: OK guys be nice, I was a NCO there, never
: received a Air Medal with the 119th, just
: got my time. Did received 10 Air Medals my
: 1st tour. So I bet most NCO's in aviation
: units saw combat time in the air before they
: became NCO's.

Don, by the time I left in June 69 there was some ugly stuff going on. As long as the company flight hour total crossfooted with the various award allocations and meshed smoothly with the battalion numbers, they could screw around with the flight hour numbers to a fare-thee-well, and nobody was the wiser. It is a fact that I flew as crew chief for about seven months and left without an Air Medal, and many others were cheated out of other legitimate awards. Some of the unscrupulous "managers" got flight status pay without flying, and some were allocated promotion point Air Medals without ever visiting the flight line. Not all, a few.

There was also tremendous resentment amongst some of the career ("lifer") NCOs that all those young kids were being showered with awards and decorations, which to them represented promotion points that they would eventually have to compete against "...in the land of the big PX," and a few unscrupulous NCOs pulled all kinds of rotten deals. They stole hours, they traded hours for steaks, for plywood, for whatever they needed. They screwed the troops they were responsible for protecting and leading.

The Army, in the late 60s and early 70s, from what I saw, was beginning to rot, or was rotting, from within. The best soldiers were viewed as threats by many of the freeloader types who were most concerned with simply protecting their turf.

Then, in the years after Vietnam, and please excuse a huge simplification, the real soldiers in the US Army NCO Corps out-lasted those reprehensible crooks and, through the late 70s and early 80s, saved the Army from the damage done by those devious, self-serving rats, and rebuilt the Army into the splendid machine that blew through Iraq in Desert Storm.

We are going to need to call those NCOs (their successors) back to duty in the years to come, to repair the damage that the politicians are doing to our Army as we speak; as we sleep. My opinion, it will take years, maybe decades. If it can be done at all, if the damage they are doing today is not, in fact, fatal.

Bob K-- limping off the soapbox