Canceled, Part I
Introduction
I have tried many times to write this story. Every time it becomes too convoluted and way too long without telling the entire story. My goal here is neither to apologize nor make myself the victim. But to lay out the facts as I experienced them and from my point of view. I will forthrightly say this is from my point of view and I don’t have any qualms about this being a subjective and opinionated account of what happened to me to essentially end my career in the military. The story is long but I may have to split this into sections.
I am writing this now for a few reasons. First, my time in the military is coming to quick and abrupt end due to the canceling. The attacks on LTC Lohmeier in the Space Force for speaking out against the ideology that in principle is the reason I am getting out. The attacks on the Fort Bragg PAO who did nothing wrong.
Nov. 1, 2021, will be my last day in the military. At 17 ½ years of active service, 22 years total since I enlisted in the Army Reserve, I will not be allowed to retire. I get nothing. I will be involuntarily discharged. I found out at the end of April I was a two-time non-select for the next rank. For officers, this is an automatic discharge. It’s federal law. Nothing you can do about it. This is all the result of one bad piece of paper in my file. 22 years of service total. From enlisted to officer. Never had even one negative counseling. But I have a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) sometimes called a letter of reprimand (LOR) in my permanent file for a Facebook post from 2019.
The Beginning of the End
Dec. 20, 2019 I was called early in the morning and told I needed to report to the Chief Of Staff’s office that afternoon. I had some inkling what it was about because the day before my senior NCO had told me I need to delete a post on facebook because he had been receiving phone calls about it from mutual work associates who knew he was in my unit. So, I deleted it the day before I was called into the COS’s office.
I reported to the COS’s office that afternoon. He slid a copy of the offending post across the table and asked me if I was aware of this post. I said, yes. He said, well, we are suspending you from command pending an Army Regulation 15-6 investigation. Oh, that is the other part, I was the commander of a small unit. He said they would assign an investigating officer and until that time there wasn’t much else to do. I tried to explain that it was hyperbole, and I was being facetious. The wheels were already in motion.
So here are some compounding issues: I was a commander, we were on block leave before deploying the unit on a nine-month rotation overseas and they (it was supposed to be “we”) were leaving at the tail end of the holiday leave schedule. We were already deploying way below personnel strength, a battle I had been fighting for almost a year. The day they suspended me from command was the beginning of holiday block leave for the command and the post. COVID was beginning and starting to affect deployments and operations.
When I walked into the COS’s office there wasn’t anyone around, which was unusual and only added to the eerie foreboding. My wife was deployed to the Iraq/Syria mission. A deployment I had done the year before. It was just a compounding and exponential mess of stress of epic proportions. Up until that moment I was planning and preparing to move my son to another state to stay with my mother-in-law, including changing school, until my wife returned in May or June.
I honestly believe that a weaker person would have been destroyed by this mess just from the beginning. I’m not tooting my own horn but let’s take a person who is offended by a facebook post and put them in this situation where their career is ending, their spouse is in a combat zone, their autistic child’s life is being uprooted and hanging the balance of the whims of cold bureaucracy. Let’s seem them fight their way out of that without collapsing.
The only thing that prepared me for this level of stress was my years of combat experience. It was really that bad. The stress and decisions I had to make on the fly were pretty intense.
The Offending Post
So, what was this horribly offensive post? The Army has copies in my file. I haven’t read it verbatim since I deleted it and when the COS handed me a copy. It was a FB post closed off to only my friends. It was a commentary on the USMC proposed policy (which is now USMC and Army policy) that new mothers get a year off between birth of the child and having to pass a fitness test and having to deploy, even on training exercises.
I used some swear words and facetiously and hyperbolically asked a rhetorical question: if women can’t do their jobs and men are going to have to pick up the slack, then why should they be allowed to serve? Now, if you know me, you know that I don’t mean it literally. Read the above statement about my wife being deployed.
I started serving on active duty early in the Iraq War. We were deploying every 12 months for extended deployments. I know women who purposefully got pregnant to avoid deploying. I don’t blame them. When else were they going to fulfill their biological imperative to have a child anyway? Were they going to squeeze it in and get pregnant the day they got back from the deployment to ensure the child was born in time for them to hand a 3-month-old baby off to a caregiver for another year? Army leaders will tell you this doesn’t happen, and it’s a sexist trope when every male leader and NCO that served during the period of high optempo has stories about females purposefully getting pregnant to avoid deployment.
I mean, the first time my wife and I deployed, we handed our 6-month-old son to my mother-in-law at the Frankfurt airport to watch him fly away as we deployed on what would become an extended tour in Iraq. I’m not unsympathetic to the plight. But I’m also a realist. I understand that we signed up to serve and that requires sacrifice. The new generation does not think that, and the new leadership doesn’t expect it. At all. You will sacrifice nothing and no comfort on behalf of the nation. What kind of soldiers does that make?
Now there are a few reasons I saw this as bad policy. The first being that a female could do a whole enlistment where half is spent unavailable to deploy even to training events and not having to pass a fitness test. You can read about that here.
The Reporter/The Offended
Now, the question may arise, if this was closed off to only your friends, then who reported it? These people on my closed-off friends list should be people who know my voice and know I have a propensity to shit post and be snarky. Well, it was an old friend from years ago who was a mutual acquaintance in our career field. She left the Army and was working as a civilian in a different agency. To make matters worse, her husband was deployed in the same element as my wife. Yikes.
