I never served but everyone that I know that did has at least one story they like to tell about when they were in. AIUI, when still on active duty, the story typically begins with “Now, this is no shit….” or some similar colorful language. I find them all fascinating and would like to hear yours. If you’ve got more than one, feel free to spill them all.
Are tales by family/relatives who have served, count, or does it have to be firsthand? Don’t want to hijack by doing the former.
Are you looking for the humorous anecdotes? It seems you are but I want to be sure, my military tale could start “this ain’t no shit…” but there isn’t any humour in it.
Any story is fine. That goes for you too @DorkVader
I guess I’m just interested in examples of how different things are from civilian life. For instance: a coworker told me that when he was in the army, they would fly him all over the world, he would do his thing and leave. What amazed me was that he said that he’d literally have no idea where in the world he was. He didn’t need to know. I just couldn’t imagine living like that.
In short, if you have a story, I’d like to hear it.
My stories from induction and boot camp are over here, posted 16 years ago:
I am going to link to something on my blog… because why not? It was supposed to be post one of three or four (this one post only covers two years), but… yeah…
If there are questions/comments, I will respond here, but no sense writing something new.
Ah, seems we mostly simulposted.
Well, ain’t no shit, but as a mechanic, you don’t really expect to be cleaning bits of brain and skull out of a vehicle during a non-wartime training exercise. Happened to me. The company XO was sitting up in his commanders hatch in his Bradley, higher than “name tape defilade”(chest-roughly nipple- high up out of a hatch).
Being a young lieutenant in the US Army and a company XO to boot, he was naturally quite busy and understandably distracted when he told his driver to turn left into a wooded area that resulted in his head and upper body being crushed to death by large tree branches.
That was one of my brads, I was in charge of command section maintenance (meaning I had the care of battalion CO, XO, our company CO and XO Bradleys in my charge being the only experienced Bradley mech in the unit at the time. It happens sometimes)
Well after about a week, the investigators released custody of the track back to us. They did hose out the interior, but did a really poor job of cleaning. I got to do the actual cleaning. My Motor Sgt(=platoon sgt sorta) told me to give it to one of my mechanics, but that was not a chore I was going to trust to a green 18 year old kid who was more shook up by the incident than me.
If I recall correctly (this was many years ago, and I’m not entirely sure I’m narrating the accurate picture):
My uncle was a cadet in Taiwan in the 1970s, preparing to become an officer in the Taiwanese navy. One day, the commander (a commandant?) was addressing the classroom of cadets when someone walked up behind him in full view of all the seated cadets and stabbed him (the commander) in the back with a knife. My uncle, and all the other cadets, were frozen, unable to move. (I don’t know what happened to the assailant afterwards.)
My father brought up this anecdote about his brother many years later (when we were discussing the Taipei 2014 subway attack ) to explain why people sometimes freeze up, or don’t intervene, in the midst of a mass shooting or stabbing incident - because they’re transfixed by shock.
(Obviously, this is not a “typical everyday life in the Taiwanese military” thing)
Damn. That kind of sucks. Do you have any regrets?
I joined in 1970, after having been in college for two years. But I had a low draft number, and was having trouble paying for any further college. I didn’t want to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, to I joined the Air Force. I was at the induction center in Oakland, waiting for a group of Air Force enlistees to gather together to get on board a plane for a flight to Basic Training in San Antonio. While I was waiting, a Marine sergeant came out and ordered all of the draftees to line up, then starting counting off by 4s - 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4. He then said, “Congratulations, all of you 4s are now US Marines. Join me over here.”
I was in Basic Training for less than a week, before my toenail started growing in ingrown, and my foot was swelling up. They sent me to the hospital to have my toenail cut off and grow back carefully so I could continue to march. But because I had spent several days away from my unit, they sent me to a different unit who were at the same level of training that I had been when I went to the hospital. Our drill instructor was totally different from most of them, he was very laid back. He didn’t yell. Except one time: when a new unit came in next door to our unit, and their drill instructor couldn’t be there to greet them, so our drill instructor took over the welcome of the new unit. He had some of the guys from our unit to serve as dormitory guards, since the new airmen didn’t know what needed to be done. One of the guys from our unit came back and told us, that he had been standing guard at the front door, when our DI yelled at him, 'dorm guard, get up here!" to the DI’s office. The guy ran up the stairs and came to attention, and our DI said, “Would you like some coffee?”
Our Basic Training was scheduled to end on December 28th, but they shut down all of the units who were about to graduate and sent us off before Christmas. Our DI spent the night before our graduation in our dormitory, and brought cookies that his wife had home made.
After Basic Training, I went to Computer Operator training at Wichita Falls, Texas. My first permanent base was at Travis, California, near to my home. You could usually choose what base you wanted to go to, if they had an opening for your position. I was stationed there for almost two years, before I got transferred to Lindsey Air Station, Germany, which is in Wiesbaden, which was the headquarters for Air Forces in Europe, While I was there, they moved headquarters to Ramstein Air Base, which is out in the country. While I was there, I transferred from Computer Operator to Programmer. When I had been in the Air Force, I reenlisted at 3 1/2 years. Air Force enlistment bonuses depended on how long you had been in, what your rank was, and what your specialty was I got $7000 for reenlisting for four more years. Some of it was taken for taxes, but just as I reenlisted, I was planning on going on vacation in Spain. They were planning on giving me my reenlistment bonus in check, but I didn’t have time to wait for a check to clear before I went on vacation, so I asked them to give me cash/ After taking out taxes, I got $5000 in $20 bills. Fortunately the base bank was right next door to the reenlistment office, so I was able to run next door and put all of that cash into my account before leaving on vacation. When I got back from my vacation, I was able to buy a car.
