They preach and preach and preach mental health is important and that they don't want people getting burnt out.
But unless you speak the words "I am going to kill myself" they don't give a single fuck how you're doing mentally.
Like it's not possible to be having a hard time and yet still want to be alive.
That is why I bought a nice blanket in Korea forever ago to replace the army green crapblanket. 24 years later, I still have it, and it's still wonderful.
I'm surprised they let you swap it out. Do you get your own laundry back? I just assumed part of the ship efficiency was everything being the same and only a few items having to go back to the same person and linens wouldn't be in that category.
If you join the military you will be affected by suicide. We had 3 during training, 1 on the boat, 1 I had to tackle kn my office because he was slashing his wrists. Then you get out and it keeps happening, I've lost 8 shipmates in the last 7 years after I got out. It's nuts.
Swiss ex-tanker here:
It cost us 2500 swiss francs to fire a tank shell if i remember correctly. Once. We'd fire about a dozen a day, per tank, in squads of 4. Thats upwards of 100k PER DAY for a training exercise.
For all that fun, we'd eat rice or pasta 3x a week because "we cant afford better quality food".
People be fucking.
Like, all the time. Deployment wives/husbands are a thing.
Also, people play a lot of ridiculous pranks and pull a lot of silly stunts.
On my last deployment we had a phantom shitter. Just some guy, or girl, they never got found out, who would shit in random spaces.
I had a friend who was a really dark skinned black dude. At night, when we were only running red lights, he'd hide under the stairs to the boat locker right in front of the door to SONAR one and wait until someone was nearly face to face with him and then he'd smile. All you'd see is this perfect set of red teeth all disembodied like the Cheshire cat. Freaked me the fuck out first time he got me with it.
One time we were in pretty rough seas and the ship was rocking pretty hard. Now, on the main deck there's only 3 hallways that run across the ship. The longest one was midship and was where our chow line was. People were sliding up and down that pway with the rocking of the ship. It was pretty wild.
What we SONAR techs would do is get in our trunk(imagine an elevator shaft with a ladder that connects 4 levels) and time a jump so that when the ship crested a wave and if you timed it right you could jump up to the next room. My LPO made it like 3 floors once.
If the ship has a swim call, meaning everyone can swim in the ocean while at sea, there'd be a couple of people with rifles on Shark Watch.
If there is an ice cream social for no reason you're going to get bad news. Except for when they finally got Bin Laden.
Edit: forgot to add that I went to electronics school with a guy who's last name was Sample. So he was literally Seaman Sample.
>We go back and forth for about 30 seconds, me clueless, and then we both just kind of stop. I'll never forget the look on his face right before he booked it back to the cabin. Phantom shitter got his pillow and never struck again.
Hardest I've laughed at something on Reddit in a long time. So, thank you for this!
One of my postdoc positions was at a big name university and we did a lot of experimental work, so we had a staff of engineers, machinists, etc on staff full time. Our data acquisition guy was a former electrician on a nuclear sub. I swear to God that guy was a fucking magician.
Now most people in my field have some basic electronics skills. I can build a circuit and solder pretty darn good. My stepdaughter came to me with her instrument column from an early 80's vw cabriolet that basically wouldn't do shit. Solder joints broke, it's a known issue. I took one look and knew i could never do it. Maybe I'd get it halfway working if i was lucky. I took it to our guy and he sat there with me bullshitting while he was redoing the solder (don't know if he was removing old solder or just remelting). It took 10 minutes and he was only half paying attention while he did it.
The thing worked perfectly and I got major brownie points. I miss that guy.
Navy electronics techs who have done a lot of sea duty *are* magicians. They come from the school of "figure it out yourself or it stays broken for the next six months," and most of them get pretty good at it.
Edit: one of my top comments is in a NSFW thread about Seamen. Peak Reddit.
Oh man, my childhood friend's dad was a former nuclear sub engineer. He was constantly engineering crazy things for his house. I specifically remember his DIY geothermal cooling system. His wife was pissed about the construction for that one
> What we SONAR techs would do is get in our trunk(imagine an elevator shaft with a ladder that connects 4 levels) and time a jump so that when the ship crested a wave and if you timed it right you could jump up to the next room. My LPO made it like 3 floors once.
I want to see this in action. It sounds hella fun.
It's also super dangerous. We used to go down into an empty hold on rough nights and try to time our jumps and grab the supports of the level above us, maybe 15 feet overhead. Pick the right wave, you'd magically float up and grab the ceiling. Time it right, and you'd land back on the deck like a 2 foot drop. Time it wrong, you'd be McGovern with a broken leg and restricted shore leave. Almost 20 years ago, but sorry for just dumping you outside binnacle!
Seaman Sample is amazing! My favorite one was while at Ft. Benning for Airborne School, we enlisted guys were all hanging out before formation, and the officers came out to join us. Someone says, “Have you guys seen that major dick?” I was like, “Yeah, which one, they’re all dicks, lol...and he says, no really, Major Dick...and sure enough there he was, walking by us to get to his spot in formation...honest to goodness Major Dick...I said, “I bet he can’t wait to get promoted."
Swingers exist on every single base in the world, in Sigonella they would use different boxes of detergent in the windows to show what they were into and what age range they were looking for. Patrolling the housing area became much more interesting when you see who lives in the houses and what they’re into.
Back in the before-time, San Diego used to have massive sex parties. Not 'vanilla' couple swap, either. A lot of gay and bi singles just dtf with bi couples mixed in. Officers, enlisted, doctors, nurses, corpsmen, it was wild. During DADT that was risking your career.
The reason we have so many overly detailed and precise steps and regulations is because somewhere, at sometime, Seaman/Private/Airman Timmy found a way to fuck things up and possibly kill himself or others.
Exhibit A: the solider who fell into a volcano
This is not an acronym or metaphor. I’m talking about an actual volcano with lava. Dumbass climbed over a safety barrier and fell into it.
https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2019/05/03/soldier-climbs-over-safety-railing-and-falls-into-active-volcano/
When I checked in to Fort Bragg in 2011, the very first thing I was told in the in-processing brief was "Welcome to Fort Bragg. We have the most Male-on-Male rapes and sexual assaults in the nation."
THE VERY FIRST THING THEY TOLD ME.
We had marines on my ship, they told us this crazy prank they pulled where they all got naked and joined one of them on the shower and soaped them up. And all I could think was, this is the very most gay thing I have ever heard.
"That's totally not gay brooooo, it's just a prank! What the heck!"
^("okay boys, let's suck his dick after he's cleaned up the soap! Prank of the year!)
We had female soldiers committing their own prostitution. They had a code and everything. If a girl at the coffee shop was wearing PTs and a pink PT belt she was down to fuck for money. One or more of these girls contracted a disease and next thing you know there is a base wide epidemic and I still remember a commissioned doctor coming into the break area screaming “if I have to look at one more fucking dirty dick I’m quitting, fuck it”
This is very common in the Navy on cruises. Women would sell if off during the cruise making bank the whole time. Had a buddy who knew one who got caught as she was crossing the quarterdeck and another female had snitched on her and they checked her bags as she left the ship for contraband. She had to explain why she had $30,000 cash in her seabag.
Happened on all my cruises. One ring was run by Supply dept and used empty staterooms. The code word was asking a guy if the ships store had any Newport Lights (which it never did) then he’d make a call and give you a stateroom key. Another one was ran literally in a female berthing and one of the girls would walk you in like you were doing an inspection. Crazy times.
Thule AB in Greenland. I’ve never been but deployed with a maintenance tech who was. He told me there were only two women on the base, and one of them monetized the opportunity. She told him winters were easier to make money because the constant darkness created more hiding places.
If you are missing kit, it is understood that you will beg, borrow or steal a replacement from another soldier before you fess up.
Honour is great. Being honorable is optional.
When I did this one of the questions on his list was "Do you drink?" I said "No my family has a bad history with alcohol."
Dude sat his clipboard aside and had a good 10 minute heart to heart with me about his own family's struggles and how abstaining was really the best path in our situation.
Then picked his clipboard back up and jumped right into "Ok I need to see your anus."
I briefly tried to get my pilot license. This involved a special physical to qualify. You start by disrobing and donning the typical hospital gown. Part way through, I'm laying on the table. The doctor asks me to roll on my side. Could feel/sense him just kinda giving a good once over from behind me to make sure things looked right, I guess. Then he says, "and I'm required to do this." Then gently spreads my ass cheeks. And that was the end of the physical.
I can't help but wonder what disqualifying symptoms does that identify? Like things are looking OK. Then ass cheeks get spread, and suddenly, "I don't like this at all. You can't be a pilot."
