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You ain't gona like this......

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Gatorman

Snot-nosed college boy!!
Joined
Jul 24, 2003
Posts
416
Go ahead TSA..."F" with the Marines again.
If this doesn't pi$$ you off.....




Trio escorting body of fallen comrade are stripped of dress blue coats, searched at airport. I guess they must have been profiled as potential bad guys ready to inflict terror in the good old US of A. Maybe if they were carrying a Mexican flag they would have been waved through........ando

By Gidget Fuentes
Times staff writer

It wasn’t the city of “brotherly love” for a trio of Marine noncommissioned officers escorting the body of a fallen Marine through the Philadelphia airport.

Each decked in their blue dress uniforms, the three enlisted Marines made their way through a security checkpoint at the Philadelphia International Airport about noon on May 3 when they were pulled aside by security workers with the federal Transportation Safety Administration.

The Marines — a sergeant and two corporals — were escorting the body of Sgt. Lea R. Mills from Dover Air Force Base, Del., to his family in Gulfport, Miss. Mills, who was married and lived in Oceanside with his wife, was killed in Iraq on April 28 by a roadside bomb. He was one of three leathernecks killed that day in Iraq’s Anbar province.

They were brothers-in-arms. Like Mills, the Marine escorts are members of the Camp Pendleton-based 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion.

The trio had to go through the terminal’s security in order to reach their flight that would take them to Houston and make sure that Mills’ body was properly placed on the airplane. While their uniforms likely would trigger the metal detector, they had figured they would be able to zip through the screening process and get on with their business.

“Wearing the blues, the metal detector is going to go off,” said Sgt. John Stock, a mechanic, who was accompanied by Cpls. Aaron Bigalk and Jason Schadeburg.

But as the Marines went through the initial screener in their dress blues, they were stopped by several TSA agents. Each was told to remove their dress uniform blouse, belt and black dress shoes, which were scanned by the detector, as the agents scanned them with hand-held detecting wands.

“They had me take off my shoes and ran them through the screening,” Stock said, speaking by phone May 5 from Gulfport, where the men are helping with Mills’ family and funeral support. “We all got searched.”

Then they were taken to a nearby room, where TSA workers patted them down.

At one point, Stock’s shoes disappeared, leaving him to frantically search for them and retrieve them from a TSA agent. Separated from their belongings, which included the flag that they bore that would drape Mills’ casket for the rest of the journey home, they worried about getting to the gate in time to ensure his safe placement in the airplane.

Time, it seemed like a half-hour, clicked by. “I was like, hey, we need to be on the tarmac,” Stock recalled. “It just took longer than it should have had to take.”

The agents said nothing to explain why all three were singled out for additional search and the Marines didn’t protest. “We were just trying to get there as quick as we could,” he added.

In all, it was a humiliating experience that left them angry.

“They could probably tell that I was pissed off,” said Stock, who noted that he’s never encountered that kind of search when going through airport security in uniform.

“I understand if I was in civilian clothes. But with what we were wearing and what we were doing … ,” he said, noting that “we had the flag with us.”

A call into TSA’s public affairs office in the D.C. area was not returned as of press time.

“The Marine Corps is currently cooperating with (TSA) to resolve this matter,” the command said in statement issued May 5 and provided by 2nd Lt. Lawton King, a 1st Marine Division spokesman at Camp Pendleton.

 
Considering the talent pool the TSA draws their screeners from, I'm not the least bit surprised this happened. The TSA is probably the most diverse, laziest, ignorant, self-important, least trained workforce in the history of the US Government. I'm just sorry there wasn't a widespread ruckus from the crowd in line.
 
TSA = Totally Suck Ass

If you even use your military ID at a major hub, you get 'extra' attention
 
Easily the most clueless group of people on planet earth (in general). It leaves one to ponder whether they've had the common sense trained out of them, or if they ever had any to begin with. I'm seriously trying to think of an organization filled with as many... Okay the Special Olympics, but that's different.
 
