Do Special Forces guys have to know how to drive a stick shift?

[chicken_wire]

@ntcrawler

Actually it wasn’t so bad and was available on quite a few cars back in the day (so I’ve heard). My parents owned a 1966 Opel Rekord, which had a 3-speed column mounted shifter. First gear was top towards you. Second was bottom away from you, and 3rd was bottom towards you. Reverse was top away-from-you. A classic H pattern, just turned on its side. Personally I detest column mounted shifter and those video game gear changing paddles, but can handle them all if necessary.

I quite liked the column shift manual in my first car (a '76 HJ Holden Kingswood, the big, Aussie, GM family car of it’s time). First was toward you and down, second was up and away, third was down from second. Reverse was towards and up. Clutch was heavy as buggery. It had a lot of clicks up by the time I got it and the column shifter would get stuck in between gears, at which point you had to alight, pop the bonnet and pull one of the linkages on the steering column back into place. Great fun at the lights. There was no power steering, power windows or air conditioning. That was a real car, damn I miss it.

[Caractacus_Pott]

chicken wire?, that sounds like my Plymouth Duster. Three on the tree, heavy clutch, loose linkage that dropped off shifting from second to third. Nothing like relying on 4-wheel drum brakes to stop you on a dime! The driver door eventually healed itself shut. I abandoned it in a shopping mall parking lot. They kept threatening to tow, I kept telling them to do so. Finally they did. I was glad because my boss was sick and tired of looking at it everytime he came to work. and, frankly, so was I. I bought my first automatic transmission after that car.

For those who are curious, it wasn’t difficult for me to adapt to a right-drive manual transmission vehicle. It’s been almost 20 years since I regularly drove that Duster but in no time I picked up shifting with the wrong hand.

[diggleblop]

I don’t know your “good friend in the Army special forces HALO team” (nor do I know of such a “team”, although many SOCOM personnel are training in HALO operations) but I will note that most people that talk about such things are at least exaggerating their experiences and often inflating their claims beyond personal experience. There would be little use in training a Delta operator who specializes in mountain ground infil ops to fly a helicopter or sail a tri-hull. Even setting aside all of the “Special Forces” people who never set foot behind lines, the field operators train very intensively to do a few very specific things–hostage rescue, sniping/countersniping, counterinsurgency and insurgent training, recon and info gathering, et cetera. They’re not Robert Ludlum superheroes, they’re guys with a high degree of fitness, a useful surfit of intellect and judgment, an incredible amount of determination and willpower, and the skills that let them do their particular job. Stranger

That’s what he said. He said specifically CIA paramilitary people, though. I have never known him to lie and he is, in fact, a HALO team member. What are his specifics? I have no idea. lol