Here are some more great military stories; I hope everyone else is enjoying these as much as I do. As for the response on why people joined the military, I’m going to organize and pose those later. If you’d like to add to that or have a story, e-mail me with the subject “Military”. Thanks.
Here are some non-sordid interrogation stories from jg:
Our team during the Gulf War (1991) had received a Tank Brigade Commander — we didn’t have a lot of details on him on the time, and he was proving difficult to break. We tried a harsh approach and he wasn’t impressed. Mutt and Jeff didn’t work. So there we were carrying on for about a half hour — none of us spoke Arabic and we had an interpreter, so imagine a bunch of gringo’s and an interpreter being theatrical (Doom! Doom!) with this COL, who was taking it pretty well. I guess we all ran out of breath and in the pause, the guy says, in perfect Oxford English, “Your aircraft destroyed all my tanks, just look outside your tent and you can see where they all are!” We felt like dolts and shoo’d him back into the holding area.
During an exercise, interrogators practice on each other, largely for language skills. On one exercise, I was playing the prisoner and we were speaking Czech. The guy who was interrogating me was actually a friend, so I was acting belligerent and jokingly told him in Czech that I wouldn’t talk to anybody but a big, blond, busty American wench. So he left. I was thinking OK, whatever. We actually had a big, blond, busty, American female in the unit, and in she walked. I almost fell off my chair when she came in, Equal Opportunity, Sexual Harassment, etc, etc, I’m going to be crucified flashed through my brain. She actually thought it was funny though, and agreed to it to see if I’d actually fall off the chair.
Here’s an amazing story from Vietnam from Greg. When I say “Our Military”, I also mean our allies who fight along side us:
Not only Americans served in Viet Nam. There were Australians, South Koreans and lots of Canadians. One Canadian was a guy on my team. Good guy, good soldier. He was a little crazy, though. One time out at an FOB, he walked into the commo room with a North Vietnamese grenade and proceeded to take it apart. Those grenades were notoriously unreliable and guys actually jumped out the windows ’cause it could have gone off — fortunately for Dave, it didn’t. Another time, we were in the Club at Chi Lang and some guy walked in who had a .410 shotgun made into a pistol. Dave was mightily impressed and, after a long examination of the weapon, asked the guy if he could fire it.
The guy said, “sure,” expecting Dave to go outside – as we all did. Dave pointed the pistol to the ceiling and blew a hole through the roof. We were banned from the Club after that little trick. Unfortunately Dave’s mother was a liberal Canadian. She wrote him a letter — which I read — that included this thoughtful remark, “I hope you get killed before you have a chance to kill Vietnamese women and children.” Dave soldiered on. (He never killed any women or kids as the only enemy we ever engaged were NVA.) The odds finally caught up with Dave and he took a round in the head. It entered his left eye and came out the back of his skull. We did what we could and medevaced him to Can Tho. We called our CO, who was in Can Tho at the time, and told him to go to the airfield and identify the body. When the dai oui got there, not only was Dave still alive but he was conscious. It was a fucking miracle. Dave now lives in Florida — he was/is a hell of a Canadian.
I’m sure there are still some left out there but if you read the media – well, you know what I mean.
Here’s yet another miracle from the Vietnam war from SSG. Adam D.:
I’ve got a good one for you about one certain incident that occurred during a patrol I was part of in 1967, near Nha Trang.
My platoon had been dispatched to a remote stretch of jungle, and were humping along. For three hours, we saw and heard nothing but the trade mark pitch blackness that was Vietnam at night. We had gone about two clicks away from our infil point where the Huey had dropped us off when the point man gave us the hold sign, by throwing up his clutched fist. Apparently, he had heard “clicking bamboo,” the signal the VC used to communicate.
Our LT got on the radio, and had the artillery boys in the rear throw up three flares. Instantly, the pitch black was turned to noon in Texas. My detachment found ourselves nearly face to face with 15 or 20 of the dreaded Viet Cong. A firefight naturally ensued, and we shot every single bullet from every clip and chain we had on us, as did our fearsome enemy.
About fifteen minutes later, silence soon overtook us. LT had a few more flares put in the air, and we checked our men. As we were doing this, so were the VC. Not a single soldier from either side had so much as a scratch on us. Both realized this at the same time, looked at each other with a “WTF?” expression on each of our faces, and stood there for about 30 seconds.
Soon, both platoons raised their hands, and slowly backed away.
After that night. I knew that I’d come home alive. I don’t know, and never will, how we escaped that, but I will forever thank God for his protection on that night.
Finally, here’s some great wisdom gotten from duty in Korea:
This is Jeff from Connecticut. I’d be more specific, but Connecticut is so freakin’ tiny, everyone knows me here. Here’s my military story:
I was stationed in Korea in an artillery battery: M109, 155mm Self Propelled. Very cool, very lethal, make big boom. In the States, most of the training is done on firing points on the base, so we usually travel on roads within the confines of the Army post. In Korea, however, the firing points are close to civilian areas, often next to small villages and towns throughout the countryside. As a result, we often traveled on public roads. We’d be driving these 20-ton tracked monsters, throwing off track pads, right on the same highway filled with cars full of nuns driving tiny little Kias and Hyundais. In order to minimize the impact we’d have on civilian traffic, our headquarters units would stage each battery on a staggered schedule so we weren’t all on the roads at the same time as we traveled to and from the training areas.
One day, we were coming in from a long field training exercise. Our battery was scheduled to be one of the last units in the line of march, so we pulled over to the side of the road to wait for a couple of hours until it was our turn to take to the highway. I decided to walk to the other platoon to talk to a buddy and was accompanied by one of the KATUSA soldiers I had befriended. (KATUSAs are Korean Augmentees to the United States Army. These guys were members of the Korean Army who had some rudimentary English skills and were assigned to the line units to learn to use American equipment. They were often employed as interpreters when we encountered Korean nationals).
The 3 of us walked about a quarter mile away from the idling vehicles to get away from the diesel exhaust and climbed to the top of a small berm. After a few minutes, we noticed some Korean soldiers about 200 meters away waving at us. We waved back. They waved some more and began yelling at us. We waved and yelled ‘Hello’ to them. They kept waving and yelling. We finally turned to the KATUSA soldier to ask him what they were yelling, but he had run away across the parking area. About the time we noticed his absence, a giant explosion went off in front of us. We dove down beside the berm and covered up as dirt and rocks started to rain down on us. Apparently, we’d stumbled upon a Korean demolition range and they were setting off explosions. They were yelling ‘Fire in the hole’ in Korean, which to me sounded strangely similar to ‘Hello American GI’. The moral of the story is: If you’re in a foreign land and your translator runs away, run after him. Don’t wait around to find out what he was running from.