"There is more to see than can ever be seen....more to do than can ever be done." Disney sure had that one right. The biggest thing that we took away from this last week is that we have got a mountain of stuff that needs to be done. We have paperwork to request, submit, and follow up on with the Army, the VA, hospitals/clinics/docs offices, and institutes of higher learning. We are planning a 21 day super sprint full out battle on the world to see how much we can physically get accomplished before we go to Arizona. We don't know when the Army is going to move on various things, but we want to have as much prepared as possible when they finally get around to it. The nice thing for us has been that we had a chance to talk over lunches this last week to develop a strategy that combines our efforts to give the maximum results.
For those keeping score on the process to get SPC Sheffer home for keeps, right now, Lloyd has three packets of paperwork floating around Fort Sill. The one that is our highest priority right now is the leave request packet for the time for us to go to Arizona. This one needs to be approved ASAP, and not just because we want to be able to know for sure that he has the leave. If it is not approved before he transfers to Charlie, he will have to resubmit to a different chain of command - and he won't have the month's notice that he is supposed to give on the request. We are praying that he gets word as soon as Monday. The second packet is the one for his med board which was submitted last Friday after a week and a half of pushing to get his commander's letter written and included. Yesterday he found out from the folks in case management that the profile information from his physical wasn't quite the right paperwork.....the doctor signed the one that said "draft" on it instead of the officially final one, so now we get to wait until he gets around to signing the correct one. Supposedly, they had been "working" on getting the signature all week. (Right. Sure. Whatever.) This makes two weeks now that nothing has moved when it should have. (The only reason that this is not more upsetting is that if it does go through, it might mess up his leave request. Maybe God's just causing this delay to allow us to get to Arizona without a hitch.) The final packet of information is his service records from when he was going through all the regular basic training stuff. (Training, certifications, qualifications, etc.) It's floating around somewhere. They lost it months ago and haven't been able to find it. Without it, he doesn't think that they will be able to process his discharge paperwork when that time comes. As soon as he hears about the leave, he will start pushing to get the chain of command to either find the paperwork or recreate it. (He doesn't want to make a fuss about too many things at once. Fight one battle at a time and all.) This is why he has become so completely paranoid about paperwork and has personal copies of everything since they screwed that up.
It has been said that TRAGEDY + TIME = HUMOR. (The Drill Sergeant "Stalker" is already almost mildly amusing after only a couple of days.) Someday, this will likely be a hysterical story told around the campfire, and someone will probably have barley pop come out of their nose as it's told. Not so much today though.
God Bless!
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