Military Humor

[el Gringo Loco 1]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Oligo @ Feb. 18 2002,08:58)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">How come I do not see any of your army stories over here? It's mainly only Noone's and my stories which are filling this thread. So Unless I do not see any other stories come up, I am forced to believe that Noone and I are the only members on this thread who actually have served.<span id='postcolor'>

I seem to recall to have written some stories...?  <span id='postcolor'>

You are forgiven

[Oligo 1]

Privates Strike Back

During exercises, it is always very important (according to the brass) to keep guard like it was the real thing. I won't comment to the wisdom of that dogma since I don't care, but during exercises, the standing of guard of course falls solely on the privates. Not even the corporals can be bothered.

Now during our two week military excursion to finnish Lapland, our platoon slept in two tents. One of the tents housed the officers and the NCOs plus some unfortunate signals privates. The other tent housed all the mortar privates, like me. The heating of the tents was handled by burning wood in a steel cylinder fireplace in the middle of the tent. Now us poor privates had to stand guard outside and after that, tend to the fire in both tents. We didn't get much sleep and started to get quite pissed at how things were handled. The final blow came, when the brass started to bitch that it wasn't warm enough in their tent.

Being the troublemaker I am, I decided to have a little payback. I had heard about one trick during a drunken evening in some bar. This trick seemed to suit the ocassion perfectly. I gathered every empty plastic soda bottle I could find and stashed them away to wait for the night. When my turn to tend to the fire came, I took the soda bottles to the tent housing the brass and crammed the fireplace full of the bottles. I waited for them to melt a little and then crammed in the rest. I topped the coctail with all the firewood I could fit in.

Survival tip for you all: If you need heat, plastic bottles burn REALLY well. After ten minutes, the whole steel fireplace and half of the chimney had turned red hot. I had to leave the tent, because the scalding heat was just too much. I waited outside and pretty soon a bunch of officers and NCOs ran from the tent in their underwear, half asleep, cursing the heat. Says I: "I hope it wasn't too cold in there tonight, sirs."

Now you wouldn't believe what a pile of shit I got. Everybody was yelling at me for hours and making me do all sorts of shit. But I got out of it by acting stupid, like you always do in the army, since they cannot ban stupidity. They knew I am not stupid, but they couldn't prove it, which really pissed them off.

Anyway, the brass took care of the heating of their tent after that...

[Oligo 1]

How to Lose You Respect with the Troops

Here's an instructional tale for all the officers out there on how to lose your respect with the troops. It's about our company commander, who didn't have much respect to start with, but eventually lost even the little he had as a result of this little mishap.

During a long exercise in scalding cold (-40 degrees Celcius), some people from artillery companies had to be medevaced because of severe frostbite. Not so in our mortar company. The only casualty was our company commander. This "officer and gentleman" sitting in the warmth of his electrically heated command post tried to cut some frozen bread with the serrated blade of his Leatherman, since he didn't have the patience to wait for the bread to melt first. The idiot managed to cut open the artery in his right wrist. They had to call in a helo to evac the poor commander to the nearest hospital, because the cut was so bad it required hospital level care. He was the only casualty medevaced with a helo from that particular exercise.

You can guess how much we "respected" that doofus after that. I can only hope he never gets to command anybody in an actual life/death situation.

[Frizbee 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Angry Radish @ Feb. 16 2002,01:56)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I'll see if I can dig up some pictures of the time one of our C-141b's came unseated from it's jacks during the lowering procedure. One of them went right through the wing, fuel everywhere, etc...

They ended up removing the wings off the aircraft because of all the damage, and making it a ground trainer for flight engineer and loadmaster training, looks pretty #### strange now.

I'd add all kinds of stories, but most of them wouldn't make any sense to anyone, because they pretty much have to do with amusing things pilots/co=pilots/flight engineers did with the systems, so they would require some knowledge of them :-(  

But, if anyone has knowlege of aircraft systems, and wants to hear some geeky avionics stories, let me know and I'll post em here :-)<span id='postcolor'>

Yes please... Always interesting to hear funny aviation stories.

[sn1per 0]

I got lots of army memories. Most of them are from really funny times involving The airport of turku, BMP-2+farmer's fucked up woods and fields, BMP-2 + 10 armed grunts going to buy candy and food from a small local shop.

