Women in the Military: Fiat Equality

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Unwelcome Facts from a Closet

Sigh. I have just read that a young woman named Sage Santangelo has failed the infantry-trainimg course for Marine officers at Quantico, bringing the rate of female failure to 29 out of 29. As an old hand with thirty years covering the military, I can attest that this vu is getting more deja all the time. Women have never succeeded at physical things in the military because they can’t. More on that in a moment.

Santangelo seems a most impressive woman. Any woman who would attempt the TBE course is necessarily impressive. We are not talking pampered Swarthmore brats in Women’ Studies. She reports making her first solo flight at fifteen, climbing most of Colorado’s highest peaks, playing goalie on a boy’s hockey team. She is Marine material, and has my respect.

But she washed out on day one. Even tough, fiercely determined, highly athletic women can’t do it. It isn’t their fault. We are born with the equipment we are born with.

A few observations I made while chasing the military around the world, which my remaining contacts tell me still hold. Females officers tended to be officers, competitive, seeing the military as a career, and doing whatever needed to advance, to include performing well. In non-physical fields, they can. Enlisted females often had little interest in the military but wanted a job, something to do, a place to have a baby at government expense. They came on average from a lower social class than the officers, often the ghetto. Female officers, like the men, wanted combat assignments because that is how you get your ticket punched to advance. The enlisted women wanted no part of combat, and would deliberately get pregnant to avoid it.

Over and over I have heard the same tale: When hard physical work was needed, the women looked cute while the men put up the tents or unloaded mortar rounds from a six-by. Mortar rounds come in crates. The crates are heavy. A six-by carries many, many of them. Women can’t do it. It isn’t just in the military. In my scuba-diving days, the women in my club–Capitol Divers–were fine divers. When a truck of forty aluminum-eighties needed unloading, the guys did it.

And there are problems that one mustn’t talk about. Menstruation, for example. Women often are in pain, they want light duty, and become erratic. Having men of low social class in authority over young women inevitably results in rape or behavior close to it, usually by black men. Women don’t like to squat and pee around men, which can lead to absurd behavior–see below. Thirteen men in a squad will work together as a team; add a woman and they will all compete to get into her pans. Sex erodes command authority: Once Admiral Jones gets involved with Seaman Sally, it stops being, “Yessir, Admiral,” and bcoms “But Bob….” Would women use sex to get what they want? No, never. Perish the thought.

The brass are terrified of women. An admiral once told me that he would not allow a woman in his office without having the door open and a witness present. All she had to do was say, “He groped me,” and he would be in deep kimchi. He knew it, and she knew it.

OK, some physical stats. Rather than pointlessly rewrite, I append in its entirely an ancient column:

Fred Reed, USMC Retired, Danang, 1967

 

The Dismal Facts

Occasionally I have written that placing women in physically demanding jobs in the military, as for example combat, is stupid and unworkable. Predictably I’ve gotten responses asserting that I hate women, abuse children, cannibalize orphans, and can’t get a date. A few, with truculence sometimes amplified by misspelling, have demanded supporting data.

OK. The following are from documents I found in a closet, left over from my days as a syndicated military columnist (“Soldiering,” Universal Press Syndicate). Note the dates: All of this has been known for a long time.

From the report of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces (report date November 15, 1992, published in book form by Brassey’s in 1993): “The average female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength… An Army study of 124 men and 186 women done in 1988 found that women are more than twice as likely to suffer leg injuries and nearly five times as likely to suffer [stress] fractures as men.”

Further: “The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about the physical differences between men and women that can be summarized as follows:

“Women’s aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.

“In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.”

From the same report: “Lt Col. William Gregor, United States Army, testified before the Commission regarding a survey he conducted at an Army ROTC Advanced Summer Camp on 623 women and 3540 men. …Evidence Gregor presented to the Commission includes:

“(a) Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test, he found that the upper quintile of women at West point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.

“(c) Only 21 women out of the initial 623 (3.4%) achieved a score equal to the male mean score of 260.

“(d) On the push-up test, only seven percent of women can meet a score of 60, while 78 percent of men exceed it.

“(e) Adopting a male standard of fitness at West Point would mean 70 percent of the women he studied would be separated as failures at the end of their junior year, only three percent would be eligible for the Recondo badge, and not one would receive the Army Physical Fitness badge….”

