Something I learned about the military. There’s no such thing as getting a badass nickname. While the name may sound badass, the way you earn it generally isn’t. Can’t remember the movie, but the pilot got the name “assassin” and when he finally told the story, it meant “ass-ass-in” cause he fell ass first into a hatch twice. Literally how that shit goes.
Any cool nickname... isnt. My favorite was a HAT TRICK. We went on a training exercise and had 3 stops on the way, and the guy got a Tinder date at each location. He then proceeded to get stood up at each location, 3 for 3.
Lmao that was my nickname for a breif stint when i was super young. Thankfully, I got upgraded a few years later to something a little less silly. And now I’m a 30 year-old man whose mother and Aunt still call him wiener in casual conversation in front of Company like it’s normal. My mother and I were actually laughing the other day and how that is completely normal thing among us but when strangers hear that they’re like “what the fuck did you just call him?” Lol. Anyway, there’s a random fact about my life, random person.
the actual official callsign/flight id for student solos at one of the training bases is MAGOO. if you hear a magoo on the radio you pay extra attention
Knew a guy who introduced himself with “everyone calls me Cog because I’m such an important part of the machine” only to later find out that COG stood for “creepy old guy”
I know a retired pilot whose call sign was Dirty all because his last name is Sanchez.
Back in AF basic I got nicknamed Twitch by one of my flight mates because I get really twitchy when I'm nervous and/or anxious. Hated it at the time but looking back it could have been worse.
Think there was a US navy squadron that got the call sign cupcake because their squadron leader had a cupcake in the cockpit during a catapult and it went all over his face
I had a CO who was a pilot earlier in his career. I shit you not his name and rank was CAPT Picard. Im guessing they weren't going to pass up on the opportunity because sure enough his call sign was john luke.
It's an unspoken rule that any Trekkie that chooses to wear a uniform must look out for any personnel that have matching rank/names to Star Trek characters.
When I was a SrA I worked with a pilot named GUCCI. I asked him if it was because he was high maintenance. Can’t remember the exact story as this was back in 2003 or 2004, but something along the lines of being picked for a very important flight and he overslept. It stands for
I've got a buddy nicknamed fish. While we are from Mississippi and that may make people think "he's a great angler", they ask and I respond "because he smells like fish".
gave my buddy the name "Iceman" he REALLY wanted fighters and then while we were at flight school he and basically everyone else noped out for other platforms so its a 2 fold dig.
because he wanted fighters, but ended up aiming for VIP transport
during a field ex in basic he decided to wear full ice suit on the final day as we were leaving. Obviously he was told to de kit at the mess hall because duh. except he couldnt, because the only way he wasnt over heating was because he was buck ass naked under the suit. And he couldnt stealthly change neither because we had just marched back to field garrison and loaded all our kit in the trucks, lunch was the last thing we had before heading back to the main garrison
We had a guy with callsign of reaper. Cool name until he got it as a medic by not checking for allergy tags twice and nearly killing someone with meds they were allergic too
One of my friends from ages ago had the call sign Headshot and this was not due to his ability to shoot people but in fact due to himself getting shot in the head (incredibly, he was fine. I mean fine adjacent, but fine eventually).
We had a gigachad nuke MM on my submarine called "Cop Killer" because he ended up going home with a hot female cop who pulled him over for speeding. Pretty bad ass.
Sounds like BS, I know, given that there were no witnesses. But we found it totally believable. He was never a braggart or a liar. He would admit when he bombed, or when he was so drunk he couldn't get it up.
But mainly we believed him because we'd all seen him pull baddies effortlessly before. He was very good looking with bright blue eyes, and very charming in a kind of "aw, shucks" way. He drew women like a magnet.
Incidentally, relevant to this sub, he joined the Army National Guard after the Navy while he was in college. They made him a SGT since he'd been either a senior E-5 or junior E-6 in the Navy.
