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Glenn Quebec posted:Let's get dark. What about your service makes you feel guilty is it double tapping some arab while in the throes of jambalaya mud butt? Or making GBS threads in a can without breaking eye contact with your ANA cohort? I work for the Coast Guard, so the main thing I do is search and rescue. You learn really quickly that you cannot save everyone. I have nightmares about drowning in darkness.
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Feb 12, 2017 07:25
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I'm always thankful that nothing I did or failed to do in the military directly resulted in the loss of human life or more than a million dollars.
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Feb 12, 2017 08:06
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Not much else to post since everyone else seemed to have covered it, I feel the same way. Yeah, I definitely killed some people. Most of it was firefights where you never saw a confirmed kill but we'd roll by their position after they bounced and find blood everywhere etc. That never bothered me. What did bothered me and still fucks with me to this day is seeing kids and random people with a bullet in their brain, body dumped on the street from all the fighting between Shia and Sunni in Baghdad. The thing that fucks with me the most is I killed a guy who didn't even deserve it. We were blocking off an intersection next to the neighborhood market and mosque with our Bradley. I was gunning, and keeping an eye on all the traffic that was being routed back around a traffic circle away from the area we were doing a meet and greet at. A guy and his buddy in a bongo truck decided to do I don't know what the gently caress, he thought he was the exception to all the traffic being rerouted? He decided to slam on the gas towards our vehicles. It happened really quick, I gave some warning shots with the coax 240, and then my TC started screaming to open up on the guy. Could have been a suicide vbied. But it wasn't. The truck kept driving because the dude was dead as gently caress all over the steering wheel and his buddy in the left seat was trying to control the truck away from us. I loving think about it constantly. I hate myself for it, because I took someone's life who was just probably doing his dayjob driving a truck in a wartorn place we completely hosed up. That and the old lady who tried running across the street when us and the iraqi army guys were in a firefight with some assholes down the street. She got caught in the crossfire. All of that poo poo fucks me up, but seeing dead kids is burned into my god drat brain. I can't get it out of my head.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:50
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On a lighter note, what's the most fun equipment you got to use? Rolling deep in an MBT, popping off rounds with a .50cal, being an airborne menace in an F-16, or I guess for you logistics guys like a truck of food or something? I dunno, I'm just a dumb civvie
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Feb 12, 2017 18:50
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mercenarynuker posted:On a lighter note, what's the most fun equipment you got to use? Rolling deep in an MBT, popping off rounds with a .50cal, being an airborne menace in an F-16, or I guess for you logistics guys like a truck of food or something? I dunno, I'm just a dumb civvie Mk-19, hands down the most fun you can have with a crew-served weapon
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Feb 12, 2017 18:57
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mercenarynuker posted:On a lighter note, what's the most fun equipment you got to use? Rolling deep in an MBT, popping off rounds with a .50cal, being an airborne menace in an F-16, or I guess for you logistics guys like a truck of food or something? I dunno, I'm just a dumb civvie One time a SF ODA took me out with them to the wastelands outside of Mosul to do their spend-ex, since they were about to leave country. That day I got to shoot: Carl Gustav (twice!) AT4 Barrett M82A1 60mm handheld mortar Some kind of rotary 6-shot 40mm grenade launcher Mini Uzi Dragunov And then they had a whole bunch of explosives left over, so they found an old dug-in Saddam era concrete bunker and blew it up. That was a good day. Of course, I got a massive case of the shits afterwards. I learned later that with the Carl Gustav, you're only supposed to shoot one round per day, or even just be around one round being shot per day, due to the concussion. I was around probably 20ish rounds shot that day, and shot two myself. Guess the concussion rumbled up my guts something fierce.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:57
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Using a computer designed in the 1960s to control the air war.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:59
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Mike-o posted:Not much else to post since everyone else seemed to have covered it, I feel the same way. Yeah, I definitely killed some people. Most of it was firefights where you never saw a confirmed kill but we'd roll by their position after they bounced and find blood everywhere etc. That never bothered me. What did bothered me and still fucks with me to this day is seeing kids and random people with a bullet in their brain, body dumped on the street from all the fighting between Shia and Sunni in Baghdad. The thing that fucks with me the most is I killed a guy who didn't even deserve it. We were blocking off an intersection next to the neighborhood market and mosque with our Bradley. I was gunning, and keeping an eye on all the traffic that was being routed back around a traffic circle away from the area we were doing a meet and greet at. A guy and his buddy in a bongo truck decided to do I don't know what the gently caress, he thought he was the exception to all the traffic being rerouted? He decided to slam on the gas towards our vehicles. It happened really quick, I gave some warning shots with the coax 240, and then my TC started screaming to open up on the guy. Could have been a suicide vbied. But it wasn't. The truck kept driving because the dude was dead as gently caress all over the steering wheel and his buddy in the left seat was trying to control the truck away from us. I loving think about it constantly. I hate myself for it, because I took someone's life who was just probably doing his dayjob driving a truck in a wartorn place we completely hosed up. That and the old lady who tried running across the street when us and the iraqi army guys were in a firefight with some assholes down the street. She got caught in the crossfire. All of that poo poo fucks me up, but seeing dead kids is burned into my god drat brain. I can't get it out of my head. Yeah, seeing families crying because they were on the wrong side of a Sunni/Shia drive by shooting and their dad/brother/etc just died was way worse than just bad guys dying.
