"You owe us for that lost M14"

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I never got to Nam till 72 and went in country as a courier carrying a 1911. Before I could get back to Iwa Kuni, my uint was moved from Iwa Kuni to DaNang. Nobody really kept track of who had what and I was handed my first M16 in country. I trained in 69 with a M14. The grunts lost weapons in fire fights all the time. By 75 when the last Marines were removed by helicopter from the embassy roof in what is now Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) literally tens of thousands of rifles were left behind. When I rotated I just handed in the 1911 I was issued and the M16 I was issued at the base armory back in Iwa Kuni. I had a freedom bird to catch. I flew in and out of country on a Marine Corps C130. I figure anyone who served in country did more than pay for their rifle, handgun or about anything else. :)

Ron
 
Ah military bills. Lose a weapon today and the least of your worries will be losing money to pay it back. When I transferred units, supply gave me a bill for an extra long sleeping system that I supposedly signed for at some point. Never mind I am 5'7 and have absolutely no need for an XL sleeping bag, the Army makes no mistakes. $900 of mistake.
 
Reloadron said:
when the last Marines were removed by helicopter from the embassy roof in what is now Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) literally tens of thousands of rifles were left behind.
Click to expand...
The US has a disturbing pattern of this type of behavior. Whenever we leave a war zone and bestow "excess" weaponry and munitions (and anything else) we always end up seeing that stuff again, eventually. US weapons with lineage back to VN were recovered from marxist rebels in el salvador in the 80's. Weapons provided to "friendly" militias in lebanon in the 80's were encountered in use by insurgents in iraq. The bad guys still have things we provided them in afg in the 80's to us against the russians that they have spent the last 2 decades using killing us. isis took over in iraq using epic amounts of US weapons and equipment- to include night vision, body armor, and armored vehicles, that were given to the iraq army, but never used by them cause they were running. RIGHT NOW, the taliban is upgrading their stocks in support of their near-certain retaking of afg. In fact, districts are already falling and we haven't even finished leaving yet.

isis.jpg afg guns.jpg
isis terrorists in iraq taliban terrorists inspecting their new equipment, captured or bought from, or abandoned by afg army
 
I never saw one LOST, but we had four firearms that we had no idea how they got in the armory. On board ship, along with the M-14s, M-60s, M-79s and 1911A1s, we have four rather nice Ruger Service Six 38Spl revolvers. No holsters, no ammo, no speedloaders, nada, and no reason why we had them, but they were on our inventory. I was allowed to shoot one after I bought ammo for it.
 
Way back when I was in the AF, we were converting from carbines to M16s. After a day of unpacking and recording serial numbers of every weapon, you guessed it, we came up one M16 short. Five of us spent most of the evening looking through the dump for all the cartons and we finally found the missing rifle still in a carton.
 
During the Civil War, and for many years afterwards, officers commanding were held financially responsible for the arms and equipment issued to their units. Many were still trying to get their accounts cleared so that they could get the arrears of pay owed them, years after the war was over.
 
A Kentucky National Guard unit flew from the USA to the former Tuzla air base in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2003. The plane returned to Atlanta where a member of the cleaning crew found a M-60 machine gun. As the young man from India walked off the plane to show the law enforcement authorities at the airport he said “I found this on the plane” and it caused quite a stir. The machine gun was taken by MPs to the nearest Army post——-US Army Forces Command Hq. It was quickly determined in the the USA the M-60 belong to the unit that recently landed in Europe. At the air base it was hush-hush the weapon was lost but what happened was well known in the States. No UCMJ action was taken against the soldier or anyone in his chain of command for losing track of the machine gun. Scuttlbutt was the commanding general didn’t want to punish guys from his old unit.
 
Mk VII said:
During the Civil War, and for many years afterwards, officers commanding were held financially responsible for the arms and equipment issued to their units. Many were still trying to get their accounts cleared so that they could get the arrears of pay owed them, years after the war was over.
Click to expand...
Pretty sure that was one of Benedict Arnold's gripes as well .... during the Revolutionary War.
 
There is probably a fair amount of discretionary and inconsistent disciplinary action involved with loss of small arms.

Loss of SAMs, ATWs, or other ordnance tends to get folks a bit more aroused.
 
earlthegoat2 said:
I wonder if John McCain had to pay for his plane?
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You mean "planes", right? He cracked up three planes during training "in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials." (source: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-06-na-aviator6-story.html) Then there is the one that was destroyed aboard ship in 1967 and the one that he was shot down in. Hey, few others would have had the opportunity to destroy more than one.
IME, it is rellatively safe to say JSM cost the US taxpayer more than the materiel destruction he wrought on the enemy.
 