After Germany, I was sent to Alabama, to Montgomery, where the Air Force computer operations systems were headquartered. I detested Alabama. I had a friend from Birmingham, who said he hated being in Montgomery, too.
I got out after 7 1/2 years. That was enough. Especially since I was unmarried and the Air Force doesn’t give a shit about unmarried members.
Not really. If I had managed to get to the school for my chosen specialty – aviation electronics tech – I likely would have washed out there. I don’t really have the manual dexterity required to handle those little bits.
That sounds like the plot to a bad sitcom. It seems that the USAF wouldn’t care for it.
It was only Army and Marines. The Air Force enlistees (and presumably Navy though I didn’t see them) didn’t participate.
I wasn’t the kind of kid who dreamed of joining the military. The thought never entered my mind, really. After graduating from high school back east my family moved to San Francisco. I planned to go to college after working for a year to establish state residency. This was 1979. So I worked in downtown SF and where I got off the bus to walk the remaining 2 blocks to work, there was a recruiting station. I stopped in one day to look at the pictures, because I’d built many models of mostly airplanes. That’s how it all started.
Fast forward to, once I realized I was seriously considering joining the Marines, I considered all branches of service and talked to a recruiter from each branch and not just join the Marines because their recruiter was the most assertive. I really didn’t know to much about the different branches and what their main missions were. I ended up choosing the Marines because, if I were to join the military at all, I wanted the toughest test and the toughest boot camp experience. To my way of thinking, if it’s the toughest then I should get the most out of the experience. This was in December 1979 / January 1980. They were generally peaceful days, except for the Iran hostage crisis that had just begun a few weeks before. It’s not like the fairly recent Vietnam situation where many were coming home in body bags. So that’s how I ended up joining the Marines.
I’ve been out for almost 30 years now, and the longer I’ve been out the more special I realize my military experience has been for me.
I suspect that’s common among the services, and most especially for the junior enlisted who don’t rate a housing allowance. When I showed up to my first ship in Japan, the single sailors E-4 and below had to live on the ship. Navy ships are not a nice place to live. I’d sooner live in a shipping container in Iraq than enlisted berthing (both of which I have done—there weren’t enough officer’s quarters on that ship, so while I got to stay in an apartment most nights in home port, I was in enlisted berthing when we were out to sea). But to tell you the truth, I’d sooner live in a shipping container in Iraq than even live in an officer’s stateroom on a ship at sea. Even that is like living in a walk-in closet with two other guys.
I was on an amphibious assault ship, 35 years after the US had last conducted an amphibious assault in the Korean War. Funding and moviemaking were focused on aircraft carriers and submarines, not troopships.
The water for everything besides drinking and washing was seawater, so the minerals in it combined with the minerals in our pee to choke the toilet pipes. If we’d been allowed to steam north to the Columbia river, the free water would flush them clear, but that never happened. Instead they’d burst or back up the toilets, flooding the decks of the crews’ head with sewage. To cross over to the stainless steel shower stalls, we had to time our runs as the ship rocked and the tide of standing water and turds would roll briefly out of the way. The dry toilet bowls would grow mounds of shit until it was impossible to squat above it. Toilet paper was also rare, so the substitutions could be creative. These conditions would last for weeks.
I tested successfully to be admitted to officer candidate school, with the understanding that it would re-set the clock back to the 4-year start. As I came back to the ship from the test center, I looked down the passageway into Marine berthing and saw something actually common on a troopship: a naked man, stepped out of the shower, inspecting his rifle. This time the sight made me think. The shoeshine and starched shirt; the ten mile runs, all that was immaterial to what business we were really in. Naked, lethal animals. Later some of those Marines would be shot to pieces fighting enemies we weren’t supposed to let anyone know we were fighting. I didn’t re-start the clock at a new 4 years, and had left the navy and the ship before it was sent to the Persian Gulf to hit an old, old but still explosive mine that the Iraqis has somehow inherited from the Tsar’s navy.
Years later, my daughter’s school sent home a sheet of paper with the Iwo Jima flag raisers at the top, and a section below where it was requested any parent veterans put their thoughts. I wrote that wars are mistakes made by people who have the power and selfishness to make other people die to cover up those mistakes. My daughter told me her teacher later whispered her thanks for what I’d written.
USS Tripoli, eh?
Yes. Aviation Senior Chief Murphy was the man of the hour that time, leading damage control. One of the best people I’ve ever met.
Thanks for posting that original thread. I was reading it and going “this is what makes the Dope so amazing.” Then thinking, damn, I missed this one back in the day. And then getting gob smacked by one of my own posts from the past. I knew I had told the story on the Dope before but didn’t know where.
I copied it to a place I can find. Dang it, I still haven’t been back to that neck of the woods and would dearly love to go. Although sometimes it may be better to keep the memory rather than be disappointed with the current reality. dunno
I went through the Oakland MEPS too.