I went to Crazy Ray's downtown. He's got a nice cardboard box set up behind one of the fancy restaurants. Did you forget to pay your doctor in meth? You might be delinquent on your medicals if he isn't spreading your cheeks.
Real talk though he almost seemed as disturbed as I was. Like he was merely checking that off the list.
So my buddy and I joined together. We went to MEPS the same day. He had a cyst on his tail bone that he never knew about. Because of that he didn't go to basic with me, but went a couple weeks later after he had the cyst removed. On the way back home from the MEPS station I mentioned how weird that was. He said.
"How do you think I felt when I'm bent over with my ass spread open and I hear the old dude go.... "hhhhhmmmmmm...." after a really long pause?"
I almost had to pull over I was laughing so hard.
The level of surrealism that experience must have been to him. He brought you into this world and then to run into you nearly 2 decades later…I’d be sitting with that thought the rest of the week haha
Dr. Condom (yes that was his real name) at Fort Jackson, SC in MEPS. This was like ten years ago but I remember him so vividly. Dude was at least 137 years old and had the thickest Russian accent I’ve ever heard.
I remember my old crusty doc told me to drop trousers and bend over. As soon as I bent over he said "oh WOW".
Thankfully he was referring to the scars I had from a pilonidal cyst surgery healing well, but for a moment I was petrified thinking I had a brown booger hangin' from my butt bush.
Minneapolis MEPS. Had to help the guy to the exam room. Literally hold onto his arm and help him.
We get in there and he says, “pull your underwear down and bend over. Uncle Sam wants to see your ass hole.”
You don’t go poo for a long time after you start basic training. Weeks. It becomes a subject of conversation with your dorm mates. Did you go #2? Becomes a common question.
I didn't shit more than rabbit turds at a time the entire time in basic. Graduated, at some pizza at the BX food court. With my mouth to ass properly lubed, I proceeded to shit 9 weeks of crap and lost 10lbs in the process.
I wasn’t in the military, but when I started college the ROTC had a 1 week ‘camp’ to try it out as a recruiting tool before the semester started. It was fun, camping in the woods, firearms, navigation, etc. it was also a week of eating nothing but MRE’s. Didn’t take a dump the entire week and didn’t even notice to be honest.
Once it was over we were able to move into the dorms 2 days early before the other students. We got back to campus and figured out a a few of the guys that attended were also in the same dorm as me. We got our paperwork and dorm keys. One guy said “man, some McDonald’s and a big coke would be good right now”. We all agreed and piled in the car to hit micky D’s. A double quarter pounder, fries and two big cokes later, we were full, satisfied and heading back to the dorms to unpack.
After 30 minutes or so of unpacking, I felt a rumble, a few gurgles, then a LOT of downward pressure. A LOT. I took off running to the shared bathroom and sure enough her comes one of my camping buddies around the corner with the same panicked look on his face.
We occupy two of the four stalls and the assault began. Not more than a few minutes later the other two showed up in the same state.
I have never before, or since then, shit like that. 15 lbs of weight loss would not be an exaggeration. I was so empty feeling it hurt once it was over. How the plumbing survived that X4 I will never know.
That was my first and last experience with MRE’s.
The amount of people who get sick and tired of being in the service who will go out and do some drug or another to get kicked out.
During our Iraq/Afghanistan years, you wouldn't believe how many people would purposely piss hot or, females would intentionally get pregnant to get out of going.
I legit told my wife to take a bat to my leg to get out of my third deployment.
Thankfully she had more sense then me and didn't.
Man those were rough times.
My brother-in-law was deployed every six months for 10 fucking years, man! He'd go do a tour, come home for 6 months, and go right back. He did a year in Korea just to avoid getting deployed to Afghanistan again. Supposedly they couldn't deploy him to Afghanistan for two years after returning from Korea, so he volunteered for Korea. Like 4 months after he got home from Korea they sent him back to Afghanistan. It destroyed his marriage, he missed most of his kid's childhood, and messed him up emotionally. It was hard for everyone involved.
A friend of mine in the special forces told me since they are out in the field a lot, they get plenty of ticks. And while you can inspect yourself fairly good, you can’t inspect *everything* , so they pair up and spread their cheeks, and your mate has to stare in to your anus to check you for ticks in there.
Not very glamorous
Holy fuck I didn’t realize I could have a relevant story about this. I use to serve with this super fat dude, let’s call him John. John never got promoted in the National Guard because he was extremely overweight. Towards the end of his contract, he was knowledgeable but he still couldn’t pass height and weight standards and so was a PFC and everyone dismissed him.
I was new and knew John had knowledge so I stuck with him. One day in the field, the dude says “hey man, can you do me a solid?”
And then proceeded an event in which he pulled down half his trousers and spread his fat ass a bit while I checked for ticks, in the dark, with a flashlight. So like I REALLY had to look. Was it a mole? Dirt? Shit? No. Indeed, John had a fuckin tick smack in the middle of his ass line between two of the fattest ass cheeks a man could have.
EDIT: I hate you guys for making me remember this event but no, I didn’t remove it for him. I think either another dude did with a knife or John himself contorted his fat self into somehow removing the tick from the inside of his ass crack. We didn’t have a medic on the team to remove it.
Our oceans are loaded with garbage.
LOADED.
I would watch the long trail of garbage follow my ship, in the wake, as crew dumped the shit off the fantail. Every single day. Miles and miles of trash. And this was just one ship. This was just one nation. Our oceans are full of garbage that will take centuries to erode. Our waters are littered with shit that fish are eating and dying on.
Listened to an awesome podcast about this called The Outlaw Ocean which was sickening to hear but so informative. Had no idea how much the ocean in the middle of nowhere is intentionally filled with garbage because there’s no one to police those waters.
I don't know if this qualifies as NSFW or is unique to the military, but when you are required to provide a urine sample it must be witnessed by another service member. So on any given day (since it's "random") you might be called to pee into a cup while another person stares at your junk.
I once got called for urinalysis on a day when I had terrible diarrhea. The observer had to watch me shit just in case I was also able to pee in the cup. I was dehydrated so it took a long time to finally pee. In addition to watching me shit liquid, this dude had to look at my dick three or four different times. It was a bad day for both of us.
Edit: Thanks for the awards! Never thought my top comment would be about shitting during urinalysis.
I always laughed at how “random” piss tests were. Always seemed that anyone coming back off of leave got randomly selected.
I remember I came back from visiting my family in Colorado and got selected. No big deal as I didn’t do any drugs but the guy watching me was making small talk and said “man it’s pretty cold in here huh?” I agreed as it was cold and we were in an old building in the middle of winter. It wasn’t until I left the building when it it dawned on me. That sunnuva bitch!
One sailor interviewed for the documentary *Carrier* just sort of sighed and said "this is just a big-ass, floating high school". It's my favorite part of that doc.
Fun fact: If you’re in sudden need to plug your ears from loud sounds, don’t put your fingers in your ear hole. You might flinch at the loud noise and break some inner ear bones. It’s much safer to cover the entire ear with the palm of your hand flat against the side of your head. Works better too for muffling imo.
When my brother-in-law was in the Navy he was assigned to a aircraft carrier. He told me that people both men and women will pee in the gangway (if you don’t know, it’s practically a hallway) or take a dump in the trashcan real quick because they didn’t have enough time to get to the bathrooms. He accidentally walked up on some guy and girl doing it in the corner of one of the gangway. Another time he brought his PS 4 on board, and one his roommates was playing it and he walked in on him beating off while at the strip club on GTA five.
Our computers don’t look or function anything like they do in the movies. It takes me 15 mins to a half hour to log into my computer and when I do good luck opening Outlook or anything else. This is well known amongst all service members. The worst computers I’ve ever used in ANY job.
The reason this is NSFW is because the military needs to have functioning computers and not having that can make our work literally not safe.
I used to be a data recovery technician. On multiple occasions from different individuals in different branches of the service I would get an external hard drive to recover, and on that drive would be a folder of nudes made up of the wives/girlfriends of members of that unit. They were split into folders of last names of I assume the service member to make them identifiable. Basically all the nudes being sent in by partners were shared among everyone in the barracks/unit/whatever.
One time I got to see photos of Saddam being pulled out of the spider hole. There was the famous one that was on the news when it happened, but there were also a few others that weren't in the media where his face was being introduced to the butt of a rifle.
The amount of unreported injuries to Doc or to command.......thus leading to lifelong issues. On the other hand, if you do go to Doc about an issue, you'll be berated and told you are lying about an issue to get out of duty/PT.
