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My FOB (Shir Ghazay) was hit a couple times while I was contracting, but my brain didn't really put together that poo poo was going down for like five minutes. I never saw the enemy and our contract didn't allow us to be armed, so we sat there, thinking it was just the gate getting tested again, then realizing it was a bit more then that, then realizing we weren't given any direction from our Marines in what to do in the event of a real emergency. Ended up getting made fun of for showing up to the office with our gear on ready to evacuate if needed, so we looked really uncool.
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Apr 15, 2015 22:26
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On the importance of dummy cords: 18mo twins drown after mother swats bee http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/twin-babies-die-mom-lets-stroller-swat-bee-article-1.2184758
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Apr 16, 2015 00:37
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Shim Howard posted:On the importance of dummy cords: Sounds more like a double homicide. Post-postpartum is a bitch.
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Apr 16, 2015 00:50
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LingcodKilla posted:Sounds more like a double homicide. Post-postpartum is a bitch. Yeah that's "I was cleaning my glasses while driving through the intersection" levels of bullshit. Nice 20k kickstarter for her poor-me fund. I wonder if they double the funds upon completion?
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Apr 16, 2015 01:25
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After the insurgents blew a couple of roads on us by planting explosives in the drainage culverts beneath the road, they tacked on clearing those coverts to our patrols until some fuckstick at regimental level could give the engineers the green light to weld grates over the openings on either side. So we're inching along, literally, satelliting a dismounted team that's doing the checks, when the farmer who I just happened to be looking at through bino's almost gets wiped out by a short round from a 120mm mortar. He's a couple hundred yards away so I laugh a bit, more so due to him putting his tractor into high gear, kicking the front wheels up into the air as he got the gently caress out of dodge than the fact that he almost died. A couple of minutes later, with the ground team notified that IDF had just become a real possibility in the next few minutes, I'm still scanning our surroundings when I drop the bino's down to light a cigarette and just over the edge of my hand, in my view, a 120mm hits the pavement about 10 feet in front of our truck. I didn't even hear it coming in over the engine but we all heard the heavy thunk as it impacted and took a huge chunk of asphalt out of the road. Thank loving god for duds. I spent the rest of that little culvert checking session ducked down at eyeball defilade in the turret, at least until counter battery leveled an area about half a click away behind a tree line. gently caress snipers, by the way.
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Apr 16, 2015 11:35
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LCL-Dead posted:A couple of minutes later, with the ground team notified that IDF had just become a real possibility in the next few minutes, I'm still scanning our surroundings when I drop the bino's down to light a cigarette and just over the edge of my hand, in my view, a 120mm hits the pavement about 10 feet in front of our truck. I didn't even hear it coming in over the engine but we all heard the heavy thunk as it impacted and took a huge chunk of asphalt out of the road. Thank loving god for duds. I spent the rest of that little culvert checking session ducked down at eyeball defilade in the turret, at least until counter battery leveled an area about half a click away behind a tree line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRjaUM1IoJU
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Apr 16, 2015 13:56
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IED idiot talk: I get called out to this bullshit IED report to secure the site for EOD en route. I get there, and it's clearly bullshit, just a bag of trash that fell off a truck where no one would drop an IED. To avoid wasting my time and get back to base before the DFAC closed, I have my platoon sergeant pull up 10' away from it (if it was an IED It was just a chickenshit pipe bomb), and then walk up on it quickly with the MRAP between me and the "IED," quickly walk around the side, pick up the bag, and shake the trash out. (Looking at it through an ACOG at 100m I was 99% sure it wasn't an IED, picking it up I was suddenly 90% sure.) My NCOs are furious with me and won't talk to me for a while, my Joes are happy they don't miss lunch. Although I did have to get into a pissing fit on BN command net to get the A/S3 to cancel EOD first. I had to convince him it definitely wasn't an IED without saying out loud "I walked up and manually interrogated the loving thing." Two days later we're on a patrol and the Iraqis ask for help with two suspected IEDs in black trash bags that they saw a guy drop near their checkpoint. This one definitely looks and sounds legit. I'm talking to the Iraqi brigade commander about EOD, and look up and see one of my Joes looking at one of the black bags with his ACOG, apparently encouraged by my recent experience identifying timewasting bullshit. Did I mention there were two of them? He apparently missed that part, because I