Fuck you. And that’s all I have to say about that.
It reminds me of Baghdad Bob talking about how US soldiers were committing suicide on the gates. And here we are, 23 years later with the USS Abraham Lincoln sitting outside of the gates of the Persian Gulf with sailors trying to jump overboard. I don’t know if jumping off an aircraft carrier is immediately lethal but I assume it’s not good for one’s health. So if any sailors had died, they would essentially be casualties of a staring contest that the US lost. I do not find this to be anything to celebrate but I am sure Iran will feel differently and we’ll see a Lego video about it shortly.
What a thoughtful and illuminating answer.
I mean it wasn’t a completely unreasonable question. That’s why I tried to answer it.
Maybe my anger is misplaced.
The question was rhetorical, and (I believed, from context) in the vein of what Hegseth would have thought.
Apparently, since two people didn’t “get it”, I missed. However, only one of them decided to get personal.
So a hearty “fuck you” to you, too.
Leaping off a carrier is not recommended, but people survive it regularly, especially if wearing a life jacket. Flight Deck crew get blown off by jet blast from time to time. They usually get picked up by our escorts or copters.
Takes far too long to turn a carrier around. I deployed once on a rescue in a whale boat for a rescue op but a Frigate had already recovered our guy by the time we were a short distance from the carrier. Honestly, launching that boat took depressingly long.
As far as I can recall, he made a full recovery.
I’m sorry I went off on you. I have… complex feelings about life aboard and aircraft carrier.
It’s fucking miserable.
ETA: Well, it’s fucking miserable for the portion of the crew that doesn’t get to pretend like it works a regular 9 to 5 job. For that latter group of people, I imagine it’s actually pretty sweet.
I was engineering, so far from 9 to 5, it sucked. During our West Pac, I was the education PO and I got E-DIV qualified enough to get us down to one watch a day. Bliss. I even got to set the watch schedule and so had my watch during my work shift, better yet.
But I well remember having to work 12 hours, get 4 off, dragging my sorry ass to mid watch for 4 hours and then getting 4 off. I rarely got 6 hours sleep on that schedule.
The routine change of US ships is no victory for Iran, but right now, it kinda looks the the war is a victory for Iran. Or at least, a loss for the US. All those leaders we murdered have been replaced by people of the same party, who appear to have tighter control of the country than before we attacked. Who’d have guessed that a common enemy might unite a population? Iran now appears to control the strait of Hormuz. I doubt Iran is much farther from nuclear weapons than it was before we started bombing, either. They have the domestic ability to engineer that stuff, and seem to have buried their factories safely under mountains. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is looking askance at the nuclear power that attacks out of the blue.
I didn’t write the title of that video so don’t blame me for the “looses”.
Well, that’s certainly reasonable, and I was both shorter and more POed tonight than I’d like to have been. My apologies. We good?
I’m not big on labeling “soft” vs. “hard” by generations. That line of thought goes back to the era of “Wooden ships and iron men”. It’s true that expectations of the people in the force are higher now, but so are capabilities. Everyone fighting in 1942 knew that the road home went through Berlin and Tokyo, and they were going to have to get by with little contact from home more personal than the occasional letter - there was simply no way to give millions of fighting men furloughs on the regular and also keep prosecuting the war. Even telecoms were swamped by the global war effort. Everyone involved knew this, and knew that there were reasons for the sacrifices they were making.
As you pointed out, we are now in a war of choice, with a volunteer force, and it’s kinda hard to anwer the question “why the hell are we doing this anyway?” with any rational answer. So yeah, psychologically it’s a lot harder, and so much more flows from that.
I think you’re also correct that the tip of the spear is fighting a two-front war - the enemy before, the idiots behind.
I know how to say “Strawberry Ice-cream” in Farsi. I couldn’t begin to try to spell it.
Sorry. That’s all I got.
We are if you say we are. I was really out of line.
Aw, come on, we can’t have people apologizing and making up, here! This is the Pit!
Then we good.
I thought it was the War Room.