I was in the Seabees for 23 years and have enough stories of my own, but the the damnedest thing I heard was from from a fellow 'Bee who had been a Boiler Technician in the fleet and then cross-rated to be a Utilitiesman in the 'Bees.
I asked him why he changed jobs and he told me this story. He was stationed on board the U.S.S Evans in 1969 and doing SEATO exercises in the South China Sea. He said he kept having the same nightmare over and over again. In the dream, there would be things falling on him and he was unable to escape.
Then one night he traded watch shifts with a shipmate so he could try to get some sleep. During that night, he had the same dream, except he suddenly realized that he was actually awake and it wasn’t a dream. Men were yelling and there was a horrible racket. He managed to get out from under all the crap flying around and get out of his bunk. The ship was listing badly, but he managed to get topside and was eventually rescued by the HMAS Melbourne, the ship that had hit the Evans and cut it in two. 74 people died in that incident, including the man he had swapped duty with.
The Navy offered him the option to take a discharge, but he asked instead to be cross-rated to a Seabee rating and to never set foot on a ship again.
In the military, boring is good. See iiandyiiii’s post #26 for when it isn’t boring.
I was in the technical part of the navy so the closest I got to combat was at Keflavik, Iceland one evening. We’d come on watch a couple hours when the phone rang and we got the word a Soviet attack was imminent. Now there hadn’t been anything exciting in the news lately and there was an IG team active at the main base, but nothing in the message said it was a drill so we played it straight.
We got out the Really Big Book of Stuff You Don’t Do Every day and flipped through it to Invasion, Soviet. My job, it turned out was to guard the emergency generator so I was issued a riot gun and five brass shells and went outside to stand by the front door of the genny building while our door Marine started circling the building with a slung M16.
I considered taking the shells from my pocket and loading them into the shotgun but decided that was stupid. After about 20 minutes a navy pickup truck came tooling up the road from the main base and paused at the gate of the compound. I felt like the wedding guard in Holy Grail. The gate marine decided everything was kosher because it came into the compound, parked a few yards away, and my division chief climbed out. He’d been on CQ (charge of quarters) at the barracks.
“What are you doing?”
“Guarding the generator, chief.”
“Okay,” and he went inside. About ten minutes later he was back out, “Come on in,”
and that was the end of that.
My father’s story. He was MP deployed as infantry and took part in the longest retreat of US Army history from North Korea near the Yalu River border with China almost all the way to the southern tip.
In his foxhole one night, there was a knife at his throat, someone patted his helmet, and whispered “Yankee”. In the morning, the enemy line, maybe 50 meters away, was filled with enemy combatants with slit throats.
I can’t find a cite but according to my father the Ghurka’s were never officially involved in the Korean war.
When I was on Guam, I had to stand duty as part of the React Force, which was a team of men who slept in a hut near the armory. If there was an alarm, we came boiling out without shotguns at the ready, but no round in the chamber.
So one night we’re all snoozing peacefully when the alarm went off, triggered by the guy on watch inside the armory fence. Thinking it was another drill, we came charging out and took up our positions about 30 feet away. I was surprised to see a person in white standing near the armory gate, and as team leader I immediately yelled “HALT! DOWN ON YOUR FACE NOW!” The guy turned around and said “I’m Ensign Smith; get over here right now!” At that point I yelled to the team “Lock and load!” At the racking of the shotgun slides, the guy dove for the dirt.
I walked toward him, stuck my foot in his back and dug out his wallet, and found that yes, he was indeed ENS Smith, and I told him to stand up. The guy was fucking livid and told me that he was the OOD and he was calling the XO to come over. The XO showed up, none too happy to be dragged out of bed at midnight, and, ignoring the ensign, asked me what had happened. After I explained my actions, he turned to the ensign in disgust and said “Be in my office at 0700.” Then turned back to me and said “Good job, troop.”
A story from my father: He was a second lieutenant in the 8th Princess Louise’s (New Brunswick) Hussars (a Canadian reserve armoured regiment) in the early 1950s, doing training at Camp Gagetown, New Brunswick. After training one day, he and a couple of other off-duty junior officers decided to head into Fredericton, the provincial capital, for some R&R. When they got there, they learned that the Lieutenant Governor was having a party, and decided to crash it.
