What do soldiers do all day?

Factual Questions
21

As far as daily schedule is concerned, when I was stationed in the boring tactical unit in Ft. Hood, my schedule was almost exactly as Otanx described, the exception being that on Thursday (instead of Friday) we departed early (3:00 pm I believe) for “family time.”

I’m curious as to why Otanx was assigned to extra PT, though, given how much he liked to run. Overweight soldiers were always measured for body fat content, and no extra PT was assigned if your body fat percentage was adequate. I was 100% “overweight” my entire career (after basic), but always came through the measurements squeakly clean.

22

So most weekends you’re free to do as you wish? Can you go away for the weekend or do you have to stay near or on camp? Could you go away for a full weekend (inc Sunday night) and get back to camp by 0630 Monday or do you need to be back in by Sunday night?

23

Not sure how it exactly works in the field, but at HQ/Pentagon, you have weekends off routinely. If, however, you want to travel out of area for the weekend, you need to take leave even for Saturday & Sunday-- if you’re unavailable for duty when called to your duty station, you better be on leave (or temporary duty to another location, i.e. TDY).

24

please explain?

…'cause it sounds sounds sorta scary

25

For the Navy, usually only those in basic training do daily PT. Once in the fleet, only those folks on mandatory fitness/weight loss programs were generally required to participate in regular PT sessions.

We had an exercise bike, a stairmaster, and…wait for it…a rowing machine. The rowing machine was back in the engine room adjacent to the main engines.

Use of the exercise equipment was not mandatory. Remaining physically fit and within weight standards was mandatory.

26

Once I finished boot camp, I never had any kind of PT in the Navy. In my time on the Nimitz as a nuke, we spent our time standing watches, performing maintenance, in drills, in training.

They had a gym available for those who wanted it, and the Marines on board ran in the hanger bay every day.

27

Navy son says:

School for most of the day.

Study time with some of the instructors which he doesn’t have to do - he gets to play his PS3 :rolleyes: - if he does well on the weekly tests, he doesn’t have to do the intensive studying with the instructors the other guys have to do. He’s doing a 3.84 or something in A-School - second in the class - so he’s got free time.

And he sleeps.

Some days, when they don’t have classes, they do PT, clean the school, clean the dorms, do watch, etc. They goof off on the weekends.

My son’s going to be a nuke! But a sub nuke. :smiley:

28

You can rest assured that his free time will evaporate as soon as he passes from A-school to nuke school and beyond. I wish him luck in his endeavor!

29

What do you mean by ‘formation’?

30

Israel is about the size of New Jersey, so you can’t really get more than 3-5 hours away from camp even if you want to… :smiley:

That said, enlisted men in the field get a “Pass” that defines when and where they are supposed to report. Generally, field soldiers will get every second weekend off, starting early Friday morning and returning to base by Sunday noon. They will also get a full week off every 3 months, circumstances allowing (which they usually do, except for times of heightened alert.) Officers are expected to manage their own time and be where they need to be, when they need to be…

HQ-type (non-shift) enlisted men are issued a “Daily Pass” which means they must be on base 8-17 Sunday through Thursday and possibly 8-13 Friday (which may have been dropped since my time.) And of course they can be detained as required if necessary. HQ officers work mostly the same hours, but again are not required to carry a Pass, and are expected to complete their assignments rather than follow a strict schedule. Which usually means a lot more than 40 weekly hours…

Bottom line, as a rule your leave time is your own. If you need to be “on call” you’re told before going on leave, and of course that’s different.

You cannot, however, leave the country without written permission.

31

I was never so busy as when I was in the military. In 23 years, I don’t ever remember a day of boredom (other than in classroom situations). I carried a DayTimer planning book and the damn thing was always full. I have never had a need for one since leaving the service.

I was trained as a construction electrician. In my years of E-1 to E5, my days were spent working in my trade, planning projects, directing projects, ordering materials, etc., as well as taking care of the endless military duties. As a senior enlisted, a lot of time is devoted to planning and managing and dealing with disciplinary issues.

32

I was a Navy Electrician’s mate. At sea we kept pretty busy except during Westpac. In general we had a 12 hour day and two four hour watches a day. One watch was during the 12 hours though. We also had drills. GQs could last a long time and if it was a NBC[sup]1[/sup] drill easily four hours.

The 12 hour work day consisted of repairs and preventative maintenance and safety checks. We generally got an hour for lunch. We were good at finding places to hide during the work day as so the actual work day was often as little 5 hours and the watches. Watches varied by department but for electricians it Steering Gear watch, Duty Electrician, Switchboard Watch and Load Dispatcher.