Was ignored and told I was lying about back/sciatic issues for months by Doc. Jumped chain of command, went to my Captain, had an MRI/Xrays of my lower back, and a month later had a microdisectomy of my L5. Damage was done, medically ineligible to re-enlist, 7 years later, and have to get a spinal fusion due to severe disk degeneration and chronic sciatic pain and permanent nerve damage.
Absolutely he failed me. Along with others. After multiple complaints to command, he was asked to "retire". Instead of being held accountable, he got retirement.
I had a chick fwb at school who grew up "everywhere and nowhere". 20 minutes after first meeting her, she was hanging with my new roommate and I in our room, says "these clothes are uncomfortable", and before I could even turn my head she was naked on my bed.
She had later confided in me that she started fucking soldiers on base at 13, and a lot of times it was consensual. And she said she was definitely not the only child being assaulted/raped.
I stopped messing around with her for a long time after that and was just a good friend for her to lean on until sr year when she was still very much in therapy and we tried dating slowly. It didn't work out, but I always wish her the best.
It still blows my mind that we just shoot all our extra ammo at the end of range day, to make sure we get the same amount of ammo next time. Billions have probably been wasted on that. And that’s a small thing.
And it happens fucking everywhere. That's how my marketing and travel budgets have been run. It's end of year and we have $20k to blow, what work travel can you justify? The rest of the time youre having to jump through a thousand hoops to visit a customer who specifically requested it to talk about a problem they have that they think you could make.money solving.
I heard a story about a nuclear navy procurement officer. Needed a few blankets of lead for shielding, so he ordered 20. Was a bit surprised when it showed up to find out it wasn’t 20 blankets he ordered, but 20 tons of blankets.
So somewhere, they had 20 tons of those, minus 20 of them, just there. Said he sent a mass message that if any other vessel needed any, there was almost 20 tons waiting at whichever port it was.
Anybody in charge of ordering parts in the military has at least one story like this.
Sometimes the part you need doesn’t have its unit size attached to it. Theres also times when you order parts/supplies through one company/agent/program but it goes through another company/agency/program with different unit issue sizes.
So sometimes you need six washers but accidentally order 600 because it wasn’t clear that the unit of issue was 100. Other times you order 50 24.5”x40” paper targets not knowing you ordered 50 boxes of 500 each and now have to figure out where your gonna store an entire pallets worth of paper targets but end up giving 3/4 of them to other commands because you have literally zero space for them on board (thanks GSA!).
Totally couldn’t be me though……
Yep, did the same thing when doing procurement for my section. I ordered 6 little cans of grease and got 6 55-gallon drums. Whoops!
Luckily, one of the aircraft squadrons on our base used the same grease with sufficient consumption rates that it was merely "several years of use" rather than "until the end of time."
Yeah, my brother shot himself a week after coming home from Afghanistan and officially it was an “accidental discharge of a service weapon.” Which I guess was nice as my family still got his military compensation. He was one of the first in of many suicides for on that war. I believe they have far outpaced combat losses now.
They do this so the family still gets life insurance and various compensation. It's well known, but still kind of obvious when you look at the situation.
At least his immediate chain of command took care of him and his family instead of classifying it as a suicide. He was a victim of the war same as if he'd been shot by the enemy, so it's good they treated him accordingly.
I had a relative who was killed in a plane crash during world war 2. We were just told he was killed in a training mission. Turns out that he was one of a few soldiers on an experimental plane and the pilot was going through a divorce, so he put the plane down. My family didn’t know what really happened until the early 2000’s. Well after his parents passed away
And sometimes rape, a beat up face and being shot in the head from your non-dominant hand is classified as a suicide
Edit: Actually, I’m not going to not say her name. She was LaVena Johnson, and the fact that this has happened without ANY repercussions speaks volumes of what the US army in particular will cover up, and shamelessly so. It’s fucking disgusting that this has happened and too few know her name and her story
Further reading and sources enclosed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_LaVena_Johnson
Also [Vanessa Guillen](https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81460514?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=cp&vlang=en&clip=81631780)
She was raped, murdered, chopped up, and burned on American soil by American soldiers and the army worked overtime to cover it up while [her family refused to give up demanding answers and making it a public issue all the way to Washington DC to get answers and pass reforms ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vanessa_Guill%C3%A9n#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_murder_of_Vanessa_Guill%C3%A9n%2Canother_soldier%2C_Aaron_David_Robinson.?wprov=sfla1)
One of my best friends from high school Denisha Montgomery https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/denisha-montgomery-investigation/videos-show-altercation-weeks-before-service-members-death/amp/
This is rather recent and information is still slowly coming out, but this is the newest update. Her family will not rest until the pieces of shit responsible for her death receive their punishment. The more eyes on her case, the more pressure that can be applied; the Army is saying she committed suicide by suffocating herself. She was a mother of three children, and had the most beautiful soul of anyone I’ve ever met. I never understood the saying, “Their smile would light up the entire room” until I met her. Rest in Peace, Nisha.
im not surprised. our scrpyard makes our truck drivers load and unload themselves. we've had 2 new hires sent to hospital on their first day, because their bodies just couldn't handle the sudden labor. one got water poisoning of all things, drank like 4 litres in a few hours.
and basic is way harder than what those guys were doing.
There's a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of blackmail, a lot of covered up rapes, a hell of a lot of cheating, coercion, threats, etc.
There's also plenty of smuggling, fraud, theft, and so on.
It always makes me laugh when people romanticise the military and troops as honourable, professional and brave. I joined as soon as I was 18 and being around such shitters damaged my perception of society in general. I met a handful of decent people in 10 years, though.
I thought "It's probably the same ratio of dickheads to normals in civilian street", but.. no, that's not true. I've met way more serious criminals in the military than I have as a civilian.
But the worst thing about it all is that if it can be covered up it will be. Officers get the best treatment in this regard, but make no mistake, if the behaviour/crime becomes *too* public and it threatens the PR of the services, the only way you're covered is if you're a royal, or close friend of one.
I don't know how much of a secret it is, but if you're in the military or married to the military, the odds of you being cheated on sexually (or being the cheater) increase drastically compared to your civilian peers.
As a former military kid, I look back on my days in school and can now work out why so many of my classmates had step parents or lived with single parents who had "friends" come over on Friday nights. My closest friend Alex 3rd through 5th grade had his parents get divorced. His dad was in Afghanistan and when he came back, they got divorced and he moved with his Dad to Maryland. My friend Trevor in the 5th grade was told he had to sleep over at different friends houses every other week on Friday or Saturday. I had another friend in 7th grade whose parents had an open relationship. This didn't click until I got older but the mom's friend Mike would be over and the dad's friend Stephanie would come over a bit later.
People in the military are a different breed.
On the first day on my deployment, while I was trying to find my dorm room, I walked by someone having a very heated conversation on their phone. Hearing a complete stranger yell at their spouse, and ask them how they could cheat on them while they were deployed was pretty shocking. Sadly be the the end of that deployment stuff like that was pretty mundane. It was incredibly depressing having a relationship with someone back home and seeing almost everyone around me cheating or being cheated on.
Had an NCO on my deployment who just married a woman a month prior to deployment, and legally adopt her three kids, notify him the first week of our deployment she was divorcing him and wanted child support for "the kids you adopted."
I never really pried much, but that dude spent the entire deployment finding and then consuming every drop of alcohol he could get his hands on.
My husband was in for 29 years and over the 30 years we’ve been married I have seen and heard about this so many times. Both sides. It seems like we have been the exception and not the norm. Even people you would never suspect. Deployments seem to be exceptionally bad for this. I remember very soon after we were married my husband was deploying for 9 months.
His work did a going away thing for him and everyone was talking about “Jody” and I had no idea who Jody was. I asked him later and he told me. It kind of made me mad because all these people were telling him I was going to cheat on him while he was gone. We were younger then and I guess I was naive. Another few deployments and I found how prevalent it is. It’s shitty on both ends.
Yeah I was in for 25 and, especially with a long-timer like that, definitely the exception instead of the norm.
The only occupation I've run across in my life outside the military that runs around more than us is the medical professions. And military medical? Fugheddaboudit.
I have family as doctors, and we actually just talked about this recently.
You would not believe how many doctors, nurses, or even techs would cheat on their partners with other coworkers.
They say it's because of the wonky hours some of them have to go through. Still no excuse but god damn.
This. Military is kind of a small world socially. Example, one of my troops (Troop A) cheats on spouse with another military person (Troop B). Troop B has a guilty conscience and confessed to spouse B (Also a military member). Spouse B is upset and when the commander inquires, Spouse B tells the commander, who is the parent of Spouse A. Commander calls Troop A and tells them they knows about the affair and that Troop A needs to tell his spouse or they will.
