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Had a dude named Hilton in OSUT that scored a 27 on his ASVAB. Dude was borderline retarded and couldn't do anything right. Totally cool dude, just pretty goddamn stupid. The one upside was that he was strong as an ox from growing up on some farm, and being a 12C requires lots of heavy lifting, which he happily did for people. He followed me to Korea although went to a different unit (him being a 12C and me being 12B) and hooked up with someone you would have sworn was closely related from the 1-72AR BDE S4 shop. During the FTX, there was a frog that hopped out of the stream in the middle of our tent site. I jokingly said 'hey Hilton, five bucks to eat that frog'. Motherfucker reached over, grabbed it and hamfisted it into his maw, chewed and swallowed. About ten people saw it happen and everyone had the most horrified look on their faces. ------ I've told this story a bunch of times before, but it's a classic. We had a Regimental Birthday Officer in Iraq. What had happened was a brand-gently caress-new 2LT that arrived about six days before main body deployment to one of the scout platoons. Lost his nods before we left Kuwait. Not misplaced, not had taken, lost. We weren't in country for more than a week and he lost his weapon. His brand new M4 with ACOG and PEQ2. Lost, as in lost for good. So naturally he gets yanked immediately and thrown deep into BDE staff. He fucks up in RS2, then RS3, then RS4 and gets placed as the RBO, Regimental Birthday Officer. Turns out that this dude was a fine arts major and had a real talent for painting, drawing and other related things. So he would send these beautiful, hand made birthday cards to people. Due to the fact we had 6000 people in our brigade, not everyone got one. We thought it was all a big loving joke until we saw the cards ourselves. I don't think I have mine anymore  ------ In Korea, when I was short timing it, we got a new E4 dude to my squad. He was in his early 30s, which is extremely odd considering being an Engineer is hard as poo poo on your body. Turns out he just enlisted, he had an MSc in Chemistry from some place that I can't remember - I think it was Rutgers? I don't know. Worked as a lab tech doing analytic chemistry for like 80k a year. Turns out he had a really, really nasty divorce and lost everything so he just said gently caress it and enlisted, and it just so happened that 12B would let him ship in three days. I got a hoot out of him telling me this, as he was standing next to my just-turned-19 year old rear end as we were cleaning up puke on the quad from the Engineer ball we had the night before.
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Nov 28, 2012 05:52
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movax posted:
He wasn't that fat, no. He was like 5'1 or so and just stocky. Honestly reminded me of a military version of Larry the Cable Guy. Dude was strong as gently caress though, he used to carry a ton of ribbon bridge pins for people which are like 65 pounds a piece or something. I did give him the five bucks for eating that frog though. Oh, and it wasn't a tiny frog either. It was maybe about the size of a cell phone. edit again: Hilton would also tell girls in Korea that he was from "LA", the girls would say "ooooh, los angeles?" and he would say "no, LA - lower alabama". Vasudus fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Nov 28, 2012 |
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Nov 28, 2012 07:07
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That reminds me: One of my drivers (meaning that I was responsible for him, he was actually top's driver) noticed that there was a stray Iraqi cat in our living area. Dude puts on gloves and grabs the cat. Comes back ten seconds later with a very angry ball of fur latched on to his hand. Kicks the cat like a football out the door and has a nasty rear end bite on his hand. Senior medic takes a look at it, says that he has to get a rabies shot to be sure. We don't have that at our CSH - just some medics and a trauma surgeon with some antivenom. So they have to call in a MEDIVAC for it. It is ~2:30am. 3rd ACR's policy was to call in to the BDE stating in plain english what you needed for a MEDIVAC if it was a non emergency, reserving 9 lines for actual serious poo poo. Apparently they had someone new at the BDE TOC that didn't understand this, so our request got forwarded to BDE air support in a 9 line format. 19 minutes of flight later, two Apaches ready to go are circling our tiny rear end FOB. The blackhawk they were escorting lands on the pad and a full PSD detachment comes hard charging out. I'm standing there next to my dumbass soldier with a brown tshirt, unbloused DCU pants, a boonie cap, my M9 and flip flops. Crew chief comes up to me, as two medics behind him have a stretcher ready, and asks where the patient is. I point at my soldier, in full DCUs next to me with a big bandage on his hand. Crew chief looks over at my soldier, who simply says "I GOTS BIT BY A CAT". Entire PSD detachment goes from  to  in about two seconds.
