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The Iron Rose posted:Oh, gently caress it, I'll hop in on this too. 
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Apr 16, 2018 18:18
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The way i did it, mcnally, is by gathering all the sizes, placing the order with everything shipped to myself, and then collected shirt cost plus shipping from everyone. Tshirts fit nicely into the small usps flat rate box, so that’s what i used for everyone.
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Apr 16, 2018 18:21
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Mr. Nice! posted:The way i did it, mcnally, is by gathering all the sizes, placing the order with everything shipped to myself, and then collected shirt cost plus shipping from everyone. Tshirts fit nicely into the small usps flat rate box, so that’s what i used for everyone. That's probably how I was gonna do it too.
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Apr 16, 2018 18:38
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I'm between a medium and a large so I never know what to get. I'll take one of both if it's like 20$ per....if it's like 25 a shirt I'll go with a L
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Apr 16, 2018 19:06
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The Iron Rose posted:Oh, gently caress it, I'll hop in on this too. That’s hardly his first small size. 
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Apr 16, 2018 19:26
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The T-shirt thread has been stickied here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3854490
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Apr 16, 2018 19:52
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Goddamnit I should have called the thread "Operation Useless Shirt"
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Apr 16, 2018 19:53
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McNally posted:Goddamnit I should have called the thread "Operation Useless Shirt" But you did? 
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Apr 16, 2018 20:05
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EVA BRAUN BLOWJOBS posted:But you did? Someone went in and changed it for me.
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Apr 16, 2018 20:06
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McNally posted:Someone went in and changed it for me. well at least you're posting in the right thread
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Apr 16, 2018 20:08
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McNally posted:Someone went in and changed it for me. 
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Apr 16, 2018 20:19
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Slavic Crime Yacht posted:well at least you're posting in the right thread I'm tired, leave me alone.
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Apr 16, 2018 20:40
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:He sees our CO, makes an "oh poo poo!" face and pulls her back into the room with him and slams and locks the door, and then pretends nobody's home when our CO starts pounding, until the CO threatens to get the keystick and the MPs and have him forcibly hauled out.  Holy poo poo. Nothing against t-shirts, but I didn't want this gem to get buried by t-shirt chat.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:20
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When an artillery battery forgets they own howitzers In 2003 I checked into my first battery, and was immediately told we were deploying to Kuwait to line up on the Iraq border, with me literally just a couple days out of artillery school. We're having one of my first staff meetings, and everyone is kind of uptight because they're trying to go over all the schoolhouse/training stuff we know about artillery, and making sure we aren't missing anything applicable to an actual war. That day they decided to go over Battery Defense, so they get up on the marker board and are diagramming out each flank of an arty battery position, and marking it with "we park the Humvee with the .50 ringmount here at our rear, with two mechanics with rifles, and here on the left flank we have two M240s and three guys which we can plus up to eight if we sound the BD alert..." We get partway into this, and one SNCO suddenly brings up that we have no heavy weapons assigned to our forward flank, so all we have in that direction is just whatever riflemen are up on the gunline crewing the howitzers. Great concern ensues, and there's talk about whether we can shift around one of the M240s, or do we maybe mount something on a ring-mount and drive it over to the front? While this whole discussion is going, butterbar me is thinking I must be missing something, since the solution *seems* really obvious but I can't be right because there's no way a dozen officers and NCOs are missing this. But this drags on for several minutes, and I really want to say something, but I don't want to look dumb at my first meeting. Finally someone pauses with a suddenly puzzled expression and says "maybe we don't need more heavy weapons on our front... because we have six 155mm howitzers pointed that direction?" TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 07:02
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hey stupid question but what's the minimum range on one of those things? Geniunely curious.
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Apr 17, 2018 07:11
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Smiling Jack posted:hey stupid question but what's the minimum range on one of those things? My vague recollection is about 400m if you set the fuses as low as you can, though it might be possible to set them even lower but it's simply not a good idea. Standard 155 HE kill zone is like 50m, casualty zone is like 100m, and beyond that there's still sporadic "jagged piece of metal might land here" for a couple hundred meters. We worked up charts for how to set up the howitzers for this, and nobody was inclined to work the numbers for under 400m because that's awfully close to just shelling yourself. Before anyone asks: 155mm doesn't have beehive/flechette rounds (the "shotgun shell full of little darts" that 105mm used to use) because in Vietnam it proved to be inferior to just cranking your fuse time down and firing HE shells. With flechettes since they fly straightish the enemy can avoid them by seeking low ground and cover, but a 155HE exploding in midair is going to be putting out damage forwards, backwards, and downwards of its burst so has a more omnidirectional effect.
