I love that show so much - I cannot possibly convey how much I love it. It’s the flat out most hilarious fucking show I’ve ever watched in my life.
Anyone know what, ‘DQ’d’ means? Are non GI’s even supposed to understand? I googled and all I could find was Dairy Queen, and I’m pretty sure that’s not it!
Anyone?
Disqualified, I believe.
Correct on DQ’d. Though I don’t remember it being used and I did HARP* duty for a week when I was in.
- HARP duty is a where you get to go home for a week and help at the local recruitment station.
A mathematician I knew somewhat worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park (this is well documented) but refused to say anything about what he did there, saying it was still classified.
The day I became a Green Beret.
I was sent to Ft Bragg.
They handed me my head cover and said, "You are now a ‘Green Beret.’ And I thought it was hard to even get a chance to try out. Who knew. *
*
- Full flash A or B team guys were the real deal.*
The only head gear I really did not like was the ‘cxxt’ cap. I still have it. It’s almost new. Bawahahahah
I once had the opposite problem:
I paid for a fast-food meal with a USAA[sup]1[/sup] credit card in about 2009. The guy taking my order had a high-and-tight haircut, and he had clearly just returned from someplace like Iraq or Afghanistan. The conversation went something like this:
Guy: Were you in?
Me: Oh, no…my dad was.
Guy: Oh, he must have been in Vietnam, right?
Me: Um…no…he was in the Army Reservers. His unit never got called up.
Guy: What did your dad do in the reserves?
Me: [Now fully mortified] He edited a base newspaper somewhere in central California.
The guy had probably been fairly miserable and might have been in real danger. He seemed to want to connect with someone who shared his experience at some level, but my family’s military history is mostly incidental. I was sorry to disappoint him.
People routinely assume I’m ex-military because of my USAA accounts. I’m not ex-military; I’m just a savvy consumer of financial services. I always correct anyone who tries to give me credit for something I haven’t done. They mean well, I’m sure, but I simply have never served in the military.
[sup]1[/sup] USAA is a financial services firm associated with the US Military. One needs to have served in the military to join or be the child of a member. I made my dad join so that I could join and then pass my membership onto my kids. The customer service is just outstanding, and the insurance and loan rates are pretty amazing too.
Even serving in the military doesn’t indicate the least bit of Glory. I was peace time Navy in the 80s serving as an Electrician. My great accomplishments had to do with being really good at training people to stand watch and being really good at major preventive maintenance on our switchboards and load centers. Glorious right?
I put up with crappy living conditions, crappy food and terrible hours but that is not glory just drudgery. Closest I came to Glory was being part of Reagan’s 600 ship navy that helped in theory to demoralize Soviet leadership and did help restore moral to the US Navy.
My Dad was in the Air Force during the Korean War, guess what. He was a weatherman stationed in Iceland. His only danger was the winter ice and he was in a plane that did a volcano fly-over. Possibly more than once, so that is cool, but not really glory and not really any more dangerous than the time he spent training near Rome, NY. I mentioned he was Air Force, so he actually had good food and quarters. Shows what a fool I was joining the Navy.
I knew a guy in Uni in the UK who claimed to be a captain in the SAS. He was actually studying on secondment from the army, but we later found out he was an artilleryman. Got busted down a rank for some exceptionally disorderly conduct about halfway through. He also claimed his father was a general (he was a butcher. As in worked in a butchers shop, not as in got a lot of his troops killed.) and that his mother was a surgeon. (Might have been true for all I know). Guy was a capable marathon runner, but of course he had participated in the Olympics according to himself. Strange case really. He was pretty accomplished as it was. It was just never enough for him.
My father told a story sometimes about all the rowdy stuff he got up to the week he was discharged from the navy in the spring of '45. It never sounded like him, but we wrote it off as special circumstances. Recently, I got his war records. There was no discharge. He was flown to Edinburgh and signed up for more duty lasting 'til the autumn of '46. Unlike all the rest of his records, the line about what he did was left blank, and the signing officers signature is indecipherable. No-one knows what he did during that time.
Military service isn’t really something to make up stories about here in Norway, unless you were in WW2. Conscription for males and females means its about as exceptional as having been to High School.