Sid and The Patriot Files

[David]

I have been debating posting this for the last couple of weeks but I feel I have to add my experiences with Sid in light of all the people defending him as an honest upright guy outside of this incident. As some of you know I built and then hosted the psycho vets website many years ago for Sid. He immediately went about selling a number of items on that site, t-shirts, bumper stickers, patches, etc., etc. I did not ask him to pay me to build the site and offered to do it for free which I did. I did ask that he payed $12.99 a month to offset the cost of bandwidth of the site and to help pay for patriotfiles. I do not remember how long he actually payed the $12.99 a month but after a number of months he stopped. I tried repeatedly to contact him and he ignored my emails for close to 6 months. I finally pulled psychovets offline. This was the first red flag I had with Sid.

Fast forward to a couple campouts into the run of campouts he hosted. He contacted me and said he wanted to take up a donation on the mountain for patriotfiles. I had not approached him regarding this, nor had I hinted in any way that he should do this but of course I was happy to hear that more people wanted to pitch in. After the campout I never heard back from him. I had no idea why he had brought it up if he did not intend to go through with it but I just dropped it. He did this again at least a couple more times over the years that I remember and possibly more. I never knew if he had taken these collections until yesterday speaking to a longtime member of the site on the phone I was told he had indeed taken collections for patriotfiles on the mountain. I can assure you he never sent a bit of those donations to the site.

Now fast forward again to my move to a new location in WA state. Not long after I got here it became clear that I was going to have difficulty paying for the site as I did not have a job yet and had mortgage to pay. I made a post on patriotfiles letting people know I needed to hit $200.00 a month in donations to keep the site online. Many people pitched in and we did actually reach $200.00 a month. It was a great relief as I did not want to close the site. This was working well for a while but then one of the servers blew and the site was down. I was again contacted by Sid at this point. He stated that his son worked for IBM or had contacts there and could get servers for little to nothing. I told him I could not even afford a couple hundred dollars as bills were pressing at the time. He told me he would arrange for the servers to be delivered free of charge after asking for the specifications I needed. At this point I noticed people beginning to drop their subscriptions and it was not long until we were below $100.00 a month again in donations. I waited as long as I could for Sid but he never contacted me back after getting the specifications for a server. I finally used an old computer I had loaned to my cousin to get the sites back up and eventually bought a new server from craigslist. Sids delay really had caused problems though as most people by that point had stopped contributing to the site when it was most needed. I do not know why Sid said the things he did but I suspect he may have been using the specifications I sent to solicit computer equipment donations for himself in light of the fact that he used the site to solicit money donations that he then pocketed.

[darrels joy]

Rest assured, when I get back to work our monthly donation will resume.

Hang in there.

Joy & Darrel

[Arrow]

David,

Thank you for bringing this out front. I know it was not something you take pleasure in doing. It's been a hard decision for you to make. I don't know who you talked to yesterday and I don't need to know. I'm just thankful for your sake this matter is out in the open. There is never any healing in any family until all the problems are on the table and a heart to heart discussion comes about. It may hurt like heck at the time but sometimes brings about an even stronger family unit. We will see.

You've got a friend in Indian Territory,

Arrow

[MSP39]

Sorry that all of this happened David, I thank you for this site and hope to contribute soon to the fund when things get better finacially here.

I echo Arrow on her comments.

[Whale]

I'll help out as soon as my balance turns black. This is a good site.

[03Fox2/1]

David,

I can see how you may have had conflicting feelings about posting this but in light of all that has transpired lately concerning wannabes, especially 39 and now Sid, I do appreciate your honesty and candor in sharing this information with us. As I said on the other site, I am going to put my money where my mouth is and give you a donation soon. It seems in retrospect that there were several indications that possibly the words and actions of Sid did not support each other. Hindsight makes us all smarter and let's hope the next wannabe or someone who attempts to steal the honor of others is quickly discovered and ousted long before he can become so ingrained in the make-up of these forums. Again, my thanks for posting this.

Semper Fi, Scott

[Keith_Hixson]

So sorry to hear about Sid's exaggerations. I try never to exaggerate (unless I'm fishing ) and I am disappointed when people do it. Still trying to figure out where the true ends and lies begin. But is getting to be obvious that Sid wasn't totally forthright. So Sorry.

Keith

[ussfa344]

Guys,

I am most likely wasting my time even bringing this up, but perhaps someone that is still in contact with sid could let him know that a good first step towards making ammends for all this would be to somehow foreward the momey collected for this site to David, and at least set that part of this whole sordid affair right.

Robert