The following, quoted by Brian Mitchell in his book Women in the Military: Flirting With Disaster (Regnery, 1998) and widely known to students of the military, are results of a test the Navy did to see how well women could perform in damage control — i.e., tasks necessary to save a ship that had been hit.

Test % Women Failing % Men Failing
Before Training After Training Before Training After Training
Stretcher carry, level 63 38 0 0
Stretcher carry/up, down ladder 94 88 0 0
Fire hose 19 6 0 0
P250 pump, carry down 99 99 9 4
P250 pump, carry up 73 52 0 0
P250, start pump 90 75 0 0
Remove SSTO pump 99 99 0 0
Torque engine bolt 78 47 0 0

Our ships can be hit. I know what supersonic stealthed cruise missiles are. So do the Iraqis.

Also from the Commission’s report: “Non-deployability briefings before the Commission showed that women were three times more non-deployable than men, primarily due to pregnancy, during Operations Desert Shield and Storm. According to Navy Captain Martha Whitehead’s testimony before the Commission, ‘the primary reason for the women being unable to deploy was pregnancy, that representing 47 percent of the women who could not deploy.'”

Maybe we need armored strollers.

My friend Catherine Aspy graduated from Harvard in 1992 and (no, I’m not on drugs) enlisted in the Army in 1995. Her account was published in Reader’s Digest, February, 1999, and is online in the Digest’s archives.

She told me the following about her experiences: “I was stunned. The Army was a vast day-care center, full of unmarried teen-age mothers using it as a welfare home. I took training seriously and really tried to keep up with the men. I found I couldn’t. It wasn’t even close. I had no idea the difference in physical ability was so huge. There were always crowds of women sitting out exercises or on crutches from training injuries.

“They [the Army] were so scared of sexual harassment that women weren’t allowed to go anywhere without another woman along. They called them ‘Battle Buddies.’ It was crazy. I was twenty-six years old but I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself.”

Women are going to take on the North Korean infantry, but need protection in the ladies’ room. Military policy is endlessly fascinating.

When I was writing the military column, I looked into the experience of Canada, which tried the experiment of feminization. I got the report from Ottawa, as did the Commission. Said the Commission:

“After extensive research, Canada has found little evidence to support the integration of women into ground units. Of 103 Canadian women who volunteered to joint infantry units, only one graduated the initial training course. The Canadian experience corroborates the testimony of LTC Gregor, who said the odds of selecting a woman matching the physical size and strength of the average male are more than 130-to-1.

From Military Medicine, October 1997, which I got from the Pentagon’s library:

(p. 690): “One-third of 450 female soldiers surveyed indicated that they experienced problematic urinary incontinence during exercise and field training activities. The other crucial finding of the survey was probably that 13.3% of the respondents restricted fluids significantly while participating in field exercises.” Because peeing was embarrassing.

Or, (p. 661): ” Kessler et al found that the lifetime prevalence of PTSD in the United States was twice as high among women…” Depression, says MilMed, is far commoner among women, as are training injuries. Et cetera.

The military is perfectly aware of all of this. Their own magazine has told them. They see it every day. But protecting careers, and rears, is more important than protecting the country.

Anyway, for those who wanted supporting evidence, there it is.

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flash
flash

and the PC circle jerk continues…” but women can do anything men can do”

The fact that women are even being considered for combat roles in the military is just more proof that the Pentagram is run by a cadre of dickless cowards totally terrified of admitting the obvious truth that women cannot cut it in the infantry.

flash
flash

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Ghost

Drat… something I have an informed opinion on and I’m on my way out the door to drive to OKC to pick up a last load of furniture items.

In spite of being a sort of “trailblazer” myself in the AWACS community as a woman, I never thought the idea of women in combat was very good. There are just too many areas where it doesn’t make sense and while I’ve known some women who I’d put up against The Hulk in a barroom brawl, I think the majority of women lack the emotional ability to cope with what happens in a boots on the ground, weapons at ready combat situation.

That’s my opinion and when I get back with my quarter sawn oak cabinet and flooring samples from the Amish mill on the way, I might expound upon it.

