@hightor,
Quote:Yes, there are people who have become concerned that the president hasn't visited troops on active duty overseas. Past presidents have reveled in the display of patriotism and support for the military.
As someone who has been deployed in a war zone, I can tell you the "VIP's" need to stay the hell away. Let me share a story of my previous feelings on these type of events from a pre and post event experience.
When I was in basic training, Nov 2003 I stated training the day after Thanksgiving, and while we were waiting in live for dinner chow, we heard that Bush had gone over seas and had Thanksgiving with the troops. I thought that was pretty cool and wondered if I would ever get so lucky as to eat with the President while deployed.
Fast forward almost 2 years later and I was deployed to Pakistan for Operation Lifeline after the earthquakes in the Kashmir region. We had been there for almost 2 months and it was Christmas time, we were done with the "recovery" portion of our mission and were well into the supply side of the mission. Our Chinooks were in the air every single day and they were flying an average of 8-12 hours a day, I was a mechanic, so if the birds were in the air I was on duty. The week or so before Xmas the "dog and pony" shows were announced. What I thought was going to be an awesome experience turned out to be about 2 weeks of hell. What to know how much vital aircraft maintenance gets done when VIP's like the Vice President, Sec Def and high level Senators come to visit? NONE! Everything gets put on hold to make everything clean and tidy for these people, the aircraft still fly but instead of a whole squad fixing it, you get 2 people as the other 5 or 6 are sweeping dust back into the desert, and setting up fake maintenance so the VIP's can ask stupid questions about easy things. Once the VIP's arrive, depending on who they are, for Rumsfeld we all got to stand in a big line as he walked down it and shook our hands and took pictures. The rest of them just walk around and look at things while someone takes their pictures. Once the VIP's leave, it's back to business as normal except now you have twice the work to do, they were around for several hours, in the same amount of time, we generally didn't work past sun down due to security issues.
Out of the dozen or more VIP's who showed up, the only one who was worth a damn and that was General Shoomaker. We were told a couple of days before Christmas that we were not going to be getting anymore personal mail until after the new year, this is a moral blow to deployed military as mail is a life line to home and this was Christmas after all. The General was there on Christmas eve and overheard 2 guys bitching about the mail and he asked our Commander about it. He was told that only "mission critical" shipments would be taking place and from the reports, he blew his top. He made a phone call and about 9 hours later 8 full size flat bed trucks of mail showed up at the base, mail we should have had weeks ago that had been held up, **** off Air Force, for unknown reasons. I myself got 9 boxes that night from friends, family and co-workers.
The moral of the story is this, visiting the troops plays well with the folks back home but doesn't go well with the people in the field. Nothing gets done and it only interrupts the real work the people in the field have to get done. Besides it doesn't really do anything to "boost" moral, unless they can get your weeks late mail delivered on Christmas Eve. In my opinion, the visit only does something for the person who is visiting to think they are seeing the "troops go about their day with a smile on their face", but they will never see the real day to day activities because mechanics with their oil/grease stained faces and t-shirts who are cussing isn't palatable to people who wear suits for a living.
