No matter where you go or where you work, there are going to be insecure people. And some of those people are going to find a way to leverage their way up the chain of command by sheer seniority, or by finding ways to “fail upward”. Usually, someone promotes a problematic person as a way to get rid of them in a way that won’t cause them to complain.

This encounter reflects something that happened to one of our young Captains early in our rotation to Kosovo, where he was moving a large armload of boxes somewhere and he got stopped by a Major with apparent self-esteem issues and insisted on getting saluted.

Now, here’s the thing about saluting: yes, you are supposed to salute a superior officer, but there are times when you are not required to salute… and one of those times is if you are working and your hands are legitimately occupied with a task. This doesn’t mean carrying a clipboard or coffee mug in your right hand so you don’t have to salute; this is if both your hands are required to maintain control of the task you are doing. Forcing someone to halt a task in progress to require them to salute you may be technically in the rules, but is seen as petty and a waste of the soldier’s time.

In this case, the new Brigade is showing up to replace our people. and Captain Jackie Tracz gets stopped by someone who really needs to find better ways to spend his time.

And why is CPT Tracz wearing a green baseball cap instead of a camouflage patrol cap? We were given –for “esprit de corps”– permission to wear baseball caps with company unit logo patches on them as long as we were on post (if we left Camp Bondsteel in uniform, we had to have military-issue caps).

I suppose people see Army Aviation having something like that and assuming that we relax our standards, and love to complain about “the Army’s Air Force”. Just remember, if you complain about Aviation but then want to go for a ride, you might want to remember a few extra barf bags.