Or not.

ragman
ragman

Fred appears to be a sexist and a racist. Only kidding, he is 100% correct in what he says! I used to give a shit about this stuff, but no more. I realized fighting this is a complete lost cause. Let ’em do what they want. Paint the F16s and F18s pink and in the place of nose art they can have images of feminine hygiene products. I have more important stuff to be concerned with than todays PC military. A good friend has two sons that are Air Force pilots and they absolutely second the account of Fred’s friend MS Aspy. God forbid we actually go up against some really tough, competent fuckers(Russian and Chinese) in first rate equipment. Maggie: what was your connection with AWACS?

Stucky

“And there are problems that one mustn’t talk about. Menstruation, for example …” —- Fred

A platoon of menstruating American women can take out an entire Russian battalion. Throw LaQuisha in the mix, and we’re damn near invincible.

Medvyed
Medvyed

Buraeucratic incompetance causing inefficiencies in the logistics of personnel deployment. Cry me a fucking river.

Women don’t fit the structure of the imperial legion. Boo hoo. That does not mean that women can’t fight. Women have proven capabilities in assymetrical warfare, resistance movements and irregular militias. Sure, the average woman is far less suited for hauling around gun barrels and stretchers than the average man, but it bears repeating, that does not mean women can’t fight.

The fact that large numbers of female soldiers are ‘washing out’ prior to commencing training is not a failure of the equality movement. It simply illustrates the high physical requirements of certain roles within the military, roles for which the majority of people are not suited. A failure of equality would be to allow unsuitable personnel to take a job simply because of gender, sexuality or culture, or conversely to deny a suitable apllicant for the same reasons.

bb

Didn’t work when the Israelites try it several decades ago.Who really believes it would work in any army.Maybe some feminist in her delusional dreams.God didn’t make women for combat.You would think most realize this after 6000 years.

flash
flash

Dykes are more than confused about their gender.They have other issues that challenge reality as well.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,

During the first Gulf War, our unit was initially undeployable because so many of our females became pregnant in order to avoid being deployed. Eventually, they were able to cobble together a single platoon from our entire company which they sent off to Saudi Arabia. I was always of the opinion that females should be in their own all female units.

Southern Sage
Southern Sage

I was in the USMC and had the misfortune to be assigned to a major headquarters support and service battalion, made up of about 50 percent women. It was a parody of a military organization. With the exception of nurses and a handful of rear area (no pun intended) jobs, they simply have no business in uniform.

raptorman
raptorman

50 percent of our females got pregnant to avoid desert storm. A further 50 percent got pregnant in country. My girl however, gave great head. I am prolly the first guy to ever get a hummer in a hummer.

IndenturedServant

Personally, I wouldn’t want women having to make decisions and take actions that men do in combat. Hell, I’d prefer it if men didn’t have to do it either but that is not the world we live in. There are however thousands of non combat roles women can and do do well in the military. Unfortunately, and I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, men are pigs and horndogs and they think and act differently around women. Women serve as a distraction for men which is detrimental in many military situations. The feminists will say this is the mans fault and a good or respectful man should be able to act appropriately but I think it’s about 95% biological.

Do women exist that would do well in combat? I’m sure there are but the time and effort it would take to find and train them pretty much precludes them from consideration IMO.

overthecliff

Tradition of men fighting in wars has it’s roots in reality. Women in combat arms is going to get a lot of people killed, including the women themselves. It will result in defeat in all probability. Why do we need studies to affirm shit we already know?

Stucky

First ya gotta cut off their titties … then the”re damn near invincible.

DC Sunsets

Since time immemorial armies always had “camp followers” (AKA whores) around as part of maintaining discipline.

Modern armies simply embed them. (Pun intended)

Why any mother or father encourages or approves of their daughter enlisting in the military is beyond my comprehension. People who would NEVER include “obey” in their wedding vows sign up for a system that requires obedience to authority (Any higher rank) on pain of actual punishment or even imprisonment.

Cognitive Dissonance, indeed.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

For the record, if I were facing combat, I’d let every dude in the platoon bugger me in hopes of getting myself pregnant.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

Agree with this post by Reed, and most of the comments to it. Equality under the law does not mean that we are all made the same way- it simply means equal treatment under the law, and that both sexes should be judged by the same criteria…. which means that vanishingly few women can cut it in most military functions if judged by the same criteria as male recruits.

