This is STRANGE: Air Force halts voluntary separation pay, 15-year retirements

[3catwoman3]

5. I spent 4 years on active duty...

...in the Air Force nurse corps, as a pediatric nurse practitioner. I took care of the kids of service men and women. Later, I spent an additional 8 years as a reservist, most of it as an IMA - Individual Mobilization Augmentee. Sort of like a one-person reserve unit - you do your reserve and active duty at the nearest base, even if there is no attached guard or reserve unit.

Military pediatric clinics are always back-breakingly busy, and the clinics at the 2 bases where my husband was assigned during those 8 years were always delighted to have an extra pair of nurse practitioner hands. The last year I was in, it was suddenly dictated that everyone must have "war readiness skills," and I was no longer permitted to fulfill my commitment in the peds clinic during the annual 2 week active duty requirement. I was assigned to the ER for one of the weeks, and the Aeromedical Staging Flight, which in-processes patients being airlifted back to the states from overseas, for the second. After spending my entire career dealing with ear infections, diaper rashes, and all the other pediatric slings and arrow, you can imagine how useful I was in those 2 urgent settings.

This was about a year and a half before the first Iraq conflict under Bush 1. I was quite certain, looking back, that plans for that were well underway at the time at the time I was no longer permitted to use the clinical skills that had previously been valued. I was pregnant with our first son at that time. I was able to resign my commission after he was born, thru a loophole. Resignations had been frozen, but there was no way I was going to leave my baby.

This announcement reminds me of all of that. Someone is probably planning something.