I don't have the time to write everything now. But during one war exercise in which I was a group leader with a motorized brigade with bmps and Pasis (sort of BTRs), we went to a local shop with a bmp and parked it in front of the shop next to some nissan. It looked quite funny. We had been in the action for almost two weeks so we went to grab some refresments. Later I started to think how it looked, when 10 guys with small arms park their BMP in front of the shop and go in the shop and buy snickers (with assault rifles and LMGs in back):D

During the same exercise I tried to shoot a moose with flare gun. Yeah, it ambushed us during our recon mission

[Hilandor 1]

my bro who is in infantry (black watch) was in Northern Ireland as a plain clothed driver, only allowed to carry  a sidearm and it HAD to be conceled.

One day on the way to pick up someone  he and his mate decided that they needed money from the bank  which is irregular as ur not allowed to goto civillian places whilst on duty  and with weapons, so off his mate went into the bank whilst my brother went to the ATM,  my bro when finished went into the bank to check up on his mate who was taking some time, as he looked in the door   there was two security guards on top of his mate  trying to restrain him and as my brother walked in the two security looked up    spotted my brother standing    with his jacket open and sidearm showing (he forgot to concele it )and the security went frantic, eventually he explained and showed his id card to the security and they let the two of them go after some questioning.  It never got back to his CO yet  but i think they realised how close they came to being in a shitload of trouble.

His mate never did get the cash from the bank neither lol

[stealth squirrel 0]

WOW the army sounds gr8

[stealth squirrel 0]

WOW more stories please.....just read all of them keep em coming

[Angry Radish 0]

Pingers

At my first base, the new arrivals on the flightline were called "pingers" no idea why, but that's the way it was:)

Anyway,the Comm-Nav and other avionics troops had already been trained in their individual systems, but had no idea about where they were on the aircraft, or any flightline procedures whatsoever.

So as trainers and supervisors, we of course took it upon ourselves to use that to our advantage to mess with them as much as possible

Some of these examples I heard about, and others I witnessed first hand, or did myself, and yes, I was caught by some of them when I first arrived as well.

Go Fetch

One of the first things you could do with a new arrival, was to send them to get things, using the usual military acronyms, thus entertaining yourself.

The most common thing to encounter, was someone at the tool checkout desk asking to sign out the keys to the aircraft so the engines could be started, which usually led to the folks behind the counter saying they didn't have them, but base OPs might, and to go check there. After that, the folks at base ops would have fun as well, and tell them that the keys were a secure item, and had to be signed out from the Security Police, and so on...

eventually, they were told that there was no such thing as keys to the aircraft, as they didnt use keys.

Another thing to send people out for, was the lubricant called K9P. So, off they go to the tool crib, or CTK, where they were told that unfortunately, they were out of K9P, and to go ckeck over at the motor pool. The motor pool was completely out as well, but the troop was told to go check over at the security forces building, as they may have some extra in their stock for their vehicles.

At the SP's, they say YES! they do in fact have some, and to stop by building 214 to get some. building 214 was, if you havent guessed it already, the kennels for the dogs the SP's use :-)

Other amusing things we sent troops out for were 10 feet of umbilical cord, 30 feet of flightline, propwash, and the list goes on.....

The worst wild goosechase I saw, was when a supervisor asked his new trainee if he had his steeltoe boots on (which were required). The trainee responded yes, he did, at which point the supervisor asked him if he had the tips checked for cracks, to which the confused trainee responded, NO.

He was told to go over to NDI (non-destructive inspection) to have the steeltoes tested.

NDI are the folks that evaluate the various metal parts on the aircraft for corrosion, cracks, etc...so they worked closely with the rest of us flightline weenies, so they knew we were always joking around. So when the trainee arrived to have his boots tested, they were more than happy to help. After a brief inspection of his boots, it was determined that the boots needed to be prepped bofore inspection, so he was sent to the sheetmetal shop to have the boots prepped. this is the point where things sort of got out of hand.

Upon his arrival at sheetmetal, the troops there took his boots, and sandblasted them, pretty much removing the entire first outer layer of his combat boots. After this was done, they sent him back to NDI, where they proceeded to put some sort of bluish-green dye on his boots for the "testing". After a few "tests" they pronounced his boots safe for flightline use, and sent him back to his supervisor wearing his blue-green sanblasted boots. Needless to say, when the trainee approached his supervisor with the boots in the breakroom, there was a little (ok, alot) of laughing. The supervisor ended up having to buy new boots for his trainee, and we all kept a close eye on the NDI and sheetmetal folks for awhile when our trainees went over there.