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that most women simply cannot cut it in combat. Expecting women to have the same brute strength as males is like expecting men to be able to bear and nurse babies.

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

Some of you have touched on this, but doesn’t “Women in combat” really stem from the politically correct shitstorm we have been and are suffering? Personally, I’m sick of this shit. Be sure not to express your opinions on how LGBT or you’re a “gay basher”. Send your kid to school down the sidewalk and around the corner and suddenly you’re arrested for “child endangerment”. Stand up for your rights in an engagement with “law enforcement” and you may wind up dead.
Hell we don’t even call things by their proper names anymore. “Peacekeeper” missiles? “Patriot Act”? Aren’t we really kidding ourselves, Women and Men ARE different and that’s as the good Lord intended.

yahsure
yahsure

I always wondered about women wanting to be like a man. Also about men who wanted to be like a woman.
One equality issue i can agree with.Is if a woman does the same job as a man she should be paid the same. My sister had this happen to her.
I think women should be in limited jobs in the military. I am just not a PC kind of a person.

Billy
Billy

What else is there to add? Fred hits a home run…

My first two enlistments were in combat arms. 1st was Airborne Infantry. Second was straight leg infantry. My third was combat support. (Which I should have never done, but it is what it is… probably why I despise cops to this day).

It was a cluster fuck. No other way to put it. I could fill dozens of pages of anecdotes of clusterfuckery…

Females trying to sleep their way through the entire company – literally. Solely for talk shit rights. Creating drama and problems where there should be none – like sleeping with two different guys simultaneously just to get them to fight it out… spreading disease (one of the females – one of the more nasty ones – came up HIV positive and at least a half a dozen guys disappeared overnight. Word was, they were relocated for “observation”… we all knew what that meant. Never saw them again.

Females sleeping with the command structure in order to get out of deployment or fast-tracked for plum assignments, awards, schools…

Coming up “pregnant” whenever we would deploy… been pregnant two fucking years, but never has the kid…

More and worse…

Meh…. I can only sit here and shake my head, wondering “what the fuck?”….

Welshman
Welshman

I think women should be allowed in the military. I am as old as dirt, and when I was in the navy women had jobs they were suited too. Most navy female officers were nurses, and enlisted women were in personnel, payroll, and shore based support units.

I think women sailors on ships are a big moral problem. I took a girlfriend on my aircraft carrier and I thought she was lucky to leave the ship with all her clothes on after a tour of the ship.

Welshman
Welshman

Oh, I almost forgot about women in the Sea-Bees. If women wanted to rough it they could get positions as equipment operators/mechanics with the Sea-Bees. Of course most of them were dikes, but they got to learn skills that related to male type jobs.

Anonymous
Anonymous

the state of western man summed up in one quote

“To an ever-greater degree the “free man” of the West is an unarmed, frightened, policed and browbeaten cipher whose first reaction to any crisis is to ‘shelter in place’.”

Richard Fernandez

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2015/01/22/the-part-of-yourself-you-used-to-own/

Medvyed
Medvyed

Red Army. The Soviets had no problem deploying women in combat roles. During WW2 these women proved invaluable in the defence of the USSR. I guess there is big diffence between defending your homeland and playing World Police for the Empire though, eh?

The cultural issues of women in the American Imperial forces are not trivial. If you can’t manage to piss in a hole because of modesty, then you are not psychologically suited for the job. If you can’t manage to keep yourself from fucking the other members of your unit, then you are not psychologically suited for the position. If you’re a rapist, then you are not psychologically suited for the position.

Llpoh

I clicked the link on the first line to the article about the woman.

Basically, she whines and says if she, and other women, had been properly trained they could pass the test.

Unbelievable. So it is the responsibility of the military to provide special training to women, so that maybe some of them might pass the tests eventually.

