I had misread it as you and a bunch of other volunteers were waiting around. Sorry.
My bro flew jets off USN carriers back in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
He tells the tale of two dudes who went outside on a sponson (essentially an open balcony outside the hull below the flight deck) in rough seas to smoke dope. After the command had already set whatever is the “rough seas; nobody goes outside unnecessarily” condition. They both get wasted, then one goes back inside leaving his pal out there. Who is duly washed away into the ocean unnoticed.
A few hours later the announcement comes over the 1MC (all-ship PA). “This is the Captain. Seaman Washington Jones report to the bridge immediately.” Everybody looks at each other and says “This oughta be good.” Seaman Jones does not report to the bridge and eventually his compatriot sobers up then fesses up to what they’d both done.
Cue massive flail aboard ship. By now it’d been hours, so a rescue attempt was known to be futile. But they can’t do nothing. And they can’t let this go unpunished / uncorrected for everyone. Turn the fleet around, send out the helos, do all sorts of remedial training for 5000 swabbies, etc.
Oops.
Privacy is hard to come by in a ship. But falling off one is really bad, and doubly so when you’re alone. Poor dumb bastard.
Vietnam, at one of the 1st Army Division bases (the “Big Red One”), near Saigon, 1967: I served in the band along with 40 of the best musicians ever. Some were drafted out of a promising Hollywood studio career.
The official function of the US Army Band is to provide music for any and all functions, as needed. While our bread-n-butter was playing for ceremonies or marching in parades, we also had a dynamite stage (dance) band – 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 5 saxes, etc.
Our base was adjacent to a Korean compound, and they had a band, too. We used to give them our old instruments (jungles are hard on instruments and we got all new ones yearly, so the Koreans got our discards which they gladly fixed up and used.) Koreans love American music, especially jazz, so one evening we took our stage band to their compound and gave them a jazz concert.
Not many of the Koreans spoke English, and none of us spoke Korean, but it didn’t matter. They danced up a storm and seemed to be having a really good time. As we were packing up our instruments to go home, the Korean sergeants shoed everyone else out of the club, but motioned to the band to hang around a bit longer. A sergeant told us to go over to the bar and pick up our favorite bottle, because they were going to show us some “Korean Training Films.” Hunh…better make that a pretty stiff drink if we have to endure their damn training films. As we settled down, they set up a 16mm projector and pulled out a large reel of film. Sigh – looked like a long night ahead.
The first scene to come on the screen was…of an American girl being serviced by a German shepherd dog, followed by two girls going at it…well, you get the idea. Not the kind of training films we expected, but we realized that there was no language barrier here as long as we stuck to two topics of common interest: music and sex.
When I was on Okinawa one of our marines was on the edge of a nearby cliff when a rogue wave swept him into the sea. His buddies immediately called for help but it was six hours before SAR found him and plucked him out, alive. It helped the water was relatively warm but still, six hours without a life jacket. Marines is tough.
And unusually floaty for somebody with (presumably) very little body fat.
There was that one time I bumped into John Kerry on a Secret Service support mission. . . in actuality the guy ran into me, but he did say ‘Pardon me.’
There was that one time my MATV’s door went WHACK! and I thought, “Man, kids are throwing rocks now?” only to find out it wasn’t a rock, but a well placed small-arms round half an inch below the window.
There were those handful of times I destroyed SLBM motors.
There was that one time @BomTek and I held Afghanistan’s first ever SD ‘Git-together’ too small for a Dope Fest.
Tripler
. . . and I got paid $150/month in demo pay
Phyllis George, who was Miss America at the time, came to our base while I was doing KP and couldn’t get out to see her. I did peek out the window to catch a glimpse of her.
We were out on exercise one February night; it was the field exercise portion of my QL3 intelligence course - basic intel and analysis, the introduction to the trade. It being winter in Canada, we were donned in warm clothes over which went our winter whites. Basically you wear green pants and coats, but then you have these white polyester covers that go over it to keep you camouflaged.
We were out on a patrol when a truck was spotted coming down the road. We decided, based on pretty flimsy evidence, that the truck was enemy force, so we prepared to ambush it. Then, as it drove by,. one of my fellow soldiers, decided he would throw a simulated grenade - but all he had was a purple smoke grenade. This gentleman’s name was, as God is my witness, Boomhauer. Pronounced like Boomhower, from King of the Hill.
Boomhauer is to my left and not really in my line of sight so I don’t actually see what he does, but as it turns out, what he did was pop his smoke grenade, throw it, hit a tree literally eight feet in front of him, and have it bounced back at us and underneath me. His accuracy is perhaps part of the reason why our squadron softball team was so bad.
From my contemporaneous viewpoint, what happened was I was preparing to fire blanks at a truck, and then suddenly the world was purple. It was purple in front of me, behind me, and to the left and the right of me. At first I thought I was having a stroke. Then I smelled something burning, but it wasn’t burnt toast. It was, in fact, my ass, because the little flame in the top of the smoke grenade had somehow come out of the grenade -I didn’t think they were supposed to do that, but I’ve never looked all that closely - and set my winter white pants on fire.
