Back in the day when I was naive enough that military recruiters assumed they could convince me to enlist, I remember asking about the different services. Someone was complaining that the Army had instituted a “time out” card, given to recruits at Basic Training. If they are stressed out by the drill sergeant, they can show this little card, and they get five minutes alone, or something like that.
Is that true? It seems beyond belief that you could pull out a little card and be a Beetle Bailey saying “100 pushups? No Sarge, I’ll take a fiver.”
FWIW, something similar does exist in Navy flight training. At least, it did when I went through, and I’m assuming it still does. It’s called a Training Time Out. You can use it when needed. It’s rarely used, but there are times it can come in handy.
I was on a training hop once, and during the preflight brief the instructor was going over one of the approaches we would use at the outlying airfield. It was an approach I hadn’t studied before, but he was briefing it straight from the publication, and I figured, “How hard can it be? I’ll have it right there in front of me.”
Well, I was wrong. On many levels. It wasn’t easy. Once in the air, I couldn’t even find the damn page in the pub that held the approach. The plane was supposed to begin turning to the field at a certain point which everyone knew (but me), and since it was my job to tell the pilot when to turn and what to do with the aircraft, the plane sailed through the turnpoint and we got called by the airport tower and yelled at over the radio. Needless to say, we called it quits and headed back for a very, very quiet ride back to base. (If you’ve ever heard the term “helmet fire,” that’s a good definition of what was going on with me, racing through the pages of the pub, frantically looking for this page I’d seen not two hours before, while the instructor was yelling at me… not one of my better days)
Afterwards we talked about what had happened and the instructor fessed up and said he hadn’t realized that the particular approach had not been on the syllabus for that hop, and that what I should have done was called a Training Time Out in the midst of my helmet fire. I never did call one in all my training (don’t know anyone else that has, either, because for the most part, you’re screaming “I can’t hack it”), but it did put in focus how those things are supposed to be used.
Despite snopes the Army did in fact issue stress cards that work essentially as stated in the op, but they only lasted one cycle before the whole idea was thrown out. I know this is true because I know two soldiers who where issued these cards in their BCT.