Military Humor

[Hilandor 1]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (ChickenHawk @ Feb. 23 2002,20:59)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">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.

 <span id='postcolor'>

lmao now that would have been funny to see haha

[ChickenHawk 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">good old Churchill<span id='postcolor'>

I thought I changed it to Nelson??</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"><span id='postcolor'>

[IsthatyouJohnWayne 0]

~That would be your avatar

[ChickenHawk 0]

oic

[Oligo 1]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Pete @ Feb. 23 2002,03:07)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Pete baba and the 40 deers?<span id='postcolor'>

Ha! I heard about this incident when I served. Seems your legend lives ever on...

[Oligo 1]

Here there be Steel Beasts

This happened during my basic training period. Our platoon had just been through a weeks worth of AT training during which the brass taught us how to sneak up to an enemy MBT and blow it away with a LAW. Luckily I had enough sobriety of mind NOT to point out that assaulting an MBT with a LAW is a suicide. You can just hope to make the MBT pissed at best.

In the end of the week there was a practical test. One by one we were invited to the test range. When I got there, the 2nd Lieutenant briefed me: "There is an enemy T-80 100 meters behind that ridgeline. Get into position on the ridge and blow it away with this LAW." I agreed to do so and swiftly proceeded into this convenient foxhole on the ridge using proper infantryman movement modes.

I had this mental image of an enormous steel beast, racing through the forest machineguns blazing and main gun coughing off once and a while. So I peeked cautiously from the foxhole. I couldn't see a goddamn thing. Absolutely no tank anywhere. So I said: "Sir, there is no enemy T-80 anywhere to be seen." I got a yelling reply: "What do you mean, private? Are you blind? There is an enemy T-80 and its pounding your position with machineguns! What are you going to do?"

I peeked again, this time raising a little higher. And no, there were no frightening steel monsters to be seen. Not even anything resebling a tank. So I rise higher and higher, until I finally stand on the bloody ridge and I swear, there is no MBT. Says the officer: "You fucking retard! You stood up like that and the goddamn T-80 blew you away with the main gun." I reply, totally puzzled: "Sir, I cannot see any T-80s from this position. I swear. Even if it did blow me away."

The officer gets totally pissed and runs down the side of the ridge for some 50 meters. He points at this olive colored thing the size of a beer case. And sure enough, it is a crude miniature model of a generic tank. I'm pretty sure my retinas had caught the picture of this thing, but since I was looking for a huge steel beast raging through the countryside (my mental image of a T-80), my mind just didn't manage to connect this pathetic thing to a T-80.

Try explaining that to an officer going ballistic...

[Viriato 0]

This is not my own experience, but my father has told it to me a bunch of times!

I'm from Spain, at the early 70' my father was on the mandatory military service at Spain, near Madrid. For those not well versed on european modern history, you shall remember that Spain was under the Franco's dictatorship.

He was a seargent (Because he acceded the military service after graduating at the university), and he was ordered to take care of a small military prison. It was summer, and horribly hot, the inmates were a mix of small criminals and "Objetores de conciencia", people who refuse to perform their mandatory militar service, and was jailed for that.

My father, showing mercy of the inmates, told two of the soldiers to grab their rifle and scort some of the inmates to a near pool, and take care that no one escapes while they could swim a while on the hot afternoon. This, of course, was against the orders he reciebed from his superior, but my father was concerned about the inmates and he thinks that there would be no harm on let them swim for a while.

The inmates and the guards (this has to happen, of course) were late on returning to the jail, and my father begun to feel upset, so he grab his small car (a SEAT 600, a VERY small car), and headed to the pool.

When he was driving to the pool, he starts to find on the side of the road things like a rifle ( a CETME, the Spanish assault rifle), or the uniform of one of the soldiers, and he begun to feel terrified. As you can imagine, if you lost inmates under your charge, and weapons, you cant expect something good for you, and live on a fascist regime doesn't help a lot!.

Finally, he found them all (inmates and soldiers), at a near wood, They were all drunked!!. My Father quickly count them, and with great relief, find that there were all of them, he grab the pistol, with one hand he drive the small car, and with the other point the inmates and carry them back to the jail!.

He spoke to the soldiers who were at charge of the inmates, and made a pact of silence.

There were no further problem...

[Decimus 2]

Here is one my dad told me:

He, who was a Lieutenant Junior Grade in the United States Navy Reserve, was serving as a the damage control officer aboard a LST (Landing Ship Tank), either the Page County or the Shanoamish(sp?) County, during the Vietnam "Conflict".  He was on shore leave in Saigon when he took a cab (or its equivalent) but the driver was headed the wrong way.  So he pulled out his .45 and put a round in the chamber and the driver apollogized and started going the right way.