During Westpac I had the chance to be the Training PO and I got almost everyone qualified for Switchboard watch. It was a carrot and stick approach. At first Switchboard watches were twice per day and included some 1st classes. Steering watch was actually less often. So my first three steps was mandatory training for all men only qualified for Steering Gear and as we qualified new watch standers the 1st classes were the first to go down to one watch and then no watches. This meant the Petty Officers that actually ran the shops were strongly behind the program. I eventually got it to where we had only one watch per day though I was standing an extra watch to qualify for Load Dispatcher.

Jim
[sup]1[/sup] Nuclear, Biological and Chemical attack.

33

My time in ('86 - '91 Active, '91 - '93 Reserves) had the following formula:

0630 - 0730: morning formation/roll-call, then PT. PT varied, but was typically sets of push-ups, sit-ups, and 2-3 mile run. We’d change up with various sports occasionally.
0730 - 0900: personal hygeine, barracks cleanup, breakfast.
0900 - 1130: work call. What we did depended on the Training Schedule, and could be anything from vehicle maintenence, classroom training, day-trips to the woods for training, range time/weapons qualifications, “area beautification” (mow the grass, trim the hedges, paint the barracks, etc.).
1130 - 1300: lunch
1300 - 1630: same as 0900 - 1130.
1630 - : “Recall” formation, dismissed for the day. Leaders may have meetings holding them after 1630.

About every six months or so we would go to “The Field” with our tanks and Bradleys and do “Maneuver Training” (coordinating companies and battalions in complex tactical maneuvers) and/or Gunnery. Field excercise were designed to be chaotic and stressfull; you may go 2-3 days with only 1-2 hours of sleep here-or-there, but no more than 8 hours total in that time. Gunnery less so; no one wanted a half-awake gunner behind the triggers of 105mm cannons, 25mm chain-guns, or TOW missile launchers.

Also about every six months we would do “Q-Services” on our vehicles, which was a semi-aqnnual detailed maintenence inspection/test of our vehicles. It was a week-long, all-day affair, and we would rotate through one platoon at a time (HQ platoon would typically be folded into one of the line platoons for this), and we would skip PT and other formations to do this.

One of the biggest gripes from new soldiers are “Details,” wherein a group of soldiers might be tasked to do something outside the scope of their MOS duties, such as putting on an orange vest and picking up roadside litter on a six-mile stretch of road, or getting “detailed” to an ammo point for another unit that’s in “The Field,” breaking down crates of ammo for their Gunnery rotation.

And there’s always Guard Details to be done somewhere.

Basically, combat soldiers not actively engaged in warfare represent a massive amount of manpower available to accomplish the 1,001 niggling little tasks that need to be done, and anyone, anyone, was fair game.

34

First off, loving the way that everybody in this thread is using 24 hour clock times even the civilians who’ve posted (including me).

That’s why I asked about it. When an army mobilises there seems to suddenly be a vast amount of manpower that appears out of nowhere, all very busy with respective tasks. I was wondering what they all do the rest of the time.

Partly out of sympathy - I hope they’re not bored - and partly out of wondering whether, if they’re all just effectively idle waiting for some kind of situation to arise where they are needed, maybe they could be used in some other way in the meantime. Even if only on a voluntary basis - maybe on a nature reserve or something.

I used to do voluntary work on a nature reserve. It certainly keeps you fit - lots of quite hard physical work so it would fulfill the PT aspect. And an army unit passing through a couple of times a year would probably be able to accomplish a lot.

But I suppose the stuff people have described in this thread would preclude that. They seem pretty busy.

35

I was fat. Max weight for me was 217, and I was at 260 - 270. Authorized body fat for me was 22% and I was at 28% at my lowest. I got to 216 when I had my first weigh in for enlistment by starving myself. I figured I would be able to keep it off once I got to basic. I was wrong. I actually worked harder to loose weight before the army then I did in basic. Prior to the Army I went from over 400 to 216 the day I enlisted. I was very happy with 260, and couldn’t bring myself to care about droping another 50.

Someone asked above what formations are. I am sure you have seen in the movies soldiers standing in a grid. Usually one person out front. Sometimes several of these grids with another senoir person in front of everyone. That is a formation also known as “That boxy thing”. It makes it easy to account for everyone. The person on the right is responsible for knowing where everyone in his squad is. They report to the person in front, and they report to the senoir person. My unit had 5 platoons each in a formation with a platoon sgt in front. Each platoon has approx 5 squads. The squad leader reports to the platoon sgt where his people are, and the plt sgt for each platoon reports to the first sgt if anyone is missing. Formations can get quite large depending on who is holding the formation. Most of the ones people are mentioning here are company sized, maybe some battalion sized formations. Largest formation I had to sit through was about 5000 people.

