More mismanagement in DC
I’m sure you’ve all read about the mix up at Arlington that forced the new Army Secretary, John McHugh to apologize for empty graves, mismarked graved, urns buried with no markings, soldiers buried on top of others…the list goes on. Thurman Higginbotham is on administrative leave pending his fate. Retiring Arlington Superintendent John Metzler is looking at a slap on his wrist – that’s all well and good. They were ultimately responsible for mismanagement at Arlington Cemetery.
However, this won’t fix the problem, just like firing people at Walter Reed didn’t fix anything. What kind of incompetent boob drives some urns out in the middle of a field and buries them thinking he’ll never be found? The same kind of boob who ignores leaking pipes in a barracks room.
The problems aren’t at the top – the problems lie with an incompetent workforce more concerned with pay checks than doing an honest days workd for an honest days pay.
The Military District of Washington needs to clean out it’s bottom-feeding workforce and find some people that appreciate their jobs. It’s not the military that’s ate up with the dumbass, it’s those civilian workers that need the boot. And this is the perfect economic climate to weed out the boobs.
If you’re worried about a family member that may be interred at Arlinton, the Army Secretary has set up a hotline. Accept my apologies on behalf of a grateful nation that we hired some serious fuckwads to care for your beloved.
Category: Military issues
the civilian people I worked with at Beumont in 70 were bottom feeding boobs. The civilian boobs that work for my friend in the Springs are incompetent, lazy, and stupid. These boobs, though decades apart, have one thing in common. They cannot be fired.
“…clean out it’s bottom-feeding workforce and find some people that appreciate their jobs.” – Amen!
Are these union slugs? If so, yes they can be fired. It just takes someone with the grit to do it and take the heat.
What a horrible mess.
I can’t imagine what the families of these soldiers must be thinking.
This is so typical. Union employees brag about doing substandard work, government people who only do enough to get a passing grade on their merit sheets, people who feel that their job sucks. All of them not worth near their wage, and none of them who cannot be replaced by no more than someone who cares.
So typically bureaucratic.
There is something missing here. Part of my job touches other peoples’ day, and soemtimes their lives. I slow down there; I take extra time to make sure that gets done right. If I find an error, I try to take the extra steps to correct it. Why?
Because that’s what I would want done for me.
What ever happened to giving a damn about the person? Treating people the way you would like to be treated? I guess it’s gone out of fashion….
I never interacted very much with most of the workers inside Arlington. The Arlington Reps, for the most part, were efficient and pretty decent guys (and gals). Of course, they had to be as it was their job to ensure that all elements came into place. NCOIC’s such as myself were responsible for the conduct of the graveside service itself, to include transfer of the deceased into and out of the Fort Myer Chapel during some ceremonies. As for the workers, they seemed to be constantly moving site to site. I’d arrive 30 minutes early sometimes to find a freshly dug grave, with the workers setting up the mock-up only minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start. On at least a few occasions the Arlington Rep had to call the workers to give us time to ensure the site was set up properly. Still, the screwups stated in the article lead me to believe that this is more on the shoulders of someone on the admin side than the backhoe operators and other workers inside the cemetery. On the back of each marker is a number denoting the section and grave site. Of course, the older head stones (pre-WWI) do not have these. The Army issues a list of all Army funerals conducted that day, which are then recon’ed to ensure the grave site matches the list. I am sure the other services issue a similar list. It is not rocket science, if the grave site number matches the section number and is sequential to the sites next to it it is right. If the name matches the marker and the site, it is right. To screw it up means someone on the admin side failed to properly file something. Even if the temporary marker is damaged or lost there should be something on file to identify the person interred within. Granted, there are a few newer sections where there have been few interments and some sections are less organized than others, but to have double burials and misidentified/unidentified remains and grave sites is unacceptable. As for the urns,… Read more »
A little off topic here, but there are some broken headstones behind Lodge 2. Probably broken while fresh graves were being dug, I first noticed them during Flags-In one year and power-walked through a bit of the cemetery to get pictures for my final essay for a history class just before PCS’ing. I’m pretty certain I took some pictures of them, along with much of the rest of the cemetery. It amazed me that in almost four years of conducting funerals, cordons and ceremonies it took a history class to get me to really research and explore the cemetery.
Hire the honorably-discharged vet.
Military taking care of military.
F*ckers who feel collecting pay and benefits are job responsibilities.
No, really, I have to work with some civilians like that.