I'm not sure if he witnessed this first hand but a couple of guys from his ship were playing catch with a cuncusion grenade.  And before long one of them was blown all over the side of the ship.

This one is when he got back to the states:

He and his twin brother (who was also a Lt JG in the USNR but never went to Vietnam) were at a club when an ensign asked him what the V stood for on his Vietnam Action Medal (I think that's what its called) so he and his brother told it was for not getting VD while he was over there.

Another story I got is from my recruiter when he was a DI (Drill Instructor).  It was on the grenade range and a female recruit had to pull the pin and lob the grenade from the hole. Simple ya? Well apearantly not because she pulls the pin and drops the grenade.  So he had to pick it up as fast has he can, throw it and then protect the recruit from the blast.  Suffice it to say she was recycled.

My personal favorite is when I was at the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS).  We had to get up at 4:30 in the morning and get ready for a good 6 or so hours of testing and filling out papers and what not.  I didn't get much sleep because my nerd of a roomate's friends called the hotel room, because my roomate was shipping out so he wanted to party.  And breakfast was terrible, runny eggs, nasty bacon strips, expired milk and orange juice.  The orange juice was the only thing that could be considered drinkable, Army food really does suck and don't get me started on those damn MREs (Meals Rejected by Etheopia).  The only thing noteworthy was that one of the recruits couldn't do the piss test and it took him about 4 hours, no joke.

This last one is from a friend of mine who is in the Air National Guard.  During weapons training you are supposed to go up to the line load your gun, fire at the target, remove the clip, clear the chamber and put the gun on safety and then go back to the start.  Well the guy next to my friend was real experienced with weapons so he lagged behind and hadn't finished firing when the horn was sounded to return to stop firing.  So he got confused and just goes back to the start.  Then one of the TIs (Training Instructor?) goes up to him and rips the rifle right out of his hands and pulls the trigger and it fires.  The idiot didnt even have it on safety.

[FeloniousPunk 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (madmike @ Feb. 17 2002,19:48)</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">lool whats the deal with not being able to keep empty shells <span id='postcolor'>

I think it is for safety, if they allowed people  to keep empty cases then the standards would slip and people might start taking live ammunition, which includes blanks.

Blanks can be dangerous.

In Scotland a boy was blinded becuase he found a blank round that after troops had been doing a public demo in a park. He found the blank a few days later and took it home and put it on top of the cooker hob. hey presto it exploded when he was inches away from it and left him blind <span id='postcolor'>

There are other reasons, too.

One is that the empty brass is sent back and reloaded (at least in the US Army). Also, the brass is counted/ weighed in order to ensure that all rounds issued were indeed fired instead of someone making off with them.

This reminds me of a story...

We were at Grafenwoehr for our semi-annual gunnery (11th Armored Cavalry Regiment). One of the units in my squadron, the chemical company, had a .50 cal machine gun range one day. Some of the soldiers there apparently had time to goof off and dream up mischief, and decided that it would be really cool to make a belt of .50 call that was composed solely of tracers, so the machinegun would look like a laser gun when I firing I guess. Unfortunately for the knuckleheads, they didn't have anything handy to remove the shells from the belt, so one of them decided to take a nice, pointy loose .50 cal round and use it to knock the other tracer rounds from the belts they were in (usually 1 in 5 shells in a belt are tracer). I think you can tell where this is going to go... the soldier doing this hit the primer hard enough with the pointy nose of the .50 cal shell to set it off, and the round went through his upper thigh, completely shattering the femur and critically injuring him. He had to be medevac'd right away.

This sounds horrible, but the silver lining everyone else was looking for was that the commander of chemical company was an utter prick, and happened to be on the range that day. We all thought that surely he'll be relieved over this, but unfortunately his career somehow survived.

[FeloniousPunk 0]

More stories, inspired by Pete's deer massacre.

At another gunnery in Grafenwoehr, the M2 Brad's from one of our infantry companies in my brigade had to fire Table VII (individual crew gunnery IIRC). One thing to know about Graf is that it has a surprisingly large population of wild boar (Wildschweine), which is mystifying to me since it is such a dangerous place. They can be a real problem in bivouac as you must be careful where you place your trash lest you get a boar as a midnight visitor in your tent (a most unwelcome guest). Well, rarely they get stuck out on a range when the shooting starts, and the Range SOPs forbid shooting at them; cease fire is immediately called and you have to wait for Range Control to come out and shoo the pest away. Why this is, I have no idea I only suspect really strict German wildlife and environmental laws. Anyway, the range goes live and all of a sudden a boar is sighted out on the range so the tower calls "Cease Fire!" and everyone does - except for one crew. The clueless gunner must have been curious as to what a 25mm Bushmaster can do to a 400 lb pig, so lined him up and fired a burst.