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Nov 28, 2012 08:02
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Veins McGee posted:Did the BDE Watch O just call line 6 as x-ray for some reason? Was this before MIRC? It's entirely possible, BDE had some real winners for the night crew. The daytime battle captain (1LT) was super on top of his game, the night one not so much. Our FOB was literally on top of the Iraq/Syria border so armed escorts were pretty common for even routine traffic. Also I have no idea what MIRC is so probably yeah. edit: maybe he was the night battle captain? They ran 3am-3pm shifts. Either way, doofus that came on at 3am was bad.
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Nov 28, 2012 08:11
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My FOB was on the border between Iraq and Syria. We had, on the side of the 12 foot high concrete barriers, printed in a huge variety of languages "US INSTALLATION DO NOT BLOCK GATE <--100 meters-->". We printed that poo poo in English, Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, French, German and Farsi. In bright orange marine-grade spraypaint. It's impossible to miss, because the letters are absolutely huge and readable at 200+ feet away. So naturally, one day some important business type dude parks his brand-loving-new, still has plastic on the back seats Mercedes about 20 feet away from the gate. He gets out, ignores the gigantic fuckoff signs and walks over the border into Syria. We ask around if anyone knows this dude. Nobody does. We don't have any method of towing him. So the guards takes the Abrams we're using as a gate and baha that mother flat. Then we use an ACE and push it into the nearby wadi. Dude comes back two days later asking where his car went, the villagers explain what happened, and he comes to us to complain. The dude speaks perfect English. He says he thought the signs were to keep criminals away, and him being a respectable businessman did not have to worry. We booted him out without a claims card.
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Dec 4, 2012 18:03
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I once scraped the side of a very angry CWO4's humvee with mine because I was getting mail for the unit by myself, and I misjudged how much space I had to make a sharp turn in the parking area. The CWO4 was in the vehicle at the time. He was not pleased. --------- Being an Engineer on the Iraq/Syria border means a lot of border construction. We had a huge, huge AO and we were responsible for building a 15 foot berm between Iraq/Syria to prevent smugglers, allegedly. Since being inside dozers and ACEs in 120 degree heat is an excuse to have heat casualties, most of the work we would do was at dusk into the night. So we're out building a berm at a new site at like 0200 and something isn't right. The paper maps had us right were we were supposed to be. The FBCB2 had us about a mile on the wrong side of the border. My XO, believing himself to be the second coming of Patton himself, said that we were fine and to continue on mission. This was his project, after all. About 0230 rolls around and my gunner says 'uh...SGT Vasudus, a BMP is the wheeled ruskie APC right?' '...no, why?' 'so what's wheeled with a 50 on it?' '...that's a BRDM...are you studying for the board or something?' 'see those lights way out to the west? like 50 of those BRDM things are coming right for us' Welp. I immediately hop up there and look down the nightvision scope to see what the christ he was talking about. Sure as poo poo, there was a huge fuckoff wheeled and light track force heading for us at high speed. At least two whole company+ sized elements. I tell my XO that we're on the wrong side of the border and the Syrians aren't very happy about it. He says they're wrong and we'll be fine, and he's gonna call in some air support to scare them off. He relays his coordinates and my TOC informs him that the FBCB2 is correct. XO comes screaming over the radio 'PACK YOUR poo poo! PACK YOUR poo poo! WE'RE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE BORDER' So we quickly left this half finished berm project and immediately left the area back to Iraq.
