This is a list of talking points I put together for another 1SG. You may find it helpful.
We produced a newsletter for Sept/Oct and are working on a monthly “Accomplishments and Efforts” email blast and digital brochures to assist with explaining the importance of being a member. Until that brochure is produced, here is a quick set of points to hit when talking with your Soldiers:
“Old School” Issues that we worked at the National Level over the years:
Access to facilities on base: Since you have been around the block for quite a few years, you remember when the National Guard were not allowed access to the PX and Commissary on bases. Back in the late 80s, the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States (EANGUS) fought at the nation level to at least get partial access to those facilities for National Guardsmen and got a law passed that provided the National Guard with the pink cards that were punched every time a Guardsman entered the facility, and you were limited to 12 visits per year. Every year we got a new card until EANGUS was able to get phase II of the law passed allowing for unlimited access. So, Soldiers today have grown up never being denied access, but it was you and I that remember the days when that benefit was off limits.
Better Equipment: It was not many decades ago that the National Guard would get equipment that Active Duty had already moth-balled and put out on static display near the parade field. Today, the National Guard receives up to date equipment, and in some instances, we get equipment before Active Duty gets it. Again, a benefit that today’s Soldiers enjoy, but don’t understand that we had to fight for those things. Imagine deploying like you are now with equipment that Active Duty got rid of 10 years ago…..
Educational Benefits: Federal Tuition Assistance has been cut off twice, just in the past 12 months. Once because of sequestration, and again because of the government shutdown. It was EANGUS that fought to get that turned back on as quickly as possible. What the politicians like to do is use the military as pawns in a game of budget chess, and out of the Military pawns group, the Active Duty look at the National Guard as the lowest form of pawn. When it comes time to cut the DoD budget, the national guard loses equipment first, loses personnel strength first, and loses benefits first. Currently, if you are in the National Guard as a Soldier, you are eligible for Federal Tuition Assistance. BUT, if you are in the Air National Guard, you do not get that benefit. It is because the Air Force does not fund their Federal Tuition benefit like the Army does for the Army Guard. Keep in mind that if the Active Duty Air Force can prevent the Air Guard from getting that educational benefit, then the Active Duty Army can do the same thing, and the only thing stopping them is resistance from Associations like EANGUS. By the way, when the Post 9-11 GI Bill was passed, it only recognized Title 10 service for qualifying for the benefit. Remember what title of orders you were under during Katrina……that’s right, Title 32, and none of that time counted towards the benefit, but all of those UNARMED Soldiers from Ft Bragg that came in with Gen Honore were receiving credit towards higher levels of Post 9-11 GI Bill.
Tricare Reserve Select: Currently, you and those you are deployed with have healthcare under Tricare. However, those Soldiers who are traditional guardsmen back home are not eligible for Tricare. It was not until late 2007 that the National Guard was afforded Tricare Reserve Select as a benefit for their service. We have to pay an insurance premium to get it, but at least we have something that we can purchase if we so choose. Ask yourself why we were not “good” enough to get this benefit back in 2001, or 1991……? I’ll tell you why. It was in 2007 that Active Duty realized that they could not fight 2 wars at the same time, and they had to rely on the National Guard as an OPERATIONAL force, rather than a STRATEGIC reserve, in order to accomplish the mission. And if we are going to be used as an operational force, then we ought to have some benefits that are on par with the rest of the OPERATIONAL force…. So, EANGUS fought on Capitol Hill to create Tricare Reserve Select. The next question you should ask your Soldiers is this….now that the Iraq war is over and Afghanistan is shutting down, what makes you think that Tricare Reserve Select will remain an option for the National Guard? Do a quick Google search and you will find countless stories about how military healthcare costs are eating the DoD budget alive….etc. If the National Guard Soldiers and Airmen of today are not careful, they could find themselves without a healthcare benefit that most of them have probably just assumed has always been there and will probably continue to be there forever…. I assure you that if we don’t fight to keep what we have today, Active Duty will try to get rid of it in the next round of budget talks.