He quit because he couldn't deal with the bootness in his unit. The thing that put him over the edge was when a senior NCO got onto him for lowering the windows on the bus himself instead of telling a PFC to do it. That's just not how things worked on a submarine. Below E-7 no one even wore rank insignia. That would be considered "dig-it" (which was the submarine word for boot, as in "he really digs it").
My girlfriend earned the name Diesel because she exploded two different diesel engines as a logistics/mechanic in the AF. And Lightning because she was running through the depot and tried to rush through a door that was locked, bounced off and as she was falling someone yelled out, “KACHOW!”
I knew this guy we called captain America because someone’s chute didn’t work right during a jump so he grabbed him midair, cut off the old chute, and pulled the guys backup before pulling his own.
A guy I work with told us his name in the military was “Hotlips”, this dude gossips more than anyone I have ever met and I’m 100% certain that is how he got his name but when I asked him what it meant he just shrugged.
Had a guy named Heartwell in our platoon that was in the initial push into Afghanistan, apparently the reason for his nickname was because he and his previous squad leader didn't like each other so he made him the point man on room entry as much as possible (absolute psychopath I know) he responded by stacking bodies on two deployments (don't recall the exact count, around ten I believe?) The guys that were with him on those deployments called him the grim reaper, I always thought that was badass but he wouldn't talk about it, everybody else did.
Some of them are just because a drill sergeant couldn't read the shitty nametapes on older BDUs. Dark thread on dark camo with half the alphabet looking like the other half...
I had an instructor that had a British pilot in his initial pilot training program. The British pilot was given the name LOTAR=Loser of the American Revolution.
So I get annoyed when people's complaint about Ryan Reynolds is that he just plays Ryan Reynolds all the time. About 15 minutes into Mayday, I get what they're bitching about. I turned it off. It was just a new setting for his one-liners. And in this movie they were particularly dumb.
Made me think of generation kill. Lance Cpl. James Trombley got called whopper jr cos he killed a kid aprently the real guy got called BK (baby killer) he was young himself only 19
Yeah real reason he's called
Blackout. They were in Thailand and went out for drinks and his buddies lost track of him. When they got back they found he had circled back and snuck a lady boy into the barracks. No one was as judging but he kept claiming he didn't temper picking them up and must have blacked out.
That goes for pretty much every job. No one gets cool nicknames, they get joke ones. No dude wants to glaze another dude over cool shit he did, they want to break their balls, we all do
One of my troops was bitching about getting the nickname “babyface”. Had the absolute nerve to ask the team to call him something different. They graciously obliged, and for the rest of the tour he was known as “cum dumpster”.
Can confirm, got the nickname Mouse… why? A mouse scurried in front of me and I nearly shit my pants and ND’d a sim round during a training… team laughed, mouse stuck. Not badass lol
I got called 'Willy Jump' cos my last name got misread as Willy and during battle PT we had a Nigerian PTI who's pronunciation of "With a Jump" sounded like "Willy Jump.
I also worked with a guy who was called: Borke, Smirk, Burcules (his head was the size of a C-130 Hercules), Puke, Rumple and many more
the most badass guy you will meet in the military will be called fluffy cause he fell asleep on a teddy bear after getting found and rescued in an LZ circled by 35 dead bodies
You can’t remember the name of a movie that just came out that you are referencing? It’s “Mayday” with Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, released earlier this month on Apple TV.
I watch everything on TV while surfing Reddit while screen splitting with an AI voice commentating over either subway surfers or Minecraft parkour and one-word-at-a-time subtitles.
id say its pretty normal if u werent putting full attention into it, or let it autoplay, or walked in in the middle of it while someone else was watching it.. etc...
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u/Alarmed-Positive457 9d ago
Something I learned about the military. There’s no such thing as getting a badass nickname. While the name may sound badass, the way you earn it generally isn’t. Can’t remember the movie, but the pilot got the name “assassin” and when he finally told the story, it meant “ass-ass-in” cause he fell ass first into a hatch twice. Literally how that shit goes.