You cannot make this shit up.

donna
donna

My daughter is a sharp shooter,has been on three tours,Relief gunner in Iraq,On tour in South Korea,and Germany.I told her if anybody tries to rape or grope you learn how to break half a dozen bones with one finger.-Yes she used this method on a drunk officer.Her C O lectured the troop the next day was no means no!Good for him!Many stories

gilberts
gilberts

Yep. Females in the military are a disaster. In fact, look up a 90s-classic, “Flirting With Disaster: Women in the Military.” The author points out just how absurd women in the military is and how it destroys the military wherever they are installed. He focused on the first class including women at the USAF academy and how they were ordered to pass the females at all costs.

I’ve heard mechanics talk about how they had females assigned who could only sit in front of a computer while they did all the work because the females couldn’t pick up the truck tools.

I worked with one whore who stated she enlisted to meet men.

I worked with one whore who popped pregnant with just days before our deployment to Iraq. She not only sat on her ass in the rear while we were overseas, but she chaptered out and got a cushy job at our base hospital as a security manager with nuthin’ but E4 rank and extensive experience sitting on her butt, eating.

I knew one female who was famous for giving hummers to troops standing in the air guard hatch on strikers during patrols.

One of the females from my brigade is immortalized on youtube as PFC Hayes-look up her stripper video she made for a guy in the HHC, who promptly shared it with the entire brigade. There’s nuthin’ sexier than stripping in a conex.

We had a female who was so deranged and unreliable, our E7 NCOIC was terrified to speak to her without a witness present.

We had another female so incompetent, she triggered a 3 round burst through the roof of the truck she was riding in on a convoy.

The supply wenches were particularly annoying. These big, fat, lazy slugs would lord it over us that we had to carry their stuff, load and unload it, and wouldn’t do shit to help us, then deny us the stuff we carried, loaded, and unloaded when we actually wanted it. They somehow ended up with all the cooler weapons we received, even though they didn’t need them.

The females in basic screwed the drill sergeants to get ahead.

One of my buddies at BNCOC told me their trainers sat their class down and explained for them just how bad females wreck unit cohesion. When they get a class of all-male soldiers, the class gels into a team quickly and they have very few problems during the course. When they get a mixed male and female class, it’s a disaster. The chicks cause jealousy, play the guys off against each other, try to get whatever advantage they can from the guys, who are all to excited to help them out. The guys resent each other, compete for the chicks, and they do not really come together as a team.

I met a guy who was a mercenary in the Congo back in the 60s. He was happy to give his honest opinion of women in a combat zone: They’re nurses and recreation. They patched up the mercs when they returned from the bush, then the mercs spent their time chasing the nurses trying to get laid. He made no bones about it-combat makes you horny as hell when you get a chance to relax. Judging by the sheer amount of nasty sexcapades going on where I was, I would say he was on to something. I remember hanging out with a medic in Iraq who told me they were constantly dealing with the nastiest cases of STDs you ever saw, including people with multiple infections at the same time. There were legends about, “the Record Breaker,” a girl who was carrying 7 different STDs at the same time! I was warned to just avoid fooling around entirely because ALL the chicks were infected.

The guys weren’t safe, either-you might have heard of women getting raped in Iraq and Saudi, but guys were also attacked. One night, I had a carload of GIs come following me down a dark street on FOB Speicher around midnight after using the MWR trailer’s internet and phones. These dudes rolled up on me real slow with their lights off, followed me around a corner up a dark block of old Iraqi officer housing, and pulled a quick U-turn and were just hopping out of their SUV when I ducked down a driveway next to my place and took off. They all hopped back into their SUV and took off. I wasn’t sure if they planned to roll me or rape me, but I didn’t wait to find out. One of my buddies caught a dude using a mirror to spy on him in his stall while he was taking a dump. Another one of my buddies was in Afghanistan and told me they had a serious issue with foreign troops, like Romanians, raping GIs. I can only imagine this problem will get worse now that we’re embracing homos in the military.

In fact, I had a friend who was in the Navy. She told me the lesbians on the ship would target an attractive girl for “recruitment” by convincing one of the male “players” to go after her with the intention of taking advantage of her and treating her like garbage. This guy’s job was to utterly abuse a girl to the point they hoped she would hate men. Then, the lesbians would try to scoop the girl up afterward and convince her to switch teams. Her stories about shipboard life were disgusting.

gilberts
gilberts

Oh-props to the USMC for not diluting their standards. They’re the only service that hasn’t just ordered that females will succeed at all costs. Go look at the Army PT standards online. What they expect from males vs females to meet the bare minimum standards might shock you. You can see males who are 6′ 220 pounds of muscle, 0% fat, and they’re considered “fat” by the official standards, while a 5’5″ female who looks like an over-stuffed couch and appears to also weigh 220 pounds can slide by with nary a care in the world.
Also-nothing looks better than a female in a maternity uniform. That’s such a sorry sight.

