Today proved to be more of the same for me. Amazingly, there's a silver lining in that. We finished our medical outprocessing. Once that was complete, the unit moved on to the administrative portion. The most important part of that is a form called DD214. That is a soldier's record of active duty. It is the key to proving everything the soldier is qualified for, entitled to, and eligible for. The desired end-state for today was for everyone to have their terminal leave computed, release from active duty orders (REFRAD), travel claim complete (we earned a small per diem for the entire mobilization), travel arrangements for going home and a DD214. Most everyone completed all of the above. I didn't. Although it means I have to stay a day or so longer, the reason is the silver lining.
The Army now has a new policy that allows Reserve and National Guard soldiers to qualify for "administrative leave" during mobilizations. This is in addition to their regular monthly accrued leave. Normal leave is accrued at a rate of 2.5 days per month. The admin leave is accrued according to how many months a soldier has been mobilized since 2001. If the total months is greater than 24, the admin leave is accrued at a rate of 4 days per month. That's me. I accrued 60 days of admin leave over the course of the deployment. When added to my regular leave, I have almost 90 days of leave I will take once I leave Camp Shelby. The problem is my orders only go until 5 May 08. That means my orders have to be extended in order to allow me to take my leave. The request for extension goes from Camp Shelby to Army Human Resources Command. It's not a "same day" turnaround. I can't complete all the admin outprocessing until I have the extension approval from HRC. It will take a day or two for it to get back to Camp Shelby. Once they have the approval, I will finish my outprocessing and go home. In the meantime, I got to watch the soldiers in my unit begin leaving to go home. All the members of my team are now gone. They all left (very happily I might add) as soon as they were done. By the end of the day there was only a skeleton crew from my unit remaining.
Since there was nothing else I could do I went for a long, outdoor run. Then I went out in town with some of the remaining soldiers. We ate supper at Copeland's (a premium restaurant chain owned by Al Copeland, the founder of Popeye's Fried Chicken). I had gumbo, catfish and corn maque choux. The beverage of the evening was Abita Amber. All in all, a good night was had by all.
I still don't know when I fly home.
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