Let me know if you want more of this stuff, all sorts of old memories are surfacing now:)

[Tydium 0]

my friend who served in the artillery once told me this story:

They were on the artillery exercise in the Finnish lapland and one night when it was his turn to keep the fire he went outside to collect some firewood. Their tent was close to their batterys HQ witch had a electric generator. The generator was one of the older ones witch have a internal fuel tank unlike the newer ones witch have a hose that you can put into the jerrycan (witch make it a lot easier to refuel). Outside he saw two people refueling the generator. As you can imagine pouring fuel into the generators fuel tank in the middle of the night is quite difficult because you can't see anything and some fuel allways go to the top of the generator and to the ground. So these guys solved the problem by using a lighter to show the light. Other showed the light while other refueled the generator.

Nothing actually happened, but I think that those guys were just lucky

[Angry Radish 0]

Along the same lines of fire safety, a few people were riding in the maintenance cargo van on the flightline, heading back in to turn in their tools after changing a fuel line on an engine. There was a small bucket in the back, containing the JP-4 that was drained from the lines during maintenence, sitting in the middle of the van. A couple people were smoking, which was no big deal, as we all did it, only this time, some of them started arguing about it, saying they really shouldn't be smoking in the truck when there is a bucket of jet fuel sitting in there. Well, one of the engine troops argued that the flashpoint of the JP-4 was too high, and that if he threw his cigarrette in the bucket, it would just go out.

Want to guess what happened next? The cigarrette actually DID go out, only just before it did, it ignited the fumes on the surface of the small bucket. So, kind of like lighting a gas grill in your back yard when the gas has been on too long, or your too close, everyone got out of the truck at the tool crib swearing at the guy, as everyone that was riding in back had all their eyebrow/eyelash/hair singed(sp?), and there was that nasty smell of burnt hair throughout the truck.

[Frizbee 0]

I haven't started training yet (for the airforce) so I don't have any funny stories myself, but I can relay on a funny story I heard about trainee FA-18 Fighter Pilots.

During each class of trainees, one is bound to stuff up on a grand enough scale to be given a nickname that will be their callsign for generally, the rest of their flying career.

In one particular class of pilots, they all swore with each other that they would work extra hard NOT to do anything stupid that would earn them such a title.

After weeks of bombing practice, the trainees were finally given a simulated mission. Two flights of two aircraft would perform a bombing run with live ammunition, while another two flights would provide air cover, and strafing support at nearby targets "of opportunity"

They were briefed that the target would be a series of long rectangular buildings with a road running through the middle of them, and that all they had to do was follow the road to the target.

Everything went fine up until one of the pilots in the escort flights become disoriented as to his position. Instead of radioing in, and risking being laughed at by his instructors on the ground, or worse, being given a bad callsign, he decided to just follow the "Road" that was below him, right as they had been briefed, to the target.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the correct road, and the only "target" he came upon, was a nearby Observation base where the bombing runs where observed for impact accuracy.

So in the pilot comes, lines up the tower on one corner of the base, and pins the trigger on his cannon, filling the tower full of holes and totally destroying it.

Next moment, over the radio comes the message "Cease fire, cease fire, you're shooting up friendlies GOD #### IT."

Sheepishly he returned to his home base to be informed that luckily, the tower was empty at the time, but that he might want to buy the Observation officers a drink next time he was in the bar. He was also informed by his instructor, that they had a new nickname for him... SNIPER, as out of the thirty shots he fired.. 29 of them had hit the tower. The highest accuracy of any of the squadron pilots.

If it had just been the correct target.

[Oligo 1]

Arctic Survival

You don't realize it until you think about it, but in sub zero weather lack of drinking water becomes a major survival problem. There is water everywhere in snow, but you don't want to go eating it, because the repercussions range from hypothermia via diarrhea to intestinal parasites.

Our platoon was fucking thirsty, because the drinking water we kept in a plastic twenty liter container had frozen stiff and wouldn't come out of the little nozzle the container had. We had the bright idea of heating the container to melt the water. The bloke with the most initiative that day hoisted the container next to the fireplace in our tent. We waited and dreamed about nice water streaming down our throats.