My wife reminded me also during my time I did 7 months of 24 on 24 off. I worked from 9AM to 9AM the next day. Then I would be off till PT the day after. I would do PT then relieve the person to go home. Repeat every day. The guy that covered the time I was off had been doing it for 3 years.

On weekends while in the US we had to be within 50 miles of post unless we were on a pass or leave. While in Korea we had to be on post/quarters before curfew everynight if we were on the peninsula. Didn’t matter if we were on leave or pass. Exceptions were for travel on official business or travel to and from the airport if going or coming back from leave. Also if you were on pass/leave you could stay in a hotel, but you had to be in your hotel room during curfew hours.

Leave works just like vacation at any job. Put in for it, and you get approved/disapproved. In the Army there is alot of paperwork to do. You have to have an itenerary on what you will be doing, where you will be doing it, and who you will be doing it with. If you are going somewhere they want to know how you are getting there. If you are driving you arn’t officially allowed to drive more than 350 miles in one day. If you are flying they want what flights you are on, and how you are getting to the airport, and picked up on the other side. They want to get ahold of you at any time incase something happens and they need to recall everyone.

A pass is simply non charged leave. If you have days where you don’t have duty like the weekend you can put in a pass to go outside the 50 mile limit. Usually you will not get called in if they need someone at the last minute to cover a duty. A pass was hard or easy to get depending on your chain of command. A pass is a privlidge and they do not have to give them to you. Also if I remember right there was a 150 mile limit on a pass. Want to go past that you had to take leave.

-Otanx

36

That’s neat ! That way, they can jury-rig a galley crew in the event of engine failure. USS Los Angeles, prepaaare for ramming speed ! :smiley:

37

If its like the rest of the navy, little to none. After boot camp, the only PT i ever did was the biannual Physical Readiness Test(PRT). And I’m fairly sure I probably only did 1/2 or less of those. The rest… Chief would show up and ask us what our scores were on the PRT we did the day before. :smiley:
I was a nuke Machinists Mate, so I spent my days mechanicing. Always stuff to fix when the plant is shut down. Oddly, I think the workload was enormously smaller when we were out at sea, simply because there was so little actual maintenance you can do to a running power plant. This made our workdays at sea pretty short. Sometimes there would be a 4 hour workday, but on most days there was so little going on we could easily get any work done that needed doing while on watch. Once you were qualified for all the watchstanding positions, it became even easier, since you just had a couple hours of training a week to keep up on, and once you had some seniority, the days would get even shorter, since we had enough people to have one watch per day for the senior watchstations. The last year I was in, most days at sea I ‘worked’ 4 hours a day on the balls to 4 watch, which consisted of 30-60 minutes of minor cleaning/maintenance, 10-30 minutes of actual plant operations, and 3 hours of bullshitting with the other watchstanders.

The only busy times for me were when pumps failed, since I was the resident pump guru for the division. Then it was 24/7 with catnaps till the thing was up and running again.

Once the plant was shut down though… Ugh. Lists ten miles long of things that needed to be done in order to do our mile long maintenance list.

I miss going out to sea.

38

I will come back later with the daily life of a conscript in the Greek Army. I am still trying to find the official timetable from ministry of defense.

39

Basically no one is tracking you. Most of the time we were told to be within 150 miles. If you wanted to go further than that you had to have what is called a DA Form 31. It is a leave/pass authorization form. Sometimes you could get passes for 3 or 4 days which included the weekend. The only time this rule would come back and bite you is if something happened to you and you were far away without a pass and couldn’t get back. I knew plenty of people who would blow in just in time to get dressed for PT. As long as you were there for work on time and ready, no one cared.

Muscle failure is excercising until your muscles fail and you cannot do any more. Usually lots of pushups and situps.

40

When I was in a RED HORSE squadron, our job was mainly construction–even during wartime. So, when we weren’t deployed to the theater, we deployed to stateside projects and did “Troop Training Projects” to keep our guys up to speed. Yes, carpentry, welding, masonry, equipment operating, and even surveying and the accounting and admin (I did the last two as the OIC) are all perishable skills. We built some good stuff, both in theater and out.

Plus, that exposure to different construction materials and techniques stays with you for the rest of your career. It’s the same thing with the new unit I’m going to. . . train train train. I’ll post more on that later. . .

Tripler
Good times, good times.