Now, a Canadian Lieutenant Governor is not the same as a US state official of the same name - he/she is the Queen’s representative in the province as a lieutenant to the Governor General as the Head of State for Canada, and while most duties are ceremonial, they must sign all legislation before it can become law, and have significant (if rarely used) political power. Formal does held by the Lieutenant Governor are a big deal, especially back then, and these officers were in drill uniforms, not the full dress normally required for such occasions. Their arrival soon attracted attention, including the attention of the LG himself, who came over to see what the hell was going on.
At this point the officers’ secret weapon kicked in - the LG was an ex-Hussar, and recognized their cap badges. They were welcomed to the party and had an enjoyable evening, which he said very much made up for the chewing out from their commander back at camp when he found out what they had done.
Oh, man. I’ll bet that poor butterbar couldn’t sit down for a week, he was reamed so hard.
I heard a similar story from a guy who at times guarded the nuclear weapons on a CV. An IG admiral, dressed in a seaman’s uniform, tried to see if he could get into the inner zone and failed spectacularly – the storyteller wound up sitting on his chest, trying to see of the front end of .45 would fit up his nostril.
One hopes the seaman on guard duty was commended for stopping the disguised admiral via whatever means necessary. That was certainly what he was supposed to do. Guarding real nukes is not like guarding a shopping mall. Even in the bowels of a warship at sea.
Stories, stories, stories. Been long enough ago for me now that most aren’t as fun to tell as they once were. Usually somebody got hurt, whether us or them. Even clowning around had overtones of impending disaster; great fun when you’re 25, kinda head-shaking now.
I got to watch the sad aftermath of one predictable tragedy in that “Dumb meets bad luck => disaster” sense.
I was attached to a mechanized infantry company equipped with:
Unlike the wiki pic we were in the tropical jungle. Where it often rained much of the day and most of the night.
At morning nose count one trooper could not be found. And one vehicle was sunk in the mud up to its hull. A sense of foreboding overtook camp as they extracted the vehicle. Yup, the trooper had decided, against procedure, to shelter from the rain under the APC. Which had slowly, ever so slowly, settled on top of him overnight. He’d been drowned in mud and then mostly crushed. Still gives me the willys to think about. I do not envy the men who had to tell the trooper’s parents back home. Nor the parents.
I did the early enlistment thing while in senior year of high school and flew out to Lackland AFB the same day I graduated. After a few weeks of basic training in the lovely Texas sun I travelled to Chanute AFB up in Illinois to learn how to be an Analog Flight Simulator Specialist. I had a great time learning (with a few side trips to visit Chicago) but at week 13 something happened-They eliminated the job I has been training for. I was told that I was now going to train to be a crew chief for the B-52D Stratofortress. A few more weeks of learning which end of a wrench is which, the importance of baling wire and the fun things that can happen with Liquid Oxygen, and I get assigned to March AFB near sunny Riverside, California. I had many an adventure while stationed there, from the earthquake the day I arrived, to watching lightning strike a plane while my bestie was working on a wing, to watching one of those big birds take off…then dive headfirst onto the tarmac while the crew that had just serviced it sat right next to me. I was standing next to a load of bombs being transferred from a rack into the bomb bay when one of them fell off the rack, and I remember to this day the sound it made when it hit the ground. There were the times they cleared the flightline so that the officially non-existent SR-71 “Blackbird” could land…which did them a fat lot of good security wise since the barracks were right across the street from the tarmac, so we all saw it take land and take off. BTW, it is kind of hard to request transfer to a plane that doesn’t exist-I tried.
Artillery battery (8 155mm guns) ready to fire live ammunition during a training, at Canjuers camp (south France). Just before firing, the sergent said “funny that, been firing from this position many times but never fired in that direction” and verified the aiming. Apparently the lieutenant had mixed north and south and the guns were aimed at 180° of the target. With real shells…and a 30km range…
The following year, the same lieutenant blew a steeple in a nearby village…only 10 km left of the target.
In the book This Side of Hell, the biography of Dan Edwards by Lowell Thomas, there is this statement of an army regulation “Worm holes in coffee beans are not sufficient cause for rejecting the beans. They add no weight and disappear when the beans are ground.”
Ah, yes, the SR-71. They were flying out of Kadena AFB on Okinawa when I was there and had been for a few years by the time I got there. Security had been very tight at first but had relaxed some. Kadena was by far the biggest installation on the island with the most facilities so we would drive down there a couple times a week and the hangar that tended them was on the north-east corner of the base, right by the highway.
