Here are some more military stories I've been e-amiled. Thanks again to everyone who's e-mailed and I'll try to put them all out eventually. My dad who - by the way - served in Vietnam has a few anecdotes I always like, so I'll have to see if he'll write them out.

Once again, there is no editing so beware of foul language that might soil thine ears.

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Drill Sergeant Rob disputes a few things said previously:

Hey Frank,

I've been reading for a looong time, but I don't usually comment much. I was gonna stay out of this, but here's what I got in response to the piece by the Marine.

By the way, if you ever want to check out my amateur blog.. here it is. http://anamericansoldier.blogspot.com [Ed Note: There are professional blogs?]

Here's the response...

OK… I was gonna stay out of this but…

If you’ve ever been in the middle of a Barroom fight, you know that sometimes it’s best to secure a corner, shelter your beer (or Peach Daquiri if you’re in the Navy) from harm, and watch the fun without actively participating. There is a lot to be said for having ringside seats at a slugfest and staying out of trouble at the same time. (Especially when you have some rank to lose.)

Then it happens… some Marine takes a poke at one of your boys… and it’s on. Rank be damned, joke over, the Guiness either hits the floor or somebody, and it’s into the fray you go.

Now I like Marines, I really do. Some of my best friends are Marines and I love the fact that once they figure out what you’re saying (You have to speak slowly) they will defend their beloved Corps to the death. But now that the first few punches have been thrown, I think I need to finish this fight.

I think a quick jab… followed by a hard right to the chin should do it.

“ The Air Force does have the highest ASVAB requirements... they are the same as the Marines.”

The Air force has the highest requirements, with a minimum score of 40. This is a good choice if your idea of being hardcore is living in a hotel without a concierge service for the duration of your deployment.

The Navy comes in second with a minimum score of 35. See the world, destroy the enemy from half a continent away, cross the equator several times… always claiming it is your first, what could be better?

The Marines actually come in third, with a minimum score of 32… but this is waiver-able with as low a score as 25.

And the lowest standard for the ASVAB belongs to, of course, the Army. HOWEVER, this is only waiver-able down to a 26.

So assuming you are a complete lug-nut, OR you indulged more than most on the night before your test and filled in A C D C over and over for the length of the score sheet and scored a 25, you will be forced, as a last resort, to enter the Marines. (source)

(that was the jab… here’s the haymaker)

“The US Navy is the only branch of the US military that is older than the Marines, and the Royal Marines of the UK are the only Marine Corps that is older than the US Marine Corps. The US Navy was officially formed in the first half of 1775 (I don't remember the date because I don't consider the start up date for a taxi service to be important), while the US Marine Corps was formed by an act of the Continental Congress on November 10, 1775 (Veterans Day falls the next day). The United States of America was not even formed until 1790 at the earliest, and the US Army was not formed until 1796.”

So which MEU did General Washington command, anyway?

The United States Army was created by the second Continental Congress on June 14th, 1775. (That’s six months prior to November, Pyle) (source)

And I know it’s been a little while since I last took American History, but I would have sworn that the United States was created with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. (Here’s a clue…Fireworks). But maybe you were talking about the introduction of the Articles of Confederation. Oh wait… that was 1778. Ratification of the Constitution? 1788. Election of the first President? 1789.

So what did happen in 1790 that would concern Marines? Well… I was at a loss, so I decided to Google it. Apparently 1790 was the year that a predecessor of the US Coast Guard was formed. It was actually known as the Cutters, or A System of Cutters. It was formed out of necessity, since the US Navy had been disbanded in 1785. This would be a very significant date for the Marines, who had apparently been forlornly standing on the Dock for five years…waiting on a ride.

(Before you get all riled up, remember that this is all in fun… and all our fellow Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Airmen are across the water working together, doing a hard job in a hard situation. We need every branch of service and I salute anyone who is willing to serve this great country in whatever service they choose.)

Jim sends in this story about training, snakes, and gnarring:

You posted my story from Osan about my Air Force brethren and more enjoyably sistren, muchas gracias it cracks my friends up.

The next post was from

AJ (LC The Humble Devildog) Garin from The People's Democratic Republic of Madison, WI

Although my 312 area code screams Chicago, I actually am a citizen of Moscow of the Midwest, Madison, Wisconsin. I would appreciate if you could send my contact info to your Leatherneck buddy as I am always looking for brothers in arms.

Just For Grins Marines and Their Army Instructors, We, Army Special Forces always impress.

The game, for Frequent Storm, was this. The island nation of, whatever name some jagoff major in DC gave it, was bad. At this time that meant communist but for whatever reason we were going to make a “regime change”. Our role in this is known as guerrilla warfare. We sneak in and link up with locals who don’t like the Jagoffian government. We train and equip them and then help these intrepid freedom fighters “Enact a regime change.” It should surprise no one that our government has been practicing this. My favorite image is the Van Hagar video for “Right Now” they have subtitles through the whole thing and at one point it shows animated stick figures. Two are talking and a third is kneeling behind the victim. One shove and the victim takes a fall while the text reads, “Right now our government is doing things we think only other governments do”. Hmm. We are aren’t we? Anywho.