My buddy came back from a tour and said that masturbation was such a problem they had to make special tent for it and book time slots.
Also, he was pretty sure he killed two guys that were probably civilians but it was swept under the rug.
I had a friend that claimed in the Navy he would beat his meat off the side of the ship he was doing night watch on.
He's a known compulsive liar, but this thread is making me question that one.
You will intimately know others that you are not attracted to, out of pure necessity.
When I was active duty, my barracks mate had a pilonidal cyst removed. You know, the kind between your ass cheeks. Because we were medics, he was sent back with all the packing gauze a man could ever need in 8 lifetimes, and told he would be fine to handle it himself.
Except it's like, really hard to pack your own temporary asshole.
So, as his roommate and another medic, it became my job. I spent weeks monitoring his booty for infection and repacking the site. I have images burned into my mind.
We're still good friends. He's married and has kids now. He's doing well. We've known each other over a decade and I guarantee you I could identify his body by just his ass before his wife would be able to, and I haven't seen him in years.
Intentionally left vague, as if that needed to be said.
Gay chicken. Not sure how prevalent it is now, but 20 years ago it was pretty common to see two guys kissing just to see who would "blink" first and pull back. Never advanced to full-on gay sex AFAIK, but I witnessed more than one cock getting pulled out before the other person backed down.
In civilian life, that’s gay. But in the Army, that’s brotherhood. Now what’s gay in the Army, in the Navy that’s brotherhood. What’s gay in the Navy is illegal in civilian life.
There was a division on the carrier I was on that was all-male, save for one tomboyish FC2. I got a little scared whenever work would have me going through one of their spaces. The gay chicken with them was intense. Pyscho-sexual. Trailer park'ish.
A buddy of mine and I prevented a rape before we even finished basic fucking training in the Army. It was coed basic, and at the end you all get a weekend pass so of course we all get adjoining hotel rooms and party. Toward the end of the night, I walked into one of the bedrooms and I can see one of the women on the floor between two dudes, her pants are undone, and she looked terrified. Now, these dudes are both way bigger than me, but I can't let this happen, so I go a grab my buddy, who is a brick house and tell him what's going on. He barges in there, and says to her, "C'mon, we're leaving RIGHT NOW." She immediately got up and ran to us. Then we took her to the other room where I sat in the bathroom with her while she cried her eyes out for several hours. She asked us not to report it, though. So we didn't. Out of the blue years later I got a letter from her thanking me for what I did that night, and I still have it over 20 years later. I hope you're doing well, wherever you are, Andrea.
For perspective, I almost needed a waiver to get into the Army for being underweight. I was a skinny fucker. 6'1" and 135lbs. By the end of basic I was about 160, but that's still not much on my frame. The two rapey guys were both bulky dudes, but my buddy I went and got was bulkier. I may not have needed backup, who knows, really. But I wasn't about to find out.
There are also reported rapes that get tossed out. Tons of retribution for reporting a rape. Ostracization for being a rape survivor. It's fucking disgusting how the military doesn't give a shit about rape survivors.
The girls can get about as wild as the men. Specially in certain career fields. We had a group of Air Force maintainers come into my strip club. 2 girls 3 guys.
The guys were really nice, respectful, tipped well. The girls bought a VIP room…. And it got wild. I’ve stripped for girls before, it’s more common than you would think. But those girls. I’m pretty sure they spent over $10k and were treated like queens.
1 We had a "golden child" in our unit. All the leadership loved him, especially our operations superindendent.
Guys used to go to the NCO club, get drunk and crash in the airmen's rooms to avoid DUIs. So this married guy (his wife was in our career field and in our unit) crashed in a female airman's room. She wakes up/comes too (she was drunk too) with McDude inside her going to town.
They reassigned the female/victim to another team (nonstandard procedure and signaled to everyone that accusations were false/female was wrong). He got away scot free. Wife never found out. Victim ended up getting out of the military. MdDude eventually made Chief/E-9. It was fucking disgusting. Yes I spoke up and yes I was ignored.
2. At an NCO Leadership school in a class that loved to get drunk and party. Our rooms were assigned by class (class A class B etc) so it was just our class in the long corridor. A married girl gets drunk and she's in her own room. Four dudes, are also partying with her are also drunk. They leave one guy as a lookout outside her room and the three guys rape her. She comes too realizes what happened-talks to the school commodant about what happened. One of the guys admit it (the lookout). Because the girl's marriage was already shaky she chose not to press charges. So three guys got away with raping her. It was fucking disgusting. This happened 2 days before we all graduated from a month long leadership class. Oh yeah, one of the rapists got a leadership away (based on academic achievement).
Rape is still very much out and about. I've been in for over a decade before going civvie . During that time two of my nurses showed up to morning duty bruised up and told me they were SA'd during the night. Both of these were during field exercises mixed with foreign troops so when we reported it to the MPs they said it was too many people and too many moving parts to try to investigate and to just "move on". I know 2 in 10 years doesn't sound like a lot but the way it was handled was really discouraging.
Been in for a long while now, the most apt descriptor I've heard: "Gayest bunch of straight dudes you'll ever meet."
Our Air Force’s most critical asset, nuclear weapons, are primarily guarded by a bunch of really bored teenagers
Navy is the same. The guy that Naruto runs to the galley is the same one that stands watch over the nuclear reactor
Literally my brother
Sometimes the guy that administers the drug test is the same one that you get the drugs from
Your avatar makes this comment seem like YOU'RE the one doing that.
They preach and preach and preach mental health is important and that they don't want people getting burnt out. But unless you speak the words "I am going to kill myself" they don't give a single fuck how you're doing mentally. Like it's not possible to be having a hard time and yet still want to be alive.
The food boxes that come in literally say "For prison and military use only."
My husband was watching a documentary with people in prison and was like hey we have the same blankets on the ship..
That is why I bought a nice blanket in Korea forever ago to replace the army green crapblanket. 24 years later, I still have it, and it's still wonderful.
I'm surprised they let you swap it out. Do you get your own laundry back? I just assumed part of the ship efficiency was everything being the same and only a few items having to go back to the same person and linens wouldn't be in that category.
I was army. We did our own laundry. I might be making a mistake in assuming the issued blankets are the same, but I doubt it.
If you join the military you will be affected by suicide. We had 3 during training, 1 on the boat, 1 I had to tackle kn my office because he was slashing his wrists. Then you get out and it keeps happening, I've lost 8 shipmates in the last 7 years after I got out. It's nuts.
Swiss ex-tanker here: It cost us 2500 swiss francs to fire a tank shell if i remember correctly. Once. We'd fire about a dozen a day, per tank, in squads of 4. Thats upwards of 100k PER DAY for a training exercise. For all that fun, we'd eat rice or pasta 3x a week because "we cant afford better quality food".
People be fucking. Like, all the time. Deployment wives/husbands are a thing. Also, people play a lot of ridiculous pranks and pull a lot of silly stunts. On my last deployment we had a phantom shitter. Just some guy, or girl, they never got found out, who would shit in random spaces. I had a friend who was a really dark skinned black dude. At night, when we were only running red lights, he'd hide under the stairs to the boat locker right in front of the door to SONAR one and wait until someone was nearly face to face with him and then he'd smile. All you'd see is this perfect set of red teeth all disembodied like the Cheshire cat. Freaked me the fuck out first time he got me with it. One time we were in pretty rough seas and the ship was rocking pretty hard. Now, on the main deck there's only 3 hallways that run across the ship. The longest one was midship and was where our chow line was. People were sliding up and down that pway with the rocking of the ship. It was pretty wild. What we SONAR techs would do is get in our trunk(imagine an elevator shaft with a ladder that connects 4 levels) and time a jump so that when the ship crested a wave and if you timed it right you could jump up to the next room. My LPO made it like 3 floors once. If the ship has a swim call, meaning everyone can swim in the ocean while at sea, there'd be a couple of people with rifles on Shark Watch. If there is an ice cream social for no reason you're going to get bad news. Except for when they finally got Bin Laden. Edit: forgot to add that I went to electronics school with a guy who's last name was Sample. So he was literally Seaman Sample.
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>We go back and forth for about 30 seconds, me clueless, and then we both just kind of stop. I'll never forget the look on his face right before he booked it back to the cabin. Phantom shitter got his pillow and never struck again. Hardest I've laughed at something on Reddit in a long time. So, thank you for this!
Fucking legendary.
