Taking a cue from Roxanne's post ... This belongs in Yahoo's "Oddly Enough" category.
6 Court-Martialed for Scrounging EquipmentCOLUMBUS, Ohio - At a time when some U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites) are complaining they have to scrounge for equipment, six Ohio-based reservists were court-martialed for taking Army vehicles abandoned in Kuwait by other units so they could carry out their own unit's mission to Iraq.
Not all the details of this terrible crime are in this article, but let's review. A) It's on record that our troops in Iraq are very short on adequate, armored transportation, and that B) they have to scrounge for stuff to reinforce their own vehicles. Not only that, C) the transports that these reservists commandeered were abandoned by other units, and D) were never listed as missing or stolen.
OK, yeah, you have to maintain discipline in the Army, or all is lost. But how could the level of offense be so bad that the Army had to take six hard-working reservists off duty, court-marshall them, and throw them in jail for six months? At the most, I'd have thought an "IOU A Coupla Hummers" letter to the units who previously owned the transports would have sufficed. I don't understand the Army's priorities here.
But then WTF do I know. I got all my understanding of Army bureaucracy from "M*A*S*H*".
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