Your drill check: If nothing else gets their attention, this one will. Ask one of those Soldiers that doesn’t understand the importance of joining EANGUS and LANGEA if he know how many days of pay he gets for a two day drill? You may find one or two won’t know the answer, but the National Guard gets 4 days of base pay for a 2 day drill. Next, ask them why? Ask them why they get 2 days of pay for every day they spend at drill. They will most likely struggle for an answer, or come up with something like “because we do more in 1 day than Active Duty does….etc. The fact is that those in Congress don’t know why the National Guard gets 2 days of pay for every day of drill either, and it didn’t take long for someone to suggest that they could save money in the budget if we simply pay Guardsmen 1 day’s pay for 1 day’s work. What that means for the National Guard is that their drill check just got cut in half, and they just earned 24 less retirement points each year. This issue was brought up when the Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation report was given to Congress, and EANGUS fought it and things have died down in D.C. for now, but a new round of budget issues will be hitting us in Jan/Feb of 2014, with another round of government shutdown happening again….maybe. This is why membership is so important. It gives the Associations the resources (funding and speaking voice) to ensure that the National Guard does not go back into the closet like we were in the 70’s and 80’s. The truth of the matter is that the Guard is under paid when it comes to total compensation. Ask yourself this…. If the service needed your skills in another unit, say at the 1SG position, what is the likelihood that you are going to be able to stay at the same armory down the road? Slim to none! Chances are that the military is going to expect you to progress in your career, become a leader, and take a position in a unit that is now hours away from your original duty station. How much money is the military going to pay you to commute to your new duty station…..? Absolutely nothing! However, if you were on Active Duty and they send you to another duty location, even temporarily, the Active Duty Solider would get travel pay, per diem, etc. When you really put pen to paper, the National Guard is a great financial bargain for the defense of this nation and its interests (see attached letter from the Pennsylvania TAG), but we have always been (until recently, perhaps) treated as second or third class. If you want proof of that, just look at the video of the Joint Chief’s testimony to congress in 2011 when we were trying to get the National Guard 4-Star General as a statutory member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Basically every Active Duty general said that they do not support it and it took politicians to make it happen. It was because of EANGUS and NGAUS working with politicians in D.C. that it happened, and they did it against the wishes of 6 different 4 star generals (1 for each branch and a vice-chairman and a chairman). The videos are here.
Early Retirement: If you do a 20 year career on Active Duty, can you retire at the end of 20 years? Absolutely. If you do 20 years in the National Guard, can you retire at the end of those 20 years? Again, absolutely. But here is the difference. Active duty gets 50% of their base pay immediately upon retirement. The National Guard gets a pro-rated check based on the retirement points earned during those 20 years, yet they have to wait until they are age 60 in order to get their pro-rated “fair” check. Ask yourself why we have to wait to get a pro-rated check? The answer is because when that arrangement was negotiated many, many, many years ago, there was no Enlisted Association for the National Guard who would stand up and fight for getting our pro-rated, fair, “beer-money” check as soon as our Active Duty counterparts got theirs. So, now, we are trying to get National Guard retirement checks early, based on how much we deploy, and the current law says that for every 90 day period that a Guardsman spends deployed in a fiscal year, they get their check 90 in advance of their 60th birthday, and they can continue to get early retirement credit for up to a total of 5 years, so if a Guardsman spends enough time deployed, they can potentially get their retirement checks at age 55, but that is it. Here is the rest of the story, and this should tick you off…….every 90 days you spend deployed has to begin and end within the same fiscal year because that was the way some genius politician wrote the law (which we are trying to fight, by the way). So, if a National Guard member deploys on September 1st of 2013 and stays deployed until August 30 of 2014, that is an entire year deployed, but because they got in the box 1 month before the start of a new fiscal year (October 1), they don’t get credit for the first full 90 days…. All because of four words added to the current law: “in a fiscal year”. Get rid of those 4 words, and all of your deployed time will count towards getting your fair retirement check just a little bit earlier. In my opinion, we should get the pro-rated check the month after we retire, but I will take what I can get now, and then go back for more, a little bit at a time. It is a constant battle, and we need membership in order for politicians to take notice and listen. If we speak for 1,000 people, that doesn’t get attention. If we speak for 100,000 members nation-wide, THAT gets attention.