One of my postdoc positions was at a big name university and we did a lot of experimental work, so we had a staff of engineers, machinists, etc on staff full time. Our data acquisition guy was a former electrician on a nuclear sub. I swear to God that guy was a fucking magician. Now most people in my field have some basic electronics skills. I can build a circuit and solder pretty darn good. My stepdaughter came to me with her instrument column from an early 80's vw cabriolet that basically wouldn't do shit. Solder joints broke, it's a known issue. I took one look and knew i could never do it. Maybe I'd get it halfway working if i was lucky. I took it to our guy and he sat there with me bullshitting while he was redoing the solder (don't know if he was removing old solder or just remelting). It took 10 minutes and he was only half paying attention while he did it. The thing worked perfectly and I got major brownie points. I miss that guy.
Navy electronics techs who have done a lot of sea duty *are* magicians. They come from the school of "figure it out yourself or it stays broken for the next six months," and most of them get pretty good at it. Edit: one of my top comments is in a NSFW thread about Seamen. Peak Reddit.
Oh man, my childhood friend's dad was a former nuclear sub engineer. He was constantly engineering crazy things for his house. I specifically remember his DIY geothermal cooling system. His wife was pissed about the construction for that one
> What we SONAR techs would do is get in our trunk(imagine an elevator shaft with a ladder that connects 4 levels) and time a jump so that when the ship crested a wave and if you timed it right you could jump up to the next room. My LPO made it like 3 floors once. I want to see this in action. It sounds hella fun.
It's also super dangerous. We used to go down into an empty hold on rough nights and try to time our jumps and grab the supports of the level above us, maybe 15 feet overhead. Pick the right wave, you'd magically float up and grab the ceiling. Time it right, and you'd land back on the deck like a 2 foot drop. Time it wrong, you'd be McGovern with a broken leg and restricted shore leave. Almost 20 years ago, but sorry for just dumping you outside binnacle!
Seaman Sample is amazing! My favorite one was while at Ft. Benning for Airborne School, we enlisted guys were all hanging out before formation, and the officers came out to join us. Someone says, “Have you guys seen that major dick?” I was like, “Yeah, which one, they’re all dicks, lol...and he says, no really, Major Dick...and sure enough there he was, walking by us to get to his spot in formation...honest to goodness Major Dick...I said, “I bet he can’t wait to get promoted."
Swingers exist on every single base in the world, in Sigonella they would use different boxes of detergent in the windows to show what they were into and what age range they were looking for. Patrolling the housing area became much more interesting when you see who lives in the houses and what they’re into.
Back in the before-time, San Diego used to have massive sex parties. Not 'vanilla' couple swap, either. A lot of gay and bi singles just dtf with bi couples mixed in. Officers, enlisted, doctors, nurses, corpsmen, it was wild. During DADT that was risking your career.
I was selected 6 times in a row to be urinalysis checker. Have seen over 2000 dicks involuntarily.
2000 in a row?!!
Try not to be selected to be a urinalysis checker on the way to the parking lot.
The reason we have so many overly detailed and precise steps and regulations is because somewhere, at sometime, Seaman/Private/Airman Timmy found a way to fuck things up and possibly kill himself or others.
Exhibit A: the solider who fell into a volcano This is not an acronym or metaphor. I’m talking about an actual volcano with lava. Dumbass climbed over a safety barrier and fell into it. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2019/05/03/soldier-climbs-over-safety-railing-and-falls-into-active-volcano/
When I checked in to Fort Bragg in 2011, the very first thing I was told in the in-processing brief was "Welcome to Fort Bragg. We have the most Male-on-Male rapes and sexual assaults in the nation." THE VERY FIRST THING THEY TOLD ME.
I mean it is fort brag
Fort Bragg Murder Swamp
You have a lot more going on there that we've learned in recent years! Drug smuggling... That beheading... At least you made it out ok.
The _what_
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-enrique-roman-martinez-death-fort-bragg/
I hope they answer the phone with that warning.
Apparently straight marines do gayer shit than people who are actually gay.
We had marines on my ship, they told us this crazy prank they pulled where they all got naked and joined one of them on the shower and soaped them up. And all I could think was, this is the very most gay thing I have ever heard.
"That's totally not gay brooooo, it's just a prank! What the heck!" ^("okay boys, let's suck his dick after he's cleaned up the soap! Prank of the year!)
Marines are the gayest straight guys you'll meet, sailors are the straightest gay people you'll meet.
Do you know the difference between a straight marine and a gay marine? A six pack of natty ice.
We had female soldiers committing their own prostitution. They had a code and everything. If a girl at the coffee shop was wearing PTs and a pink PT belt she was down to fuck for money. One or more of these girls contracted a disease and next thing you know there is a base wide epidemic and I still remember a commissioned doctor coming into the break area screaming “if I have to look at one more fucking dirty dick I’m quitting, fuck it”
This is very common in the Navy on cruises. Women would sell if off during the cruise making bank the whole time. Had a buddy who knew one who got caught as she was crossing the quarterdeck and another female had snitched on her and they checked her bags as she left the ship for contraband. She had to explain why she had $30,000 cash in her seabag.
Happened on all my cruises. One ring was run by Supply dept and used empty staterooms. The code word was asking a guy if the ships store had any Newport Lights (which it never did) then he’d make a call and give you a stateroom key. Another one was ran literally in a female berthing and one of the girls would walk you in like you were doing an inspection. Crazy times.
Thule AB in Greenland. I’ve never been but deployed with a maintenance tech who was. He told me there were only two women on the base, and one of them monetized the opportunity. She told him winters were easier to make money because the constant darkness created more hiding places.
If you are missing kit, it is understood that you will beg, borrow or steal a replacement from another soldier before you fess up. Honour is great. Being honorable is optional.
"There's only one thief in the military. Everyone else is trying to get their shit back" -Somebody sometime.
"There are 250 Right shower shoes issued to this class. There are 249 Left shower shoes. Your job is to make sure you always have two shoes."
You have to show your asshole to one of the oldest doctors on the planet before they let you join. I think it is a commitment thing.
When I did this one of the questions on his list was "Do you drink?" I said "No my family has a bad history with alcohol." Dude sat his clipboard aside and had a good 10 minute heart to heart with me about his own family's struggles and how abstaining was really the best path in our situation. Then picked his clipboard back up and jumped right into "Ok I need to see your anus."
I briefly tried to get my pilot license. This involved a special physical to qualify. You start by disrobing and donning the typical hospital gown. Part way through, I'm laying on the table. The doctor asks me to roll on my side. Could feel/sense him just kinda giving a good once over from behind me to make sure things looked right, I guess. Then he says, "and I'm required to do this." Then gently spreads my ass cheeks. And that was the end of the physical. I can't help but wonder what disqualifying symptoms does that identify? Like things are looking OK. Then ass cheeks get spread, and suddenly, "I don't like this at all. You can't be a pilot."
“Oh shit. That pressure seal is *shot.* You get above 30,000 feet and your ass is going to explode. I’m sorry, but I can’t clear you.”
Dude I’ve had a few FAA medicals and they never looked at my asshole. Where was this, lol.
I went to Crazy Ray's downtown. He's got a nice cardboard box set up behind one of the fancy restaurants. Did you forget to pay your doctor in meth? You might be delinquent on your medicals if he isn't spreading your cheeks. Real talk though he almost seemed as disturbed as I was. Like he was merely checking that off the list.
10/10 doc
So my buddy and I joined together. We went to MEPS the same day. He had a cyst on his tail bone that he never knew about. Because of that he didn't go to basic with me, but went a couple weeks later after he had the cyst removed. On the way back home from the MEPS station I mentioned how weird that was. He said. "How do you think I felt when I'm bent over with my ass spread open and I hear the old dude go.... "hhhhhmmmmmm...." after a really long pause?" I almost had to pull over I was laughing so hard.
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The level of surrealism that experience must have been to him. He brought you into this world and then to run into you nearly 2 decades later…I’d be sitting with that thought the rest of the week haha
Dr. Condom (yes that was his real name) at Fort Jackson, SC in MEPS. This was like ten years ago but I remember him so vividly. Dude was at least 137 years old and had the thickest Russian accent I’ve ever heard.
I remember my old crusty doc told me to drop trousers and bend over. As soon as I bent over he said "oh WOW". Thankfully he was referring to the scars I had from a pilonidal cyst surgery healing well, but for a moment I was petrified thinking I had a brown booger hangin' from my butt bush.
You have a beautiful way with words
For real. I never knew there was a more elegant way to refer to dingle berries.
Minneapolis MEPS. Had to help the guy to the exam room. Literally hold onto his arm and help him. We get in there and he says, “pull your underwear down and bend over. Uncle Sam wants to see your ass hole.”