Whatever intentions we may have had for lollygagging our way through this exercise, Chief Rodd was going to train, and his ally was the team sergeant Butch . That was too much for the rest of us too overcome, so we resigned ourselves to actually busting our asses. We didn’t know just what we had just bought into. We had almost a full week for isolation, way too long. That gave Chief Rodd plenty of time to show us how much fun patrolling in the jungle can be. Now all of us had patrolled in the jungle before, we just hadn’t done it anywhere near as slowly as we soon learned we needed too. We had plenty of time scheduled to practice all of our walking in the great outdoors procedures, and the first afternoon was a real eye opener. We saddled up and figured we would wander around doing hand and arm signals for a while and then head back to the hooch. We got about 10 steps out of the compound before Chief Rodd halted us and told us we were not going to move very far, but he wanted us to pay complete attention to what we were doing. Now you have to understand, hearing “We are not moving very far” is normally excellent news, and in all honesty we moved less than 1000 meters. But it took us almost four hours. That’s not because we laid in the shade and rested, then walked in at the end. It’s because we moved that fucking slow. Lawdy lawdy, we would take a step and then freeze, listen, smell, sense, commune, meditate, and many other very passive things that you can do while crouched in the jungle carrying very heavy things in the stifling heat. The truth is that is was instantly obvious that Chief definitely knew what he was doing, and also that it was kicking our asses.

Our re-invasion of Okinawa paled beyond insignificance when compared to the original. WWII was close to over when we invaded, but Okinawa had to go before we could take a shot at the main islands of Japan. The Japanese were dug into the caves and hills of a tropical coral aquarium toy and they were deep into the kamikaze mentality as an enemy. They had no supplies and no real hope but somehow that made them tougher as every encounter was a last shot at immortality for a Japanese soldier. The island was so unbelievably harsh that walking, or more accurately crawling over much of it gave us incredible empathy for everyone who had to finish up a war here.

Our mode for sneaking into Jagoffia involved a rented,shrimp trawler with our rolled up Zodiac boats and gear dropping us about 10 miles off the coast from our beach landing zone. We inflate the boats and drive to a link up with our new allies, sounds not simple but doable. Before we could do all this water operating we needed a briefing about the dangerous marine life. Our medic “Gorgeous” George told us of the dangers from sea snakes. Now George is from near Boston so he has that accent to start with, but he is also Portuguese so there is that flavor thrown into the mix. But, the kicker was that he dipped Copenhagen snuff about half a can at a time. Add this together and you have a completely incomprehensible individual. As he informed us of the dangers posed by sea snakes he stated in a mélange of accents that I will not attempt to reproduce, “Now sea snakes are as deadly as anything on earth, but they can’t bite you very easily because they have tiny little teeth. They almost gotta get a little flap of skin like between your fingers and gnorr on it.” Now the only word I changed was gnaw to gnorr. You have to hear that whole quote in the combination Boston, Portuguese, Copenhagen accent to truly love it, but once he said gnorr we all lost it. I asked the question on everyone’s mind “George, what the fuck did you just say? It sounded like you said the snake had to gnorr on you to hurt you.” “Yeah that’s right they gotta get a real little piece of skin and gnorr on it. They got little tiny teeth, that’s all they can do.” He replied. I had to finish up with the question on everybody’s mind “Are you saying that the snake has to gnaw on us in order to hurt us?” “Exactly” he answered, “They gotta gnorr on ya’.”

We managed to navigate our way onto our home island without any gnorring related injuries. There we met up with our guerrillas and moved to the base camp. Our guerrillas, for this exercise, were Marine aircraft mechanics and our opponents were a Marine infantry unit portraying the military of Jagoffia. Actually, our opponents were a particularly famous marine infantry unit with two unit flags obtained during a noble exploit, their difficulty was that we had actually done extensive work under the canopy of this hellhole, and they had no clue how horrible the ground really was.

Part of guerrilla warfare is taking people with few combat skills, like our mechanics, and teaching them to fight and survive. Craig and I took a patrol out to practice some of theses skills and along the way we came upon the other famous island snake, Habu the pit viper. This sweet critter was also in George’s briefing and we were informed of the nastiness of it’s venom and it’s inch and a half long fangs. When our point Marine froze and pointed to one coiled on a rock in a creek bed, Craig decided it was a good time to start his snakeskin collection. Somehow Craiggles had confused the sea snake and habu. He thought that habu was the one with the tiny teeth that had to gnorr on you. The Marines, who knew how dangerous the snake was, watched awestruck as Craig pulled out his K-bar and started poking at the viper. I could see some of this from my position at the back, but I couldn’t believe the answer when I asked one of the Marines what was going on. “Sgt. Lewis is killing a habu with his knife” came the reply. “WHAT?” I hissed. “Yeah, he told us to let him know if we saw any ‘cuz he wanted the skin” the private informed me. “Holy Shit!” was all I could manage. I hurried to where Craig was crouching down doing his best Crocodile Hunter imitation with the snake draped over his not very long knife blade. “Drop it you fuckin’ idiot” I told him. He flashed me his most charming, dumbass smile and said, “Relax man. This is habu, remember “they gotta gnorr on you” you know, George, all that shit.” “Drop the fuckin’ snake Craig.” I commanded, “That was sea snakes that gnorr. THAT is a fuckin’ habu with big fuckin’ teeth.” Craig doing the best job of turning ghost white I have ever seen for a black man, promptly dropped the snake and jumped several feet backward. I then did the bright thing and dropped a BAR (big ass rock) on the snake, which up ‘til then had been too amazed to bite the fool.

