Longer than 2.5 days.. You will be in the hole.
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sTUPID qUESTIONS aBOUT ocs
- Thread starter TheBubba
- Start date
Longer than 2.5 days.. You will be in the hole.
Hey guys, did a search for this without any real answers. I just got FS date for March 4, 2o12. My brothers wedding is April 21. I am the best man and the wedding is in Connecticut. Will I be able to request to leave for it only 6 weeks in to OCS? If so, my brother is wondering if I will have any dress uniforms at that point - he would like me to wear one if its not uncouth for Candidates to do so. Thanks!
AA75, if you get a chance to get onto AW, this is good advice. Get the hell out of OCS, recharge your batteries, and take all the leave you can.
In the very, very near future, you'll be looking over your LES and trying to plan out a day or two between deployments, workups, dets, weekends, holidays, duties, etc. in which to burn some leave (that you'll inevitably lose on Oct 1st, anyway).
If the Navy is giving you some time to take leave, TAKE IT.
Gee dangit. Well I wonder what my options are. I suppose there is no way for civilians to change OCS dates, but I swear in tomorrow I'll have to ask my OR. Unless anyone else has some super advice or someone with an earlier class date wants to swap, my brother is gonna be pissed!
Best advice: Get used to it. Things like this are going to happen all the time during your time in the military. You're going to miss birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, you name it. That's just the nature of the business. Sometimes, you'll be lucky enough to make a phone call or Skype. At OCS. . .probably not so much.
If you make it clear to your class team after RLP that your brother has a wedding coming up, and you were hoping to be able to make a phone call at a certain time to congratulate them, they may go for it, or they may tell you to wait until your specified time for your phone privileges.
Don't. Do. This.
Think about how many candidates will gladly take your spot if you change dates because of a wedding...a spot you may never get back, because it'll appear to your recruiter that you're not the committed candidate he thought you were.
Like eas7888 stated, in the military, you are going to miss important events in the lives of your friends and loved ones. If this is something you can't deal with, you might want to consider a new line of work.
FWIW, I was there, on the flight line after a deployment, when a fellow pilot met his son for the first time...at the age of 7 months. This is not uncommon, by the way.
I will say this, the military is getting better. Though not much, service members now have the option of taking 10 days of paternity leave when their spouse (not sure if it's an option for a 'baby mama') has their child. It's not much, as you can still miss the first year of their life, but it's certainly a start.
Yeah, but I doubt very seriously that would ever fly on a deployment. My brother was actually able to watch his son's birth via Skype on deployment (gross, but cool).
Take some time and sit down and explain to your brother the truth, and the parents too for that matter if you desire. You're signing up to become an Officer, with that there are oftentimes sacrifices that you will have to make in order to get to where you want to be. Although it sucks, this is one of them. If your brother REALLY loves you and wants whats best for you, he'll understand that you're about to embark upon something that is way bigger than yourself and that this is completely out of your control. You will have 1 bazillion other chances to look fancy in your uniform at weddings, graduations, class reunions, etc.
He'll be more proud of you when you earn the right to wear your blues/whites at the Commissioning ceremony. But as everyone else stated, especially in aviation and moreso during training (flight school), you will miss A TON of stuff. I've missed more weddings (really fun ones too), bachelor parties, regular parties, NYE parties, Christmas (yes I flew during the entire christmas leave period last year), Thanksgiving, other miscellaneous holidays ,etc. It's the nature of the beast man and your family will understand....or if they don't they will at some point because they'll be forced to do so.
Maybe the weekend of the wedding, if you go up your chain of command at OCS and ask the proper way, maybe your Class O and DI will decide to be nice for 5 min and let you call your brother to congratulate him and give him an update on your progress and talk to him. That's not the same as being there, but for me and I'm sure for many others, hearing the sound of your familys voice, no matter who it was, was something that helped keep me going and was almost a stress reliever many times.
Well, I don't know how the Navy works (yet, still getting there), but in the Army, our unit was required to make the travel arrangements for the soldier, even when we were in the CENTCOM AOR.
That's awesome! I personally haven't heard of that in the Navy, but then again Army deployments are way worse than ours so it's good they are able to do that.