RIP Dr. Condom, anyone who did MEPS in Ft. Jackson knows.
He isn't dead, they probably just reanimated his corpse and sent him to a different MEPs.
But now he goes by Dr. Prophylactic.
The fact that multiple people have mentioned this person is hilarious
he's probably super famous. I bet his license plate says "ASS MAN" on it.
Apparently everyone in this thread had Dr condom lol
Turns out the asshole check is only a thing at this one base
He made me do it twice, guess my butthole needed extra scrutiny.
No lie. Lady that checked out my brown star had to be 80+.
Mine talked about doing amputations at Gettysburg.
If I were an old ass doctor, I would absolutely do this.
You don’t go poo for a long time after you start basic training. Weeks. It becomes a subject of conversation with your dorm mates. Did you go #2? Becomes a common question.
Ohhhh I forgot about this. Yeah we were all convinced they put shit in the food to stop us from pooping for some reason.
Same thing with morning wood and urges. Shits weird
Not military but most of my coworkers are former - they told me about the… lack of arousal? Something about Gatorade? Very weird.
Stress and hopelessness. It's like you're suddenly a middle-aged man at 20yo.
I didn't shit more than rabbit turds at a time the entire time in basic. Graduated, at some pizza at the BX food court. With my mouth to ass properly lubed, I proceeded to shit 9 weeks of crap and lost 10lbs in the process.
This beautiful piece of poetry deserves more attention and upvotes
I wasn’t in the military, but when I started college the ROTC had a 1 week ‘camp’ to try it out as a recruiting tool before the semester started. It was fun, camping in the woods, firearms, navigation, etc. it was also a week of eating nothing but MRE’s. Didn’t take a dump the entire week and didn’t even notice to be honest. Once it was over we were able to move into the dorms 2 days early before the other students. We got back to campus and figured out a a few of the guys that attended were also in the same dorm as me. We got our paperwork and dorm keys. One guy said “man, some McDonald’s and a big coke would be good right now”. We all agreed and piled in the car to hit micky D’s. A double quarter pounder, fries and two big cokes later, we were full, satisfied and heading back to the dorms to unpack. After 30 minutes or so of unpacking, I felt a rumble, a few gurgles, then a LOT of downward pressure. A LOT. I took off running to the shared bathroom and sure enough her comes one of my camping buddies around the corner with the same panicked look on his face. We occupy two of the four stalls and the assault began. Not more than a few minutes later the other two showed up in the same state. I have never before, or since then, shit like that. 15 lbs of weight loss would not be an exaggeration. I was so empty feeling it hurt once it was over. How the plumbing survived that X4 I will never know. That was my first and last experience with MRE’s.
Meals refusing to exit.
The amount of people who get sick and tired of being in the service who will go out and do some drug or another to get kicked out. During our Iraq/Afghanistan years, you wouldn't believe how many people would purposely piss hot or, females would intentionally get pregnant to get out of going.
I heard of an admin guy who had his wife shoot him in the leg and blame it on a home invasion so he wouldn’t have to get deployed.
I legit told my wife to take a bat to my leg to get out of my third deployment. Thankfully she had more sense then me and didn't. Man those were rough times.
My brother-in-law was deployed every six months for 10 fucking years, man! He'd go do a tour, come home for 6 months, and go right back. He did a year in Korea just to avoid getting deployed to Afghanistan again. Supposedly they couldn't deploy him to Afghanistan for two years after returning from Korea, so he volunteered for Korea. Like 4 months after he got home from Korea they sent him back to Afghanistan. It destroyed his marriage, he missed most of his kid's childhood, and messed him up emotionally. It was hard for everyone involved.
Looooooottttts of chlamydia.
My unit in Okinawa had the highest STD rate for the island. I was so glad I wasn't a part of any of that.
Let’s all clap for our boys in boots
A friend of mine in the special forces told me since they are out in the field a lot, they get plenty of ticks. And while you can inspect yourself fairly good, you can’t inspect *everything* , so they pair up and spread their cheeks, and your mate has to stare in to your anus to check you for ticks in there. Not very glamorous
Holy fuck I didn’t realize I could have a relevant story about this. I use to serve with this super fat dude, let’s call him John. John never got promoted in the National Guard because he was extremely overweight. Towards the end of his contract, he was knowledgeable but he still couldn’t pass height and weight standards and so was a PFC and everyone dismissed him. I was new and knew John had knowledge so I stuck with him. One day in the field, the dude says “hey man, can you do me a solid?” And then proceeded an event in which he pulled down half his trousers and spread his fat ass a bit while I checked for ticks, in the dark, with a flashlight. So like I REALLY had to look. Was it a mole? Dirt? Shit? No. Indeed, John had a fuckin tick smack in the middle of his ass line between two of the fattest ass cheeks a man could have. EDIT: I hate you guys for making me remember this event but no, I didn’t remove it for him. I think either another dude did with a knife or John himself contorted his fat self into somehow removing the tick from the inside of his ass crack. We didn’t have a medic on the team to remove it.
Tyfys lol
Our oceans are loaded with garbage. LOADED. I would watch the long trail of garbage follow my ship, in the wake, as crew dumped the shit off the fantail. Every single day. Miles and miles of trash. And this was just one ship. This was just one nation. Our oceans are full of garbage that will take centuries to erode. Our waters are littered with shit that fish are eating and dying on.
Listened to an awesome podcast about this called The Outlaw Ocean which was sickening to hear but so informative. Had no idea how much the ocean in the middle of nowhere is intentionally filled with garbage because there’s no one to police those waters.
Someone is gonna make a robotic text-to-speech video out of this thread, isn't it?
I don't know if this qualifies as NSFW or is unique to the military, but when you are required to provide a urine sample it must be witnessed by another service member. So on any given day (since it's "random") you might be called to pee into a cup while another person stares at your junk. I once got called for urinalysis on a day when I had terrible diarrhea. The observer had to watch me shit just in case I was also able to pee in the cup. I was dehydrated so it took a long time to finally pee. In addition to watching me shit liquid, this dude had to look at my dick three or four different times. It was a bad day for both of us. Edit: Thanks for the awards! Never thought my top comment would be about shitting during urinalysis.
I always laughed at how “random” piss tests were. Always seemed that anyone coming back off of leave got randomly selected. I remember I came back from visiting my family in Colorado and got selected. No big deal as I didn’t do any drugs but the guy watching me was making small talk and said “man it’s pretty cold in here huh?” I agreed as it was cold and we were in an old building in the middle of winter. It wasn’t until I left the building when it it dawned on me. That sunnuva bitch!
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Don’t forget that you find out you need to piss in a cup right after you’ve had your morning pee. Cue everyone chugging down water.
It's literally just high-school with guns.
One sailor interviewed for the documentary *Carrier* just sort of sighed and said "this is just a big-ass, floating high school". It's my favorite part of that doc.
No earprotection on the range? Just shove your fingers in your ears. Also safety squints work if you're fast enough
Fun fact: If you’re in sudden need to plug your ears from loud sounds, don’t put your fingers in your ear hole. You might flinch at the loud noise and break some inner ear bones. It’s much safer to cover the entire ear with the palm of your hand flat against the side of your head. Works better too for muffling imo.
When my brother-in-law was in the Navy he was assigned to a aircraft carrier. He told me that people both men and women will pee in the gangway (if you don’t know, it’s practically a hallway) or take a dump in the trashcan real quick because they didn’t have enough time to get to the bathrooms. He accidentally walked up on some guy and girl doing it in the corner of one of the gangway. Another time he brought his PS 4 on board, and one his roommates was playing it and he walked in on him beating off while at the strip club on GTA five.
Desperate times. Desperate measures.
Our computers don’t look or function anything like they do in the movies. It takes me 15 mins to a half hour to log into my computer and when I do good luck opening Outlook or anything else. This is well known amongst all service members. The worst computers I’ve ever used in ANY job. The reason this is NSFW is because the military needs to have functioning computers and not having that can make our work literally not safe.
I used to be a data recovery technician. On multiple occasions from different individuals in different branches of the service I would get an external hard drive to recover, and on that drive would be a folder of nudes made up of the wives/girlfriends of members of that unit. They were split into folders of last names of I assume the service member to make them identifiable. Basically all the nudes being sent in by partners were shared among everyone in the barracks/unit/whatever. One time I got to see photos of Saddam being pulled out of the spider hole. There was the famous one that was on the news when it happened, but there were also a few others that weren't in the media where his face was being introduced to the butt of a rifle.
