Rabhadh posted:

Why are you so salty that some guy didn't want to waste his time in the military? I know an Israeli guy who faked a mental illness to get out of it.

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

I heard that swiss official service was just training to use those big rear end MGs that every swiss is required by law to have?

Nuclear War posted:

Well, its not hardcore academic history, but Sandy Mitchell wrote some fairly well researched fiction books on the life of a commissar in some fairly hot-water situations. I'd say they give you a feel for how a commissar lived

JcDent posted:

Everybody wants to dodge the draft. I know a Korean guy who went to study in Japan just so he could get away from it.

Volunteer rules, draft drools!

Raenir Salazar posted:

I read a book about a Polish Jewish person who served in the Red Army during WWII and it was interesting so I'd be interested in Sandy's stuff.

Pornographic Memory posted:

Sandy Mitchell writes Warhammer 40,000 books

ArchangeI posted:

By the end Germany had a draft in name only. It was basically mandatory to state whether you wanted to volunteer or not. No one who didn't want to had to serve or even do the civil service. Pretty much every German man has dozens of anecdotes about people getting exempted from military service for the dumbest poo poo imaginable. One of my friends got out of it because he had had a broken arm five years before he showed up for the draft examination. Another one got out because he ran a really high fever when he was a child. I got out because I'm colorblind.

Hiding your German citizenship to escape the draft is the literal equivalent of a US college student in TYOOL 2015 moving to Canada to escape the Selective Service registration.

Koesj posted:

They get to choose whether or not to store the weapon at home IIRC, and it doesn't come with ammo anymore. Also, they're just standard military issue rifles - SG550s.

Klaus88 posted:

Frostwerks posted:

Dude, the nation of switzerland is the BEST nation on earth. EVERYONE is packing at ALL times with PLENTIFUL ammo. This is WHY they have NEVER been CONQUERED and why CRIME is so LOW.

Raenir Salazar posted:

I didn't catch it.

Tias posted:

Commissars are a thing in the insane war-themed sci-fi universe of Warhammer 40.000, and all they do is basically explode soldiers who won't fight. So Sandy Mitchell hasn't written anything about soviet commissars, he's written a fiction series about a goofy science fiction dude who does kind of the same job that soviet ones did, but in space.

Rabhadh posted:

Why are you so salty that some guy didn't want to waste his time in the military? I know an Israeli guy who faked a mental illness to get out of it.

Archangel posted:

Hiding your German citizenship to escape the draft is the literal equivalent of a US college student in TYOOL 2015 moving to Canada to escape the Selective Service registration.

Tias posted:

Commissars are a thing in the insane war-themed sci-fi universe of Warhammer 40.000, and all they do is basically explode soldiers who won't fight. So Sandy Mitchell hasn't written anything about soviet commissars, he's written a fiction series about a goofy science fiction dude who does kind of the same job that soviet ones did, but in space.

xthetenth posted:

Part of the gimmick is that because he was generously endowed with a self-preservation instinct, he ends up much closer to a morale officer than an executioner.

His troops get pretty veteran too, it's honestly a better depiction of the WWII Red Army than Enemy at the Gates or Company of Heroes 2.

Klaus88 posted:

As long as you ignore the whole fighting the Zerg on Meth amphetamines and fighting hand to hand duels with super-human berserkers in power-armor with swords and axes that are also chainsaws.

Warhammer has always been a silly setting.

bewbies posted:

So I heard a story on the AP US history test and conservatives getting all up in their asses about it not being excessively pro-murka enough so I took a practice exam today and I was genuinely surprised at how valid it was. There were sections on women's suffrage, Brown v BOE (and southern response), postbellum south ugliness, racially based immigration quotas, worker exploitation, conservation (and opposition to conservation), etc and so on.

In other words I totally get why this pissed off republicans, it is way too academically honest and based in fact to align with modern conservative politics.

bewbies posted:

In other words I totally get why this pissed off republicans, it is way too academically honest and based in fact to align with modern conservative politics.

xthetenth posted:

I'm not ignoring that. CoH 2 especially is that bad. At least the Cain books have one side almost rightish.