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theotherwaldo said:
-I'd heard that John McCain was the first Viet Cong flying ace... .
Click to expand...
Actually a small piece of Naval History. I think it was maybe '67 when the USS Forestall CV59 was operating off the coast on N. Vietnam. A Zuni rocket launched off a F4B Phantom striking the external fuel tank of an A4 Skyhawk piloted by McCain. Then things got ugly as the flight deck was loaded with fueled armed planes waiting takeoff for a strike. Bombs, including a 1,000 pounder began cooking off and pilots waiting takeoff were stuck in their aircraft. I don't know who punched out and who didn't but over 100 men died in that mishap. Those familiar with the incident know after repairs the Forestall had the name Forrest Fire. I found it,
Rocket causes deadly fire on aircraft carrier
Fuel from burning aircraft worked it's way below decks making an already bad situation worse. Anyway it was McCain in the A4 which the Zuni hit. There is plenty of film footage of that disaster.

After Nam in 72 I was assigned to 4th Marine Corps District Cleveland Ohio as a Recruiter. I enlisted a kid who was among the last Marines extracted from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. Our carriers off the coast were deluged with people trying to get out and helicopters were simply shoved overboard to make room. Some good film footage of all of that also. Interesting times.

Ron
 
Apparently Dad made E-5 while in the South Pacific during WWII...more than once, as I understand it.

He apparently had little patience for officers who didn't know their aft alimentary canal opening from a hole in the ground!

:rofl:


As for the government catching up to what you owe them...oh, yeah...I've got first hand experience with that.

Way back in the early 90s when I finally got through the divorce from my first wife, the laws changed on BAQ just before the divorce and as a result, my entitlement after the divorce was "BAQ difference", since I had dependent children and was living on base.

Okie-dokie, whatever. Sucked that I wouldn't be getting full married BAQ any more, but them's the breaks.

Anyway...the Yeoman put the paperwork through immediately after I notified the command of the divorce. Aaaand DFAS kept sending me full married BAQ.

So the YNC notified DFAS again. Aaaand DFAS kept sending me full married BAQ.

After about three months of this, the YNC said "Just put the money in the bank, because they'll eventually catch up and you'll have to repay it."

So I did.

About a year later, as we're coming back from a 6 month deployment, the YNC gave me a message from DFAS. They had finally figured out they had overpaid me and were going to take it out of my pay. As in ALL my pay for just over the next three months.

The Chief said he could put in paperwork to change that repayment to 12 months. I told him I still had the money in the bank and why couldn't I just pay it in full as soon as we got back home?

He said "You know how long it took them to figure this out, even though we sent messages to DFAS in the first place? Now imagine you paying it back in full, they don't figure this out, and STILL take you pay for the next three months."

He offered to have the repayment adjusted to 12 months instead of three. I told him "Nah...I've got over three months pay sitting in the bank right now from this. Let them take their money and I'll just live off that until it's all repaid."
 
It helps to befriend the pogies. (I were one myself, Supply, when I wasn't in the Arms Room) I developed a system to make the weekly Arms Room S/N checks more efficient. All of the officers that had to do the weekly check (It rotated, and it seems to draw heavily on LT's) appreciated this, and it really paid off when I got a company grade Article 15, a month before getting out. The paperwork for reduction to PFC and the pay reduction was sent to Division Finance, which happened to be part of our BN. The LT who ran that office was one often stuck with Arms Room inventory, and to show his appreciation of my efficiency, he conveniently lost that paperwork. I still had to wear PFC rank, but I was getting paid my SPC pay, and my exit ID says SPC on it. When I outprocessed, I stopped to get his sign-off, and he held up the forms in question and said, "Now that you're ETS'ing, I don't need to hang on to these anymore." He ripped them up, and round filed him. I thanked him, and he thanked me for getting him in-n-out of the Arms Room in 10-15 minutes, vs. the hour or more it took my predecessor to do the inventories. (Even with half the rifles in there. She always had a bunch at the Maintenance Facility. I got them fixed and all back within a month.)
 
The loss of a small arm is a greater offense than losing classified information or an aircraft, especially as it usually involves lower ranking EM who are easier to throw under the bus.
 
My story has nothing to do with firearms in the US Military, but it does have to do with spanner wrenches mounted on firehose reel platforms that are all around the decks of a ship.

Back in 1972, my ship a USCG 378ft High Endurance Cutter, got a GOA audit. One the items listed as discrepancy was the very high number of spanner wrenches we went through every month. The GOA boy's couldn't figure it out, and we were not telling.

The night after the audit ended I was in a bar sitting next to one of the GOA guys. He seem like a nice fellow, and asked me off the record what was happening to all the spanner wrench's Well I told him straight up, we throw them overboard. You see, our ship is painted White, and the spanner wrenches are made of lightly galvanized steel, and the salt spray makes them rust quickly and then they leave ugly orange rust streaks on the nice white paint. So when they start to rust, we just throw them overboard, and put a new one out in it's place. Then we lather, rise and repeat.....

I told him if they made the wrenches out of a non-rusting material the problem would solve itself.....
 