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Dec 4, 2012 18:31
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AB posted:Please tell me he got relieved for that. Hahahahaha gently caress no. We were so outnumbered, overtasked and undermanned he could have murdered someone in public and still have command. My unit had an AO about the size of two or three battalions, plus a city and a border checkpoint. Days were long. My XO was the absolute worst and it was my entire responsibility to be his babysitter. Literally, that's what my primary job was when I was outside the wire; I was his PSD. My job wouldn't even require me to be outside the wire most of the time if it wasn't for the fact that my XO wanted to religiously go out to get combat experience. He was some sort of West Point superstar, a fourth generation officer from a long line of colonels who never got that star. Except he was just a cocky poo poo without any real skills and loved to claim credit for the 20+ hours I put into the job every day. My XO trusted me explicitly, and ran absolutely everything that required judgment and reasoning by me, because the other officers hated him and he couldn't look like an idiot in front of anyone else. So being attached at the hip to him, means that I was involved in just about every aspect of my company's operations. I mean, 90% of the time he already made up his mind on things and ran it by me to confirm, I'm not saying I was like the god of the company or anything. But I was privy to way, way more information than the job would normally entail. He liked to wrestle people and ended up breaking my best friend's leg doing so. Thankfully, he was just my TOC runner so aside from not being able to actually run, he was able to do his job just fine. He tried to wrestle me one day and I "accidentally" elbowed him in the jimmies so hard he threw up. Since I was his golden boy he believed me when I said it was an accident. I kept every single incident of misconduct and malfeasance in my leaders book, in the event that he ever tried to throw me under the bus. I told him this about 9 months in to the tour and it absolutely terrified him, and gave me some serious bargaining power if I ever needed it. Due to how things ended up, he was my first line supervisor most of the time and did write up some bitching NCOERs. So that was nice.
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Dec 4, 2012 19:26
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They should make people at family day sit there in the company building at 0500 to draw weapons, then finally get to the range at noon, and fire one magazine before shutting it down. You'll have to plan that event one time and one time only.
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Dec 26, 2012 22:18
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Range control in Iraq was rad because 1) We ran the range at our 400-something FOB. and 2) We didn't give a gently caress. SF had the range on reserve from 0600-0800, every day. Some days they would use grenades, some days flashbangs, some days captured soviet gear. Every once in awhile they would pull out the M134 which would garner quite the audience. After that though, it was free reign. You come in, you ask to reserve the range or walk on it. I ask what you're using, what you're shooting at, who is doing the shooting and how long you plan on taking. Want to lob dildos of doom at plywood cutouts you made yourself? loving pick up after yourself and I don't give a gently caress. Want to just empty a mag at 50 meter targets, which eventually became our SOP before patrol? gently caress it, whatever. Don't lose you poo poo and don't gently caress up my berm.
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Dec 27, 2012 00:10
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DoktorLoken posted:That's definitely a He'll probably be the only dude eating at the DS' table in the DFAC.
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Jan 28, 2013 00:46
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moment. I can only imagine the hilarity of a former DS getting out and then coming back in as an E4 for whatever reason and having to redo BCT due to a break in service. I'm sure it's happened.
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I think that would be the worst fate for me if I were stupid enough to take the TDRL buyback. Not being in the Army again, but the fact that I would have to survive ~15 weeks of OSUT again, knowing what I do now. I'm pretty sure I would go blind from rolling my eyes so often.
