The Long Blue Line (WINTER 2020)

NATIONAL RETIREE
COUNCIL CO-CHAIRS
WELCOME TO A NEW DECADE! We hope that you all enjoyed a peaceful 2019 holiday season with
family and friends. While the anticipation of what 2020 and beyond holds for us all awaits, you are currently
reading one new development. As announced in your last newsletter, the National Coast Guard Museum
Association has graciously partnered with us to assume the role of publishing our hard-copy retiree
newsletter going forward.
Our goal is to provide you an enhanced product that incorporates everything you are used to seeing
in your newsletter – plus more! Whether you are reading the hard-copy or electronic version of our new
newsletter, we invite your feedback, both positive and negative. We want this next generation of the
retiree newsletter to be as useful to all of our retirees and annuitants as possible!
We realize that our retiree and annuitant community is a diverse one. Many of you are actively pursuing
post-military careers and continuing to raise families. Some of us are lucky enough to be at the stage of
pursing personal passions that had been on hold throughout both Coast Guard and second careers.
Many of you have chosen “permanent moorings” and are simply enjoying closeness with family and
friends while working to remain as healthy as possible throughout our ever-increasing golden years.
Whatever your situation, we strongly urge that you connect with one of the 18 regional retiree councils
nearest to you. All 18 regional councils and leadership contacts can be found under the Retiree Services
Program tab at dcms.uscg.mil/retiree. Joining a regional
council will ensure that you are not only kept advised of
retiree activities in your geographic area, but also provides
you an additional link to the distribution of important and timesensitive
retiree/annuitant information. Your national retiree
council is pursuing a goal to assist each regional council to
become as robust as possible. But it all starts with you joining
your regional council. While never required, please consider
offering to assist your regional council in whatever ways your
time and interests afford. Remember the words of General
James Doolittle: “There is nothing stronger than the heart of
a volunteer!”
Finally, we met with our Commandant, ADM Karl Schultz,
MCPOCG Jason Vanderhaden, CG-1 RADM Joanna Nunan,
and their staffs on 31 Oct 2019. Our annual brief to the
Commandant was a robust one-hour conversation regarding
the issues most important to his retiree/annuitant community.
We spent a good amount of time discussing success factors
regarding the new retiree newsletter.
But most importantly, we reviewed in detail the continuing
issue of excessive processing times of audit error worksheets
(AEWs) at PPC; a required step to authorization for a
concurrent VA disability annuity. ADM Schultz “gets it” that
delaying deserving retirees access to earned VA disability
pay, for whatever reasons within PPC, is unacceptable. Thus,
elsewhere in this newsletter you will read a letter from CG-1
outlining the “tiger team” approach in progress to resolve this
long standing issue.
RADM Jeff Hathaway, USCG (Ret)
hathaway.cgnrc@aol.com
MCPO Kevin Isherwood, USCG (Ret)
Kevin.D.Isherwood@gmail.com
2 WINTER 2020
THE LONG BLUE LINE