see him take his eye off the ACOG, look at this feet, and see a second black trash bag. He opened it with his barrel, turned white, and started running. Sort of. He ran about three steps, and then froze, waiting to die. Then ran another ten steps, froze, decided he wasn't going to die, and ran the rest of the way in one go. I chewed his rear end out, while mentally kicking myself for setting such a bad example. Two minutes later the Iraqi army dispersed some guys off an overlooking hill and the triggerman pulled out his phone and detonated them both before running off. Not sure why he didn't kill my guy when he had the chance. IED Iraqi idiot talk: We're driving back to the FOB, almost home, and there's a van on a side street that starts edging forward. My gunner swings his .50 cal on him and he stops. We drive by. Ten seconds later I hear my platoon sergeant yelling on the net "DON'T STOP, DON'T STOP, DON'T STOP." I tell my driver not to stop, and start a ten count before I'm going to interrupt to ask what's going on if he hasn't reported yet. I get to about 7 and BOOOOOOOM!!!! Apparently this van had ~1200 lbs of HME in it and he rammed my platoon sergeant in the side, stopped, waived and smiled at my trail vehicle, and then blew himself up after he didn't stop and got 50-75m past him. I'm still not sure whether he just hosed up his initial detonation when he made contact, or he was hoping we'd treat it like an accident and dismount. Two of my guy got concussions, some unknown numbers of Iraqi pedestrians got aced and evacuated before QRF arrived and we had unshit our britches enough to dismount and assess the site. The Slithery D fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 22:01
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The Slithery D posted:Two minutes later the Iraqi army dispersed some guys off an overlooking hill and the triggerman pulled out his phone and detonated them both before running off. Not sure why he didn't kill my guy when he had the chance. Maybe waiting to see if more than one guy would get in the blast radius.
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Apr 16, 2015 22:38
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EVA BRAUN BLOWJOBS posted:Maybe waiting to see if more than one guy would get in the blast radius. kdr bro
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Apr 17, 2015 14:34
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The Slithery D posted:IED Iraqi idiot talk: 
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Apr 17, 2015 18:32
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I don't have any cool stories but army stupidity. We spent 15 months at Balad which is akin to living at a resort where tourism is rampant and you just want to get to work but every one is riding the bus to get to the pool or whatever. Balad got hit a few times a week with IDF. Sometimes it was on the other side of the FOB and sometimes it was close enough to cause concern. Fewer was when they hit one of our CHU complexes and other stuff and could hear the "SSEEEOOOBOOM" of it coming in. Closest to me was like 50m or so. It was akin to poking a dog in a cage a lot over 15 months. So we get back and 2 weeks later we do a change of command and decide to shoot off the FA cannon right behind us and didn't let anyone really know. That didn't go over well. And a few people hit the deck. Also gently caress CRAMs. I never saw them working other than a test fire at 0300 in the morning. No one told me about those things and I thought I was about to die as soon as it opened up. That loving thing was like, right next to me too.
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Apr 17, 2015 19:02
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The Slithery D posted:Apparently this van had ~1200 lbs of HME in it and he rammed my platoon sergeant in the side, stopped, waived and smiled at my trail vehicle, and then blew himself up after he didn't stop and got 50-75m past him. I'm still not sure whether he just hosed up his initial detonation when he made contact, or he was hoping we'd treat it like an accident and dismount. Two of my guy got concussions, some unknown numbers of Iraqi pedestrians got aced and evacuated before QRF arrived and we had unshit our britches enough to dismount and assess the site. this is the poo poo that would make me lose sleep at night. the indirect landing like close enough that i could feel the blast also made me lose a little sleep at night. not much. maybe like five minutes, but still.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:11
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Cole posted:this is the poo poo that would make me lose sleep at night. FOB Warrior (Kirkuk) circa 2008-09 got lots of indirect, multiple rockets per attack, 2-5 times a week. They rarely killed Americans, but the loving TCNs were shrapnel magnets. The Army and Air Force reactions were very different when the alarms went off. The Army guys looked around to see if an NCO was going to yell at them, then strolled over to a bunker, stood outside, and smoked. Their attitude was like "I didn't come to this cushy FOB with great food, running water, and air conditioning just to let Hajj scare me and ruin my day." The Air Force guys loving combat rolled for the nearest cover, white faced and intense. Their attitude was more "I didn't come to this god forsaken hell hole with lovely food, limited hot water, and hot barracks just to get killed." If it went off in the DFAC the wing wipers would loving get on the ground agains the walls or under the tables, while the Joes just stared at them and kept eating.
