What do Army reserve people do on their weekends in service?

I assume some type of training. Is that mostly in the classroom? Or do they go to a local site and train with weapons?

It might be weapon firing, or field exercises, or qualifying to pass various tests. Some types of ranges might be a considerable distance from the normal place of duty.

I imagine it depends on what sort of reserve unit they’re assigned to. I had a classmate in an Army reserve unit. On drill weekends, they’d throw him out of a C-130. In a Transportation Corps type reserve unit, they’d probably be inspecting, repairing, servicing, and/or rebuilding vehicles. In a Quartermaster (QM) reserve unit, they’d probably do QM types of things.

A bit of both, often in the same weekend. Weapons training can be on a range or blank fire at some other location. Sometimes there are live fire excercises on a ‘Range’ which is really just a bit of ground deep within army land. Regular admin things like fitness tests and weapons qualification also have to happen sometime. Also first aid, radio and navigation training, etc etc.

A lot of people also have to do their jobs for real on an exercise - driving the troops round, feeding and supplying them mainly.

I was in an armor unit in the 60’s. We didn’t have adequate space to train on the M-50 tanks. Because the tracks chewed up the city streets, we couldn’t leave the armory.

As Jaguars mentioned up thread, a lot of classroom training. The mess hall would fed us.

Then on Sunday, we would clean up the armory for our next weekend.

2004-2010 for me. Some weekends, we would just show up, do classroom training and then various chores around the armory. Such chores were things like doing the preventive maintenance on all the vehicles, take out the trash, take inventories of equipment and weapons (our unit never had any ammo, just weapons, naturally) and so on.

Some weekends, we’d show up on friday evening (we’d get paid extra) and usually we’d have to drive several military 2.5 ton trucks and the rest of the unit would get to ride in comfort in a chartered bus. The bus would go to a larger base in the middle of the state (hours and hours of driving). We’d get dinner eating MREs on the bus.

Upon arrival, we’d sleep on cots in barracks and usually this was a weapons qualification weekend, where we’d get issued our rifles, exactly as much ammo as needed to qualify (exactly 3 bullets to get a rough zero, exactly 40 rounds for the pop up target range), and after shooting we’d play the “clean this weapon until the armorer takes it back” game. This game was the hardest part, you’d polish and polish and polish and 'nope, carbon residue specs right here, keep scrubbing soldier".

Certainly these FTXes were a lot more fun than a normal drill day, though.

And yet, somehow the weapons are never clean when you pull them from the armoury next time… do you guys get assigned personal weapons in the US?

Sorta. On long deployments to warzones, soldiers usually get to keep the same weapon the entire tour. Sometimes it’s even a new one. It depends on the unit, but some units permit the soldier to load up the weapon with various accessories like flashlights, holographic sights, laser sights, bipods, etc.

I think officially my national guard unit did have a weapon to soldier assignment sheet, but obviously the moment a soldier leaves the unit, someone else will get assigned that weapon.

It barely mattered - iron sight m16s, and my unit wasn’t combat arms. When it was deployed, they provided medical services to detainees in a prison and helped guard it. Nothing you needed more than a weapon that goes bang (and when guarding it, there was a QRF force of mainline infantry soldiers who would respond to an incursion. The main point of pulling guard tower duty was to spot the intruders in the first place and raise the alarm, not shoot them)

I was not in the reserves, but on active duty, we did get assigned personal weapons. The armorer kept them all locked up until we needed to use them, but we were supposed to remember both the serial number and the three-digit number the armorer painted on the stock so we could go sign for our weapon when the armorer called out our number. In basic and AIT, though, we were issued weapons at random.

In the US Army, though, we did NOT keep our assigned weapons at home. We weren’t even allowed to keep personal weapons at home, if I recall correctly (I didn’t have any, so I don’t remember the rules in detail). I believe personally owned weapons were supposed to be signed over to the arms room until you wanted to go hunting or to the range or something. This was if you lived on post. I’m sure off-post soldiers just had to follow the local laws on firearm ownership. The movies often get this wrong. I’ve seen several movies where a soldier goes home on leave wearing his uniform and carrying his army-issued pistol. For one thing, most enlisted guys don’t carry pistols. For another, you certainly don’t get to carry your weapon anywhere except official training exercises or war.