I immediately made the link of who reported it based on the chain it was reported to my command. They received the post from an Army agency nowhere in our chain of command. I knew the people who worked there and even recently had worked with them on another project. The offended person on my friends list was good friends with the people in that office. Since the offended had no real recourse, she sent it to them (all females, by the way). They sent it to my command, which of course, proceeded to investigate me for it.
Now, an offensive Facebook post of this variety that isn’t implicitly dangerous, i.e. (Threatening violence or implying some affiliation with dangerous groups) would, at most, get you a negative counseling, maybe a low mark on your evaluation somewhere, but you usually wouldn’t get any punishment for it. I found it peculiar that they would launch a full-scale Army Regulation 15-6 investigation for this, when it should be delete it, apologize, here’s a counseling, don’t do it again, or you’ll get UCMJ (which is questionable on First Amendment grounds). Which by the way is why they don’t give you UCMJ and they wouldn’t give me the opportunity for a court-martial. This is all about how the military uses admin action to get around pesky things like due process.
However, something the COS said caught my attention. He stated that this had been sent to them and the media, and they had to get ahead of it. So, the problem here is not that a public affairs official in the US Army sent information to the media in order to embarrass the service; it was that I made a post to a selective and private group of my friends. The command was blackmailed into doing an investigation by the local media and the PAOs at the other Army command. I have to assume they were also weighing this blackmail when they meted out the final punishment. I’m sorry, administrative action, which ends your career but is totally not punishment.
That’s when I realized I was being canceled. Cancel culture had come for me. It was inside the gates. We had a broken arrow. Not only was it a broken arrow, but it was also a fragging. Someone from the inside was rolling a grenade under my tent. The people rolling the grenade were people I had worked with, been cordial with, and provided support to. So, I really didn’t understand why they would do this.
The offended never directly addressed me. If they had contacted me since they were offended, I probably would have agreed with them, apologized, and deleted the post. Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll never know because it didn’t happen as things do in a normal and rational environment. I didn’t know the offended person actually hated me. I’m such a naïve dolt. I mean, she must have if she wanted to take my career away from me and destroy my life.
The Investigation
So, as we left the story, it was the end of December. I was about to go on leave for Christmas and drive up to see family. I was also supposed to be dropping my son and all his belongings to stay with my mother-in-law. That was no longer happening, and he was very confused because we had been planning and preparing for months. Autistic kids don’t really like having their surroundings and schedule changed. They must be prepped.
So, we go on leave. We return. I show up the first week of January, even though I’m suspended from command, to make sure everyone that is going on the rotation leaves and has the proper equipment, etc. Now, I’m just waiting, thinking they are going to assign an investigator, and I’ll be a couple of weeks behind the unit. We’ll clear this up and move on with our lives.
I wasn’t contacted by the Investigating Officer (IO) until mid-February. 60 days. Two months after I’m told I’m being investigated. All this time I have to reach out to the command our unit is supporting and sort of negotiate when I’m going to get there. I’ve seen these investigations before. They usually take a week. They get some statements from the person being investigated, everyone involved, and decide quickly, especially when you’re talking about unit deploying without the commander.
I sit down with the IO, and it’s apparent they’ve done a deep dive on my social media presence. But I really only have one personal one where I post, and it’s Facebook. They found every public post they could find, about 3- 5, and asked me about them. Of course, the primary one is the aforementioned post, and the other is a picture I used from the #Walkaway campaign as a banner picture a couple of years earlier. They had a printout from Wikipedia (we only have the best IOs in the Army) about the #Walkaway campaign, which was just straight leftist propaganda talking about how it was a Russian bot campaign. It was just the most ridiculous thing. Because I had actually spoken to Brandon Straka on numerous occasions, he was not a Russian bot.
The Corps PAO helped them comb my social media presence to find more dirt to justify the investigation. That’s the best they could come up with. I know the Corps PAO helped because there are sworn statements from the now-retired Deputy PAO describing how he scoured by FB profile looking for dirt, going years back. Keep in mind this is at the same post where we have soldiers disappearing and we are on the search, at this very time, for a female soldier who disappeared from the barracks. The PAO is doing a horrible job at managing the PR of it all. But they had time to spend hours searching for me on facebook and saving all my posts.
I made some statements because I thought if I cooperate, I can get out the door, get to my soldiers and do the mission I’m supposed to be doing. Because at the time, I wasn’t doing anything. The post was essentially shut down due to COVID. Everyone was working from home. I didn’t have a job because I was suspended from command, and the soldiers were all gone anyway. Everyone I talked to assumed this would be the case. I would get investigated. They would find out I didn’t do anything wrong, that I treat everyone fairly, my command EO assessments don’t describe or show any bias. I would move on with my life in short order after cooperating.
Lesson learned, though: never cooperate with the IO. Don’t make a statement. Don’t say a word. Get a lawyer. Don’t waive your rights. The peculiar thing is that I made multiple trips to trial defense, and those incompetent boobs said there was nothing they could do for me until I get a GOMOR, then they can act on my behalf in the Board of Inquiry. Even in seeking out legal counsel, I didn’t receive any.
The first week of March 2020, I received a call to come sign for my GOMOR from the Battalion Commander.
I think that is where I will pick up in Cancelled, Part II. The GOMOR and the ensuing Board of Inquiry and how the Army uses administrative action to usurp due process, the General officer who gives me the GOMOR is relieved and investigated. I have to hire a civilian attorney. This gets worse. Trust me.