On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 16:36:03 -0500, Cub Driver
wrote:


Whether it's a warrant or a commission doesn't matter nearly as
much as how well you lead...

My company commander in France was a major (well--it was a large
company!).

I was in a training company a t Ft. Rucker (1977) that had over 700
people in it. For a while I was a platoon leader, with the august
rank of E-2. The other three platoon leaders were all E-6s. The C.O.
was a captain, a mustang officer promoted from W.O. in RVN. There
were no Lts in that company.

[stuff snipped]

Yet another case, a captain at Fort Bragg, was to have been RIFfed a
week or so before he finished the twenty years (whatever) that would
have enabled him to retire (when he did eventually retire) with a
captain's pay and status, rather than the sergeant he was about to
become. The captain checked into the hospital with some mysterious
heart flutter (whatever). He was a very popular man, and several of us
visited him there to wish him well. Of course there was nothing at all
wrong with him. It seems that the army wouldn't bust a hospitalized
man. Once he had passed the magic day, he meant to check out and take
his reduction like a man.

Strange story - the Army pays retirement money at the highest rank a
person ever held, not the last rank they held. I once saw an Army
Times retirement notice which listed a bunch of people newly retired,
and one of them was an E-1! Maybe a typo, maybe not.

And I knew two C.W.O.s that were riffed in the big "non-qualitative
RIF" of 1976/77 who opted to stay in as E-5s. They later got their
warrants back. One of them had 7,000 + hours on CH-47s alone.
They retired with their warrant ranks.

Warrants were very rare in the 1950s. I don't think I ever met a
warrant officer during my two years in the army. (The major of course
was shipped out to serve in another outfit.) Later, in Vietnam, I saw
bunches of them, usually driving helicopters.


They were there, you just didn't meet them. Of course there were many
more during the Vietnam war.

John Hairell )