Your Navy has moved thousands upon thousands of Katrina refugees across the country (with press accounts attributing their efforts to the Air Force, so it goes) and this is how we get press:
PENSACOLA, Fla., Sept. 6 – Two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to safety.
Instead, their superiors chided the pilots, Lt. David Shand and Lt. Matt Udkow, at a meeting the next morning for rescuing civilians when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast.
This fits the NYT weltanschaung perfectly: Unspoiled junior military personnel (like we journalists would have been, if ever we’d served) are upbraided by automaton martinet senior officers, themselves fully inculcated into the mysteries of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about!!! The bad military folks, in other words. The ones that didn’t leave the service while still pure, and go to Columbia, and get journalism degrees.
The episode illustrates how the rescue effort in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina had to compete with the military’s other, more mundane logistical needs.
Logistical needs are only mundane until you’re the guy running out of ammo, or gas, or food. And you’re the guy whose job it is to do the rescuing. While somebody else has the job of running the “mundane” logistical lines. It’s very simple: Some folks shoot, and other folks bring up bullets. Everyone wants to shoot, but if someone doesn’t bring up bullets, eventually we run out. And then good people start to die in large numbers. The same thing is true in search and rescue.
Speak that truth to power.
Could this possibly have been a miscommunication? The article says they were given permission to continue with rescue ops once they were able to make contact and ask. But they were reprimanded the following morning.
Or is this a case of somebody leaking this to the media because he resented being reprimanded for acting outside his mission?
Nice new look Lex but then again, I’m a medical pog and our values should never be trusted.
Kind of early for a Friday Musing isn’t it? I like the new look though, not that anything was wrong with the old one.
Good catch, Joe – still getting used to the new interface.
Sean, glad you like it – and I trust you guys and your values. Something about having to put my elbows on the table make me want to trust you
Beth – I think both are probably true: Once the guys got off mission, it’s impossible to say, “Stop rescuing people.” But once they return to base, the boss has a right to tell them that their “initiative” was misdirected. I think at that point, one of the guys grew a beak and protested that his boss was being an idiot, or words to that effect. When the boss (no doubt harried) took exception and put the pilot to pasture for a while to cool down, the young man went to the press.
Yelling at your seniors is viewed rather dimly, over here. As is going over their heads to the press…
I saw this yesterday in the EB and just wrote it off to a NYTs kind of job- IE blackening the eye of an institution under the guise of “just rteporting”.
I take it the CDR was their (the JOs) CO. Bad move. LT fitreps loom. LOL.
But then again some folks may be terminal. To prove a point:
“We’re not technically a search-and-rescue unit, but we’re trained to do search and rescue,” said Lieutenant Shand, a 17-year Navy veteran..”
A 17 year LT doesn’t have much to lose…
The question remains though. Would you hire him if you owned a helo business?
As the movie TopGun points out, Maverick is a fine callsign for gamblers but isn’t neccesarily a good moniker to have in Naval Aviation.
B2
I suppose the stereotype authoritarian commander makes sense if one’s experience with the military is confined to Kelly’s Heroes reruns (quite frankly the folks I new in the service were a far more diverse group than the yuppies I’ve dealt with since then). Of course it wouldn’t register on the NYT type that the assigned mission just might have been just as, or even more, important and life critical than a rescue of opportunity. Beside, if you don’t get chewed out a few times as a JO you’re probably a bit short in the initiative dept. anyway (as an old associate of mine used to frequently put it “if we’re not suppossed to, somebody will yell at us”, they did).
As far as 17 year LTs go, probably an ALDO or NESEP.
New site looks good, I imagine the “object expected” error flags will diminish over time.
Let’s see -
Free-lancing a mission, talking back to the boss and going to the press afterwards…and messing with unit integrity …
Probably not getting a very high mark in “judgment” on the next fitrep..
you guys just don’t the know the details