I've never done ROTC, but have dealt with a bunch of cadets professionally through SMP. I know mostly the Army side, but have friends who are/were in AF, which is what I'm assuming. You basically have 3 avenues by which to approach this. Obviously you chain of command isn't going to help you. The second is to contact the state in which you plan to go to and ask for help. Unfortunately cadets are non-deployable and only kind of count towards their numbers so they might not be as helpful, though if you express interest in State OCS/Direct commission this would help. The other problem is that with the economy in shambles, end of Iraq and the coming funding draw downs the State pro The third is to just directly email someone at the ROTC unit you are interested in. Make sure you do it from an official military address and know what the fuck you are talking about. If you made it to the box try to mention that you are a war vet as well. The professors have to deal with entitled college kids all day, if you talk to them like a vet and show them the respect that O4-6 deserves it will go a long way. I have personally witnessed Cadets making a scene arguing with an O6 who had to be nice or the cadet would quit. I don't know how much official pull ROTC has, but we all know what effect a senior officer calling another can have. If you have any more questions or are doing the Army shoot me a PM and I'll try to help you out.
Thats unfortunate as we have a whole bunch of them coming to Australia to replace the hornets in the next few years. Had heard good things about them.
The only bad gouge I heard about it is that it's a single engine platform. Sometimes, very rarely on a multi-engine jet like the F-18 or the F-22, one of the engine's goes out and you have to use the still running engine to restart it. The jets can still fly if only one engine is operating, you just have to do a lot of things differently. With the F-35, you're kinda screwed if the engine goes out because there's no secondary engine to restart it. As far as the Marine's variant, the F-35B STOVL, we desperately need a replacement for our quickly falling apart AV-8B Harriers. It's also replacing the Hornets, which are also on their last leg, albeit still running well and still being built. But yeah, our mission, as Marine Pilots, is to support the guy on the ground in any way possible. If we were to use the F-22, we would lose our carrier capability, limiting our offshore aircraft to just helo's, which don't carry large ordinance. Ultimately this causes us to stray away from our roots as a Maritime Prepositioning Force and a force in readiness and lose our expeditionary mentality. As far as the capabilities go, I believe it would cost a shit-ton more to attempt to alter the nearly perfect F-22 to be able to take off vertically than it would to just design an all new aircraft. And frankly, we as a Marine Corps don't really have that kind of money to spend. Plus, we don't really need the insane maneuverability or other awesome capabilities of the Raptor as it doesn't really play into our mission.
If memory serves correctly, commanders with NJP authority (I don't know who that would be in AF) can approve educationally-based separations up to 90 days prior to an EOAS. We did it for a couple of sailors on my ships that wanted to start full-time and had a service termination timeline similar to yours. You should also be able to use terminal leave to push back a little further, i.e. if your commander lets you out in late August vice November you can still make the start of classes. This is all completely up to the commander's discretion, though. If no one in your immediate chain of command wants to help, then contact a base educational specialist, get all the relevant regs, and drop a special request chit to speak to the CO directly. That avenue exists for a reason, and in my opinion this is a legitimate cause to use it.
As of right now the GI Bill backlog is on each individual state. I'm from Oregon and I got my money within a month, on the other hand I know guys from Minnesota who waited five months.
I lurk here more than I post (obviously), but after reading this thread, I didn't see any other female vets. Ex-Army, got out as an E-4, basic, Ft. Jackson, AIT (52D, crosstrained as 63B & 76C while in Korea), Ft. Belvoir, then off to Yongsan, Korea, then finished out in Ft. Hood. It's been over 10 years since I got out, but feel free to ask me if you have any questions from that far back about females in the military.
Looks like I'll be heading to Benning April 17 2010 for IBOLC wth BAC and Ranger immediately after. 6+ months at Benning sucks but at least I won't be going through Ranger in the winter.
Tho I still work with the military every day as a civilian contractor, I miss being a part of it. Mostly cause all these Army fucks, though cool, are not 1/10th as smart as my Navy brethren. Fuck, I miss the uniform. Stupid broken ankle...
For anyone who is wondering, I'm in my 4th week of Aviation Primary Indoc. of the 6 weeks that it entails. So far I've passed Aerodynamics I dealing with the basics of Aero, lift, and drag; Weather dealing with the basics of weather, wind, and fronts; Aerodynamics II dealing with turning flight, takeoffs, and landings; Engines dealing with the general outline of how turbo engines work including all the subsystems; and I have Navigation tomorrow which deals with reading charts, the whiz wheel, and plotting courses. On Friday I have Flight Rules and Regulations which is not that big of a deal, and I passed the Mile swim easily. Coming up this week, I have a full day of first aid/cpr, and a few other random classes dealing with different personnel in aviation. Next week we start our land and water survival stuff which ranges from foraging for berries to starting fires...basically boy scout stuff. Water survival should be fun with the Helo dunker and parachute drags. The final week we do the altitude chamber, final helo dunks, and a couple other awesome things I can't readily think of. I'll graduate on the holiest day of the year too, St. Patrick's Day. How absolutely amazing is that!?
Hey guys, bill Murray here. Some of you know where I'm at right now, I figured I could post an update. Were about a quarter of the way through and have roughly 35% of our team left. It's hard, the course gets inside your head mentally, but I'm still hanging in there. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. See ya guys
Done with all my exams. Now We get to the fun stuff like the altitude chamber, parachute ops, land survival, and helo dunker. Hell yes!! Graduate in a week and a half.
Did anyone catch anyone catch the first episode of The Pacific last night? It looks like Spielberg and Hanks came up with another winner. So far it looks like they'll be following a whole Division instead of one company, with some attention given to the home front (I know John Basilone went a war-bond tour after he received the MOH). It amazes me how they can pick some relatively unknown actors and get this caliber of performance out of them. Other than the guy from Die Hard 2 playing Chesty Puller and the guy from season 3 of 24, I didn't recognize anyone.
So maybe the people of the idiot board can help me. I want to take some civilian classes, nothing major just some online courses so when I get out most of my basics are taken care of, my chain of command seems to be failing me. So for a soldier in the army what would the proper steps be to getting enrolled in some civilian classes. I have googled it but I'm not really getting anywhere. Also unrelated in a way but I did use a significant portion of my time with correspondence courses, any way to get civilian credit for them? I have found differing views on google.
I'm assuming you are active duty. Are you stationed CONUS or OCONUS? Regardless, there should be an education office on post that can assist you with tuition assistance and all of that good stuff. If you want to do online courses I suggest American Military University (AMU). They include the price of the book in your tuition cost, so you are paying absolutely nothing for your education. If you have more specific questions you can PM me.
Service Members: How did you all choose your corps? I'm ready to join a service and am leaning towards the Army or Air Force. Been getting lots of good advice from family and friends in each branch of service but still have not been able to choose. Any thoughts or additional advice?
What jobs or MOS are you looking at? Experiences in the same career field can vary greatly between services. What are the reasons that you have narrowed down to Air Force and Army and excluded the others? What are you career intentions, four and go or lifer? Your first post is to vague to give any meaningful advice. I joined the Navy because they offered me the job that I was interested in, the other branches not so much.
I really don't have a preferred MOS or jobs. Really am open minded here and I have a great opportunity right now where I have no mortgage or lease, just student loans and car payments to make. One of the big reasons I'll be joining a service is to just get away from the private sector for a while, hopefully see parts of the country and world I've not seen. Planning on four years and am open to further military career if it feels right.
From what I hear, 'open-minded' people that enlist get to drag chains across carriers or kick in doors in shithole towns.