I'm going to hit the sack.

Not really. That's where background checks come into play. It could be prosecuted, but the most that would probably happen is the guy would be denied and possibly placed on the FBI's watch list if it was a government job. Non-veteran applicants would not be harmed by this. When I worked on the civilian side, we have guys who would claim that they were in the Marines or the Army to get a job with us when the weren't. It only take one phone call to verify this stuff. They get denied on the spot.

Now hold on here for a second folks. Falsely claiming to be a police officer or being handicap to use certain privileges that comes with that status is a whole different issue mainly because of those certain special privileges. There are no special privileges attached to claiming being a war hero. Claiming to being handicap when you are not is physically depriving someone who is handicap of having access to certain accomadations that should be available to them. Falsely claiming to be a police officer can allow someone to have unauthorized authority to do a whole bunch of things that would be highly illegal. Tell me what can someone gain to falsely claim of being a war hero that can deprive someone of services or take advantage of against the community? Nothing except a false sense of respect and recognition... untill found out. This is nowhere near close to be classified as identity theft. Do I agree with what Mr. Strandlof did?... no. However, I do not find anything illegal about it. If this law is enforced, it would open Pandora's box. Anything that anybody says, that turns out to be false, no matter how small it is, can now be prosecuted, and that my friends is a very scary thing. What if you said one thing, thought it was true, but turns out to be false, and now you can face criminal charges because of it? That is classified as a fascist government and I will not support those ideals or beliefs. These are some of the things we have to accept in order to maintain that this country is a free country. I see it as the same as flag burning. It's disgracefull, but it's not illegal. We just have to put up with it and roll our eyes and tell the guy he's a moron. That's the most that you can do.

Dumb @$$e$

Samsung Vibrant just came out on the 21st.

Last week my flight was informed that a former member of our unit died from an accidental overdose of medication... he was my age, 30. A few days later we've had to deal with a NORI. Today we were informed that another former member of our unit committed suicide. Both individuals I knew. Now we got a UCI coming up in a couple weeks. Talk about a serious charlie foxtrot for flight morale.

Well, apparently the guy killed himself over a girl. I don't know about you folks, but no girl is worth killing yourself over. So I'm kind of pissed and disappointed in the guy. Don't get me wrong, the guy was a great person, very friendly, always seemed to have a positive attitude, but suicide is probably one of the biggest cowardly acts anybody can do to themselves.

Can they even spare the resources to conduct drills? Not that I'm complaining. The less they have, the easier it is for us to take 'em out. I wonder how many of their own aircraft will break down in mid flight from lack of maintenance?

I'm going to post these up on my facebook account. I'm sure to get some flak from my liberal side of the family.