I don’t think there’s an end date for the deployment. USS George Washington is taking the place of USS Ronald Reagan as the forward deployed carrier at Naval Base Yokosuka in Japan. My son will likely be there until his service time is complete as he’s attached to this boat.
Ultimately the GW will need another refit/refuel sometime down the road. Like seven years I think it is for a nuclear carrier? So eventually it will have to come home. This ship was in Japan until the Reagan arrived in 2015 to relieve it.
Oh my gosh, your heart must be so full, @DaveLong! That’s so touching to hear about your “boy”. Hugs to all the Long clan today.
!!
I guess the more relevant question then is how long it will be till a seaman and his family are united again? Although from what I know of military service in the movies, you guys are Skyping regularly?
Communication is difficult tbh. They apparently use Starlink for Internet/Phones and it’s not the best. My son was told Facebook Messenger is pretty reliable so we’re going to try that. He also has an email address I can reach him at.
Congress passed a law that says no ship can be deployed longer than ten years, so basically if he were to stay in, then he could potentially be there until 2034, at which time I’ll be about three to five years from retirement… *gulp*
Reagan was in Japan for ten years. They’ve been forced to come home now thankfully for those men and women on board. I believe both ships will meet in San Diego, same as they did in 2015 when they swapped places the last time.
All this is public knowledge btw. My son doesn’t talk much about what he does as he is a Nuke. Basically what goes on behind that guarded door to the plant stays in the plant.
The refueling process is crazy, too. They cut a hole down through all the decks, lift out the core with a huge crane, drop in a new core, and weld back up all the decks.
This will probably be the last RCOH for the GW. It was going to be mothballed before Congress made a push for an overhaul. Barbara Bush christened the ship.
We really don’t know what kind of Leave he’ll get to come home. My ex-father-in-law has been fighting cancer a long time now and it’s likely he will pass within a year so that might get him Leave to come home briefly. My Mom is also not in the best of health. Grandparents passing may not be enough though for such a long round trip.
He will have Leave of course. It’s just with so far to go, I don’t know how that is going to play out yet. I certainly intend to go visit him in Japan and I will fly to San Diego in a couple months if at all possible. That’s of course on the other side of the country for me so… not cheap.
Nuclear aircraft carrier refueling is literally a process that takes years and massive amounts of money. The Navy takes advantage that the ship is basically cut open to modernize/replace everything else inside that it can.
Right. That part for sure. They actually do have some functioning Wi-Fi on the ship now that was added as part of the refit. Still using Steam powered catapults though. I’m sure Trump would love that.
Vernon Reffitt got $30,000 to leave the Army in 1992. It was a one-time, lump-sum special separation benefit offered to service members when the U.S. had to reduce its active-duty force.
Now, more than 30 years later, the federal government wants that money back.
Thousands have found themselves in Reffitt’s position due to a little-known law that prohibits veterans from receiving both disability and special separation pay. Under the law, the VA has to recoup special separation benefits from veterans before those eligible can begin receiving disability payments.
The law has forced at least 79,000 veterans to repay different types of separation benefits between 2013 and 2020, according to a study published in 2022 by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group. The actual number of affected veterans is likely much higher because researchers were not able to access data prior to 2013 due to VA system changes, Stephanie Rennane, the study’s lead author, said.
In Reffitt’s case, the VA erroneously allowed him to receive both benefits without penalty for more than 30 years. In a statement, the agency said it was “unaware of the amount” of Reffitt’s special separation benefit when he began receiving disability compensation in 1992.
With interest as well? Because that would be a cherry on top to them getting fucked like this.
I remember around that time, they did something not related to separation where folks were getting extra pay for some thing for a few months longer than it should’ve happened, but they wasted no time in taking that back once it was noticed. IIRC they just docked straight out of people’s pay until it was cleared.
Also it seems like major bullshit that it should have any impact on disability benefits unless this separation thing was specifically about getting out due to a disability and it was some sort of lump sump thing in place of the monthly disability. The headline just reads like it was the regular drawdown this at the end of the Cold War, and Desert Storm, so yeah really sounds like they are just fucking people over.
Edit: IIUC you also have to go in and get an exam however often to keep the disability benefits going in some if not all cases. I know in my case, I was given 10% disability, and it seemed stupid that I was getting disability so I never bothered to go whenever the next exam was due. I even completely forgot about the whole thing until a couple years ago when I was talking to the VA about something, and the person was telling me I should be getting disability. I knew in my case that what was going on was tied to something that started when I was in elementary school, so it wasn’t the Army.
There’s a dude on YouTube called mandatory funday who has personally talked about how freaked out folks in the military get of they accidentally get paid too much, because they know the military will eventually fuck them over for SO much more afterwards.
That is 100% truth. When you get overpaid for whatever reason, your supervisors are quick to send you to the finance clerks to fix the issue before it becomes a problem on future paychecks.
I suspect some of this goes back to the Vietnam era. There were cottage industries exploiting veterans and veterans’ benefits programs, everything from fake cosmetology schools so folks could collect educational benefits without, um, getting educated I guess, to fake disability claims, etc. The actual extent of these frauds, and the degree to which average vets were benefiting rather than being scammed in those cases, is hard to tell now, as it was then.
My father, a disabled retired Army vet himself, worked at the VA as a psychologist in the seventies, after his Army career ended (thanks Viet Cong!). The tension between helping vets, scams, unclear or obtuse VA regulations, and the general social milieu was rough for sure.
Then again, it’s also just as probable that in typical American fashion, we screw over the poor service people and let the billionaires get away with literal murder.
The thing this guy apparently is getting screwed with looks like a draw down benefit that existed from 1991-2001, if I am reading the info the link in the article correctly. It just seems so shitty, “hey, the Sovs are done and we don’t need all of you any longer, please take this money and go, and then in the fine print (we will recoup this from va benefits).
TWZ has been all over this the last couple of weeks. Navy has very quietly revealed it adapted the SM-6 into the AIM-174. So they now have in service a very long range air-to-air missile. And one that can presumably also be used in an anti-ballistic missile and anti-ship role like the regular SM-6 can. Seems like the US Navy can still do something right.
Mello was a financial manager who handled funding for a youth program at the military base and determined whether grant money was available. She created a fraudulent group called Child Health and Youth Lifelong Development, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Mello used the fake organization she created to apply for grants through the military program. She filled out more than 40 applications over six years, illegally receiving nearly $109 million, assistant US Attorney Justin Simmons wrote in a court document asking for Mello to be sentenced to more than 19 years in prison.