So naturally I plunge my ass into a snowbank.
The real problem was that I’d been so close to the smoke grenade that not only were by pants ruined by fire, but all the rest of my winter uniform, including my winter boots, mitts, and helmet cover, were stained purple. None of it was useful anymore for camouflage on any terrain on this planet. Ilooked like I was about to attend a Minnesota Vikings game. It look a LOT of explanation to get new stuff from stores.
Great story. I’ve heard of war games with the “Red team” and the “Blue team”. You were obviously the person who could see both sides.
OK - Here’s a story told to me by a WWII vet.
He had kitchen duty and was in a corner (out of sight) peeling potatoes when he heard the camp MD come in to see the head cook. The MD said they were monitoring the sewage system and the soldiers weren’t, er, putting enough into it; they needed something to clean them out. Well, chicken soup was on the menu that night, so they proceeded to shave GI soap into the soup. They then noticed him in the corner. “RAISE YOUR HAND SOLDIER AND REPEAT - I WILL NOT REVEAL THE INFORMATION WHICH I AM PRIVY (pun intended) TO…”. As a final blow the put him to work serving the soup.
This one sounds like a tall tale. It doesn’t make sense in so many ways.
Let’s just say it was told to me by someone VERY trustworthy.
I can’t imagine the doc being able to measure – let alone be interested in – the contents of the sewage system. The… artificially induced contents might not be representative anyway.
I had an uncle in the army during WWII and he mentioned how in the field they would clean their mess gear by dunking them in three tanks, one soapy and two clear, as glimpsed in this training film, but by the time several hundred men had done so, enough soap was carried over into even the second rinse tank they were getting diarrhea. He would faithfully follow instructions then do his own rinse using a little canteen water and a lot of polishing.
One thing I hated in the Air Force was wearing chem gear (the suit, boots, gasmask, and gloves worn to protect oneself from a chemical attack). It was hot and you felt like you weren’t getting enough air. During basic training, we had to wear chem gear in a gas chamber filled with tear gas and then, two by two, remove our masks and speak before we could leave the chamber. For the rest of our time in the Air Force, we had to do a refresher course periodically where we practiced putting the gear on and taking it off, but didn’t have to go in the gas chamber. During one refresher course, the instructor was discussing how to go through the decontamination area when removing the chem gear and commented that if you had urinated in your suit, you would be given priority in the decon line. A few people commented that it might be worth it to piss yourself to get out of the chem gear a little sooner, which should illustrate just how much it sucked.
Try flying in that stuff.
We had a different gas mask that sort of fit under our usual flying helmet and also served as an oxygen mask. The filter canister looked like a human liver & attached to your gear about where your real liver is.
We had our regular fire resistant leather flying gloves then the butyl rubber ones over those. etc. And a rubber cape/ poncho we wore to/from the jet, but not in it.
Glad I never had to do more than train that way. Actual chem warfare is nasty nasty business.
The only thing my father ever said about his military service, aside from having to drive across Texas and it was really boring, was that you could always tell who the draftees were because most of them had figured out that you literally couldn’t get fired, and they weren’t going to send anyone to Leavenworth just for not washing the truck or whatever, so they just didn’t do anything. They’d get sent to dig latrines or KP duty or whatever the crappiest job on base was, but it never motivated anyone to actually be good soldiers.
I never saw anyone fuck off that much. We all did our jobs, often with much grumbling. Sometimes guys were fined- there was a name for the minor infractions but I don’t remember what it was called. I got a couple of such fines, but it’s partly their fault for putting me in an MOS totally unsuited to me. 
We have some similarities. I also joined under a delayed entry program (Cache) and entered the service four months later. That four months ended up counting as time-in-service. I did a tour in Whidbey Island from 1978-1981 at the base Seabee unit. Great place with good housing and terrific recreational areas. It was second in best duty stations only after my tour with the State Department.
There were a few times, after my EOD time, that at Kunsan and it’s monthly exercises, I asked myself
“Self, why am I doing this?” To buttress that thought, the quarter inch of body sweat in my boots at the end of every shift punctuated that question.
Tripler
But I knew why, so I did it anyway.
This may have been mentioned already but one thing I found that was unexpected is that at boot camp you are thrown together with people from all walks of life and from all over the place. I mean, for folks like me who did not move a lot while growing up, you don’t realize how geographically isolated your life is until you get to boot camp. And not only are you geographically isolated, but you are also economically isolated, generally speaking, while growing up. Kids tend to congregate with other kids from the same economic class. Generally speaking.
Another sense of ‘isolation’, for want of a better term, is with respect to criminal activity. Whichever side of the law one grows up on, when you get to boot camp and the military you mix with folks on all sides of the law. One guy in my boot camp platoon was given the choice by a judge: either go to jail, or join the Marines.
The military is a great mixing pot of people from all sorts of lifestyles. And in my life I’m seeing the advantages of being able to relate to and communicate with all kinds of folks, because of that experience.
And I am grateful for that.