Originally posted by warrenchmobile:

I am an old soldier and prone to "war stories," so here is one of mine:

In January 1976, I was stationed in Germany but scheduled to leave one Monday morning for a new assignment in the United States. The flight wouuld be on a comercial passenger airliner chartered by the Air Force to move service members and dependents from Germany to the States. The local Military Personnel Office could not find my field personnel file. Their solution: take the scheduled flight and they would mail my field personnel file to my new duty station when they found it.

I rejected that because I had called that office every day for the preceding two weeks with no results. I doubted their efforts would be improved by the removal of daily reminders.
They did find my file but could not get it to me before my original flight departed so I had them schedule a later flight.

I made that flight with my field personnel file. It was, however, on an Air Force cargo jet rather than a chartered airliner. I sat in a pressurized, heated cargo bay. In a commercial airline seat clamped to the floor; an economy seat, mind you, not business or first class.

The flight attendant was an Air Force crew chief whose attentions consisted of giving me a box lunch with cold fried chicken, two slices of bread, a pickle, and a half-pint of milk before the flight took off. Oh, and hearing protection. That was a ball of beeswax to divide in half, knead to the desired shape, and stick in my ears.

No in-flight movie or music, no magazines. One could stare at the cargo, crated jet engines, coffins, and whatever else was being hauled; most of which would not have fit in the cargo bay of a commercial airliner.

Aesthetically, the worst flight of my life. But I got to New Jersey alive and in one piece with my field personnel file. Overall a success.

Sometimes just have to do the best you can with what you have.

Jesus man, no-one faking asked. And this story is so far detached from the persons issues that it simply doesn't relate....

I'm sure everyone has a story where they have to overcome some great ordeal only to eventually come out successful but they don't apply to everything. You don't have to 'suck it up' or 'learn to make do' with every single faking thing in life just because you had to stick bees wax in your ear once. Learn some perspective man.

Oh, thanks for your service.