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Apr 19, 2015 15:12
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The Slithery D posted:FOB Warrior (Kirkuk) circa 2008-09 got lots of indirect, multiple rockets per attack, 2-5 times a week. They rarely killed Americans, but the loving TCNs were shrapnel magnets. The Army and Air Force reactions were very different when the alarms went off. sounds about right. we had some air force construction guys (dunno what their job is actually called) come build us a new fusion cell and TOC and poo poo on our little outpost. an RPG flew overhead and nothing followed, so we figured it was the usual RPG hit and run that we had seen all throughout the tour. we never found the fucker who was chucking RPGs at us (happened maybe once a month), so we all just sat there. the air force guys stormed the guard towers like it was the beaches of normandy though.
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Apr 19, 2015 15:17
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lets not forget the average AF dude hasn't had any combat related training outside of first aid in years if at all.
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Apr 19, 2015 15:27
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Larry Parrish posted:lets not forget the average AF dude hasn't had any combat related training outside of first aid in years if at all. Also they're all literally pussies
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Apr 19, 2015 15:48
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Wasabi the J posted:My FOB (Shir Ghazay) was hit a couple times while I was contracting, but my brain didn't really put together that poo poo was going down for like five minutes. You were really uncool. You deserved to be made fun of, I'm glad it stuck with you so you won't be that fuckup next time.
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Apr 19, 2015 16:58
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at some recent SAPR training done by an interactive social justice troupe acting out "prelude to rape" some AF guys said they thought the rapist was the protagonist because he was just trying to get his woman to get in line. seem like cool dudes i learned deep down we are all the rapist and rapees. namaste.
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Apr 19, 2015 18:51
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Wasabi the J posted:I hook up poo poo to generators all the time, but it always frightened me how little training we get on the proper use of them; that and how cavalier people are with 10-40 kW of electricity. Then there was the time one of our AGE guys was monkeying around with the control panel for the 'Nam era MEP-12s that provided our "shore power," which he very quickly stopped when he realized that the control panel shack was less a "control panel" and more a "power distribution facility" (it had a shitload of live wires in it). Or the time that we were helping CE tear down our ramp after we moved and went to move one of the PSPs with a forklift...we got a little bit of resistance so we stopped and took a closer look. Turns out that it was still connected to buried (live) high voltage lines. Really everything to go with power on our old ramp was a complete shitshow and it's amazing none of us died considering how much we got tagged to be the ones screwing around with it even though we had zero for training when it came to electrical power anything. The Slithery D posted:FOB Warrior (Kirkuk) circa 2008-09 got lots of indirect, multiple rockets per attack, 2-5 times a week. They rarely killed Americans, but the loving TCNs were shrapnel magnets. The Army and Air Force reactions were very different when the alarms went off. Some F-16 maintainers at KAF were out at EOR (end of runway...area where you do final checks on the plane and pull arming pins before they taxi to the runway) with two of their planes when a 107 hits a couple hundred meters away. They hit the deck and a couple of seconds later the second one hits close enough to pepper the side of one of the F-16s with shrapnel right where they'd been standing. Lucky dudes. Of course on the flip side of that we'd have people get yelled at by AF leadership for not taking cover in a (hardened) DFAC. Whenever it'd happen I'd look around to see if there was anyone in an AF uniform that outranked me (O-3)...if not I'd just keep eating. There was one morning where the Taliban changed up their routine and popped off a couple rockets at breakfast. The Supreme guys haul rear end to the bunker and we're all just standing there in line going "son of a bitch I don't want to have dry cereal for breakfast" when some Army SPC gets behind the counter and starts making omelets and poo poo. The Supreme guys were pretty pro at making omelets and scrambles but that Specialist knew what he was doing. Same AF leadership had a policy that post rocket attack you had to run from the building you were in (that presumably didn't get blown up) outside to a bunker...so you run from the non-blown up completely safe building you are in outside to where there could be UXO or any other kind of post-attack hazard. AF leadership was/is pretty stupid.
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Apr 19, 2015 20:27
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maffew buildings posted:at some recent SAPR training done by an interactive social justice troupe acting out "prelude to rape" some AF guys said they thought the rapist was the protagonist because he was just trying to get his woman to get in line. seem like cool dudes did you enlist maffew?