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Feb 12, 2017 19:00
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Zeris fucked around with this message at 19:29 on May 28, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 19:20
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The Rat posted:Yeah, seeing families crying because they were on the wrong side of a Sunni/Shia drive by shooting and their dad/brother/etc just died was way worse than just bad guys dying. The 'bad guy' thing stands out. Did you think the opposing forces were bad guys because of a belief in the mission, or was it just doing your job and getting back at the people who shot at your side? What ratio of genuine enthusiasm for winning the war to conditioning/protecting your buddies( or all three) did those of you who were deployed have?
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Feb 12, 2017 19:24
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mercenarynuker posted:On a lighter note, what's the most fun equipment you got to use? Rolling deep in an MBT, popping off rounds with a .50cal, being an airborne menace in an F-16, or I guess for you logistics guys like a truck of food or something? I dunno, I'm just a dumb civvie M320, fun as poo poo. Skimming an Abrams at full throttle across water, driffttttuuuuuu through mud, knocking over trees and smashing into an abandoned car that some idiot probably ran an insurance job on. 120mm main gun. Also, had a HMMWV for a while in Korea. Was cut down like a pickup, had the motor with the giant rear end turbo on it, and brakes were questionable. I used to drive first sergeant around for about 6 weeks around ranges while I had a broken arm, and that chopped up HMMWV had some serious nuts.
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Feb 12, 2017 19:25
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Tias posted:The 'bad guy' thing stands out. Did you think the opposing forces were bad guys because of a belief in the mission, or was it just doing your job and getting back at the people who shot at your side? What ratio of genuine enthusiasm for winning the war to conditioning/protecting your buddies( or all three) did those of you who were deployed have? Getting into the morality of armed conflict is tedious and annoying. Everybody knows that the USA is on God's side, anyway
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Feb 12, 2017 19:27
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Tias posted:The 'bad guy' thing stands out. Did you think the opposing forces were bad guys because of a belief in the mission, or was it just doing your job and getting back at the people who shot at your side? What ratio of genuine enthusiasm for winning the war to conditioning/protecting your buddies( or all three) did those of you who were deployed have? Guys shooting at us = assholes Guys kidnapping people and kids, shooting them, and then dumping their bodies in the streets = bad guys Sometimes they were the same people. War loving sucks. I honestly don't hate the guys we fought, we invaded their country. I hate them for killing my friends, just as much as they probably hate me for killing theirs. But the guys going around, dragging some guy and his two young sons into a car right in front of their mom, driving the next street over to have them kneel and pop them all in the head.....gently caress those guys. They deserve death. I have no illusions that I was protecting America or some bullshit. Maybe I did when I was going to the recruiter's office because I was young and dumb. It quickly just becomes a black and white "kill them before they kill me and my friends". This is in context of Iraq. I met a lot of Iraqis that were cool people, normal people just trying to live their lives. But Afghanistan? gently caress every single male in that entire country. They're backwards dumb as rocks shithead Islam equivalent rednecks who gently caress little boys (and sometimes little girls) as a socially acceptable ritual. Not mincing words, go look up bacha bazi.
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Feb 12, 2017 19:40
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Zeris fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 28, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 19:43
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Depends on rear end size Somebody fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 28, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 19:45
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Unless she was intel or aircrew, enormous. Edit: Not in the good way.
