Lt. Commander Bill Goss, USN (Ret) is an internationally
known speaker and author. Enlisting in 1974,
Bill worked on underwater weapons in Europe
for the U.S. Navy until he was discharged
as a Mineman Second Class in 1977. A former New Jersey Golden Glove boxer, Bill was also the light-heavy weight boxing champion at the U.S. Naval Air Stations in Pensacola, Corpus Christi, and Jacksonville. After his enlisted tour of duty, Bill attended
Rutgers University on the GI Bill and earned
an MBA from the Southern New Hampshire University. Bill graduated Aviation Officer
Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida, and
earned his Navy Wings of Gold the following
year in Corpus Christi, Texas.
As a P-3
Orion pilot, Bill flew missions against
Soviet submarines in the North and South Atlantic
and Mediterranean and deployed to a very wide
variety of sites around the world. He became
an instructor pilot in the T-44 Pegasus and
then the Assistant Navigator of the nuclear
aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, deploying
throughout the Pacific from the Vinson's homeport
in the San Francisco Bay area. Bill and his
family returned to the east coast where he
flew P-3 Orions and a variety of other aircraft
while working for the admiral at NAS Jacksonville.
While there, Bill was diagnosed with a rare
form of cancer called amelanotic malignant
melanoma, had surgery, and retired from the
Navy. Bill is the author of The Luckiest
Unlucky Man Alive: A Wild Ride Overcoming
Life's Greatest Challenges -- And How You
Can Too. His second book, published by
Simon and Schuster's newest hardcover imprint,
Atria Books, is titled There's a Flying
Squirrel in My Coffee: Overcoming Cancer With
the Help of My Pet.
Bill is a contributing writer to many other
books including the New York Times bestseller,
Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul. Bill's life story has been featured on national
and international radio shows, and in publications
such as the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles
Times, New Jersey Star Ledger, The Dallas
Morning News, The St. Petersburg Times,
and Maxim Magazine.
A motivational and inspirational speaker,
Bill is featured every month on the Discovery
Channel's Animal Planet. Bill's mailing address
is:
Bill Goss International
P.O. Box 7060
Orange Park, FL 32073
What Robert Stumpf represented to American taxpayers in 1991 was a fighter pilot so well trained and so experienced as a leader and war fighter that his value as an asset to the United States was almost incalculable. But I can tell you this ... to the American taxpayer Robert Stumpf was worth many MANY millions of dollars.
Governmental decisions based on political correctness squandered all of that real and intrinsic value, resulting in a gigantic net loss to the American taxpayer.
What am I talking about? Well, you see, I was a Navy pilot, and on good days I was an average one at best. And we won't talk about the bad days. However, by the end of my career, just the accumulated fuel bill of the planes and ships I flew or navigated (and once even crashed) amounted to many millions of taxpayers dollars. And I'm serious, I'm only talking about the fuel bill. But that is just the cost of doing business if you are going to have aviators in your military, especially when most are just average military aviators ... because, lets face it, in any given group, the large majority of us are just average.
Well, by no stretch of the imagination was Robert Stumpf anywhere remotely near average. A combat experienced fighter pilot and leader of such ability that he commanded what so many believe to be the top military flight demonstration team in the world, THE BLUE ANGELS, the level of skill and experience this man had as a leader in the U.S. Navy was truly worth 100 times if not a 1000 times more than myself.
Yet in the 1990s our government threw all that value away, all for the sake of political correctness. Dumb.
Let's face it. The Tailhook debacle of 1991 was a mess. A military officer is supposed to act like an officer and gentleman at all times and under all circumstances. However this is totally unrealistic because this would then mean all military officers were perfect, and this is not only not true, but it is impossible, because obviously no one is perfect ... not even Naval Aviators. But when in public places and when in public view, military officers should represent themselves properly or they should be punished. Some officers at Tailhook represented the U.S. military poorly at Tailhook and they deserved to be punished ... and they were punished.
Yet the political correctness after Tailhook 1991 was a different kind of political correctness. It was all-consuming. It said that if you were at Tailhook, regardless of whether you represented yourself poorly or not ... if you were there, you were going to get punished, no matter what ... and no matter how huge an asset the training you received and the skills you learned and the freakishly God-given natural talents God imbued you with as a warrior that virtually no one else in the world had ... if you were at Tailhook, your career was history. This represented a mega-loss to the American taxpayer, which includes you, me and even Robert Stumpf ... who, like the rest of us, has to pay taxes too.
