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I was in the military when Clinton and Carter were in office. It is very frustrating for the military. Personnel are drastically cut and you can't get spare parts, but the mission doesn't change. I was a vehicle mechanic at a Radar sight in Germany during the Carter years and we couldn't get spare parts. We had buses that we used to transport personnel to the outlying radar sights and some of them were broken when I arrived and stayed broken for the whole three years that I was assigned. They were bluebird school buses - nothing special. They took off-the-shelf parts, but we still couldn't get them.

We were prying apart flasher units that were sealed and rewinding the wires on the magnetic coils by hand to try to get the blinkers to work. They would work for a couple of days and then we had to do it over again. We cannibalized parts off the "hanger queens" that stayed broke to try to keep the few buses that we had running. We had guys who were going on leave to the states pick up parts that we paid for out of our own pockets.

We were authorized twice as many personnel as we had assigned, so we usually worked from four in the morning until the last bus returned at 7 p.m. and was fixed and ready to go out at 5 the next morning. We only had about eight buses that were running and we needed every one of them to get all the crews to both radar sights. As they say "Failure was not an option". We had to keep all eight buses running no matter what. Sometimes that meant working all night long and grabbing a couple of hours sleep in the back of a truck or in the break room. The last three months I was stationed there we worked 12+-on and 12-off with no days off.

I retrained into command and control while I was at that station and spent three months during the winter sleeping in a tent on the shores of the North Sea. We returned to garrison and didn't even have time to completely unpack before they sent us to Saudi to live in tents for another three months.

If my wife hadn't been pregnant at the end of the tour and the economy still in the tank, I would have gotten out of the military. As it was, we ended up getting a divorce because of the stress it caused on our marriage. Now that I'm older and less self-centered, I can understand the stress that she was under. We lived off base because there was not enough on-base housing for Jr NCOs. There was no English-speaking radio or TV available. There were no Americans anywhere near where we lived and we couldn't afford a car. We borrowed a car once or twice a month to do grocery shopping. The rest of the time my wife sat alone in an old drafty farmhouse with no one to talk to and nothing to do.

The damage that Carter and Clinton did wasn't fixed when they left office; it will take decades to fix. The bottom line is that a lot of people in the mid NCO ranks got out due to the stress. That creates a gap in the enlisted force that takes 10 years or more to fill. The equipment was so run down that it took at least five years of the budget cycle to repair or replace it. That money should have been spent on other priorities.