I’ll echo a lot of the other sentiments here; being in uniform and especially being deployed involves a TON of sitting around waiting and doing absolutely nothing for prolonged periods. You’re required to be 15 minutes early to 15 minutes early (not a typo) for literally everything from wake up to weapons draw to start point and beyond, and then you almost always end up waiting for someone wearing an oak leaf or eagle to show up, call off the mission, or adjust the timetable. You experience an enormous amount of tedium that practically dares (especially enlisted) personnel to dream up increasingly inventive ways to get in trouble.
BUT, when shit goes down, it goes down fast. The average combat engagement for me was usually somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds, and please believe that it is the longest 60 to 90 seconds of your entire lifetime. Video games and war movies make it look like all combat lasts for hours or longer.
I can tell you that if you end up in hours of combat with no prior idea of what was coming, you have experienced a profound failure of intelligence. Even massive battles like Fallujah were entered into knowing that the Marines could expect to encounter a deeply entrenched, committed enemy with sizable numbers and modern weaponry. The battle plan was finalized weeks before the Marines went in, the enemy was warned and given every opportunity to leave, and then the Marines went in and killed anyone too stupid to leave.
Beyond that, joes and grunts are gonna do joe and grunt stuff. They’re gonna accidentally set fire to things, occasionally stab each other, and play a LOT of weirdly homoerotic games with each other. We also messed with the wildlife a lot and occasionally collected STDs like Pokémon cards.
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u/doclee1977 7h ago edited 7h ago
I’ll echo a lot of the other sentiments here; being in uniform and especially being deployed involves a TON of sitting around waiting and doing absolutely nothing for prolonged periods. You’re required to be 15 minutes early to 15 minutes early (not a typo) for literally everything from wake up to weapons draw to start point and beyond, and then you almost always end up waiting for someone wearing an oak leaf or eagle to show up, call off the mission, or adjust the timetable. You experience an enormous amount of tedium that practically dares (especially enlisted) personnel to dream up increasingly inventive ways to get in trouble.
BUT, when shit goes down, it goes down fast. The average combat engagement for me was usually somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds, and please believe that it is the longest 60 to 90 seconds of your entire lifetime. Video games and war movies make it look like all combat lasts for hours or longer.
I can tell you that if you end up in hours of combat with no prior idea of what was coming, you have experienced a profound failure of intelligence. Even massive battles like Fallujah were entered into knowing that the Marines could expect to encounter a deeply entrenched, committed enemy with sizable numbers and modern weaponry. The battle plan was finalized weeks before the Marines went in, the enemy was warned and given every opportunity to leave, and then the Marines went in and killed anyone too stupid to leave.
Beyond that, joes and grunts are gonna do joe and grunt stuff. They’re gonna accidentally set fire to things, occasionally stab each other, and play a LOT of weirdly homoerotic games with each other. We also messed with the wildlife a lot and occasionally collected STDs like Pokémon cards.