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Apr 17, 2018 07:42
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I forget how big they made SABOT rounds, but I know that even the tiniest was bad news for everyone involved. Edit: those and beehive are the worst I think I’ve seen besides nukes
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Apr 17, 2018 08:17
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9uXLzZyucI
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Apr 17, 2018 16:24
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To piggyback off the sir here there's fuzes just for poo poo like steel rain missions. Fuzes that like going off early because trees or birds.
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Apr 17, 2018 17:23
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Steezo posted:To piggyback off the sir here there's fuzes just for poo poo like steel rain missions. Fuzes that like going off early because trees or birds. Yeah, that's the Variable Time (VT) fuze ("fuze" is the standard NATO spelling). And TIL why it's called Variable Time. I always thought it was weird that it wasn't just called "Proximity Fuze" since theoretically any timed fuze is "variable" since you can set it for different times. If anything, VT is less-variable because it defaults to going off 20m(?) above the ground. Basically it has a really crude little radar in it and as it flies it sends out pings, and when the ping returns fast enough to indicate it's hitting something 20m away, the shell explodes in the air. The reason it's called Variable Time is much the same reason that tanks are called "tanks": it's a deliberate attempt to conceal its nature. In WWII the Allies spent a buttload of time and money to create proximity fuses (especially for AA, but it was also applied to everything else once they figured it out). In the beginning it was so sensitive that the Allies only permitted VT AA to be used over water, to keep a dud shell from being exploited and reverse engineered. Once the Germans figured out we'd discovered VT, they put out a huge bounty for any intact fuze. So in any case, when they first shipped out VT fuzes, they insisted everyone call them "Variable Time" so that if the enemy heard about the resupply, they wouldn't realize it was an automatic airburst shell. The more you know! And just to get in some brief idiocy: in 2004 at Camp Junction City (later renamed Camp Ramadi) we had LNs building cinderblock hooches for the Marines, with roofs made of corrugated metal with foam insulation against the sun. So LNs being LNs, when they were making roofs they'd just throw the scrap, including narrow sharp strips from small adjustments, down into the alley between hooches. One night, one of our joes was walking down one of the alleys to go to the head, with no flashlight on a blacked-out base, and stepped in a pile of scrap and lacerated his foot so badly he had to be Medevac'ed to Germany. All over base we've got guys walking around with their arms in slings, or all bandaged up or on crutches, from getting shot, shelled, concussed, etc. and yet they were still kept on-base on Light Duty, but this cat hosed his foot up *so* bad he had to leave country. That's drat impressive.
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Apr 17, 2018 18:48
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That makes so much sense. I never questioned VT. I figured it was for blanketing an area and then timing explosions to go off simultaneously for whatever loving reason. I miss this part of the ammunition side of things. Geeking out over explosives.
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Apr 17, 2018 20:17
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I'm up to page 99 in the thread, and just hitting the ASVAB dick-slapathon. I don't recall my ASVAB score, but apparently it was high enough that I qualified for whatever. The one I do remember is the DLAB though (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) which is a bunch of exercises with made-up languages just seeing what your overall linguistic skill potential is. Minimum score to become a Linguist is 100, I got 137 out of 176.  Anyway, speaking of languages and idiots. Rifleman Dodd is a 1932 novel about a British sniper during the Peninsular Wars in Portugal. I will emphasize that it is clearly a Young Adult novel, it's a derring-do tale for young British boys. The Marine Corps loves this book for some reason, and it was issued in Boot Camp so I read it like 8 times since it was the only non-manual book I had. The language is slightly stilted because it's British and a few generations back, but our DI was trying to cajole more joes into reading it, and said "look, I know this book is kind of hard to read, since it's like in Old English and stuff." I mean, I know what he meant by that, but the technical language nerd in me just got a vision of assigning the original Beowulf to boots: quote:Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, Rifleman Dodd is supposed to be inspirational because he gets separated from his unit and goes all one-man army with his mad sniper skills. But much like Starship Troopers (beloved by the Corps) I don't think they really looked at the context of the book. The climactic final scene features Dodd almost getting killed to go set fire to a bunch of wood the Spanish are about to use to build bridges. So he sets it on fire and runs off fist-pumping, but before the Spanish can start to put the fire out, a superior rides up and says "oh good, you got the message, we're falling back so everyone has to burn all the wood so the enemy can't build bridges to follow us." And then the book emphasizes that Dodd spends the rest of his life proud that he's a hero for destroying the bridge materials the Spanish actually wanted to destroy anyway. Which honestly sounds a lot like OEF/OIF so I guess it's applicable.