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Apr 19, 2015 21:01
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mr nice told me it would be a good time
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Apr 19, 2015 21:44
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iyaayas01 posted:Some F-16 maintainers at KAF were out at EOR (end of runway...area where you do final checks on the plane and pull arming pins before they taxi to the runway) with two of their planes when a 107 hits a couple hundred meters away. They hit the deck and a couple of seconds later the second one hits close enough to pepper the side of one of the F-16s with shrapnel right where they'd been standing. Lucky dudes. KAF was a weird, weird place. Even for Afghanistan. I'd hop around to other bases and it only made it seem more bizarre. Being not only AF but medical, my knowledge of hardened structures started and ended with my penis. Well, everyone's penises...people love to get their junk examined when deployed. Within a week of getting there, they landed a rocket right next to the CASF where I was standing around and hit a couple of TCNs. I'll admit that had me a bit rattled, especially since I was always seeing the traumas coming into the Role 3 and suddenly considered that I might be a patient if unlucky. After a while I was with the crowd who prioritized eating over cover.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:46
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Regarding KAF, here's the email I sent to my friends and family at home about my experience there.quote:Subject: I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. The Slithery D fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Apr 19, 2015 |
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Apr 19, 2015 22:20
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The Slithery D posted:Regarding KAF, here's the email I sent to my friends and family at home about my experience there. I was stationed on KAF for the majority of my deployment. This man speaks the truth. Someone put up a lifeguard stand by the poo poo pond, with a sign that said "LIFEGUARD ON DOOTY"; another advertised it as Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, and another had a graffiti UFO drawn in with "AREA FIFTY-POO" stenciled in below it. I think my favorite (if it could be called that) was the mannequin sitting on a toilet who had a fishing pole in hand, with a sign next to him that said "Brown trout: no limit!". 
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Apr 19, 2015 22:42
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During the rainy season the whole tent area us peasant army guys were in got flooded. I don't want to think about if it ever reached the shitpond level.
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Apr 19, 2015 23:26
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Mike-o posted:During the rainy season the whole tent area us peasant army guys were in got flooded. I don't want to think about if it ever reached the shitpond level. i lived on the side of a mountain during rainy season. mudslides own.
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Apr 19, 2015 23:30
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What pissed me off the most is that it was like "Alright! Get to be on a main FOB this deployment!" completely expecting it to be like the nice big bases in Iraq. gently caress no, it was worse than my tiny rear end COP in the middle of Baghdad was.
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Apr 19, 2015 23:45
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Mike-o posted:What pissed me off the most is that it was like "Alright! Get to be on a main FOB this deployment!" completely expecting it to be like the nice big bases in Iraq. gently caress no, it was worse than my tiny rear end COP in the middle of Baghdad was. the nice big bases are the loving worst though the best time I had in iraq was at Gabe, which was a tiny shithole
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Apr 19, 2015 23:49
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Nostalgia4Butts posted:the nice big bases are the loving worst though  than being yelled at for not saluting in a no salute area, the "are you loving serious?" Of those participating and hosting fun runs. Which easily had thousands of people doing it. Iraq never made sense. I had more fun on Al Assad and Talil
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Apr 20, 2015 00:29
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gently caress you if you didn't have the luxury of being out of regs as gently caress going to an improvised shitter and/or shower in a platoon sized jss/cop
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Apr 20, 2015 00:36
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Fucitol posted:gently caress you if you didn't have the luxury of being out of regs as gently caress going to an improvised shitter and/or shower in a platoon sized jss/cop if you didn't piss into a tube stuck into the wall that drained into a street then gently caress you. 
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Apr 20, 2015 00:49
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Fucitol posted:gently caress you if you didn't have the luxury of being out of regs as gently caress going to an improvised shitter and/or shower in a platoon sized jss/cop Civilian clothing on my FOB, but that's because I was "attached" with *redacted* SF 
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Apr 20, 2015 01:46
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basketball shorts, showershoes, and civilian t-shirts were my uniforms when i was off-duty at gabe unlike when i was speicher, which was full battle rattle anytime you weren't doing PT or sleeping.
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Apr 20, 2015 02:09
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Confirming tiny PB's own.