I grabbed Craig who was shaking pretty good and said, “You are one lucky motherfucker. If that thing had bit you I think I might’ve just let you die ‘cuz that was Darwin Awards quality stupidity.” “Oh my God” was all Craig had left. “Alright now get your shit together,” I told him, “Those Marines think you did that shit on purpose. We’ve got the makings of an excellent legend here. These fucker’s are gonna be telling the story of crazy Sgt. Lewis who kills vipers with a K-bar, for the rest of their lives. You gotta play this off like you meant it.” That was something Craig could buy off on, so he sucked it up and headed back to tell the troopies not to try this at home because we were trained professionals. He graciously donated the skin to one of the Marines who “cured” it with salt from his MREs and made a hatband for his flop hat. The problem was once the story got out all our guerrillas wanted to be mighty, snake slayers and pretty soon our base camp looked like a taxidermy shop with hides tacked to every tree, most perfectly, harmless varieties.

Mark writes about military friends and life on a ship:

One thing to remember about guys who are remembering their military past is that back when they were in, they probably didn't like the guys they hung around with - while if they were to run into one of them in the present, they'd probably just about kiss them.

For men thinking back on it, the most important thing is to remember that back then they were young, and healthy with no worries and if any worries showed up, there were 20 buddies who had your back.

Thinking back on it...

There was the guy who manned the consol that controlled the nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles...and all he wanted to do was be allowed to launch just one at the middle east to settle it out a bit; that was back in 1985 - the man was apparantly psychic (addendum; I can neither confirm, nor deny, that there were any nuclear weapons on board my ship).

There was the guy who got hungry one night and beat up the Domino's delivery guy because he wouldn't give him a free pizza.

There where the two who would wrap electric cables around their heads, don capes (ie, towells) and jump about being RADIOMAN, DEFENDER'S OF DEMOCRACY (and beer).

Navy ships are "dry", but it was always funny the way the XO would get himself tangled up in the security curtain every time he went into the radio shack.

Uncle Sam is an ok friend - he tied up a barge alongside and allowed us to drink beer on it in the middle of the Persian Gulf...ok friend; had he been a good friend it wouldn't have been 3.2 beer and there would have been more than three per man (then again, 300 drunken sailors armed with nuclear weapons might have caused a diplomatic incident, or something).

How do you replace a broken copier? Well, you can either fill out a bazillion forms in triplicate, or you can just toss it over the side, report it "lost at sea" and they'll express one out to you at God only knows what cost to the taxpayer...

Don't tell anyone that what they're actually doing out there at sea is fishing...please pay no attention to the vast array of fishing gear each ship has on it as it heads to sea.

You drink a lot of beer and tarry with women of low repute when ashore because you can, and its fun.

Bob Kingsbery from Frisco, Texas has a WWII story about the lengths men will go to for cold beer:

My father, Jack Kingsbery, was a bomber group crew chief in England during WWII. Here is one of his stories...

On one bombing mission German fighter planes hit one of our B-24's engines. The pilot was able to feather the engine and fly it home safely. There was a shortage of bombers; so all combat-damaged planes were repaired as fast as possible and sent back into action. We removed the damaged engine and had the new engine installed by daylight, ready for a test flight to be sure it functioned properly.

This was in mid-July and it can get hot even in England. The British pubs served their beer at room temperature. American soldiers really complained about the "warm" beer but drank it anyway. Sometimes Air Transport Command personnel who flew new planes to our base would bring several cases of good old American beer for our base personnel. Since there was no ice on our base our soldiers had to drink the American beer warm.

A new B-24 had come in from the states that morning and was parked next to our plane. The ferry crew gave our ground crew two cases of Lone Star beer. About that time a flight crew came out for the test flight on my plane. The normal test for a new engine is to fly 30 or 40 minutes at about 5,000 feet. Since we had worked all night replacing the engine I felt my crew needed a reward. I changed the flight plan and wrote that the plane needed to fly to 25,000 feet. The temperature at that height would be about zero. I told my ground crew to fill two five-gallon buckets with water, put the bottles of Lone Star in the water and load the buckets on the plane.

The test flight crew never questions the authority of the crew chief so off my plane went into the wild blue yonder. After reaching 25,000 feet the water in the two beer buckets began to freeze. When the plane landed the Lone Star was icy cold and our crew had a well-deserved beer bash. Flying a B-24 to 25,000 feet requires lots of fuel. I'm sure we probably set an all-time record for the cost of producing cold beer. But my crew said the cold beer was great.

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I have a backlog of more to put up, but keep it coming. If you have military experience (first-hand or second-hand) I'd love to hear more jokes and anecdotes. E-mail me with the subject "Military".

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