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Apr 17, 2018 21:03
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I've gotten to the part of the thread about losing serialized gear, and crashing two helicopters trying to find one missing M9 in Iraq, and I got a good one. Digging a deeper hole via international arms dealing So after OIF-2, our battalion has a real mess of records, trying to reconcile the different accounts and figure out our combat losses, regular losses, extra poo poo we somehow acquired, etc. My recollection is that part of the complication was guys getting medevac'ed with all their gear and the hospital confiscating their weapons and us trying to eventually get them back. Midway through this reconciling process, L Battery's armorers realize they have two M16A4s in their cage that aren't on their books. So of course the immediate reaction is "hey, free rifles!" One guy took one home to keep at his on-base housing as a souvenir, the other gave one to his dad as a gift. A couple weeks go by and more records get cross-checked, and the armorers are given an updated sheet which now has them two A4s short. Now at this point, there are a couple smart ways to go. The absolute best would be to immediately gather the rifles together, smuggle them back in, and come out saying "oh hey we looked under a pile of barrel-bags and found them or they fell behind a shelf or something" and the issue would be resolved with at the most an rear end-chewing for not looking hard enough. The next-smartest would be to fully disassemble the rifle, take a hacksaw and cut the serial number area off the lower and throw the lower all duct-taped up in junk and chuck it in a dumpster far from home, and then take the unserialized parts and sell them on AR15.com Nope. At this point "tripling" or even "quintupling" seems too light of a word. They decided to X-down to the whatevereth power. So one guy calls this girl he knows who allegedly has some underworld connections, and she agrees she can make the rifles disappear forever and cut them in on the profits. So they drive the rifles to her apartment IN TIJUANA. Yup, hid them in their car and smuggled stolen federal automatic weapons into Mexico. After a few days of missing rifles, eventually NCIS gets involved. They apply Occam's Razor and figure that armorer theft is the single simplest solution, so they separate the two guys and interrogate them and both immediately narc each other out. They provide NCIS the girl's phone number, and they call her and say "Listen carefully, you have one hour to wrap the rifles up in a blanket and take them to the front office at the San Diego border crossing, ask for Inspector Smith, hand him the bundle and just walk away. If you don't meet him within one hour, we're giving all your information to the Federales and telling them you're smuggling automatic weapons for the narcos." Girl ain't dumb, so thirty minutes later she's handing over both A4s to a NCIS agent and the issue is resolved. Each guy got nailed with I think three years of hard time, and both were married and I can guess that a first-termer marriage isn't going to fare well with three years of separation. So yeah, a truly impressive display of taking a handful of poo poo and turning it into a world of poo poo. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 02:31
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And I thought HQ battery shooting at our guys as they did route recon because the XO thought radio protocol was for faggots was goddamn retarded. Did 3/11 turn into a black hole of stupid when my crew left or did I just not notice because of the event horizon of suck? Steezo fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 02:40
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Digging a deeper hole via international arms dealing jesus tittyfucking christ
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Apr 18, 2018 03:00
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:I've gotten to the part of the thread about losing serialized gear, and crashing two helicopters trying to find one missing M9 in Iraq, and I got a good one. What the gently caress.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:02
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o7
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Apr 18, 2018 03:06
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:What the gently caress. Not even the dumbest poo poo that battalion did. Off the top of my head, throwing ap mines off the road like frisbees, patrolling hammered, ND of a .50 into a mosque the day after someone NDs the Mk19 into their lawn... Good times
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Apr 18, 2018 03:06
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They 3↑44'd down. Wasn't there one about somebody taking over a new shop and finding a bunch of off-the-books crypto poo poo, shoving it back in whatever dark corner of hell it came from, and immediately putting in for a transfer? shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 03:26
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Steezo posted:And I thought HQ battery shooting at our guys as they did route recon because the XO thought radio protocol was for faggots was goddamn retarded. Are you talking about OIF-I with 3/11? Because I think it was HQ Battery that opened up on a foot patrol from another battery during a sandstorm in OIF-I and one kid took some nasty M16 hits but survived. The SNCO saw figures out in the sand, ordered the nearby joes to fire and they refused since they couldn't ID the target, so just the SNCO and one other guy ended up firing their rifles. The chilling part was that one of the guys the SNCO told to open up was an M240 gunner, but his MG jammed or something, so they narrowly avoided opening up on their own guys with a belt of 7.62. EDIT: the closest I ever got to getting shot over four deployments was by the dire enemy... G Co. 23rd Marines. That's it's own fun story for another day. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 03:35
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:n-down Careful
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Apr 18, 2018 03:36
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EVA BRAUN BLOWJOBS posted:Careful It's pretty clear from context that it means a number, like "solve for n". But changing for clarity just so nobody gets vexed. EDIT: I got probated ages ago for saying "kafir" which I argue was kinda bullshit because it was clearly in the context of "what a Somali would call an Ethiopian" and not "what a Afrikaner would call a Zulu." Shoulda just gone with "kuffar" for clarity. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 03:38
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Digging a deeper hole via international arms dealing This will probably be topical again. 
