Ha ha!  Just wait till the first time he arrives at an assignment, with all his household goods still in transit from his last base, only to be told not to unpack since he's been reassigned elsewhere.  Ha ha!  Oh, the joys of enlisted life. [/sarcasm]

June 30, 1994.  Mike had been assigned in Alaska for a year, while the three babies and I had to stay in Georgia.  Mike was offered two assignments when his year was over (serving "remote" does entitle one to benefits, after all - not that he chose his remote assignment in the first place):  Griffiss AFB in Upstate New York, and Tinker AFB in eastern Oklahoma.  Tinker is only a few hours away from my family, and after living 16 hours away for six years, I would have liked to be close to them, but the group Mike would have been assigned to there was a "mobility unit," which means that all the equipment they work on is far away, so they spend two or three weeks on the road and then a few days at home, and then a few weeks on the road again, year round.  I don't have to tell you which base we chose.  Besides, Griffiss was scheduled to close in Sept of 95, so we knew we'd only be there for a year, and thought it would be really nice to have a real, snowy winter just once.

So Mike flew home from Alaska the second week of June and he took three weeks of leave to give us time to visit family before leaving the South.  We arrived at a hotel in Rome NY, around 4pm on the 30th of June (have I mentioned that there was still snow on the ground?) and called his shop to let them know we'd arrived.  "Don't unpack," the guy said.  "You've been diverted."  Diverted, where, pray tell?  Why, to Tinker, of course!

Turns out that this guy had been manning the shop alone for four months (and it was a sitation where they needed someone on call 24/7) and, although the shop was never supposed to have fewer than four people, and although four people had been assigned there and should have been arriving about the same time we were, all four of them had been diverted.  I guess they figured the poor airman could continue to man that radar 24/7 for the next 15 months until the base closed!

Well, the next day Mike made some phone calls and explained the situation quite clearly, including the fact that the military was in violation of whatever code it was that said that the shop had to have no fewer than four people, and given the nature of the job, there were serious safety issues when one person had to man it 24/7, which this airman had already been doing for several months, and the Inspector General probably wasn't aware that this was happening...

We got to unpack after all.