Pain? What Pain?

So, my Master Sergeant gave me a bit of a lecture at the end of the work day yesterday.
The interesting part is, simplified, it was "Your leaders are screwing up, don't be like them."

I can't tell you how glad I am that I'm not the only one seeing what I'm seeing.

Some of the madness I have had to deal with has had me frustrated, to say the least. To have a first-line supervisor that I try really hard not to complain about, because I feel it is disrespectful for one leader to talk badly about another, well, it's aggravating. My friends, none the less, know multiple stories about her that would surely make her drill sergeants blush. I try to keep it with folks outside of work, though, so that my frustrations don't run over into the workplace.

I am trying to be patient, and kind, and a whole lot of other stuff I feel that I'm failing at, but I'm still doing better than I did in Korea. I guess that's a starting place, right?

My Soldier will be signing in on Halloween, and will be coming here about a week later. I can't wait to actually meet this Soldier that I've talked to so much. MSG gave me the choice to send her elsewhere and get a Soldier in from somewhere here on post. I told him no, I was keeping her. I know she looks bad on paper, having no PT test recently, being young, recently married, and overweight, but I'm a firm believer in some Soldiers just wanting a chance to prove themselves. Korea is not a place where that happens. She's worked her butt off recently so that she can come here and get back on track, and I'll be damned if I take that chance away from her.

We had a Soldier in Basic Training. I don't remember his name anymore, but I remember that our platoon was mad as all get-out (myself included, I won't lie) when he got switched to our platoon because he was doing so badly in his other platoon. One day, lined up in the hallway, he was one or two people behind me. A Soldier from his last platoon started talking trash to him from across the hall. I looked that Soldier dead in the face and said "Maybe he wasn't any good in your platoon, but it must have been you guys, because he's doing great with us." I thought that 18 year old Soldier was going to cry when he heard me talk about him that way. It was a bold-faced lie, but I looked at him, after the offending Soldier stepped away, and said "I put my word out there for you, you know you gotta get right now, right?" He said yes, and was awarded the Most Improved Soldier Award at the end of our training.