Pretty soon the water had somewhat melted, since the container made satisfying splashing sounds when moved. We were overjoyed (and thirsty). Somebody tried to turn the knob of the nozzle to enable the streaming function. But the plastic nozzle had melted shut in the heat. Next we tried to open the big screw cap on the top of the container. But it had melted shut also. What we now had on our hands was twenty liters of water hermetically sealed inside three millimeters of olive green plastic. Everybody was very thirsty and pissed.

So the bloke with the most initiative took an axe and showed that MOFO container who is the boss. We got our water, but the container couldn't be closed anymore.

Back at base the logistics guys asked what happened to our container. We told them it was run over by a tank.  

My friend who served as a field artillery forward observer got into similar situation, but they didn't even have a container of water to help. They radioed the HQ for water resupply. HQ promised to send water. What my friend and his squad got was a pile of tea bags and no water.  

[Tovarish 0]

"We would like Monkeys"

Ok, my father told me this story when I was little & it always cracks me up even to think of it...

We're originally from Cuba, and my dad, who was completing his mandatory service, managed to get shipped to the Ukraine to study Aviation Engineering (Many Cuban military cadets were sent to study in Soviet universities if they showed talent). Anyways, a couple of his fellow Cuban classmates were black, which I'm sure I don't need to tell you, it's pretty rare to see a black man in Ukraine. Also most of the Cuban cadets had a basic knowledge of the Russian language, but it was far from perfect.

So here's the funny part: Winter was beginning to set in, and of course the Cubans, used to a tropical climate, began to feel it. My dad's two black classmates decided they needed long underwear, so they looked it up in their spanish/russian dictionaries. Now the problem arose when they looked up the Cuban slang term for long underweard, which is "Monkeys".

So... Picture this: Two black men in the middle of the USSR, in foreign military uniforms, asking a clothing store clerk for Monkeys in broken Russian

[Chan 1]

Wow, Is this thread some sort of scam to recruit people to the military..  

My brother is serving as a gunner in the US Army Light infantry, he saids that over there it is pretty boring.

He took a year of college and decided to give up on schooling and join the military. I guess he regreted the choice he made. The only fun over there is the constant firefight exercises, M4s and M240Bravos loaded with blanks. Not much fun besides the weekends when they could have off, the weekends is pretty much constant rounds of Tekken on Playstation 2, shopping, and beer.

I guess the army is not really exciting unless you are in a assignment on the other side of the world.  

[madmike 0]

The British army is alot of fun, but there are some times when people hate it like doing 18 hour days in Northern Ireland but then in places like cypress and belize it is 8 til 3 and half a day on friday and the weekend off.

[Longinius 1]

Most of the time most of the soldiers spend their time in service whining about how much it sucks. Years later they visit forums like this and tell tales of how fun it was

[Oligo 1]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Longinius @ Feb. 22 2002,10:51)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Most of the time most of the soldiers spend their time in service whining about how much it sucks. Years later they visit forums like this and tell tales of how fun it was <span id='postcolor'>

Yeah. Most of the stories I told, I sure as #### wasn't laughing when they happened. And in service, I did constantly think how much it sucks. But now after years in civvie life, I realize my life sucks even more now than it did back at the service. Guess even sucking is relative.

[FallenPaladin 0]

In my Bundeswehr-time I and a few other medics had an exercise with the regiment we were responsible for (Radio operators) in Baumholder here in Germany. An American tank platoon is stationed there too.

One day we had to give first aid-lessons under simulated combat circumstances. The radio operators had no idea what they were up about, but we did

We had liters of fake blood and fake teared-apart limbs and other funny stuff like that. For example you could simulate wounds with spreading blood, by pressing a large button on your side. Looked really scary that shit!!

Our radio operators came to our exercise station, not knowing what would happen to them in groups of four people. Everytime a group arrived, a truck with mounted Machinegun on top started to fire at a tank target. You could see the poor radio operators go prone. Then we exploded a training charge besides the truck and a smoke grenade. The guys in the truck started screaming like #### and one of them trew a fake hand covered with blood through the sidewindow, then let himself fall out of the door. The radio operators turned pale or pale-green. After that shock they had to give first aid and carry the three totally bloodcovered and screaming or unconcious (our guys deserved an Oscar for that  )wounded to a bunker two hundred meters away.

What really pissed the radio operators off, more than the shock we gave them was that one of our "wounded" was

VERY tall, almost seven feet high and his weight was something about 230 pounds! Now try to carry such an

animal when being shot at

The first three groops of radio operators had done their best (but the wounded hardly survived) but were now totally powerless and pissed. So we decided to help the next ones a little...