KarmaPolice said:
Easily the most clueless group of people on planet earth (in general). It leaves one to ponder whether they've had the common sense trained out of them, or if they ever had any to begin with. I'm seriously trying to think of an organization filled with as many... Okay the Special Olympics, but that's different.

the special olympics.....that hilarious......wait, no it isn't.....yes it is....


ak
 
How 'bout a contrary view from a jarhead?

The TSA is clueless...no question...but their bosses aren't dumb. I can buy a set of dress blues at a surplus store and shave my head. "We're here to escort a body".

This escort team should have done it right...and bypassed all that crap. The CACO should've contacted the airline's cargo boss and arranged for the escort to enter the SIDA area under esort by properly-badged rampers. In my experience (too much of it!), the rampers would've fallen over themselves to help under those circumstances.

At NWA our MSP cargo boss is a retired Marine LtCol, and every body we've had through here has been given superb VIP treatment, including the escorts. In at least one case, "Buster" even spent the night in the cargo hangar with the remains of a Marine in MSP when his local escort didn't show due to a comm error.

The TSA is infested with bozos, so it's incumbent upon the military to recognize the best "work-around".

If you're Active Duty, spread the word!
 
Occam's Razor said:
How 'bout a contrary view from a jarhead?

The TSA is clueless...no question...but their bosses aren't dumb. I can buy a set of dress blues at a surplus store and shave my head. "We're here to escort a body".

This escort team should have done it right...and bypassed all that crap. The CACO should've contacted the airline's cargo boss and arranged for the escort to enter the SIDA area under esort by properly-badged rampers. In my experience (too much of it!), the rampers would've fallen over themselves to help under those circumstances.

At NWA our MSP cargo boss is a retired Marine LtCol, and every body we've had through here has been given superb VIP treatment, including the escorts. In at least one case, "Buster" even spent the night in the cargo hangar with the remains of a Marine in MSP when his local escort didn't show due to a comm error.

The TSA is infested with bozos, so it's incumbent upon the military to recognize the best "work-around".

If you're Active Duty, spread the word!

I'm not defending the TSA, but I was thinking the same as you Occam. They shouldn't have been put in that situation.
 
One more thing: The airlines need to get smart on this too! We have a special POC at NWA to handle remains, so I know it can be done. Maybe a courtesy call to each airline's P.R. boss to make sure the person who takes the shipment request frags the cargo people at every stop on the mission.
 
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I just think that the TSA took this one too far and should be called up on the carpet for this. This is just outragous.
If it were just a body in a box that was being escorted by a funeral director, would he have gotten the same treatment? Maybe.

These are United Stated Marines performing a duty out of respect for a fallen vetran who lost his life defending our Rights.

Maybe we should go back to right after 9/11 and have the Guard pulling duty at the airports. I know that it will take less people to do the work and respect will be both taken and given.

I could not believe what I saw the last time I flew from DFW to PBI and back. Most of them looked like they lived in the trailer park at the end of the runway. One guy even looked like Ted Kuzenski (SP?) the unabommer with a wand.

Creapy.

I would hope that some one from the director of the TSA's office could read all of this tread.
 
Gatorman, I am on board with you in the sense that the loss of dignity of the escort is unforgivable.

That said, if I'm TSA, there's no way I'm allowing ANYBODY through security without a search, period. The bad guys have shown again and again that, while warped, they're pretty clever about setting up unanticipated attacks of unusual form.

If I'm head of that TSA station, I would have, with great discretion, taken the Marines out of public view for a search. The body of the fallen hero would be checked using whatever means is normal for cargo. Obviously the body and coffin are not going through security topside, they're down below.

This was handled VERY badly by the TSA.
 
The TSA are definately clowns, and things still get thru. In Jan I flew from MCO to LGA, and later found that I had forgotten about my Super Leatherman in my backpack (Carry On) the whole way...They never found it. lol
 

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