Dirty Laundry

Why bring up my firing decades after the fact? Guess some of this stuff needs to be aired.

Sometimes the devil is in the details. Sometimes one needs a bird's eye view.

When one see this stuff as it develops over time, it provides a perspective of "whaaaaat!?" When one understands the bird's eye view, the question is begged of, "what really was going on?" And, I didn't want to comment again, but here is the bird's eye view of all of this (and, as you will see, it is not really even about me at all - although saying such a thing in the government is considered a weakness).

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There was a lot of worry, anxiety, people called to action, etcetera, etcetera when the towers fell (9/11) and the National Guard was called up. Coupled with the Base Realignment and Closure Act implementation in the 1990s there were just a lot of organizational changes that contributed to, let’s call it, disorganization. Misinterpretations of others may have occurred concerning my being a Navy employee in the Navy program (called the Cooperative Education Program back then) to recruit those working on their bachelor’s degree in engineering in order to ensure their future civilian staffing needs were met. Naturally once one graduated one was no longer eligible for that employment program and so the Navy, through its chain-of-command, would have to dismiss those not making adequate progress or keeping their grades above a certain threshold and in the case of those that graduated to make a decision of whether to convert that student employee to a career employee (that is, regular employee) or to not continue their employment. I was given good reviews and so shortly after I graduated, I was converted to career employee (from the student employee status) also known as a federal employee within one of the Navy’s facility commands.

Naturally, being that low in the command structure (it is a long ladder from entry –level engineer to full working, independent status or even into the ranks of management) most of the issues that occurred during my career were way above the vision and overall view that those at the full working level or in management (both military and civilian) would have had. (Note - Independent does not mean independent of the chain-of-command.) So, when called to a meeting under nefarious seeming circumstances and put in a position of having to lead that meeting and putting my foot down at the notion of clean air act waivers and boondoggle environmental projects, I likely will never have the full insight on what that meeting was all about. But, as with other seemingly nefarious issues and circumstances, it seemed to me that all those issues were resolved way back when those things happened and that management had a good grasp or understanding of the going on.

But a lot of personnel (civilian and military), not to mention business across the country, faced the prospect of losing their then current means of earning a living, and those stresses may be why some suspiciously acting people said “they are looking the other way,” and “they reformed the FARs, so we can do what we want,” or otherwise relied on rumor and grapevine talk rather than using proper chain-of-command protocols to determine what was actually what. Such stresses may have acted under that common saying with the Army, you better ask for permission rather than relying on forgiveness but that with the Navy, its better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission. With me, my only involvement with contracts and construction contractors was during my student employment (and that last year of employment before getting fired). It is not always easy to distinguish for most folks the difference between construction and engineering, but when it gets to the nitty gritty, there is a definite and distinct difference between what the engineers do and what the contracts department (and those involved on construction contracts) do.

I was fired in 2007. As I said in that first paragraph, “There was a lot of worry, anxiety, people called to action, etcetera, etcetera …” at that time and so went on with my life. My relatively low seniority when I started my career, other aspects of BRAC, rumor and grapevine talk, or even people actually trying to exploit the Navy’s student employees or possibly to commit fraud or corruption represent just way too many variables for me to ever understand all that was going on way back then. The latest reminder of my firing (the periodic reminders being the only reasons I ever brought this stuff up to anyone in the first place) was just a year ago and comes at a time that, if I had not been fired, I would be filing for retirement. I really have to wonder of someone was playing a long con or, as I have wondered in writing and aloud over the course of the two decades since my firing, “is this a case of a decades long (1991-2007) multi-state (CA, AZ, TX, IL) racketeering-stature criminal conspiracy to defraud the Navy (or perhaps myself if they got me confused with someone born with a silver spoon in their mouth).”