And there are those who have not.

5/25/2015 1:39:15 AM

Cool story

5/25/2015 1:42:44 AM

[Edited on May 25, 2015 at 2:49 AM. Reason : z]

5/25/2015 2:49:14 AM

Who is....george bush?

5/25/2015 8:39:55 AM

there are those who have sniffed another man's used boxer shorts, and there are those who have not.

5/25/2015 9:22:22 AM

Kind of...I mean, I've been rocketed/mortared dozens of times. The closest one was maybe a couple hundred yards away, though, and we never even heard half of them impact.

I've seen the tracers flying and things blowing up below me from my jet (especially in Iraq...you'd just be flying along and see the sky flash below you where a big IED went off). I've heard the play-by-play of the fighting going on below me on the radio, and I've heard frantic, out of breath radio calls from JTACs with small arms rattling off in the background (including a group that was pinned down, with a B-1 making bombing runs back and forth across the enemy positions, and helos coming to extract them not having enough fuel, although they may have tried anyway. To this day I don't know what happened to them.) Many of my missions in Iraq, and almost all in Afghanistan, were supporting special forces raids (mostly black SOF). I've escorted convoys that got attacked, gotten back to base, and gotten the word from intel that our guys had KIA...so that makes it real, but it wasn't me.

I suppose there was a constant, low-level threat, especially in Afghanistan. Iraq was pretty safe...plenty of places to land, we never took indirect fire, and the base we were at (Al Asad) never took small arms fire on takeoff/landing. Afghanistan constantly took mortars and rocket fire to the bases (few times per week at Bagram; basically every day at Kandahar), and occasionally took small arms on takeoff/landing (mostly at slow stuff, not jets). There were one or two times where I saw something that I thought might have been small arms, but not really. There were a handful of instances, like kidnapping attempts in Baghdad, local workers nearly piecing together an IED on base in Bagram, a dude out running getting pinned down by an off-base sniper in Bagram, and my own squadron getting attacked by maybe 20 enemy fighters who breached the perimeter and had a firefight in our camp with a couple of our Marines getting shot/blown up pretty badly (and one of my mechanics killing a Taliban fighter)--but I was on a temporary assignment in Qatar when that happened. I've had hydraulic failures and other emergencies, been scary-tight on fuel, and once had a lightning strike to the nose of the jet 10' in front of my face (at night, over Khost, on the Af/Pak border), and thought a few times, "I don't want to eject anywhere, but especially not here."

...but really, in my mind, I never saw combat. Not personally. I was a spectator to it, and was even directly involved with a bunch of it, but not really in it. Not intimately immersed in it, with bullets whizzing by or explosions close enough to do anything. To whatever extent one might consider that I "saw combat", I have to remind myself that "uhh, I guess I sort of did. Kind of." When I hear that phrase, in my mind, that's someone else, not me, almost like it was before I ever joined the Marines to begin with. Even though I left the base almost every day in my jet...it's different. In my mind, and I'm pretty sure in the minds of most of my friends, we were more or less fobbits, except maybe somewhat more useful.

[Edited on May 25, 2015 at 10:23 AM. Reason : pretty useful in Afghanistan. Useful in Iraq from ~'03-'06 or so. Not much by '08 when I got there.]

5/25/2015 10:11:19 AM

[Edited on May 25, 2015 at 11:40 AM. Reason : ^interesting take]

5/25/2015 11:39:54 AM

and yes, have been in combat and have been in many firefights.

Baquba was a pretty hot place in '06, '07.

5/25/2015 11:50:59 AM

5/25/2015 12:02:41 PM

^^^^At one time, did you want to be "in combat"? Like, do you lament not getting to experience it as you define it?

5/25/2015 5:04:51 PM

double post

[Edited on May 25, 2015 at 7:58 PM. Reason : a]

5/25/2015 7:57:53 PM

Never saw combat, but definitely felt my life was in jeopardy at times (mostly due to the stupidity of those around me)

5/25/2015 7:57:53 PM

^Tell the electric warhead story

5/25/2015 8:03:16 PM

^^^^ Oh hell yes. I always wanted to fly, but I wanted to fly F-18s, Harriers, or Cobra attack helicopters, which do a lot more shooting, and are at least a little more up close and personal.

I was mostly at 20k', jamming stuff. We didn't even have a gun on the jet, and the only missiles I ever shot were at target barges out in the Pacific ocean, haha.


I signed up for the USMC before 9/11; I thought I'd be killing warlords or the LRA or whatever in some African hellhole. I've loved aviation since I was a little kid, and a little bit of the reason I signed up was a desire for travel and adventure in general, but by far the biggest reason I joined the USMC is that there are a lot of awful people around the world doing awful things to innocent people, and I wanted to kill lots of them (I have never had any desire for the adrenaline rush of getting shot at. I would have been perfectly happy just killing the shit out of assholes, in a one-way sort of encounter). After 9/11, that changed the focus of our military adventurism (which I largely am not not a very big fan of, from a policy perspective), but the new targets were mostly plenty terrible and worthy of killing.

That is a short-ish answer, and there are grey areas and "what ifs", but that's a really long discussion, and suffice to say that I've thought plenty about it.

5/25/2015 8:19:10 PM

^^

So I was an ammo troop and spent most of my times around bombs, bullets, flare, missiles, etc..basically anything that went boom, I touched, built, installed or stored

We were unloading some 20mm High Explosive rounds from a UAL



And one of the things that we do is inspect the rounds that come out, mostly for dents/grease and clean them them as needed. These rounds are electrically primed, meaning inorder to fire, the gun system on the aircraft fires a small charge rather than percussion (ie a hammer to a round of a gun). Well, one jackass didn't know what to clean them with, so he grabbed the closest thing he could find, which was STEEL wool. So he picks up a round and starts to take a pad to the bottom of the round...fucking dumbass.

5/25/2015 8:26:08 PM

Infantry

5/25/2015 9:47:23 PM

Quote :

"I was mostly at 20k', jamming stuff. We didn't even have a gun on the jet"

Ok so I'm sure you know there's an old wive's tale about a Prowler back in the day jamming a San Diego radio station to play the Bob's Jammin' on repeat. Is that shit true?

Quote :

" the only missiles I ever shot were at target barges out in the Pacific ocean, haha"

How many $100's of thousands was that per trigger pull? I thought it was [way] more than 2, but Google says otherwise.

5/25/2015 11:29:21 PM

i've been a couple intense rap battles with some m'fkas yadig?

5/26/2015 1:03:18 AM