Four checklists. Four authorities. None of them talking to each other, and not one of them telling you the order or the pace.
Every one of them is authoritative inside its own lane. None of them owns the seam between them — and the seam is where retirements go sideways.
Your retirement date is what the paperwork keys off. Your terminal leave start is what your life keys off. Sixty to ninety days sit between them, and nothing in the official sources flags the gap.
Every item is sequenced backward from the two dates that actually move the work — not forward from today, which is how everything else is built.
Facing his own retirement, the founder was handed what every retiring sailor is handed — four separate checklists, none of them sequenced, no single source telling him the order or the pace.
So he bought a twenty-four-month wall calendar, laid all four out on the kitchen table, anchored his retirement date and his terminal leave start, and backward-planned the entire process by hand. Colour-coded by type. Buffer built in on every step that depended on somebody else's signature, because he learned early that nobody out there moves at your pace.
It worked. And nobody should have to build it twice.
A retired Navy Mustang — twenty years, six enlisted and fourteen commissioned. Hospital Corpsman to Surface Warfare Medical Department Officer. FMF enlisted and FMF officer. Naval War College and Maritime Advanced Warfighting School. One retirement, walked from both sides of the line.
Every item carries the date it hangs on, the source you can go read for yourself, and a rank lens for the mess or the wardroom. Verified as of a date you can see.
We can't make NPC route your package faster or make the VA schedule your physical sooner. Nothing can. What we can do is make the dependencies visible early enough that you stay out in front. That's the only promise here.
Leave your name and I'll tell you when the doors open. One e-mail a month until then, and each one will contain something useful.
One typed field. The other two are taps, and they are the only reason I ask: so I know whether to send you something useful for T-20 or T-6, and whether to write it from the wardroom or the mess. No spam, no selling your address, leave any time.