Military Leave and Sick Days

by Hap Rocketto

Getting time off from work to participate in an active shooting schedule is a problem most folks face. It is tough to find a happy balance of limited vacation time between the requirements of shooting and what is required to be good family man.

This problem has been a constant source of irritation in the high power community since the National Rifle Association and the Civilian Marksmanship Program have gone their separate ways at Camp Perry. The CMP Games and the M1A Match have been added, as well as a few others, to expand the schedule. However, the placement of the Games and M1A Match, between the National Matches and NRA Championships have caused more than a few shooters, with limited free time, to choose one match series over the other.

When I first started the important matches, the National Trophy Individual Match, the Presidents Hundred, and the NRA Championships to include the Wimbledon and Leech, were so scheduled as to start on a Sunday and end the following Sunday. It was eight days of shooting which only required you to burn five days of vacation unless you were way far away from Perry and needed more than one day’s travel time.

My employer had a liberal military leave policy which allowed me to use my annual training time in bits and pieces when I was shooting for All Guard. This annoyed the school business manager whose brother, ironically enough, was a general officer in the Connecticut National Guard so she was somewhat familiar with the system. Our contract read, “three weeks in a calendar year” and this was interpreted to be 21 days. Used judiciously that turned into four work weeks if your orders were cut properly. It wasn’t hard to get my orders cut properly as the man doing it was also the State Marksmanship Coordinator who earned a promotion because of the team’s success. When I would file my paper work the business manager often said that I was wrong taking the leave because I enjoyed what I was doing. I wasn’t wrong, but she was right-I was enjoying what I was doing.

On another occasion I requested a half day of military leave on a Friday so that I might comfortably travel to Quantico for a regional. The weekend traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike makes it one of the world’s largest six lane parking lots and I hoped to avoid the situation by getting off to an early start.

I found myself emptying my mailbox of its load of circulars, catalogs, and assorted correspondence a few days before the match at Quantico. After filing the next week’s lunch menu and events calendar I opened an envelope carrying the return address of the school’s central office. The enclosed document was my request for the military day. Scrawled on it was a note from the superintendent denying my request. Furthermore, he went on to say that that I had already taken some military days already and had better watch out in the future.

Under the conditions of my contract my request for leave was rhetorical and the veiled threat angered me. As I was getting ready to take my complaint to my union representative I noticed that there was one more piece of correspondence from the superintendent. It announced that school was going to be cancelled on the day I wanted to take off. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing.

My joy ride could not last forever and one year I ran out of military leave just before the Sawgrass Match in Florida. I decided that I would take a chance, knowing that I was doing wrong, and book out sick on a Friday so I could fly down on Thursday night and shoot all three days. I had gone years without using a single sick day and thought that no one would think it amiss.

That weekend in Miami I had three of the best days of shooting in my life. After the match I posed for the obligatory photos and answered a few questions from the match staff. I returned home laden with NRA points, trophies, glory, and bit of sunburn in plenty of time to make it to school on time Monday morning.

It turns out that contract negotiations were going on at the same time and the union and the school board had reached an impasse over the issue of sick leave. Central Office was convinced that many teachers were abusing sick leave. I suspect they were right. I may have built up an incredible number of days but there were many of my colleagues that used them as fast as they got them. The basketball coach, for example, was notorious for not being in school after a loss. He was lucky we got 15 sick days a year because he played a 20 game schedule and he was a poor coach.

A few days after I got home the sick leave matter was again raised at the bargaining table. The chief negotiator for the school district stood up and held aloft the morning edition of the local newspaper. It was open to the sports page.

He thumped his hand against it and angrily bellowed, “Your union brother Hap Rocketto called in sick last Friday!”

There, on the sports page, for the first time that I could ever remember, was a report about a rifle match and it was accompanied by my Florida photo.

The silence in the room from the union side was deafening.

After a few heartbeats the Union’s chief negotiator Ed Lang, a good friend of mine, leapt to his feet and in defense of both the union and me cried out, “Wow! Just think of what kind of score he could have shot if he hadn’t been sick!”