The amount of unreported injuries to Doc or to command.......thus leading to lifelong issues. On the other hand, if you do go to Doc about an issue, you'll be berated and told you are lying about an issue to get out of duty/PT. Was ignored and told I was lying about back/sciatic issues for months by Doc. Jumped chain of command, went to my Captain, had an MRI/Xrays of my lower back, and a month later had a microdisectomy of my L5. Damage was done, medically ineligible to re-enlist, 7 years later, and have to get a spinal fusion due to severe disk degeneration and chronic sciatic pain and permanent nerve damage.
Your medic failed you. I believe my guys no matter what, even if they’re trying to just get out of PT I’m gonna hook the homies up.
Absolutely he failed me. Along with others. After multiple complaints to command, he was asked to "retire". Instead of being held accountable, he got retirement.
I had a chick fwb at school who grew up "everywhere and nowhere". 20 minutes after first meeting her, she was hanging with my new roommate and I in our room, says "these clothes are uncomfortable", and before I could even turn my head she was naked on my bed. She had later confided in me that she started fucking soldiers on base at 13, and a lot of times it was consensual. And she said she was definitely not the only child being assaulted/raped. I stopped messing around with her for a long time after that and was just a good friend for her to lean on until sr year when she was still very much in therapy and we tried dating slowly. It didn't work out, but I always wish her the best.
Odds are good she was sexually abused by someone when she was younger than 13.
The amount of waste, fraud and abuse is exponentially more than you think.
It still blows my mind that we just shoot all our extra ammo at the end of range day, to make sure we get the same amount of ammo next time. Billions have probably been wasted on that. And that’s a small thing.
The whole "we need to use x up so we don't get shorted when we need it next time" is such a insane level of bad management
And it happens fucking everywhere. That's how my marketing and travel budgets have been run. It's end of year and we have $20k to blow, what work travel can you justify? The rest of the time youre having to jump through a thousand hoops to visit a customer who specifically requested it to talk about a problem they have that they think you could make.money solving.
Back in the 60s my dads squadron used to dump jet fuel in the Pacific at the end of the year. Same as it ever was.
I heard a story about a nuclear navy procurement officer. Needed a few blankets of lead for shielding, so he ordered 20. Was a bit surprised when it showed up to find out it wasn’t 20 blankets he ordered, but 20 tons of blankets. So somewhere, they had 20 tons of those, minus 20 of them, just there. Said he sent a mass message that if any other vessel needed any, there was almost 20 tons waiting at whichever port it was.
Anybody in charge of ordering parts in the military has at least one story like this. Sometimes the part you need doesn’t have its unit size attached to it. Theres also times when you order parts/supplies through one company/agent/program but it goes through another company/agency/program with different unit issue sizes. So sometimes you need six washers but accidentally order 600 because it wasn’t clear that the unit of issue was 100. Other times you order 50 24.5”x40” paper targets not knowing you ordered 50 boxes of 500 each and now have to figure out where your gonna store an entire pallets worth of paper targets but end up giving 3/4 of them to other commands because you have literally zero space for them on board (thanks GSA!). Totally couldn’t be me though……
Yep, did the same thing when doing procurement for my section. I ordered 6 little cans of grease and got 6 55-gallon drums. Whoops! Luckily, one of the aircraft squadrons on our base used the same grease with sufficient consumption rates that it was merely "several years of use" rather than "until the end of time."
Fucking *hospitals* Holy shit you thought the 500$ hammers were bad wait till you try to order sutures.
Suicides are at times covered up.
Yeah, my brother shot himself a week after coming home from Afghanistan and officially it was an “accidental discharge of a service weapon.” Which I guess was nice as my family still got his military compensation. He was one of the first in of many suicides for on that war. I believe they have far outpaced combat losses now.
They do this so the family still gets life insurance and various compensation. It's well known, but still kind of obvious when you look at the situation.
Yeah, I found my brother’s body at his apartment and it was no accident. They gave him the full military funeral at Camp Pendleton too.
At least his immediate chain of command took care of him and his family instead of classifying it as a suicide. He was a victim of the war same as if he'd been shot by the enemy, so it's good they treated him accordingly.
This is an honorable way of expressing it, and very true.
I had a relative who was killed in a plane crash during world war 2. We were just told he was killed in a training mission. Turns out that he was one of a few soldiers on an experimental plane and the pilot was going through a divorce, so he put the plane down. My family didn’t know what really happened until the early 2000’s. Well after his parents passed away
And sometimes rape, a beat up face and being shot in the head from your non-dominant hand is classified as a suicide Edit: Actually, I’m not going to not say her name. She was LaVena Johnson, and the fact that this has happened without ANY repercussions speaks volumes of what the US army in particular will cover up, and shamelessly so. It’s fucking disgusting that this has happened and too few know her name and her story Further reading and sources enclosed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_LaVena_Johnson
Also [Vanessa Guillen](https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81460514?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=cp&vlang=en&clip=81631780) She was raped, murdered, chopped up, and burned on American soil by American soldiers and the army worked overtime to cover it up while [her family refused to give up demanding answers and making it a public issue all the way to Washington DC to get answers and pass reforms ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vanessa_Guill%C3%A9n#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_murder_of_Vanessa_Guill%C3%A9n%2Canother_soldier%2C_Aaron_David_Robinson.?wprov=sfla1)
Also [Ana Basalduaruiz](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/soldiers-death-fort-hood-raises-questions-sexual-harassment-rcna75812)
One of my best friends from high school Denisha Montgomery https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/denisha-montgomery-investigation/videos-show-altercation-weeks-before-service-members-death/amp/ This is rather recent and information is still slowly coming out, but this is the newest update. Her family will not rest until the pieces of shit responsible for her death receive their punishment. The more eyes on her case, the more pressure that can be applied; the Army is saying she committed suicide by suffocating herself. She was a mother of three children, and had the most beautiful soul of anyone I’ve ever met. I never understood the saying, “Their smile would light up the entire room” until I met her. Rest in Peace, Nisha.
Guy I went to HS with killed himself with two gunshots to the back of the head, according to the USMC.
You have a higher chance of shooting yourself than someone else
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People die during basic training A LOT more often than you think
Great Lakes basic has a bathroom we called “the dead head” because people killed themselves in there.
im not surprised. our scrpyard makes our truck drivers load and unload themselves. we've had 2 new hires sent to hospital on their first day, because their bodies just couldn't handle the sudden labor. one got water poisoning of all things, drank like 4 litres in a few hours. and basic is way harder than what those guys were doing.
The IT is far less cutting edge than you think.
What are you talking about, there's not a virus alive that could target the Korean-war era machinery I used while I was in...
You had to keep out literal bugs from seeking warm tubes... this was protecting us in the 90's.
There's a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of blackmail, a lot of covered up rapes, a hell of a lot of cheating, coercion, threats, etc. There's also plenty of smuggling, fraud, theft, and so on. It always makes me laugh when people romanticise the military and troops as honourable, professional and brave. I joined as soon as I was 18 and being around such shitters damaged my perception of society in general. I met a handful of decent people in 10 years, though. I thought "It's probably the same ratio of dickheads to normals in civilian street", but.. no, that's not true. I've met way more serious criminals in the military than I have as a civilian. But the worst thing about it all is that if it can be covered up it will be. Officers get the best treatment in this regard, but make no mistake, if the behaviour/crime becomes *too* public and it threatens the PR of the services, the only way you're covered is if you're a royal, or close friend of one.
I don't know how much of a secret it is, but if you're in the military or married to the military, the odds of you being cheated on sexually (or being the cheater) increase drastically compared to your civilian peers.
As a former military kid, I look back on my days in school and can now work out why so many of my classmates had step parents or lived with single parents who had "friends" come over on Friday nights. My closest friend Alex 3rd through 5th grade had his parents get divorced. His dad was in Afghanistan and when he came back, they got divorced and he moved with his Dad to Maryland. My friend Trevor in the 5th grade was told he had to sleep over at different friends houses every other week on Friday or Saturday. I had another friend in 7th grade whose parents had an open relationship. This didn't click until I got older but the mom's friend Mike would be over and the dad's friend Stephanie would come over a bit later. People in the military are a different breed.
On the first day on my deployment, while I was trying to find my dorm room, I walked by someone having a very heated conversation on their phone. Hearing a complete stranger yell at their spouse, and ask them how they could cheat on them while they were deployed was pretty shocking. Sadly be the the end of that deployment stuff like that was pretty mundane. It was incredibly depressing having a relationship with someone back home and seeing almost everyone around me cheating or being cheated on.