Well, the gunner got in a lot of trouble, I think he got a field grade article 15, and the platoon leader and range officer got reprimands, but I wish the Army showed a little humor there. I can only imagine what that must have looked like at close range, but I laugh everytime I do. It was too far too see much from where I was other than a small moving blob, a bunch of dust being kicked up from cannon shells, then all the angry excitement of the range people bringing justice on the wayward Bradley crew.

I also wonder what was done with the boar corpse!

PS - Fallen Paladin. I was stationed in Baumholder for 2 years (1994-1995). There was more than an American tank platoon there, there is a whole mechanized brigade (2d Brigade, 1st AD).

[Angry Radish 0]

Umm, A little help here?

One time myself, and a couple other flightline workers were changing out a 20 man liferaft which is stowed in a compartment on top of the wing root on a C-141b. This liferaft is deployed by pulling a handle from inside the aircraft, which pulls on a cable connected to the rafts inflation mechanism.

Anyhoo, we were all up on the wing with the cover off the compartment, and the next step is to reach under and disconnect the cable. Want to guess what happened, and who was supposed to be disconnecting it?

Well, as soon as we heard that loud hissing noise, we all turned tail and ran down the wing to get away. In the 3-5 seconds it took to run down the wing and turn around, we had a bright orange 20 man liferaft fully inflated and ready to use on top of an aircraft parked on the ground in the middle of Oklahoma.

The real fun part came when we had to call the line supervisor to the aircraft to deal with somehow transporting it back to the lifesupport shop for repacking and reinspection.

It goes without saying that I was extremely careful when changing them from then on

[FeloniousPunk 0]

One more for today. The Tale of Moo the Cow.

In my officer time, I was on the battalion staff in charge of maintenance support operations to our brigade (mechanized infantry, 2 mech inf battalions, 1 tank battalion, 1 artillery battalion, 1 engineer battalion). I worked a lot with our B Company, which was the maintenance company and did all the heavy maintenance for the brigade. B Company had a lot of cool stuff, including a complete metal working shop. The sergeant in charge of the shops at B Company had a mascot his metal workers made for him, named Moo the Cow. Moo's body was a 55 gallon drum, with metal poles for legs, a metal pole for a neck, a metal can for a head, bolts for eyes, and a glued on rubber NBC suit glove for udders, the whole thing painted white with black spots. Moo sat on top of the big van that was the shops office in the field.

It goes without saying of course that Moo quickly became the target of many abduction attempts. This sergeant though was a giant of man, with a mean temper, and a combat veteran of the 82nd, and kept a close watch on his Moo. Many amateurish attempts on Moo were made but he foiled them all. His boasting over Moo's security became unbearable, so several of us from the staff came up with a cunning plan to abduct Moo (cunning plans are our stock in trade). Well... won't go into that, but we did succeed to kidnapping Moo. Then the real torment began. SFC F. was distraught and mad as hell and tried furiously to find out where his cow was, but we never betrayed our secret (God was it hard not to gloat). We created fake ransom letters complete with cut out and pasted letters and pictures of Moo chained up and posted them secretly all over the battalion area.

This went on for about a week, with SFC F. beside himself in anger. Finally, we decided we had to dispose of Moo. We had a demolitions range scheduled - and yeah, Moo made it out to the range. We packed Moo with 3 kg of C-4 and wrapped her with detcord, and took a final picture. Then, behind cover - BOOM!

We collected the few remaining scraps of Moo we could find and anonymously deposited them on SFC F's desk, along with the picture.  

By then he had a good idea of who was responsible, and plotted his vengeance, but that is a tale for a different time   .

[IsthatyouJohnWayne 0]

LOL Great stories all!

i can just imagine that 'cow' going up

mangled udders thrown into the air

..the horror......

[Stealt Eagle 1]

Haven't u still got the picture of Moo

[TheOmega 0]

No offence but i dont want to tread on the bs. Easy to "spot". Well cow's where mentioned, werent they.

[FeloniousPunk 0]

I wish I did, Stealth Eagle! SFC F. got to keep the photo along with the scraps, his last earthly reminders of his metal friend.

[Angry Radish 0]

There, cleaner than a....WTF!

When I was in the Air Force, we had a cleaner we called Trich, mainly becasue it was easier than saying Trichloroethylene

Anyhoo, we used this for general degreasing of small parts, mainly electronic connectors, as it almost immediately removed any water or grease from contacts. Truely great stuff, yes, at least till the EPA told us we couldn't use it anymore, but that's a different story.

One day an avionics troop was on the flightdeck, and after installing an ADI, saw that there was alot of dirt and smudges on many of the instruments, so he decided to clean em up.