Now that we have all these new “genders” to worry about, will we have guys wearing maternity uniforms, too? I’m sure the maternity ACU uniform is very comfortable when you’re exploring your feminine side, sort of like camo pajamas.

El Coyote
El Coyote

Gilberts, your long comment above deserved to be the main article.

If you read TBP long enough, you change your pre-conceptions and opinions. It is part of growing. I had to do a bit of mind-fucking and question my ideas with regard to the above observations. I never worked with any female before and thank heaven because I was not mature enough to have handled it well.

An inspector offered this philosophical tidbit; “You don’t see the world as it is but you see your own part of the world.” My part of the world is impacted by a woman who has a wide variation in judgment, capability and temperament. A woman 30 years younger would be called a bitch.

This is what I see in my part of the world and it is validated by the comments here:

1. They cause drama
2. They cause jealousy
3. They cause clusterfuckery
4. They want privileges based on their gender

Overthecliff
Overthecliff

Chicago is absolutely right. To bad the military is being run by politically correct servants of TPTB.

RiNS

Putting aside the Physical differences I think even more important is the mental. Take 10,000 raw 18 year old recruits. All men in reasonable shape and of average or above size. In 3 months you will have a force that believes not in the importance of oneself but of the colours of their regiment. Much like the worker bees protecting their Queen will give their lives to defend. This sharp end unit will slice thru the PC army of today like a hot knife thru butter.

ssgconway

James Webb’s 1979 ‘Women Can’t Fight’ essay took this on, front and center. He’ll catch hell if he follows through with his presidential exploratory committee…for telling the truth. Like I used to say when still in uniform, we’ll be able to play these social engineering games until we play a ‘Division 1-A’ opponent, and that’s when Momma’s going to be asking her Congressman some very hard questions…..
link: http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/jim-webb-women-cant-fight/

Billy
Billy

@ conway,

Outstanding reference. +1

Webb nailed it. Moreover, he did it much better than I ever could. And your comment “we’ll be able to play these social engineering games until we play a ‘Division 1-A’ opponent, and that’s when Momma’s going to be asking her Congressman some very hard questions” is spot on.

I made a similar comment a few years ago. Something along the lines of the number of genuine fighting units we have that are actually capable, are dwindling rapidly. Individual performance has gotten so poor that the average Infantryman isn’t really any better than his counterpart. The only thing saving us is our technology, which is fortunately formidable. Get past the technology, and then you get to see the true quality of our fighting soldiers and Marines…

Some other thoughts: Webb made the observation that the pool of Americans drawn upon to fill the ranks of Infantry and Marines is made up of tough men… While that might have been true when the essay was penned, I scarcely say that is true today, what with the feminization and emasculation of our males. Some skinny jeans, makeup and nail polish wearing Metrosexual Emo is going to be good soldier or Marine material? Ehh… I’m thinking “No”… Not when every American male is being doped to the gills when they start demonstrating masculine traits, or hooted down as a Neanderthal or a misogynist if he tells them to go to hell and actually acts like a male…

The point I have reached is “Fuck em”… I’m just past caring anymore… they want to fuck everything up? Be my guest. Just don’t come crawling for help when shit blows up in your face because I’ll just piss on you and laugh…

I can remember being a Boot… 3 solid months of abuse. Nothing was off limits, and God help you if you showed weakness. If you fucked up or were a Blue Falcon, you were beaten. The Blanket Party was popular…

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Blanket Party, I shall explain: If a Boot fucked up habitually or turned Blue Falcon – in other words, snitched on his fellow soldiers or otherwise fucked them over – he was subject to a Blanket Party. This is where the aforementioned fucked-over soldiers lie in wait for the fuckup in question… most likely when he has to piss in the middle of the night. On his way back to his rack, a blanket is thrown over his head and several soldiers beat the everloving shit out of him, leaving him dazed and bleeding on the barracks floor. Usually, one Blanket Party is enough to convince the fuckup or Blue Falcon to unfuck himself and get with the program.)