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Jan 28, 2013 02:07
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When I was doing a range in Korea one of the squad leaders, a 22 years in E6 whose been on BN+ staff for the last 15, nearly killed my entire squad. We were doing a platoon level demo mission, really simple stuff. Few crater charges, few blocks of C4, really simple stuff. The last part of the process involves using a clacker and a tester.  The idea being that the clacker (the M57 Firing Device) is connected to the Test Set, which simulates a live connection. You look into the end of the tester and you hit the clacker, if the tester lights up the clacker works. Hooray. Now when your demolitions doesn't fire off, you know immediately that it's not your clacker. I wasn't there, as I was downrange with the rest of my squad setting up the last bits of demo, but as the story goes this squad leader doesn't remember the details about how to do this poo poo. He connects the clacker to the real demolitions line and not the tester and tries to clack it. Anyone that's worked with clackers knows they very rarely work the first, second or even third time if they're old as poo poo. The story goes that he made it to two clacks before my LT saw what was happening and knocked the loving thing out of his hands. He then proceeded to scream until his voice gave out, and this E6 quickly found himself back in BN staff somewhere in 2ID. I think they sent him to 1-72AR  Had the clacker actually worked the first or second time, he would have detonated the shot, which was about a half dozen cratering charges.  These things. edit: And before someone corrects me, we were using the claymore det lines and caps to bust the shot. Yes, I know that sounds dumb. They wouldn't give us the requested amount of poppers. That's Korea for you. Vasudus fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 02:44
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AB posted:
Ask Cage Kicker, I talk about this poo poo casually.
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Jan 30, 2013 02:58
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It wasn't even anything super interesting either, I never did a ton of cool poo poo. I was just lucky enough to be around idiots enough to have something to talk about but not be injured by them.
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Jan 30, 2013 03:16
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Cobbsprite posted:Ahh, poo poo. I worked closely with some guys in 1-72. What year was this? Winter gunnery of 03, so late December 03 to early January 04.
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Jan 30, 2013 03:34
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Cobbsprite posted:Couple of my platoon guys might have known him, then. They transferred out of 1-72 to the 1BCT 1Cav PSD in '06 and probably knew him. Entirely possible. Short, mid-40s E6 from A CO 2nd EN. Can't for the goddamn death of me (har har) remember his name though. Had a collection on his wall of literally every playboy magazine ever made until that point. Had a greyed out pedo stash, originally from Montana.
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Jan 30, 2013 04:59
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Samu posted:As a fellow combat engineer all I can say to this s gently caress that guy. Don't they make you signal your intent to fire on those ranges? You know, the whole screaming FIRE IN THE HOLE in all four cardinal directions?  I am the third from the left, middle row, next to the dude with the scum stache. That huge fuckoff crater was not there when the morning started.
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Jan 30, 2013 05:04
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Samu posted:Do you guys use manufactured charges to do cratering? We use 27kg of tri-grain 8 feet down initiated with a quarter block of C4 and it makes a much bigger hole than that. Yeah, at least under normal circumstances we used 40lb charges, composition H6 explosives. Usually a quarter or a half block to set it off, with a ring of cord for the det system. All doubled up and redundant, of course. The crater is rather ho-hum sized because we're not allowed to bury the charges more than a few feet in the ground - the resulting explosion is more flashy, but the amount of earth moved is rather low. I hated the ranges in Korea for stuff like that.
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Jan 30, 2013 05:19
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To a degree it's more frowned upon when you're still in the service more than anything. My boss has memorabilia from Korea -> present, including patches, pins, berets and coins from a variety of SF commands from all branches that were given to him over the years. Nobody ever confused him for being anything that he wasn't, but that's because my office is literally 100% veterans. It's a bigger deal when the dude still puts on the uniform. ninja edit: my boss was a military social worker during Vietnam.
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Jan 31, 2013 22:47
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People think I'm kidding when I say that the military is full of the most colossal idiots you'll ever meet, and that the only reason we've "won" as many conflicts as we have is because the other side is somehow, inexplicably, more stupid. It's a land of the blind thing.
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Feb 2, 2013 00:28
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Martello posted:an rear end in a top hat who doesn't get along with his wife. That's why my company commander was such a dick sometimes. I used to get in pretty goddamn early since I had 5:30 ops meetings to take notes for (  ) and when I would walk across from the barracks at like 5:15 the CO's car would be there. With snow on it from the night before. Go inside to the company office and the CQ would be loving around with some excel nonsense and the runner would be organizing our FMs or buffing the floor or something. Peek inside the CO's office and there's a cot and a go bag. When that happens everyone knew it was a 2100 night.