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Apr 18, 2018 03:45
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Are you talking about OIF-I with 3/11? Yes I am. I was in the battery that got shot at. You might remember me as the reason the gunnys humvee was called twisted sister.(Wasn't allowed to use lights at night and found a mortar pit, which looked a lot like more sand with the old nods). HQ got one burst off the 240 before it jammed. Worst thing I had to do was stay on my position as a gunner when reac, then corpsman up was called. The XO responsible for that unannounced unplanned route recon was unable to admit fault, failure or that there was a lesson to be learned. So they sped him to the rear after finding out each gun crew was competing for the honor of killing him. Almost 15 years to the day and I'm still extremely pissed. Also I'm on the border now after a tweetstorm so I'm still an idiot.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:47
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Steezo posted:Yes I am. I was in the battery that got shot at. Small corps/long war! Were you there with 3/11 in OIF-II when Chance Phelps got shot? How weird is it that they made a Kevin Bacon movie about him?
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Apr 18, 2018 04:00
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Small corps/long war! I was in the AP battery so I was on Okinawa when that happened. I remember giving him poo poo for being a boot when I made Cpl. That movie and the intense shame I felt are why, when I was in a particularly stupid mood and I re-enlisted it wasn't back to the Marines.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:07
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shame on an IGA posted:They 3↑44'd down. Not me, but I was running a comsec office that had 2 numbered accounts at one point. Oops, I mean 3, the one everyone forgot about and my predecessor didn't mention because he didn't know where all the poo poo was so he just turned over the 2 accounts and pcsed. Took almost my whole two years there getting that sorted out without going to jail, just some marked down evals.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:37
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shame on an IGA posted:They 3↑44'd down. I was doing a closeout inventory with one of the reserve med labs I was assigned to in the early - mid 90's and found an unsecured trailer with a bunch of crypto and commo gear left in it. When it was mentioned to the CO, 'Oh that's where that stuff went. Just close it back up.' I dropped my IRR request that day.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:39
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Friendly Fire stories! 1-41 Inf tried to kill me with a .50 We rolled up on a 113 that wasn't responding to recognition signals. As my TC was getting ready to go knock on the loving thing, it turned and opened up on our gun truck. They didn't hit us, by some miracle. Their track can't say the same. We had 4 gun trucks in the lead, escorting something like 80 vehicles. Once two 50s and two Mk19 opened up, they broke contact. The lasting image will a tracer, heading straight for my face, the arcing up about 10 inches from my windshield.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:53
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I am jealous of friendly fire incidents in the bullshit war. Before I deployed I was an MP on Camp Kinser in Okinawa. We constantly had to secure unlocked buildings. We also had to have our guns drawn for this poo poo. Lots of warehouses on Kinser have rooms with two openings. I was a boot, meritorious Lance, and there was a Corporal with me. He made me clear the surrounding rooms while he stayed in a room with two doors. He told me to knock three times and open the door when I'm done with the rooms on the opposite side of where we entered. I cleared the rooms and was about to knock and for some reason this dude opens the loving door. Every time I see this gif I see this dude's reaction:  He gives that look and raises his M9 right in front of my loving face. He somehow missed and I escaped with my life and a perforated ear drum. There's probably a bullet hole still in some supply building that had arctic cammies in it on Kinser, we never reported it. But gently caress me I would have preferred a letter home about friendly fire in Iraq than "Sorry mom, my idiot boss shot me in the face in Japan a night after we got wasted at karaoke."
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Apr 18, 2018 06:33
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