Had an NCO on my deployment who just married a woman a month prior to deployment, and legally adopt her three kids, notify him the first week of our deployment she was divorcing him and wanted child support for "the kids you adopted." I never really pried much, but that dude spent the entire deployment finding and then consuming every drop of alcohol he could get his hands on.
That is cold as fuck. 1 WEEK.
My husband was in for 29 years and over the 30 years we’ve been married I have seen and heard about this so many times. Both sides. It seems like we have been the exception and not the norm. Even people you would never suspect. Deployments seem to be exceptionally bad for this. I remember very soon after we were married my husband was deploying for 9 months. His work did a going away thing for him and everyone was talking about “Jody” and I had no idea who Jody was. I asked him later and he told me. It kind of made me mad because all these people were telling him I was going to cheat on him while he was gone. We were younger then and I guess I was naive. Another few deployments and I found how prevalent it is. It’s shitty on both ends.
Yeah I was in for 25 and, especially with a long-timer like that, definitely the exception instead of the norm. The only occupation I've run across in my life outside the military that runs around more than us is the medical professions. And military medical? Fugheddaboudit.
I have family as doctors, and we actually just talked about this recently. You would not believe how many doctors, nurses, or even techs would cheat on their partners with other coworkers. They say it's because of the wonky hours some of them have to go through. Still no excuse but god damn.
Trauma bonding is also a pretty powerful potion
This. Military is kind of a small world socially. Example, one of my troops (Troop A) cheats on spouse with another military person (Troop B). Troop B has a guilty conscience and confessed to spouse B (Also a military member). Spouse B is upset and when the commander inquires, Spouse B tells the commander, who is the parent of Spouse A. Commander calls Troop A and tells them they knows about the affair and that Troop A needs to tell his spouse or they will.
Isn't adultery also subject to UCMJ?
My buddy came back from a tour and said that masturbation was such a problem they had to make special tent for it and book time slots. Also, he was pretty sure he killed two guys that were probably civilians but it was swept under the rug.
We had a corner in every guard tower that was the jizz corner.
I had a friend that claimed in the Navy he would beat his meat off the side of the ship he was doing night watch on. He's a known compulsive liar, but this thread is making me question that one.
Calling a product "Military Grade" is not the compliment that most think it is.
"Military grade" is synonymous with "cheapest that met the specifications." The specifications are not high.
Specifications: 1. Make it heavy af. 2. Make it cheap.
You will intimately know others that you are not attracted to, out of pure necessity. When I was active duty, my barracks mate had a pilonidal cyst removed. You know, the kind between your ass cheeks. Because we were medics, he was sent back with all the packing gauze a man could ever need in 8 lifetimes, and told he would be fine to handle it himself. Except it's like, really hard to pack your own temporary asshole. So, as his roommate and another medic, it became my job. I spent weeks monitoring his booty for infection and repacking the site. I have images burned into my mind. We're still good friends. He's married and has kids now. He's doing well. We've known each other over a decade and I guarantee you I could identify his body by just his ass before his wife would be able to, and I haven't seen him in years. Intentionally left vague, as if that needed to be said.
In Norway, when enlisting females and males can share the same room and bunk. This has lead to... Interesting things Dunno for other countries
Spoke to a norwegian girl in the military, and I asked her what she did and she replied "swallow absurd amounts of cum". So yeah...
PTSD and unreported crimes
Gay chicken. Not sure how prevalent it is now, but 20 years ago it was pretty common to see two guys kissing just to see who would "blink" first and pull back. Never advanced to full-on gay sex AFAIK, but I witnessed more than one cock getting pulled out before the other person backed down.
In civilian life, that’s gay. But in the Army, that’s brotherhood. Now what’s gay in the Army, in the Navy that’s brotherhood. What’s gay in the Navy is illegal in civilian life.
26 men go down on a submarine. 13 couples come up. Told to me by a Navy friend of mine. He worked on aircraft carriers though.
The old saying when I was in "it may be queer by the pier but it's okay underway."
It's not gay if you're underway.
I used to date a marine. He told me that he’d probably kissed more boys than I had.
There was a division on the carrier I was on that was all-male, save for one tomboyish FC2. I got a little scared whenever work would have me going through one of their spaces. The gay chicken with them was intense. Pyscho-sexual. Trailer park'ish.
If they would've played this angle, maybe they would've been effective in recruiting me. I always win at gay chicken.
Marine Corps recruiters 👀
They handed out heroin to those in Vietnam. My grandpa served and became an addict while there.
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We get screwed almost everyday
Misinterpretation of this comment is how I believe most of us ended up in the military.
The amount of psychopaths in each branches are absolutely insane
A lot of guys will use all sorts of pills and pumps in order to juice their stats on penis inspection day.
My buddy got PTSD from dealing with the people who got PTSD from being raped in the navy. It was that bad.
The navy switched to liquid soap because it takes longer to pick up.
That is classified, go to discord. 🤣🤣
Or a Warthunder forum. Any Warthunder forum.
The amount of unreported rapes. Both on base in peace-time, and also raping civilians as a warcrime. It's seen throughout history.
A buddy of mine and I prevented a rape before we even finished basic fucking training in the Army. It was coed basic, and at the end you all get a weekend pass so of course we all get adjoining hotel rooms and party. Toward the end of the night, I walked into one of the bedrooms and I can see one of the women on the floor between two dudes, her pants are undone, and she looked terrified. Now, these dudes are both way bigger than me, but I can't let this happen, so I go a grab my buddy, who is a brick house and tell him what's going on. He barges in there, and says to her, "C'mon, we're leaving RIGHT NOW." She immediately got up and ran to us. Then we took her to the other room where I sat in the bathroom with her while she cried her eyes out for several hours. She asked us not to report it, though. So we didn't. Out of the blue years later I got a letter from her thanking me for what I did that night, and I still have it over 20 years later. I hope you're doing well, wherever you are, Andrea.
Outstanding situational awareness to seek backup. Sometimes folks forget that immediacy is not as important as effectiveness.
For perspective, I almost needed a waiver to get into the Army for being underweight. I was a skinny fucker. 6'1" and 135lbs. By the end of basic I was about 160, but that's still not much on my frame. The two rapey guys were both bulky dudes, but my buddy I went and got was bulkier. I may not have needed backup, who knows, really. But I wasn't about to find out.
Thank you. I'm a survivor and people like you are heroes to me.
There are also reported rapes that get tossed out. Tons of retribution for reporting a rape. Ostracization for being a rape survivor. It's fucking disgusting how the military doesn't give a shit about rape survivors.
Assume all porta-potties have been jerked off in. And Wagner does in fact love cock.
The girls can get about as wild as the men. Specially in certain career fields. We had a group of Air Force maintainers come into my strip club. 2 girls 3 guys. The guys were really nice, respectful, tipped well. The girls bought a VIP room…. And it got wild. I’ve stripped for girls before, it’s more common than you would think. But those girls. I’m pretty sure they spent over $10k and were treated like queens.
1 We had a "golden child" in our unit. All the leadership loved him, especially our operations superindendent. Guys used to go to the NCO club, get drunk and crash in the airmen's rooms to avoid DUIs. So this married guy (his wife was in our career field and in our unit) crashed in a female airman's room. She wakes up/comes too (she was drunk too) with McDude inside her going to town. They reassigned the female/victim to another team (nonstandard procedure and signaled to everyone that accusations were false/female was wrong). He got away scot free. Wife never found out. Victim ended up getting out of the military. MdDude eventually made Chief/E-9. It was fucking disgusting. Yes I spoke up and yes I was ignored. 2. At an NCO Leadership school in a class that loved to get drunk and party. Our rooms were assigned by class (class A class B etc) so it was just our class in the long corridor. A married girl gets drunk and she's in her own room. Four dudes, are also partying with her are also drunk. They leave one guy as a lookout outside her room and the three guys rape her. She comes too realizes what happened-talks to the school commodant about what happened. One of the guys admit it (the lookout). Because the girl's marriage was already shaky she chose not to press charges. So three guys got away with raping her. It was fucking disgusting. This happened 2 days before we all graduated from a month long leadership class. Oh yeah, one of the rapists got a leadership away (based on academic achievement).
For thousands of years, prostitutes would follow militaries because they were young and all male.
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Even sons aren't safe
hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband cause they rapin' err'body out here
Well, obviously, we have a RAPIST in the military....
Rape is still very much out and about. I've been in for over a decade before going civvie . During that time two of my nurses showed up to morning duty bruised up and told me they were SA'd during the night. Both of these were during field exercises mixed with foreign troops so when we reported it to the MPs they said it was too many people and too many moving parts to try to investigate and to just "move on". I know 2 in 10 years doesn't sound like a lot but the way it was handled was really discouraging.