Equipment Sign Out Forms: Fill & Download for Free

We had an officer who one day decided to do just that- with flair. He came on duty, stood roll call, gassed the patrol car at the City lot and drove from Montgomery, Alabama to New Orleans, LA. His girlfriend, who lived there, met him at a department store parking lot. He changed out of his uniform, locked all his issued equipment in the trunk along with the keys and made a long distance call to the desk. He told them exactly where they could pick up the vehicle and equipment, and no-one ever heard from him again.For anyone who says he should have been charged with stealing the car, it was signed out to him. In Alabama, the only thing they could have charged him with would have been Unauthorized Use Of A Vehicle, a misdemeanor. They couldn't sign a warrant without a current address, so they swallowed the bitter pill and let it go.I imagine he didn't get a good reference for future jobs.Oh, forgot to mention this was in the mid-1980′s.

What you get to keep depends on what you are able to acquire above and beyond the gear you are issued. When I was in the Air Force they kept track of gear on paper. It was very inefficient. Also, I managed to pick up a few minor piece along the way. I left service with some spare M16 magazines, a kevlar helmet, 5–6 A-bags, several canteens, a camo poncho, a set of wrenches, a couple of pairs of handcuffs, a “Deadly Force Authorized” sign in English and German and a few other odds and ends. A guy I know who stayed in until retirement stated that he had the opportunity to acquire a set of PVS’7’s and a thermal imager while in Iraq, but didn’t. If it isn’t signed out to you and they don’t know about it, you have an opportunity to keep it. Weapons and expensive gear will be tightly controlled, but in a war situation the controls on all but weapons get a bit looser. However, if you “acquire” something and it is known that a buddy lost the same item, you’d better give it up. Also, just because you can keep something does not mean that it is ethical or even a good idea.

I was a young A1C working alert at Kunsan AB, South Korea back in 1992. The alert facility had just opened up and myself and a young buck sergeant had been tasked with the first rotation as weapons troops at the facility. We had two F-16’s and a backup fueled and ready with 2xAIM120’s, 2xAIM-9’s, a full load of HEI ammo and wing tanks parked in revetments about 200 feet from the building where we ate and slept for a week at a time. The jets would scramble anytime there was a reconnaissance asset in the air or whenever a practice was called.The second time we had jets scramble, one of them comes down and on post-flight inspection, one of the wing fuel tanks needs to be replaced. No problem - we de-arm the tank and the air frame guys get busy pulling the tank and replacing it. The super in charge of the alert facility and we the weapons troops all know that a functional check must be run on the new tank. Being a go-getting young trooper, I tell him to bring me out to the flight line - we can sign out the test equipment and not bother the weekend duty crew - the sarge and I can handle this no sweat.We get the generator and air hooked up to the jet and sarge climbs into the cockpit thinking to himself - ‘test station 4… don’t test station 6…’ So of course he punches up his SMS, selects station 6 and pickles the button. He asks if I am seeing the light on my tester and I ask nervously ‘are you on station 4?’ to which he replies ‘no, i’m on 6′… my next question, which I knew the answer to and wanted to die before asking was ‘did you de-arm station 6?’ He had not - nor had he disconnected the live missiles, nor had he installed the hold-back tool on the live gun.It was a lot of fun telling the crew chiefs that they now had to swap the wing tank on the other side - oh and explaining the whole thing to the weekend duty crew and my shop chief when he showed up was awesome too. Luckily for me I was ‘the dumb airman’ and not responsible — little did they know that I was the ‘brains’ behind the incident…Could have hurt a lot of people and destroyed a lot of property if things had gone wrong… Luckily it was just a few hours work that was lost…Most boneheaded play… ever…