Now is the time for me to fess up to what I did, the actions that were written into documents that provided the justification for my expulsion from the army band. Here it is verbatim from my counseling form:
You are being counseled for your poor performance and lack of military bearing on two Full Honor Funerals the morning of 31 May 2017.
o Banging of instrument against gravestones in ANC (Arlington National Cemetery)
o Swiveling of the head while at attention in front of family members at grave site and on the march
o Making extraneous noise during silent portions of the mission
o Direct statement to leaders of not caring about the mission nor the family of the fallen
Sounds pretty bad doesn’t it? What was I thinking?
I was thinking of the meeting I had with the senior members of my section two months earlier when I raised a concern that we were not all adhering to the highest standards and that some of us were in fact being very fidgety in formation, swiveling heads, talking and making other extraneous noises during ceremonies.
They told me not to care. All of them.
I also brought the issue up to my rating chain and they too told me not to be concerned.
There were many times that my colleagues asked me why I cared, why I even tried to have standards uniformly maintained. To me, it just made sense to reward good behavior and not reward the bad, but that, for all the policy and memoranda the army could muster, was not how it worked in the army band. When the worst offender of fidgetiness on ceremonies was promoted ahead of me, I decided to take them at their word and stop caring, stop trying. That’s what they want, that’s what they reward, then I can do it too. So when I was pulled aside by my section leader and asked why I exhibited these behaviors that morning of May 31, the ones I had specifically talked to him about two months earlier, I repeated back to him exactly what he had said to me at that earlier meeting “Why do you care?” He did not appreciate the irony, thus the fourth bullet point in my counseling form.
“Sure, maybe I can see that” you are saying to yourself, “but why did you beat your trombone against a tombstone? That sounds totally insane.” Yes, that would be totally insane so let me give you some context. There once was a section member who would drag his trombone behind him on the street while marching in the cemetery. He was beloved for such hilarious stunts. I didn’t have the guts to do that, so I just didn’t move my instrument out of the way as I marched past tombstones; pretty benign I thought.
So now let’s put everything in order:
1. I lobby to have senior soldiers observe the highest standards of behavior on ceremonies instead of the lowest.
2. I complain to my chain of command that the standards are not being enforced.
3. On all sides I am told to stop caring, by my peers and by my chain of command.
4. I at long last heed this advice.
5. I am written up for not caring and behaving in the way I had previously complained about, behaviors that they had refused to address with other soldiers.
Have you ever heard of gaslighting? It goes exactly like this.
In any case, their trap worked perfectly and they now had all the evidence they needed to force me out of the army.
Why didn’t I see this coming? Again, I will paint the picture of tolerable offenses that merited no to very limited punishment in the army band: padlocking another person's clarinet, drop kicking your own clarinet, walking off a funeral early to get to an appointment, punching a locker due to upset about the workload and breaking one’s hand, crushing a trumpet in the clothes-presser, and of course fondling the balls of your boss.
Somehow, my offenses were beyond the pale, worthy of ending my career, worthy of having army band leadership threaten my pension. My offenses on that one morning of funerals erased 16 years of glowing ratings. My most recent evaluation prior to this incident stated “This Soldier’s performance as a musician in the United States Army Band is highly regarded. She is an excellent mentor to the Staff Sergeants in the band and is constantly looking for ways to improve the unit.” Yet another recent evaluation stated “ [she] possesses a great amount of integrity, sound judgment and professionalism.”
Why was it so easy to write me off? Why was I never given a way to recover and simply exist peacefully until I could retire? Why did they bludgeon me with this one offense over and over again for the next year and a half? How do they assess their leadership to allow someone with so much potential to suddenly be worthless and even so detrimental to the organization that her presence cannot be tolerated? In your assessment of how this happened how can you claim good governance? How can all the blame be on the soldier who went from “promote now” to “unfit for service” in less than two years? Does that happen because of a swivel of the head? Does that happen when an instrument hits a tombstone in passing? Why am I the only one who asks these questions? Why did the investigators of my whistleblower complaint not ask these questions? As I learned in my career in the army, the answer to those “why” questions is simply “because, ARMY!” That’s all you need to know.
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