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Feb 12, 2017 20:08
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Pesticide20 posted:Mk-19, hands down the most fun you can have with a crew-served weapon
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Feb 12, 2017 21:37
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Hell yeah the Mk-19 was fun. Besides guns and the 25mm on the Bradley I enjoyed using those cellphone kits we had back in the day to dump data from captured phones because despite having been a dumb dumb grunt I'm a huge technology dork as well.
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Feb 12, 2017 21:45
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Molentik posted:For you yanks, what is the general view on other Allied militaries ( Brits, Germans, Dutch, Polish etc) and their branches? I'm not military, but I do security work overseas. I was in Mogadishu chilling with the Swedish security guys (who are on point BTW, solid dudes). One of them had an amazing poop story. He was on a flight and the bathroom was down. He was progressively more violently ill and it got to the point where he couldn't hold it. He ended up standing in the aisle, then dropped trou, held onto the bulkhead with one hand and poo poo into a bag he was holding with the other hand, while screaming "What the gently caress are you looking at?" at the entire plane. This of course let to more poop stories being shared, but that one stuck with me.
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Feb 13, 2017 00:17
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I'm assuming service members are automatically issued a passport. What kind of visa do you get when you are shipped overseas? Are there differences between being sent to Germany and Iraq? Wondering this because I just read about a Chinese soldier who accidentally crossed the border into India and only after fifty years he was able to return to China.
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Feb 13, 2017 10:36
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Fragrag posted:I'm assuming service members are automatically issued a passport. What kind of visa do you get when you are shipped overseas? Are there differences between being sent to Germany and Iraq? Speaking from Navy perspective: passports are the responsibility of the individual and not required. The ship drives up to the pier and you get off and go gently caress around. I've been to 8 countries by ship and never had to present a passport or anything like that. Passports were recommended, though, just in case you had to make an emergency trip home. Most people didn't get one.
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Feb 13, 2017 11:16
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Never had a passport, just used my military ID when I'd fly home from Germany and back.
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Feb 13, 2017 12:50
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This article is doing the rounds on social media, and touches on a few questions I get asked a lot, especially now that I'm in school. I was wondering what other people thought about this. How do you feel about spending X years in the military and not seeing combat? What It Means To Be A Veteran Without The Experience Of War
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Feb 13, 2017 13:10
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Pesticide20 posted:Getting into the morality of armed conflict is tedious and annoying. Everybody knows that the USA is on God's side, anyway I don't think I was  I hang out a lot in the milhist thread, and my experience at my history courses has been that soldiers in the past used to get a lot more worked up over the political arguments for war( militarized societies and their indoctrination helped a lot with this), but nowadays there seems to be some ridicule towards people who really believe in their mission. I was just curious what your personal experiences are, and to what degree it depends on the individual mission.
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Feb 13, 2017 14:00
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AlexanderCA posted:So the big question that you're not supposed to ask because it's obviously very obtrusive, but this is a internet forum so people can easily choose not to respond. Have you ever killed someone? I realize most military never even see combat, let alone close enough for a confirmed kill. So any action where you "pulled the trigger" so to speak to set in motion a attempt to take someone out. If any of the NCO's above me have had a stroke, aneurysm or heart attack from years of delayed stress reaction, then I'm taking credit for those kills. Aside from that, no, never killed anyone, I was an Air Wing POG
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Feb 13, 2017 14:17
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Fragrag posted:I'm assuming service members are automatically issued a passport. What kind of visa do you get when you are shipped overseas? Are there differences between being sent to Germany and Iraq? you dont need a passport when you're invading.
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Feb 13, 2017 14:57
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Frosted Flake posted:This article is doing the rounds on social media, and touches on a few questions I get asked a lot, especially now that I'm in school. I was wondering what other people thought about this. How do you feel about spending X years in the military and not seeing combat? quote:Without having been involved in combat I’m left wondering what kind of man I am. I can answer this for him: he's a dumbass. If he wants to trade his feelings about not deploying with what I picked up in the trauama ward at the main hospital on Kandahar Airfield (wounded soldiers'/marines' last stop before Landstuhl) I'm all for it.
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Feb 13, 2017 15:18
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Yeah, that article is just attention seeking fodder. Plenty of people don't deploy and they don't let it effect their overall douche level. My brother managed to avoid deployment and he's still a huge douche about "mah serbice". He's always more than happy to snag a free meal on veterans day too. Reminds me of that Family Guy where Chris wants to join the army because of the veterans day parade and the float full of Iraq War soldiers that came home fine and gloating.
