As you may know, I've been doing funeral details since August. In that time period, I've done 12 funerals spanning 18 days -- pretty much an entire month's worth of workdays. All this while I'm still running a platoon and fulfilling my staff duties (like overnight watch officer). It's a sobering duty and an honor to serve the families of veterans, but the travel has been a burden to my family and I've been looking forward to getting relieved.
We used to have four officers in our battalion to rotate through for funerals, but by the end of December it was down to two: me and another guy. The week after Christmas, as everyone else enjoyed a three-day work week (and half-days, at that), I spent two days on the road.
By January 4, the battalion was supposed to have more people available for officer funerals, but no one went to the training except two officers from my own company. For whatever reason, no other officers could spare the time to do the one-hour training session.
So now, instead of having one officer (me) out half of the time, my company's going to hav one officer out three-quarters of the time.
Today I got a call to do another one, but thankfully it was during class, so I didn't answer my phone and one of the other lieutenants got assigned to it. I'd have been really angry if I'd have had to drop a second class because no other officer in the battalion was willing to step up.
No comments:
Post a Comment