You were run till you vomited, then run even more. I’ve seen guys run till they puked, then run till they lost bowel and bladder control. Didn’t matter – keep going. I’ve been dogged in a gig pit until it was physically impossible for me to lift a fork to my mouth to eat. One Lieutenant was killed in a gig pit the cycle before mine in Airborne School – they dogged him so hard, a blood vessel burst in his brain and he dropped dead…

I remember one kid who fucked up so badly, they gave him an E-tool (entrenching tool… small fold-able shovel) and told him to dig a fighting position. Told him to keep digging until they came back. That was at about 18:00 hrs. The Drills didn’t come back till the next morning, by which time he had excavated a hole so deep, a ladder was required for him to climb out…

I saw no less than 3 guys make a break for the wire while in training… they just broke… up and ran for it. Only one guy had the foresight to call someone he knew and got picked up on the other side of the fence…

Last I heard, and I don’t know if they’re still being used, they cut Boot to 2 months – eliminating an entire month of training – and have this shit called “Stress Cards”… means if the Drill is being a big old meanie to you, you can hold up this fucking card and he has to go away… I shit you not…

I seriously fear for the next scrap we get into with a “Division 1-A opponent”….. it’s gonna be fucking ugly…

El Coyote
El Coyote

Billy says:

Individual performance has gotten so poor that the average Infantryman isn’t really any better than his counterpart. The only thing saving us is our technology, which is fortunately formidable. Get past the technology, and then you get to see the true quality of our fighting soldiers and Marines…

AW says once Moore’s Law comes to an end @ 5Nano, our technology will be no better than theirs.

Anonymous
Anonymous

@Ragman… I was what was called an ART… airborne radar tech. Admin posted a little story of mine called Visits to the Kingdome a month or so ago and a few old AWACers came out of the woodwork here to say hello.

Are you another?

Ghost

Oops… Forgot I’m on a friend’s computer. Anon above was me…

gilberts
gilberts

Oh, I couldn’t help adding-the mixed training is a joke. I did a mixed basic training. I was 26 when I signed up right after 9/11. I was in a platoon full of 17, 18, 19 year old male and female recruits. When they ran us all up to the bay to get the initial briefing from our drill sergeants, all I saw was the guys on one side sizing up the girls on the other side and vice versa.

I knew in that first 30 seconds, the drills had already lost-the platoon was going to be like high school with the guys all trying to get into the same 3 girls’ pants. We had a couple of reasonably attractive girls. One of whom was so unbelievably stupid, I’ll never forget when we did a training exercise and were having the after action review and the drill asked her what she thought about it and she honestly stated, “Drill Sergeant, I don’t think.” You couldn’t make that shit up. I think all-male training would be a hell of a lot more productive. It was pathetic the extremes people went to trying to get laid, like crawling into dumpsters or hiding in port-a-potties.

Another passably attractive girl was a little sharper than the rest and immediately started trying to make herself as useful as possible. You see this type a lot in the army. These chicks are a little better-organized and smarter than the rest and immediately try to make themselves indispensable to the NCOs and Officers with the intention of never being sent off to do shit details or hard work-they’re too important to the day-to-day operation of the army to be wasted on police calls and cleaning details. This particular one was screwing one of our drills and broke up his marriage. I guess she pushed it too far when she asked an LT at our next unit if there was “anything else” she could do for him. Apparently, he didn’t appreciate an E4 taking a pass at him and booted her out of her cushy position.

Then, there were the snitches. The females were constantly tattling, mostly on each other, to the drills. They would sneak little notes under the drills’ office door ratting each other out for hiding food or chewing gum or talking at night. Even when we were all punished together, and told straight up we would all be punished for tattling, they still kept it up. We figured out quickly who it was, too. The tattlers were mainly the black female recruits. They would write little anonymous notes for any reason, real or imagined, just to get each other in trouble. I couldn’t believe people, who were legally “adults,” behaved this way.

