You don't know who Eric Shinseki is? He was the Chief of Staff of the Army back in 2001 who mandated that all Soldiers wear a beret as their headgear. He wanted everyone to wear the beret in order to improve the esprit de corps. This pissed off just about everybody.
The Rangers hated it, because Shinseki demanded that all Army Soldiers wear a black beret, and the black beret was the Ranger's color. They now wear tan.
The rest of the Army hated it because we now had to wear a floppy hat that took two hands to get it sitting on your head correctly, that held in heat thanks to the fact that it was BLACK and WOOL, and stank to high heaven after a period of constant wear.
All in all, it was a decision that was a self-inflicted dick-stomping, and rather than improving the esprit de corps of the Army it did the opposite. The beret was universally reviled by everyone who had to wear it, and in 2011 the Sergeant Major of the Army, who had listened to the troops, ordered that the soft cap be returned as the headgear for daily wear in garrison. The beret still exists for the Class A Uniform.
So I told you all that just so I can tell you all this - the same guy who made that colossal mistake was put in charge of the Department of VA back in 2009.
And now we get this.....
A Veterans Affairs employee at the VA Medical Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, has been placed on administrative leave after CBS News obtained an email showing an employee directing his staff on how to game the appointments system to make it appear as though veterans were being seen within the VA's 14-day directive.
And this is on top of the crap going on at the Phoenix VA...
Look, the VA has been in trouble for a while. You can't conduct a thirteen year war and expect that the facilities you had in place before the war are going to be adequate to deal with the amount of healthcare that's going to be required by the troops coming home. But Shinseki has been in place for five years now. And what, if anything, has he done?
Everything he touches, it seems, turns to shit.....
1 comment:
The VA has been a horror for a lot longer then 13 years, they have failed the Vets from at least Korea on.
For the current leadership to not do something, to at least have Gen Shinseki step down, for him to have not fixed the know issues, is his failing.
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