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Feb 6, 2013 19:00
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Do Infantry officers even participate in room clearance? I mean, when we cleared poo poo as 21Bs the LT was always commanding, not being some schmuck in a stack. Each individual unit always has their own SOP for clearance yeah, but I have no idea if in training they have 11As involved in the actually process.
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Feb 7, 2013 22:14
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I'm always interested in how countries with conscription handle things. Or just foreign militaries in general.
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Feb 12, 2013 20:49
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KetTarma posted:I was in the pretend floating military. Does that mean he authorized a high explosive bombardment instead of an illumination flare? Yes, for extra blue-on-blue action. That reminds me of one of the first night ops 3ACR did in Tal'Afar when we got there in 05. One of the adjacent scout companies called in an illumination mission. Okay, no problem. It gets blasted over the net and everyone's waiting for it because ZOMG FIRST FIRING MISSION OF THE DEPLOYMENT. Round arrives, but somethings wrong...it's a bit too low... Queue the round going off approximately 200 feet above the city and promptly falling right onto someone's house. Iraqis sleep on the roof when it's warm out. Queue a whole bunch of people screaming and yelling because a loving gigantic many hundred degree, bright as the loving sun illumination round landed on their roof. Which like aliens, proceeds to dissolve the roof and fall into the next floor. And the next. Then it sets the house on fire. Thankfully, only like two or three houses ended up burning down and nobody was injured. Civil Affairs must have had a loving field day, because those people walked away from the ordeal with big loving smiles on their face.
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Mar 29, 2013 18:34
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I knew an E7 that was getting a (civil) engineering degree from I *think* University of Colorado-Boulder. He had been getting it for the last five years and at the time I knew him, was a first semester junior. I asked him what'll happen if/when branch decides he's going to PCS and he just told me hopefully that never happens. I never did see if he got it or not.
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Apr 1, 2013 01:13
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Any story involving ANP/ANA/INP/INA is probably true. Those dudes have done some crazy things.
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Apr 9, 2013 02:23
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what in the gently caress this isnt the drunk thread
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May 3, 2013 05:25
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Veins McGee posted:I don't recall bringing the Marine Corps into this and I think their stringent 'no utilities off base' thing is silly and a pain in the rear end. That being said, when one is appearing on national TV, representing their service, maybe they should dress up a little bit more than what you wear on a daily basis. I know the decision almost certainly wasn't his so it was probably his retard command, imagine that in the AF. "Hmm we can have some guy look like a slob in this zippered cloth bag or he could wear just about anything else" Acceptable use of cammies: within 5 miles of the post and still during the working day (ie dude was shamming to go do something) This is pretty much the only time I wouldn't cringe when I saw ACUs in the springs.
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May 10, 2013 07:57
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HATE CURES TRANNYS posted:People think I'm weird because I change before going home after drill. I have a 3 hour drive and need to stop for gas and stuff. I think it's a big reserve/NG thing to try and bring as much attention to the fact that you are military as possible. They probably want to be thanked for their service despite never leaving the state of Pennsylvania in their lives except for AT.
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May 10, 2013 19:29
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Less regular chat more topical chat about idiots por favor.
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May 10, 2013 21:18
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:As an aside is there a "true tales for the flight line" thread in GiP? I'm feeling nostalgic and would love to read/share a few tales. As long as you can fill it with enough content to make it interesting, go make one. And keep the loving AF-lingo at a minimum so other people can follow along!
