Gosh thats like being two days before retirement on the police force.
Probably not. The enemy, especially if speaking their native language, can only issue orders or describe battlefield situations. That’s likely the extent of their vocabulary.
Soldiers, especially those on a mission possibly behind enemy lines, carry surprisingly little gear. This could be a corollary to the ‘iron constitution’ rule, perhaps. Maybe they have enormous pockets to hold their food and sleeping equipment. That, or off-screen burros.
There’s a big room in Washington with maps on the wall plotting US targets. There’s no fighting allowed there.
Sentries never notice anything. They just get killed a lot.
Any helicopter that appears before the last 20 minutes will explode.
They always tend to speak excellent English too.
Seems to me wire rims are more common. At any rate, the guy with the glasses is always shy and Jewish.
No matter what kind of bomb it is, it always makes the same noise.
The randomness of death in combat is really a failure to understand irony and tragedy. If you can avoid irony and heroism, and you aren’t an extra, you’re golden.
Don’t rescue the kid.
Omaha beach was taken by a couple of Higgins boats and a bunch of fog machines. Higgins boats are like clown’s cars, in that hundreds of soldiers can fit inside a 36 foot boat.
If your CO orders you to retrieve someone from enemy territory, trade the interpreter for a P-51 Mustang.
Screwing off is the secret to a successful military career, doubly so if you are a doctor.
A big heart beats a big gun, eight times out of ten.
Shooting at a panzer with a pistol really works 'cos a P51 will appear and bomb it…just in the nick of time.
You will still die tho’
This is a little-known and under-appreciated feature of the Colt .45: The Airstrike Target Painter. Shoot a high-value target with the gun, and a fighter bomber will appear to dispatch it for you.
Nowadays, I understand you can do the same thing with a laserpointer.
In WW2 movies of the 1940s, the enemy screams when killed. Americans do not.
Not a conscientious objector, but the only movie I remember that had anything similar to this was To Hell and Back. One can argue that the events portrayed in it are over-the-top, and unbelievable.
But it seems that they happened, anyways.
My own additions to the thread:
Depth charge attacks are just like hits on the shield of the Enterprise on Star Trek - they just shake things up without doing any damage. They’re stressful, because they’re loud, not because they’re effective.
Shipboard damage control is always an ad hoc situation, where no one is really in charge, and the loudest shouter is the one who gets things done.
Fighter pilots are compelled to give everyone a real time blow-by-blow radio account of everything that’s currently happening to them: “Red Leader! I’ve got multiple bandits on me! They came from nowhere! I can’t shake them! It’s half past six! I ate ants as a child!”.
I beg to differ.
A depth charge exploded close enough to a submarine will most certainly cause the hull to rupture. I’d call that very effective
That’s the point isn’t it? In the movies they just shake you up a bit. Unless of course it is an enemy vessel.
All soldiers wear their dog tags hanging out all the time. Nothing says “I’m a soldier” like dog tags hanging out.
Also, when you get a chance to make love to your woman, she will use those hanging dog tags to pull you towards her.
You remember correctly. Just rewatched Platoon this week on On Demand. It’s a young girl (I believe two) but the camera never lets you see faces and critical body parts. There’s no doubt about what’s happening and I believe the Kevin Dillon character Bunny is involved.
On an unrelated note, I was friends with a girl who was dating an ROTC cadet, and she once claimed that such a use was the only practical reason she could ever derive for the mens’ service dress uniforms including a necktie. She them demonstrated by grabbing her boyfriend by the necktie and walking off with him. 
She may have been dragging him off so he wouldn’t be late to class, but he certainly didn’t seem upset at the treatment.
Actually, up until half-past six and eating ants as a kid, that’s all very reasonable stuff to say over the radio. I took some pilot training when I was in high school, and I can tell you that even when stressing keeping radio chatter to an extreme minimum, pilots have a lot they have to say over the radio in day-to-day situations, let alone with the Red Baron trying to shoot them down.
In the movie Iron Eagle, they explained having the main character talk incessantly about what was going on by saying that he was making a record on the cockpit voice recorder for any later investigations on what went on during the mission. Dunno if pilots actually do this while going on questionable missions or not.
Oh, something else that I learned from war movies:
Naval officers are prone to breaking into song. Enthusiastically off-key starting around the 1970s. (cite: Top Gun, Flight of the Intruder, Down Periscope, most Frank Sinatra movies taking place in WWII)
From older movies:
If you’re fatally hit by multiple bullets, you’ll clutch your chest and expire peacefully. Maybe a spot of blood the size of a quarter will appear on your chest.
If you’re killed by an expoding shell, you’ll leap through the air and expire peacefully.
If you’re wounded you may be in enough pain to grimace while the doc works on you. There certainly won’t be any exposed internal organs, and you won’t be reduced to a screaming crying hysterical wreck.
Officers? Officers!? I never, ever heard a single officer sing, ever. Blue-shirt scum, on the other hand…
I can neither confirm, nor deny, having gone through engineering watches singing Gilbert & Sullivan, Tom Lehrer, and sundry other songs as a barometer of how much I was loving life.
If I were to have done it, however, it would have been horribly, painfully, and excrutiatingly off-key.
BTW, chowder, I’d meant that comment about depth charge attacks (and DC, too) to be instances of things I’ve seen in many movies that I believe are contrary to fact.
Otakuloki : I know you did
Hardy Kruger got away
Jack Hawkins was always the ships captain…always
All Japanese POW commandants are deranged and brutal
Mr Lawrence did not have a Merry Christmas
In any German POW camp there is always at least one shifty eyed guard
Steve McQueen was the best motor cyclist…ever