Veteran Status: HR 1405 passed the House yesterday. It conveys veteran status on those Guard and Reserve members who serve honorably for at least 20 good years. Originally introduced as stand-alone legislation by Rep. Tim Walz, the measure was added to a bill that also would require the secretary of veterans affairs to include an appeals form along with any benefits-denial notification. Rep. Tim Walz, life member of EANGUS and Minnesota Congressman, spoke on the bill just before it passed on a voice vote. Bottom line on this one is that it still has to pass the Senate and then get signed into law. We have some ways to go yet, but this is the stuff that the EANGUS National Office does every day, and while I agree that we need to do a better job getting the word out, just because we are not in front of everyone every day giving updates on 50 different pieces of legislation, does not mean that we are not accomplishing anything. We have a Facebook page and a website with news articles that give a snapshot of the past week or month’s efforts. It is the best we can do with the time we have at the moment.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/LANGEA/
As for local Louisiana efforts:
We are working on getting the 25% Auto Insurance Discount to apply to ALL National Guardsmen, not just Active Military Personnel (AMP), like it does now. By the way, if you are deployed and did not fill out the 25% Discount form and send it to your Insurer…..your losing money, and quite a bit of it.
Take a look at the new facilities that have been built around the state. That takes a “lobbying” effort and educating our elected representatives at both the local and state level to find the funding.
State Tuition Exemption Program – If you think that this money just appears every year for the National Guard, then you are living under a rock. The education dollars in Louisiana have been, and will continue to be, a finite resource and LANGEA puts effort into keeping that funding in the budget every year. Ask some of your Soldiers that are using the benefit if they are a member of the very Association that fights to keep that benefit funded……shouldn’t take much to get them to understand that a $36.00 membership is cheap compared to them paying their own way to college.
Getting Hunting and Fishing Licenses back to the way they were under Gov. Foster. Currently, we can get a discounted license because the LA Dept of Wildlife and Fisheries was short on funding many years ago and they took away the free license. Today, they have funding, but are not too interested in putting this benefit for National Guard service back into the law. We are working on it.
$250,000 no cost insurance policy while deployed. This is something that you are currently enjoying while deployed, however, when this was originally signed into law, it was not funded. That was just after Louisiana lost over a dozen Soldiers in Afghanistan. It took over a year to get the funding approved in the budget before those Soldier’s families were paid the benefit.
For those with a Louisiana State job, we supported the law to award military service credit towards the state public retirement system.
There is another bill that will be taken up in February that will prohibit civilian employers from terminating employment of a service member for attending medical appointments necessary for veteran’s benefits.
We are also supporting legislation that makes it a crime in Louisiana to impersonate a veteran or the fraudulent representation as a veteran-owned business.
And, if you have stuck with this email this far, let me end it with this thought. I agree that nobody likes to be told that they have to do something, especially when there is little time to bring everyone up to speed on why. That being said, there are very few things that are being shown “special attention” that are not for good reason. It boils down to trust. Do you trust that what you are being told to do is valid and the right thing to do. The Louisiana National Guard and the National Guard in general live in a constant balancing act of taking cuts in manpower, equipment, and benefits. Especially now. If we are not careful, the National Guard will go back on the shelf and the benefits that go along with service will disappear, along with troop strength in our units. The point of all of this is retaining our Soldiers and Airmen and keeping them in uniform. Many of the things that need to be done are things that you and your Guardsmen cannot do while in uniform, but as a part of an Association, you can get involved in legislative issues and become a strong voice, but only with strong membership numbers will it truly make a difference. Encourage and educate your Soldiers on what their membership means to the entire Louisiana National Guard. Together, we can do great things for ourselves and those who choose to follow in the coming years. Let’s leave the Guard in better shape than when we found it, but if you are forcing people to join, that is counterproductive and filling the Association with people who have a bad taste in their mouth about the very entity that is making life in the National Guard as good as it is right now.
I am ready to conduct educational briefings at any unit on any drill that we can coordinate (once everyone gets back, of course). I am confident that Soldiers and Airmen will join the Association if we take the time to explain it, and I appreciate you bringing this issue to the surface. I will ensure that LANGEA and EANGUS get better material in the hands our Enlisted leaders so that they have the tools that they need to reach our membership goal. If there is anything that we can do for your Soldiers and Airmen, please let us know.
