Travel claims…
Anybody that spent time in the military has a ton of stories of travel claims gone wrong. Juvat’s four part tale of woe over at Old AF Sarge HERE makes me wonder how THAT travel claim went, and it reminded me of one such incident that happened to us back in the day.
Normally when you deploy as a squadron you’re on what is called blanket travel, e.g. one set of travel orders for the entire squadron. However…
We were detached from the deployment site for various missions and thereby lies the tale…
We were detached on a set of 3 day TAD orders to go from site A to B to fly one mission. Having flown said mission we were preparing to depart when we received ‘further tasking’ from higher, now requiring us to go from B to C (and change operational commanders). So two more flights from C and we’re… NOT going back… Now going to D…
From D we fly one mission, recover at E, fly and back to D on day 11. With me so far?
So we finally get told we can leave, fly back to C, crew rest and get up to go back to A… Not so fast, changed orders from original operational commander now wants us at location F… Sigh… And it’s COLD, and we have flight suits, and shorts and polo shirts… And we’re out of money… And have been for a week…
On arrival at F, we go on alert to fly… for NINE @#$%^% days… and never fly. Finally get a day off, then five more days on alert, before we’re released.
Finally arrive back at site A 26 days after we left on a 3 day trip… A hour after landing, we’re told we’re going BACK to site F 12 hours later, and spend another two weeks there, flying twice (on another set of TAD orders for 3 days).
Now as all good aviators know, you always get your orders stamped in and out on travel (CYA don’t you know)… Problem was Site E didn’t have anybody that was Navy to stamp the orders, so the USAF det stamped them, before we went out to the hotel (and didn’t stamp quarters not available on the orders).
Soooo… End of deployment, and we are all frantically digging in helmet bags, Nav bags, and flight suits for old copies of TAD orders, receipts, etc. Manage to find enough to cover all the dets (59 days of a 178 day deployment), and the entire crew duly fills out the claims so that everyone’s matches (I think it was something like an 11 page claim)…
And we Xerox and attach probably an additional 30 pages of documentation, orders, receipts, etc. to each claim. As the mission commander, it was my job to make sure they got into Personnel so they could be submitted for payment, so after a double check, I trot my happy ass down to Personnel, turn every body’s claim in rubber banded together to the Personnel Chief (Now my Nav at the time was a finance and accounting major, he’d done some calculations and figured we were owed somewhere between $2000 and $3000 dollars).
A month, maybe a month and a half goes by, most of the people in the squadron have been paid, and not a single one of us has seen anything… So I go talk to Personnel, they tell me to wait, Travel will get to them eventually…
Another couple of weeks go by and finally the flight engineer gets a check. For $21!!!
WTF???
I tell him don’t cash it, and back to Personnel I go… Get the Personnel Officer in his office and I ‘think’ I might have been a tad irate about this time… So he calls over to Travel- Sure enough NONE of us is getting over $50 back. I think I might have made a mild threat about this time, and told him ‘I’ was personally going to Travel to chat with them.
I stopped back in the office on the way out the door and picked up my Xerox copy of the claim I’d submitted and off to Travel I went. After a couple of rounds with the front desk and one supervisor, I finally got to the Travel Officer, and he saw that I wasn’t going away. So he calls in the Chief and one of the people to ‘explain’ to this dumbass aviator why he wasn’t getting any money back. Low and behold, they bring in our claims and there is not a SINGLE piece of paper for justification attached!!!
I show them the Xerox of my original claim, and they profess ignorance, saying they can’t pay and almost but not quite accusing me of defrauding the government by filing a false claim. I point out each copy that supports every TAD trip, and the Chief seizes on the 3 day cum 26 day trip, stating they were only valid for the 3 original days. He needed more documentation to actually prove we’d been to the other places, to which I pointed out the various stamps on the reverse…
Still not good enough… At this point I was pissed, so back to the squadron I go, and into the vault, because I knew there were classified orders directing us place to place. Sure enough, I find message traffic from higher to the CO directing each step of our trips. I get with the custodian and he makes up a package of all the messages, and signs them out to Travel with me as the courier for the next morning.
Next day it’s back to Travel, and I walk into the Travel Officer’s office package in hand, and flop it on his desk and tell him to sign. Of course he wants to know what he’s signing for, and about that time the Chief comes in. I tell the officer it’s classified message traffic up to X level, and verifies all our travel. He literally refused to touch it, and looked at the Chief, telling him to take the copy I’d brought of the justification and pay us. The Chief had done some checking and told me as an aside, that when the paperwork had come in to Travel, there wasn’t ANY justification attached to any of our claims.
Back to our Personnel office I go, and find out the asshole assistant personnel officer decided since the travel claims didn’t all fit in the boxes he had, to rip our 30 pages of justifications off our 11 claims so everything would fit in the box.
Sigh…
Two weeks later we finally got paid, almost a month later than the rest of the squadron.
OBTW, that asshole assistant personnel officer is now flying for Delta and STILL can’t sign for an airplane… 🙂