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Apr 20, 2015 02:40
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I think I mentioned this before, but COMKAF (KAF Installation Commander, USAF one-star) ordered a no-notice health inspection of the boardwalk restaurants. Unlike the DFACs, which were (in theory) regularly inspected by US/NATO mil/gov contract oversight folks, the boardwalk restaurants were completely on their own with no oversight whatsoever. Among the many, many, many violations that they found were rat feces in multiple food storage areas (including on the food itself) as well as a whole bunch of them turning off their food storage refrigerators/freezers at night to save power. This was in the summer where even at night its still 90 loving degrees outside. Even after these findings were published to the KAF population at large and after they shut down the entire boardwalk for a couple of weeks....people still ate at all the restaurants, including the ones that had violations (which was basically all of them except for the smoothie place, the kabob/pizza place, and the coffee/donut shop that used to be Tim Horton's.) Seems appropriate for the idiot thread. And yeah, there was a whole bunch of great graffiti all over KAF (also a plethora of dicks). We had a gigantic Grim Reaper on an A-Wall with some Latin that said "Everyone lives, but not everyone deserves to." We stenciled a little Hellfire onto the wall whenever one of our planes expended a missile. That wall has been up and running since 2012....so there's a whole shitload of missiles.
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Apr 20, 2015 03:25
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Who do you think oversaw those health inspections? It's why I never once ate there. Their food supply was the same or worse than the DFACs, with dirt, lack of refrigeration, preparing food on the floor with birds and rats, grossly filthy and sick workers, expired products, etc.
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Apr 20, 2015 04:49
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If you didn't eat Naan the Afghanis gave you on the reg, you seriously missed out on the best part of going to Afghanistan.
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Apr 20, 2015 07:31
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Going back to people running away from IDF sirens. Fallujah, 2006, DFAC 1, roughly 1130 or close to midnight, somewhere in there. My section had just finished grabbing a bite at mid-rats and were gathered around our section leader's truck in the parking lot, going over the new patrol routes and a drop-off spot for an OP we'd been asked to provide. There are about 17 of us gathered around the truck in various states of boredom, smoking, some with gear on, some in boots and utes. Around us there are the multiple trucks (7 tons, LVS', gun trucks) from a USMC logistics convoy that had rolled in about the same time we'd shown up to the DFAC. Most of their guys are inside. There are a couple walking around as firewatch, more sleeping on top of ISO's/hoods/etc. Queue the incoming alarm. My section reacts by looking up, my section leader with a look of frustration as his prep talk is cut off, though none of us move away from the truck. Complacent as gently caress, the incoming alarm went off probably 20-25 times a day and rarely was there ever an impact on base. 90% of the time the jihadis would get up on an overpass with a handheld 60mm, jump out of the car, launch one in the direction of the base and then jump back in the car and take off to avoid counter battery. The group of guys around the logistics convoy take off like a group of roaches on heroin. The guys asleep on top of the ISO's, on top of the LVS'/7tons, rolled off of their perches to the ground. I mean, this was easily a 15-16 foot drop and these guys just rolled off and hit the ground with another roll before beelining for the closest mortar bunker. Like roaches when you turn the lights on, there were a hell of a lot more of them than I remembered seeing at first and it ended with two guys kind of running in circles, trying to fight a battle against being a good Marine and checking for anyone left behind and running for the cover of a bunker. Eventually they come out and one of them asks us why we didn't run and I don't think anyone answered him. By that point we were gearing up and getting the trucks ready to roll. The IDF eventually did land 7 impacts in a row within the base months later and the hadji's like to shoot rockets at DFAC 2, but they never hit anything vital, just TCN trucks.
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Apr 20, 2015 12:43
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USMC503 posted:If you didn't eat Naan the Afghanis gave you on the reg, you seriously missed out on the best part of going to Afghanistan. Best/worst local food deployment meals. Go. In Iraq we had the local big shots bring our patrol base a huge rear end fish that came out of the Tigris. Seriously, the loving thing massed about the same as an Iraqi kid. Only fish I ever ate that had big fat deposits in it. No, I don't want to know what you think it ate in the Tigris. In Afghanistan (Arghandab valley north of Kandahar), our DCOP fed us one of the local J Lo (fat rear end) sheep. They didn't bother trimming off the 20 lbs of fat on the rear end, everyone just ate around it.
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Apr 20, 2015 13:23
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Mike-o posted:During the rainy season the whole tent area us peasant army guys were in got flooded. I don't want to think about if it ever reached the shitpond level. My buddies were stuck in KAF full-time and I had to spend a couple months there; I was so happy to miss the absolutely biblical poo poo-flood of 2011. poo poo water was so high that you could drown if you went into a culvert around South Park. One of my favorite idiot moments was how on one of our last two nights in country, these two idiot-rear end chicks in our unit decided that was the night to get drunk at the MWR tent (between laundry and the PX, for those familiar with KAF) and get busted by the MP's. They couldn't keep it copacetic like everyone else and either 1) wait or 2)
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Apr 20, 2015 14:37
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