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I started out as a private and then went to sergeant before I became a Lt., and then went to cpt.
You'll understand me, as one former NCO to a former-NCO-turned-officer, with all the brotherly love I intend, when I say: Fucking traitor. :>
FWIW, one anecdote among many:
My former father-in-law was a ring-knocker, Master's from the Sorbonne, five percenter, but also very deeply principled. He all but resigned his commission when he was a major because his Bn Cdr kept him (out of petty jealousy and punitive BS) out at Yakima during a measly mini-deployment when his wife was suddenly admitted to the hospital with aggressive cancer and their two young daughters were alone in the house. It was just stupid.
The post commanders' wife eventually heard about this, urged her husband to act, and he sent a Huey out to get the major. The brigade CO talked him out of resigning, brought him up to Bde as S3, gave him a stellar OER -- but he never forgot, and turned down battalion command when he was selected for it.
As a logistics officer at the Pentagon, he also discovered that there was no way the force could logistically support our OPLAN for returning forces to Germany if the Soviets came over the Fulda Gap. He tried to fix this, wrote a rather detailed classified report that went nowhere, and sought permission ... denied ... to publish it in Military Review and see what the rest of the officer corps thought about it. After getting rejected, he spent nine months re-writing the same report from unclassified sources, published it in MilReview, and got the changes pushed through. Eventually, they selected him for a star, even though he hadn't punched any of his command tickets ... but he said, forget it, and retired. Last I heard, he was agitating for changes to Tricare.
As you know, there are guys like that out there. They get their beat-downs, they dig in and persevere, and sometimes, they come out on top. I have a tremendous amount of respect for them, and several of them have been a big influence on me.
