Bear_Nenno, any twig can produce children - but if he was that dumb, i doubt he did a good job raising them. :-]
About the dumbest guy from my high school graduating class enlisted w the Army and was off to boot camp shortly after we finished school. We all had him pegged for the kind of jobs talked about above - petroleum specialist, mop-pusher, etc. Instead, he gets a gig as a tank crewman just in time for the first Gulf War. (question - is there a job for a loudmouth simpleton in a tank crew? Thats the one he must have had).
His tour was cut short, however, when he sent home some snapshots from Kuwait, including several of the inside of his tank, which was apparently a major, major, no-no, as he eventually ended up spending some time making big rocks into little rocks at a military detention facility.
It’s unfortunate that so many shitbags want to be on a tank crew. There a million ways to kill yourself or your buddies accidentally in a tank. If you’re just sitting wrong, if your foot isn’t in the right place, if you grab a shell wrong, if you turn the turret too early, if your ground guide isn’t wearing his glasses (WTF!?). . .
Drill Sergeants at tank school pretty much spend the whole day like this: “Dont touch that it’s kill you.” “Dont sit there you could die”. “Make sure you do this before you do that or your buddy will be sliced in two” “No dont do it like that”
He may very well have had that knocked out of him by the time he got out of basic. If not, his first tank crew certainly knocked it out of him.
This I’m having trouble with. I’ve seen (and taken) plenty of pictures of the inside of an M-1 tank. It’s not classified. Hell, the Army used to have a “virtual tour” of the inside of an M-1’s turret on its website.
I’ll emphasize what Bear said about tanks:
When we finally got to go down to the motorpool and get on a tank in basic, the DS gave us a stern safety lecture, along with a slide show, that went something like this:
“Men, listen up and listen good. You are about to begin training on one of the finest killing machines ever devised by the mind of man.”
first slide: the bloody stump of a soldier’s foot where it had been ripped in two by being caught between the turret and hull as the turret traversed
“This tank can go faster, shoot straighter, and take more damage than any other tank in the world.”
next slide: the bloody stump of a soldier’s hand from getting it caught by the breech during a recoil exercise
“This bitch is a stone killer, and she don’t much give a damn whether it’s you or Ivan she kills.”
next slide: the crushed corpse of a soldier caught between a tank and a hard place
They showed us this right after lunch. The DS had plenty of trash cans ready for the barfers, and a few had to take advantage of that rare moment of military largese, even if the DS stopped the slide show (on a bloody scene, of course) to wait until a soldier was done puking, before continuing the safety lecture. I didn’t toss, even if my stomach rumbled and grumbled a bit.
We had no tank accidents during our training cycle.
But I’ve seen about one major tank accident per year that I was in. All of them resulted in medical discharges, with the ex-soldier going on disability.
One of the young men in my freshman year dormitory left school after he failed out to join the army (or navy or airforce… don’t quite remember which). They put him in Alaska, forecasting weather.
… today… cold, with snow
tomorrow, cold, with snow.
Well, that was our joke anyway. It’s probably harder than it sounds… and I’ll probably be regretting it when we fail to thwart a Chinese invasion due to bad weather forecasting.
You really don’t know a lot of combat engineers, do you? There’s lots of specialized heavy equipment, bridging gear, and explosives that these guys are trained to use. Lots of math, reading and interpreting construction plans, and some serious civil engineering once you get to NCO or above levels.
A guy I went to school with went into the Navy. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer (and turned out later to have some mental health problems). But he had a degree, and managed to get through OCS and get commissioned. His first job as an ensign was selling movie tickets on board an aircraft carrier.
Smarter guys are found at the NCO level regardless of specialty… I spent a few months attached to a combat engineering battalion where I got to know quite a few of them. In fact they’re the ones who told me that the engineers are the dumping ground for the lowest-qualified enlisted soldiers. This is why it’s even more important for their leaders to be smart.