Billy
Billy

@ gil,

Dude, I can’t imagine something like that…. “mixed” training… Jeebus…

I can’t even imagine a female being treated like a male during deployment…

Just going off to squeeze one off was taking your health into your own hands. We would wait until we saw someone trying to sneak off without being noticed, just to have 5 minutes to shit in peace…

We’d follow them at a distance and then wait until they got nice and settled, dropping the kids off at the pool…. and then we’d start throwing rocks at them. Just a real barrage of rocks… I mean, what were they going to do? Pants around their ankles, shit hanging out their ass? Chase us? The best one could hope for is putting your helmet on and try to deflect as many rocks as possible with the shovel…

Still, it was better than the port-a-pottys…. once in awhile you’d find a port a potty and, thinking you were safe, settle in for a leisurely shit… unbeknownst to you, your so-called “friends” would be duct taping the door shut. That’s if you were lucky. If you weren’t lucky, they’d just gang up on the port-a-potty and push it over, facedown on the door, trapping you…. and all that that means…

Childish? Yep. Idiotic? Yep. But it was fucking awesome… and hilarious, too…

gilberts
gilberts

I used to have fun throwing rocks at the potties. They’re so damn loud when you wing a rock at them.
In Alaska, the fun was seeing how big the piss stalactite from the urinal to the floor would get. Day by day, you could see it growing from all the dudes using that thing. Somewhere, I have a picture of this frozen wall of piss from the urinal thing down to the floor where it connected to the pissicle on the floor. It was a monumental achievement.

In Iraq, no one wanted to walk all the way to a latrine, so they would just piss in the liter water bottles. If you climbed on a wall of Hesco barriers, all you would see were dozens and dozens of abandoned piss bottles tossed up high where no one was likely to see them. They would roast and roast for days and weeks and months and years in the sun, slowly turning yellow to orange to red. Just these nasty legacies of beverages past…

gilberts
gilberts

Oh, Billy-Your basic comments reminded me. Yeah, they softened it up a lot. I didn’t see stress cards in 2001, but I heard they had been recently phased out.
Instead, we had an experimental PT regimen that dispensed almost entirely with running. We didn’t run for several weeks. We got smoked when we screwed up, but our PT was pretty cheesy. It was largely aerobics. Windmills, stretches, touch your toes, side-ways running, lunges, and maybe some crunches and pushups, but hardly what you would expect. It didn’t seem to do much for us. I know we got stronger, but I figure it was more the constant daily smoke sessions than the weak PT. The running was scary, since we did relatively little of it and how the hell do you work your way up to the PT test, when you’re not running?

They told the drills they couldn’t be rude, so they yelled at you, but they couldn’t really be “scary.” There was one guy who was a big, mean SOB and he seemed so emasculated when you heard him yelling at people and you could see he was censoring himself. He kept calling people “B.D.” and no one knew what it was supposed to mean, until it slipped out-“Brain Damaged.” The story was it was his favorite thing to call recruits, since he couldn’t cuss at them, until some tender special unique snowflake complained to mommy and daddy and they complained to their congressman and he was called on the carpet for being a big meanie. So he could just have civilized conniption fits.

There was one drill who abandoned yelling entirely. He opted for insanity. He would start talking and never stop. Seriously-that was his way of punishing you. When we got in trouble, instead of yelling or smoking us, he would start lecturing us and start wandering into a land of insanity rife with religious references and strange morals and lessons and random anecdotes and rules and warnings and… I don’t know how to explain it. It would just stretch on for minutes into a quarter hour into a half hour, and beyond, of him just talking. It was so painful, you wanted to be punished. You just wanted it to be over. He just kept talking and he never repeated himself. I can’t remember more than a couple things he ever said, but it was all insane. Like the time he said, “Now, I don’t want to beat a dead horse. Because I don’t eat horse meat. Unless the Good Lord puts it in front of me…..” Or the time he lectured us on laying out our gear for inspection. Some of our guys were working in the kitchen while the rest of us prepped for inspection. He wanted us to lay their stuff out, too, and he said something insane like, “Now we’re all dogs in the dog show, but some of us aren’t here and it’s important we make everyone look like a good dog….” It was mind-bending and tedious and awful to have to listen to. He’s probably the next Bob Ross and a total zen master at this point.

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