The next time our huge guy grabbed one of the radio operators, which we pointed out for being wounded, threw him over his shoulder and started running to that bunker. Inside he put that shaken guy to his feets. He was pale like a wall and couldn`t hardly believe how he had been carried

The expression on his face was the funniest I`ve ever seen in my military time.

[Noone 4]

Yeah, i admit, that i also spent my time in then army whining... But after all it was not my choice to join. Later on i realised how much fun it was. No worries, no decisions, no resposiblities... Fun...

[Angry Radish 0]

Yup, I'll admit, I bitched too, though there were times I would look around at all the aircraft taxiing, taking off, etc..... and thing "you know, this is really freaking cool"

The best thing about the whole bit though, was Job Security!

as long as I did what I was supposed to, I didn't have to worry about getting fired!

####, I could get back in right now if I really wanted to, they are short handed on my AFSC

Too used to the better pay now though    :

[Pete 1]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Monkey Lib Front @ Feb. 12 2002,03:54)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I wonder if pete has any funny storys?<span id='postcolor'>

sure i do....however i been gone for some time working in norway, ill go back at sunday but ill have internet there from now on, so ill be posting a lot soon again...

ok, the story

Pete baba and the 40 deers?

we had a long 3 week live fire exercise in northern finland, i was there as a mortar soldier and there was also ALL finnish mortar companies, from the whole finland, and a lot of artillery too...and loads of other kinds of troops, mainly artillery and mortars tho,. we were way over 10.000 there for 3 weeks...

we prepared to fire at a target some amount of kilometres away and we were to fire a combined volley with 3-4 other companies...but as soon we got the fire order it was followed with a hold fire order, we didnt get to shoot one grenade, but some other (a swedish speaking mortar-unit...) was more trigger happy and got 3 grenades (120 mm) away before they stopped the firing..

we didnt know much of the reason, or that the other company had fired at all...we were all really far from eachother and explosions and detonations were very usual so i didnt pay much attention to the 3 big booms from the distance.

what had happened was that the fireleading team (forward observers?..dont know the english terms) aborted the fire-mission when they saw a herd of deers walk into the target area...a total of 200 of them, and the 3 grenades had hit right amongst them and killed 41 of them immeadetly, wounding some 60 of them that had to be shot at the location.

the next day the newspaper had a article about it and included a "deer-masskiller-history" in it, we scored second position in it...a train had killed over 80 in one hit wounding even more...

when we got back to base we were called "Porohoro" instead of the usual "Korohoro"

korohoro = nickname from mortar soldiers...comes from "kranaatinheitin" which is abreviated as "krh"...Poro = the name for "deer" in finland.......very embarrassing for us...the whole incident

lol....i have a lot of stories..as do all the people who served in the army, the army is a place for stupidity...and it shows

[Karppa 0]

I was in the AA forces (whatever) and we had these russian-made anti-aircraft guns called "sergei". In one war exercise we had three of these and we took them into good shooting positions. One was in the middle of a village next to a shop, the other was parked in front of a pub and the third one was in the middle of a school yard. The villagers thought that war had started..

[ChickenHawk 0]

I'm not in the military.... yet

But I was an army cadet for a while and there was one particular interesting story to tell apart from shooting my CO point blank with a blank round...

We were doing an escape and evasion exercise somewhere in the brit countryside. We had to set up a field telephone so that our platoon leader's harbour area could contact our CO's HQ situated back at the army base in an officers room.

I was laying the telephone wire and tieing it off every now and then on some gatepost or tree. I had to run a few yards with the wire coming out the pack that I was carring on my back, that thing was heavy as hell.

Anyways, we got the two field telephones connected and they worked so we could call HQ if we spotted the guys we were trying to catpure.

After a few hours of patrolling we returned to the harbour area for the next group to go out, we were just sitting around doing nothing when the field telephone flew out of the platoon leaders poncho and off through the woods.

The same thing happened with the telephone back at our CO's HQ. It flew out the officers room window and across the parade ground.

It seems the army forgot to tell us that they also used the ground we were on as a tank exercise area. The telephone wire had got caught on the front of a challenger.

[IsthatyouJohnWayne 0]

LOL

and i like your sig Chickenhawk- good old Churchill ,stirring stuff