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Reloadron said:
Actually a small piece of Naval History. I think it was maybe '67 when the USS Forestall CV59 was operating off the coast on N. Vietnam. A Zuni rocket launched off a F4B Phantom striking the external fuel tank of an A4 Skyhawk piloted by McCain. Then things got ugly as the flight deck was loaded with fueled armed planes waiting takeoff for a strike. Bombs, including a 1,000 pounder began cooking off and pilots waiting takeoff were stuck in their aircraft. I don't know who punched out and who didn't but over 100 men died in that mishap. Those familiar with the incident know after repairs the Forestall had the name Forrest Fire. I found it,
Rocket causes deadly fire on aircraft carrier
Fuel from burning aircraft worked it's way below decks making an already bad situation worse. Anyway it was McCain in the A4 which the Zuni hit. There is plenty of film footage of that disaster.

After Nam in 72 I was assigned to 4th Marine Corps District Cleveland Ohio as a Recruiter. I enlisted a kid who was among the last Marines extracted from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. Our carriers off the coast were deluged with people trying to get out and helicopters were simply shoved overboard to make room. Some good film footage of all of that also. Interesting times.

Ron
Click to expand...
Geez, knew about the Forrestal fire, but not that JM was the pilot who got hit.....wow, just wow.

A Zuni caused the Enterprise fire too, 28 dead. SMH.....
 
BobinNC said:
My story has nothing to do with firearms in the US Military, but it does have to do with spanner wrenches mounted on firehose reel platforms that are all around the decks of a ship.

Back in 1972, my ship a USCG 378ft High Endurance Cutter, got a GOA audit. One the items listed as discrepancy was the very high number of spanner wrenches we went through every month. The GOA boy's couldn't figure it out, and we were not telling.

The night after the audit ended I was in a bar sitting next to one of the GOA guys. He seem like a nice fellow, and asked me off the record what was happening to all the spanner wrench's Well I told him straight up, we throw them overboard. You see, our ship is painted White, and the spanner wrenches are made of lightly galvanized steel, and the salt spray makes them rust quickly and then they leave ugly orange rust streaks on the nice white paint. So when they start to rust, we just throw them overboard, and put a new one out in it's place. Then we lather, rise and repeat.....

I told him if they made the wrenches out of a non-rusting material the problem would solve itself.....
Click to expand...

I do believe all the ones I've ever seen or used in the Navy were aluminum.
 
RetiredUSNChief said:
Apparently Dad made E-5 while in the South Pacific during WWII...more than once, as I understand it.

He apparently had little patience for officers who didn't know their aft alimentary canal opening from a hole in the ground!

:rofl:


As for the government catching up to what you owe them...oh, yeah...I've got first hand experience with that.

Way back in the early 90s when I finally got through the divorce from my first wife, the laws changed on BAQ just before the divorce and as a result, my entitlement after the divorce was "BAQ difference", since I had dependent children and was living on base.

Okie-dokie, whatever. Sucked that I wouldn't be getting full married BAQ any more, but them's the breaks.

Anyway...the Yeoman put the paperwork through immediately after I notified the command of the divorce. Aaaand DFAS kept sending me full married BAQ.

So the YNC notified DFAS again. Aaaand DFAS kept sending me full married BAQ.

After about three months of this, the YNC said "Just put the money in the bank, because they'll eventually catch up and you'll have to repay it."

So I did.

About a year later, as we're coming back from a 6 month deployment, the YNC gave me a message from DFAS. They had finally figured out they had overpaid me and were going to take it out of my pay. As in ALL my pay for just over the next three months.

The Chief said he could put in paperwork to change that repayment to 12 months. I told him I still had the money in the bank and why couldn't I just pay it in full as soon as we got back home?

He said "You know how long it took them to figure this out, even though we sent messages to DFAS in the first place? Now imagine you paying it back in full, they don't figure this out, and STILL take you pay for the next three months."

He offered to have the repayment adjusted to 12 months instead of three. I told him "Nah...I've got over three months pay sitting in the bank right now from this. Let them take their money and I'll just live off that until it's all repaid."
Click to expand...
That was a smart move. Few enlisted guys I knew would have had the self discipline.
 
RetiredUSNChief said:
I do believe all the ones I've ever seen or used in the Navy were aluminum.
Click to expand...

Chief,

The USCG didn't quite have the budget or the vast procurement system that the USN had. We never even had a pair of Big Eyes for use on the bridge, until we chopped over to USN Control when deployed to Vietnam. We could then use the vast USN procurement system, which brought many goodies for us poor relations,. Yes, later we did get aluminum spanners, as I recall.

Former QM2 USCG
 
A pparently Dad made E-5 while in the South Pacific during WWII...more than once, as I understand it.

He apparently had little patience for officers who didn't know their aft alimentary canal opening from a hole in the ground!
Click to expand...
As an E3 in the USAF in 1978, I had a job in the missile complex where I was more or less self-supervised. I also had the authority to pull the military driver's lecense of any military personnel that abused our vehicles or was otherwise unfit or unsafe to operate a vehicle. I had to threaten a captain one time that I would pull his license if he insisted on attempting to return to base in TC red.
Another major was educated on how to tell if a vehicle stuck in the mud of a ditch actually slid off the road or was purposely driven into the ditch. Easier to tell if you just look.....! :oops:
 
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