Tias posted:

Commissars are a thing in the insane war-themed sci-fi universe of Warhammer 40.000, and all they do is basically explode soldiers who won't fight. So Sandy Mitchell hasn't written anything about soviet commissars, he's written a fiction series about a goofy science fiction dude who does kind of the same job that soviet ones did, but in space.

SeanBeansShako posted:

I'm not Russian nor eastern european in general and it pisses me off. It pretty much checks multiple boxes of bad. And we're only just talking about the story line here.

Rabhadh posted:

Why are you so salty that some guy didn't want to waste his time in the military? I know an Israeli guy who faked a mental illness to get out of it.

JaucheCharly posted:

There's every reason to be salty. You don't fake mental illness, because that means they can deprive you of your right to decision, which means that you cannot have a driver's license and you will be put under supervision of a custodian, who will manage your financial affairs. There's almost no way to get out of this. Other places, other rules, here you don't fake mental illness.

Some oval office dodges the service for some asinine reason, somebody else with a real disability gets drafted and you and 5 other guys have to carry his heartsick rear end to the infirmary each time he collapses, another goes civil service and drives old farts around all day or sits in the sun, smoking, another goes military and "volunteers" to get sent to the border for the next months without ever being asked if he volunteers, which is a poo poo-tier category of it's own. You don't go civil service if you want to own a gun in the next decade, because they'll slap a ban on you that lasts for 15 something years here in A.

If you go military, you'll spend the next 9 months boring yourself to death, looking at the clock and praying that it runs faster. You can forget studying or doing something constructive, because they will try to keep you occupied with some retarded poo poo, because they assume that you are an animal that cannot occupy itself (which is the obvious answer if you look at the guys that share a room with you that just try to light up their farts). The best part about it is, that you are surrounded by chavs, your superiors are village idiots with severe inferiority complexes. The only people that treat you like a human being are officers, when they hear that you're educated. It's horrible.

While the civil service guys can sleep in their own beds and go home, you might be stuck in the rear end end of nowhere until you're shifted somewhere else months later. The baracks are total poo poo, there's nothing to do there, and you can pray that they'll let you out into the rural shithole that's next to your place. There's a saying here that they "fold up the pavement at 7pm", which means that everything is closed by then, and you can listen to the crickets. If you're lucky the canteen sells beer in the evening. Some dudes keep booze in their cars, and incidentally, that's one of the best memories that I have from there, drinking rum with Foche and that tall guy at the parking lot, watching the stars and listening to the crickets.

To add insult to injury, your pay is a joke and substantially less than what the civil service guys get. What they pay doesn't cover your expenses, even with all the subsidies you lose money each month. Most people end up with some debt after the service, unless they live with their parents.

First world military problems. I knew a guy who fled from Iran, who had to do his service there. They handed rifles to him and his fellows and dropped them into some ditch in the desert to watch some spots where smugglers came through. Smugglers with DShKs on their pickups. Lonely cold nights in the desert.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

What's the deal with wwii milsurp showing up in global trouble spots well into the 21st century? Was the poo poo that durable, or was there just so much of it that new stocks are continually being unearthed, even ~70 years later?

xthetenth posted:

Huh. That's not a new thing. I swear my high school AP US textbook had stuff on the Battle of Blair Mountain and all sort of scurvy anti-minority and anti-socialist stuff.

Xiahou Dun posted:

Uh. Apparently my off hand comment on how I didn't renew my German passport for a while to avoid conscription hit a sore spot for some people.

Sorry about that!

(Also good to know, Libliuni ; none of my cousins back in Germany had to do it either, so I basically learned everything I know about it from my uncles, and that's more them telling stories than actually trying to explain it to me.)

Grand Prize Winner posted:

What's the deal with wwii milsurp showing up in global trouble spots well into the 21st century? Was the poo poo that durable, or was there just so much of it that new stocks are continually being unearthed, even ~70 years later?