Since Trich evaporates VERY quickly, he used a rag, and pretty much saturated it, then quickly rubbed it over all the instruments he could reach before it all evaporated.

To his horror, not only did the trich remove that dirt he was so worried about, it removed ALL of the lettering, markings and lines that were painted on the instruments.

So, the rest of the day was spent installing new instruments and OPschecking them ALL before it's next flight, not fun :-)

[FallenPaladin 0]

Really strong stuff

Guess my mother sometimes would like to have some of it...

[Black Op 0]

yes, would be a nice mothers day present

[Guest]

Ok, here is my story how I almost got court-martialed:

When I did my military service, during my basic training, I was stationed at a base that mainly hosted amphibious units. As you can guess It all revolves around water a lot. Our base was on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, with a lot of small islands around.

One day we hade a large excersise, where a landing and occupation of the main island was to be trained. The men were divided into an attacking and a defending force. I got to be in the attacking group, but was not assigned any active role, since I had hurt my leg during a dive the day before. I got to be assigned as a spotter for a sniper who was covering the far side of the island from another small island nearby (about 300m away).

I was pretty disappointed, since this was the first time we were to use latex bullets, instead of the usal laser emitters/sensors. The latex bullets can be dangerous at close range, but if you shoot from a distance they only hurt like hell. They are also hard to shoot with, because of the light weight and low speed, but it still beats the stupid laser-pointer we usually practiced with (Swedish version of MILES gear).

We didn't expect anything to happen and we were right. We sat in a bush for more then six hours. Our orders were to assist the invasion of the island, but since we were covering the wrong side of the island, we saw nothing. When the excersise was to be terminated, they would tell us by radio.

Anyway, I was the spotter, so I sporadically checked the main island for activity, but nothing was happening. Suddenly about 16:30 (the excersise had started 9:30) I see a group of people walking on "our side" of the island. The group consisted of ten soldiers, led by a navy guy in a white uniform!

I told the sniper and he agreed that the navy guy was a too good target to let go. I ranged. He shot and hit the guy in the upper torso. We reallocated and had a good laugh about those stupid navy boys running around in their whites.

About 30 min later a big HKP-10 Puma helicopter suddenly appeared over our little hideout. It landed nearby and a very angy navy captain met us and called us all sorts of unpleasant names.

The situation was that the excersise had ended several hours ago and the man in whites that my sniper had shot was a visiting vice-admiral who was getting a tour of the island. Our radio was broken, so we didn't know.  

We didn't get court-martialed, since the radio was really broken, but I got guard duty for two weeks.

[InRange 1]

LOL

Well, not you almost being court-martialed but the sniper shooting the admiral

[Guest]

Ok, here is another story.

During my basic command training I was to supervise two AT soldiers during a live-fire excersise. They were supposed to take out a truck that was partially hidden in vegetation. I had a designated spot from which I was supposed to watch them from a distance and evaluate their performance. This was a night excersise, so we were supposed to use night-vision goggles. I didn't bother with that because I knew the area by heart so I put them on first when I reached my observation spot. I didn't manage to get a visual on the ATs, but i trusted that they knew what they were doing.

After a while I got their radio-call. It went something like this (but in swedish):

[ATs] 2C3 to 1C3 we have the target in sight.

[me] Ok, 2C3, you can fire at will.

[ATs] Negative 1C3, cannot fire.

[me] Repeat, 1C3, do you have a shot on the target?

[ATs] Affermative, 1C3, we have a shot on the target.

(Here I was starting to get impatient)

[me] 1C3, take the shot!

[ATs] Negative, 1C3, can't do.

(Here I got pretty pissed)

[me] And why is that private?

[ATs] You are standing less then two meters from the target, Sir.

I quickly looked behind my back, and yes, there it was, the truck. I had navigated to the wrong place in the dark and was currently standing about 1 meter from the target, right in front of the truck!

[stealth squirrel 0]

LOL!!wot rank where/are you?

[Guest]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (stealth squirrel @ Mar. 12 2002,20:38)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">LOL!!wot rank where/are you?<span id='postcolor'>

Hm, not so easy to answer actually. This was during command training for platoon leader, so yes it must have been sergeant at the time.

[Frizbee 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (denoir @ Mar. 12 2002,21:19)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (stealth squirrel @ Mar. 12 2002,20:38)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">LOL!!wot rank where/are you?<span id='postcolor'>

Hm, not so easy to answer actually. This was during command training for platoon leader, so yes it must have been sergeant at the time.

<span id='postcolor'>

Be glad real life isn't like Operation Flashpoint... or they would have fired and then gone "Oh no, 1 is down."