Generally the hangar doors were open and sometimes you could see the tips of the angled twin-tail above the embankment sometimes. If the doors were closed that meant a flight was imminent and if we weren’t pressed for time, we’d stop by Habu* Hill, a knoll a quarter-mile from the main runway, a half-mile up from the windward end to watch it take off. It was very loud
Likewise, if you passed by the hill, an Air Force pickup truck stopped and idling in front of it meant a landing might be soon. When it came in it would touch down at the end of the runway then as it rolled in front of the truck a small object would pop up from the midline about halfway back just before it deployed the braking parachute. The object would fly into the air a good thirty feet then drop to the runway. The truck would dart out, a guy would jump from the passenger side to retrieve it, and the truck drove away at high speed.
*On Okinawa the nickname for the SR-71 was Habu instead of Blackbird, named after a small, dark, very fast and very venomous snake on the island.
I was at Patrick AFB in Cocoa Beach FL (tough duty) for a few months back in 1982. There was a detachment of U-2s there. The airplanes weren’t there full time, but some part of the supplies & support crews were. I never had any idea why they were at that base versus some other. Anyhow, much like @DesertDog just above, after awhile you learned to recognize the signs a U-2 op was about to happen. His tale is what reminded me of this story.
The airplane would waddle out of its hangar over to the end of the runway then line up & sit there. And sit there, and sit there, and sit there. Fortunately Patrick was not a busy base.
Then without warning he’d throttle up, the ancient 1950s J75 turbojet belching thick black smoke & noise, he’d release brakes, roll forward what looked like about 4 airplane lengths then rise into the air like a B-52, without raising the nose. Once he’d levitated 30 or 40 feet up he’d quickly pull the nose up to an insane angle (45 degrees? 60 degrees??) and simply drive slowly up into the sky like a dirigible until he was a dot.
It reminded me of nothing so much as watching a very slender blimp take off. Insane high angle, insane low speed and away it pottered slowly into the sky, with still a darn impressive rate of climb. Then it was gone.
By comparison landings were real ordinary, if a little precarious looking.
As a PFC, I got put on guard duty at the entrance to a tank gunnery range. I was given an access roster (a list of authorized personnel), and told not to admit anyone who is not on that roster.
A jeep pulled up (yes, it was that long ago; but the Army was in the process of transitioning to the Humvee at the time) loaded with a Brigadier, a Full-Bird Colonel, a Major, and a Master Sergeant (someone’s gotta drive all that brass around). I took their IDs, checked them against the access roster, and nope, they were not on it. But I knew they were VIP, and likely would be granted access, so I told them to wait a moment while I called the Sergeant of the Guard.
SOG showed up, checked them over, called the Range Control Tower to inform them that VIPs were inbound (give them a courtesy heads-up) and passed the VIPs through (they were with TRADOC, and conducting random training audits and spot-inspections).
I later found out that the Major pulled a “Karen,” and made a complaint, because some snot-nosed PFC didn’t just pass them through. The Brigadier corrected him publicly, on-the-spot (a general no-no in the military, as you well know), said I had followed not only SOP but Orders as well, and had done everything absolutely correctly, with a few kind words on my correct military demeanor and professionalism.
While on a Border Rotation in Camp Hof (Hof, Germany) in December of '87, we got an Alert that Warsaw Pact mechanized forces were advancing on the border.
We scrambled our lone tank company (while the rest of USAEUR was going on alert and scrambling) and set up on a ridge overlooking the border crossing, put warshots in the gun tubes, and were basically waiting for WWIII to begin.
Turns out, a lone East German Motorized Rifle Regiment had missed the turn off to their training area. They pulled up to the border, realized their mistake, turned around, and rolled away north.
I guess East German lieutenants are just as good at map reading as their western counterparts.
It doesn’t sound entirely on the up-and-up either; if as @Rick_Kitchen points out, they were all USAF volunteers, the Marine sergeant couldn’t actually shanghai them into the Marine Corps. Draftees, sure. They just divvy draftees according to the needs of the services.
But volunteers aren’t done that way- those poor guys probably didn’t know any better, and were intimidated and ended up Marines despite wanting to be in the Air Force, because they were afraid and/or unsure about standing up for themselves.