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May 15, 2013 19:03
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The one and only time I was on fireguard in our tent with the heater (a bigass potbelly cast iron heater that runs on JP8) I was sitting far too close to it. I had been doing incredibly heavy labor for like the last 18 hours (picket pounding wooo) and it was 3am so I was obviously nodding the gently caress off. I fell forward and to the right, narrowly missing the side of the heater. Had I fallen to the left, the side of my face would have landed directly on top of it. That was the last time I ever did fireguard inside the tent, and would trade places with dudes outside doing roaming. Rather freeze my nuts off in -40F weather than risk that poo poo again.
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May 22, 2013 21:35
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EVA BRAUN BLOWJOBS posted:We have heaters that run on JP8? New Army motto: "If it doesn't run on jet fuel, it aint poo poo." Yeah, they were bigass potbelly heaters that you put (normally) in a GP-Large. Put your metal jerrycan of JP8 on it, attach a nozzle and let it go. You *can* put them in a GP-Medium but they take up about four cots worth of space, because anything within a four foot radius is like the surface of the sun. Seriously, it gets like four or five hundred degrees and the metal glows red hot if you crank it up. We used them in Korea because the training area that we were at was right at the base of some mountains, and with the wind it would routinely get to -40F or colder, our thermometer only went that far. It never stopped dudes from trying to dry their clothes/boots on it though, making the tent routinely smell like swamp rear end.
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May 22, 2013 21:51
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Samu posted:So happy I got into the heavy equipment side of the combat engineer trade. We build our own FOBs and haul these around with our equipment: Being a mechanized combat engineer is the loving way to go. It still sucks, but we can make it suck less.
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May 22, 2013 23:36
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One of the guys that ended up being a spare driver deserted on us, but not intentionally. Basic timeline was that right before first R&R leave went out, he found out his wife was cheating on him. Dude goes home on the first wave, goes to his house, jody beats the gently caress out of him with a baseball bat until his body is unidentifiable. Dude lives, goes to the hospital and has no identification on him. Wife never visited to identify him. Spends however many weeks in a coma, then however long in rehab because he busted like everything. At some point he finds out that nobody ever notified us of his situation, and the hospital had no idea he was in the military. So he naturally freaks the gently caress out because he's been gone for like, nine weeks at this point or something and calls Rear D. Rear D does the Army solution, and dispatches MPs to arrest and detain him. Spends however many weeks dealing with that poo poo, and ends up coming back to us around month 7 or so of our deployment. He gets written up for lying on his leave form (he said Colorado where we were stationed, got busted up / hospitalized in Louisiana), busted down to E1, and sent to HQ platoon as a driver. He was a cool dude. We always busted his balls for going to confront jody completely unarmed.
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Jun 1, 2013 20:17
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Brittle Beard posted:Wow, seems pretty harsh. Poor dude had already been through hell. What ever happened to the military taking care of it's own? Most of the punishment wasn't directed from the company level. When you're the first and only person to desert in the recent history of 3ACR, you tend to attract attention from up on high. edit: old dog child posted:Once you make a single mistake you're as good as a terrorist Also this.
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Jun 1, 2013 21:20
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Sudden death never bothered me. Probably how I was never really concerned with handling explosives - gently caress up and you're a red mist in the wind. I think I was more nervous handling things like blasting caps and those unexploded MLRS bomblets. poo poo that will take a finger/hand/arm but leave the rest of you intact.
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Jun 3, 2013 19:16
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I never personally handled the bomblets, I was out on mission when we found a few (in/around the Sunni triangle). We drew straws or did rock/paper/scissors to see who was handling what calls. MLRS bomblets were the only situation we flat out refused to handle and called EOD. They would chide us about not being real Sappers until we told them what it was and then they would immediately change tone and take our 9-line.
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Jun 3, 2013 19:33
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gleep gloop posted:50FA isn't making me people think EOD is just a bunch of retards running around. Are you trying to tell me this is not the case?
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Oct 10, 2013 01:20
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Pesticide20 posted:While I was in Afghanistan an E-7 died huffing duster. Fiver says he still got a BSM/MSM.
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Oct 19, 2013 20:02
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