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Feb 13, 2017 15:30
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Man I know it's been touched on before but are you guys really like magical beasts that no civilian can understand? I'm a merchant mariner and spend half the year out at sea on 1000 foot ships with 20 man crews and everything and I just got told the other day that I can NEVER UNDERSTAND the struggles of being a supply officer in the Navy. I mean obviously I can't understand combat or whatever but a lot of military jobs sound pretty comprehensible after doing 50-100% travel industrial work my whole working life.
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Feb 13, 2017 15:34
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Zeris fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 28, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 15:47
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Zeris fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 28, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 15:49
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I just glanced through that and I just want to say lol at "warrior" bullshit
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Feb 13, 2017 15:51
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I never got the feeling that everyone who was in the (Canadian) Army beween 1953-2002 was somehow lacking. Maybe this is a post-Afghanistan thing?
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Feb 13, 2017 16:02
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Fragrag posted:I'm assuming service members are automatically issued a passport. What kind of visa do you get when you are shipped overseas? Are there differences between being sent to Germany and Iraq? It's not automatic, but in my unit everybody had them, I think. If you travel via military ports of entry, you don't get stamped or anything. I had a government passport (brown cover, vs the usual US citizen's blue cover) for like 6 years, traveled overseas numerous times, never got a stamp because we never went through a civilian airport. This also complicated things if there were legal issues...we had a guy driving off-base in a Gulf state, got rear-ended by a local citizen, and there was literally a C-130 on the ramp with engines turning to get him out if law enforcement's tone shifted in the slightest (they were trying to blame him, because that's how they treat foreigners).
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Feb 13, 2017 16:17
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LITERALLY SHAKING posted:Yeah, that article is just attention seeking fodder. xposting my recent post in the Idiots thread here because it's basically the same suboptimal posted:I have a friend who enlisted in the Marine Corps a few days before 9/11, prompted by a break up with his junior year sweetheart. He got a technical, non-combat job, and spent his eight years doing maintenance on vehicle components in Japan and Korea. Now that he's out, he talks about his time in the Marines as though he were crawling through trenches, cutting throats on the reg. He's become a major gun-nut, despite never shooting beyond basic rifle qualification his entire time in. As an added anecdote, he called me up sobbing in early 2004 and posted a bunch of sad stuff on MySpace when he found out there was a chance he would be sent to Al-Asad AB to be a guard for a few months- not go out on patrols or do anything like that, literally just guard the base. He ended up not going and deleted all the weepy stuff off MySpace immediately thereafter.
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Feb 13, 2017 16:18
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poo poo, that would be a cake duty. Just pull guard probably three days a week? Al-Asad was big enough to have a rotating schedule put out by a mayors cell. Not all noncombat vets are that retarded though. Got a cousin that was NG infantry. He rotated to Germany for 7 months or so during the invasion of Iraq, but never saw a sandbox. Dude's a fireman now and while he acknowledges his service with a small sticker, he doesn't go hunting attention for it. He's a good dude.
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Feb 13, 2017 18:12
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Zeris posted:T&P / War Horse is not where you should be sourcing opinions on the military
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Feb 13, 2017 18:38
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Somewhere between 75 and 100 percent of all the guys I know who post nonstop on Facebook about how veteran they are and how much respect you owe them and "as a veteran..." never did jack poo poo. The guys who were so obviously hosed up that command never let them deploy are the worst for that.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:07
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Godholio posted:It's not automatic, but in my unit everybody had them, I think. If you travel via military ports of entry, you don't get stamped or anything. I had a government passport (brown cover, vs the usual US citizen's blue cover) for like 6 years, traveled overseas numerous times, never got a stamp because we never went through a civilian airport. This also complicated things if there were legal issues...we had a guy driving off-base in a Gulf state, got rear-ended by a local citizen, and there was literally a C-130 on the ramp with engines turning to get him out if law enforcement's tone shifted in the slightest (they were trying to blame him, because that's how they treat foreigners). Thanks for the answers and indulging me on boring bureaucratic details! I'm honestly surprised that there's not more oversight by the host country nor the guest country.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:07
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It's tracked, but it's not handled through standard customs channels. We were always greeted by the local customs people, but "behind the scenes" it was tracked differently. I don't know the details back there, but I've had to show my military ID, had my bags searched, all the usual stuff but it was all done on a military base and nobody ever checked for passports.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:10
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