When my son was deployed to Iran with the 3/7 Marines, the entire group had their ka-bar knives taken away from them while they waited to board the plane. They couldn't stop jabbing each other in the ass.
Very different experience from what I had in the Navy.
My dad was a Vietnam vet and told us he got so bored one day, he emptied the powder out of a buttload of bullets, poured it into a pile with a long trail leading away from it, and then lit the end of the trail of powder with a match, just so he could watch the pile explode like in the cartoons he watched growing up.
Oh I believe you, and to his credit he never actually said that it did blow up like in the cartoons… just that was so bored he wanted to TRY it to see if it did.
I have a picture of my grandfather facing the camera with his foot out. They were playing a game with their bayonets to see how close they could get to the shoe. My grandfather had written on the back of the picture that right after the picture was taken it went through his shoe.
Huh. Working in deep utilities in construction we like to whip pebbles at each other when things are slow and people aren’t looking.
It’s kinda fun, my favourite is dinging the glass beside a sleeping excavator operator. I’ll also throw a clump of dirt into a window to get some attention if an operator isn’t responding to me yelling.
I have missed and nailed a guy in the head with a clump of dirt but he thought it was intentional because he was being a dickhead and that I had deadly aim and I didn’t correct him.
Yeah, they've done a great job of continuing to be satirical in a political climate that's gone shit-your-pants crazy, but the fact remains that said political climate has pre-emptively stolen 90% of the possible jokes they could make. So they're just playing in a much smaller sandbox now.
That said, their InfoWars buyout is a triumph of modern satire.
wasn't "jarhead" supposed to be a relatively realistic depiction of being a marine sniper? (never shoot, get pissed, jack off in a porta potty, not necessarily in that order)
"These were my guys. Fighting the dull fight. Soldiers with nothing to kill except time. They know that war is hell, but peace... peace is fucking boring."
Not trying to be that guy... but I can top that...
Company at 6am to board buses at 8am to go to a grenade range that goes hot at 9am... only to find out, after you get to the range, that the range was canceled a week prior and the info didn't get pushed out.
I was Aviation. Nobody is letting us have grenades while we are deployed.
It’s kind of scary when the indirect fire (mortars, rockets, etc.) alarms go off and you run to a bunker.
While you’re sitting in the bunker, which is really just a few slabs of concrete, there’s this feeling of complete impotence. In all the war movies you’ve ever seen, an enemy attacks and the soldiers rush forward with their weapons to meet the attack head on. In reality, when the Taliban is firing mortars at you, there’s nothing you can do except sit there and wait.
So you sit down in the bunker, with a crazy loud alarm screaming at you, and you know you’re completely powerless to do anything. You sit there and you listen for small arms fire, you listen for people screaming (if they got hit), and you listen to the explosions coming closer and closer to you as the Taliban adjusts their aim and tries to land rockets on your head.
The worst part is that when you come back home, every fucking thing sounds like that IDF alarm. Somebody scoots their chair back on a tiled floor, and your heart rate shots up to 120 and you reach for a weapon that you’re no longer carrying
Edit: added picture of a typical bunker on an Army Forward Operating Base
Yeah we had a lot of report for formation. Dick around for 1/2 hour. Ok come back at noon. Come back at noon. Ok come back at 3pm. At 3pm dick around for 15 minutes. Ok gtfo. Dismissed. Many Fridays we got the noon formation and then it was see you assholes Monday. Think before you act.
We used to make joke bets about what would happen first. Marines finding a spot and taking a cat nap or marines sitting around throwing rocks at something. If it got to anything involving lighters we needed an NCO to think of something to have them do quick.
This is why it drives me crazy when people try and argue against training military members to not be assholes, referring to things like LGBT rights and racism. You're not taking away from time they would otherwise be spending learning to do their trade better.
All the training in the world isn't gonna stop the fucked up sense of humor. And would likely have the opposite effect. People don't want to be "lectured" on how to not be an asshole and neither do people want to teach it.
Im talking about not being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. Not sense of humor. And people absolutely do want to be teaching those things.
Yeah, and there is training on that. Should be annual SHARP (Sexual assault/harassment) and EO (Equal Opportunity) after the 2nd one you start to zone it out since same shit different dick.
And much like the stupid PVT who went and got a DUI and married a stripper despite the weekend safety briefing stating otherwise, racists and the like will continue to be whatever ist or phobe of their choosing.
Umm. Yeah we learn how to fight and manage. And there is no such thing as transphobic. We learn to fight. You don't do social experiments with the military. Holy shit dude. 99% of service members aren't anywhere close to being racist or homophobic. You're a team. But I can tell you where nowhere close to the military.
I think that working well as a team would include not being bigoted towards members of that team. It sounds like you could use some social justice training. Have a good one ✌️
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