So a few weeks ago, a wrong was finally righted in a Clinton Administration decision that was overturned by the Bush Administration. And finally, yes finally, a post active duty promotion was approved by William Navas, the Asst. Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. In a July 23 memo Navas wrote that retired Commander Robert Stumpf should finally be elevated to the rank of Captain, six years after he gave up trying to fight the politically correct machinery of the time, even though four investigations had cleared him of any wrongdoing at the 1991 Tailhook Convention. Navas could not have stated it any more clearly in his memo than with the following statement: "I conclude at this time that an injustice has resulted in not promoting petitioner to the grade of captain."
Many in the military, especially in Naval Aviation, felt that Robert Stumpf had been part of a witch hunt against all the naval officers who attended the 1991 Tailhook Convention, even though attendance was almost an absolute requirement for certain leaders within the tactical aviation community. Of course, I'm referring specifically to those genetically gifted aviators who first volunteered to and then qualified for the chance to be catapulted off and trapped aboard one of our multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-owned and paid for, nuclear aircraft carriers. And I want you to know that I was not one of these people. I flew P-3 Orions, a very capable land-based reconnaissance aircraft, but it did not land on ships ... which was a good thing for me, because I had enough trouble just landing on land.
Very few people in the world have the training or the natural ability to lead two thousand sailors and aviators, the approximate amount that comprise an entire aircraft carrier wing. That kind of person is a true, I mean really TRUE, one in one hundred million person (in other words, maybe 60 people in the world, at any given time, have exactly what it takes to pull this off successfully).
Without a doubt, Robert Stumpf was one of these 60 utterly extraordinarily capable human beings ... and that's why we, as taxpayers, lost a lot of money to political correctness in the 90s.
What was the American taxpayers' loss, was a gain for FedEx, where Bob Stumpf now flies cargo jets. One man who fought very hard to get Stumpf finally promoted to captain was a former Navy pilot himself ... Senator John McCain.
Stumpf's name had been approved for promotion to captain in 1994. But the then Secretary of Navy John Dalton pulled his name from the promotion list again and ordered a fifth inquiry. Yes, you read that correct ... a fifth inquiry. I guess when you are cleared of any wrong doing in the first inquiry, the second inquiry, the third inquiry, and the fourth inquiry ... it just makes politically correct sense to have another inquiry, and then another, and another ... however long it takes ... until you either achieve the verdict that you want to hear ... or your extraordinarily capable fighter pilot throws up his hands in disgust and for his family's sake, he does something totally out of character for himself ... he quits the fight. We're talking about fighter pilot (in truth a fighter/bomber pilot) trained at an extraordinary expense to lead other fighter pilots off the pointy ends of ships, into battle, and then back to what looks like a postage stamp in the middle of an immensely dark ocean for a super high stress arrested gear landing.
Oh yeah, that was smart, getting rid of Robert Stumpf, yeah, that made a lot of sense ... well then I've got some Florida real estate to sell you ... (I really do!)
Well, that wrong has been finally righted by the present Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England. Thank you, Mr. England.
Through Stumpf's attorney, Charles Gittens, the following statements were issued: "My family and I are exceptionally pleased by the Navy's decision. We hope this is the beginning of a measured re-examination of the injustices accorded to hundreds of naval aviators whose promising careers were terminated prematurely during the shameful political hysteria following the 1993 investigations. While it is nice to set the record straight after all these years, I sincerely regret that I was forced to leave active duty service before my tour of duty as a carrier air wing commander, a position for which the Navy had invested so much in preparing me. Likewise, it remains painful and frustrating to have to watch from the sidelines while my former colleagues prosecute the war on terror."
As taxpayers, Robert, it's painful and frustrating for us too. We know you would have done an incredible job as one of our finest trained leaders in the global war on terror ... a war we cannot win by being politically correct, but by being blessed with gifted and dedicated military leaders like yourself, with life experiences that uniquely prepare you for a pinnacle point of military leadership ... and those talents are wisely used and not foolishly squandered away due to naïve political correctness. Because in the global war on terror, the naïve will always lose. Always.
