Military BS Stories or the last liar wins.

[actaeon277]

but oddly they didn’t consult me about my wishes.

I find that difficult to believe.

The Navy was VERY accommodating of my wishes.

 

[Alamo]

60th anniversary​

The 419th Tactical Fighter Wing says goodbye to the F-105 Thunderchief at Hill Air Force Base June 4, 1984. The farewell was complete with a 24-ship flyover to commemorate the occasion. The event saluted an aircraft that played an important part in USAF history and focused on the continuing modernization of the Air Force Reserve. (Archive photo by Raymond Massa)

https://media.defense.gov/2015/Sep/24/2001304406/-1/-1/0/150924-F-IL704-007.JPG


That’s a pretty nice formation.


The 419th TFW, an Air Force Reserve unit, was the last operational unit of F105 Thunderchiefs in the Air Force. The 105s were replaced with F-16s starting in 1983. Two years later the 419th won the Air Force’s Gunsmoke gunnery competition for fighters.

The 419th lists some interesting stuff on their website:

1998, Kuwait, Operation Southern Watch, 419th Wing’s 466th FS became the first F-16 unit to deploy precision guided munitions in combat.

1999, Operation Northern Watch, the 466FS became the first F-16 unit to employ the Litening II targeting pod in combat.

466 FS became first F-16 unit deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom and are credited with destroying important Al Qaeda assets, and provided close-air support to ground troops.

466 FS first to fly F-16 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In 2007 they became part of a Total Force Initiative where an Air Force Reserve Wing and an active duty wing (in this case the 388th) would co-locate and fly and maintain the same aircraft and deploy together.

2017 419th Wing joined the 388th FW for the F-35A’s first deployment to Europe in April and the aircraft’s first Indo-Asia-Pacific deployment for a Theater Security Package mission in November.

In April 2019, 419th FW pilots, maintainers, and support personnel deployed to Al Dhafra Air Base*, United Arab Emirates, as part of the very first F-35A deployment to the Middle East. Working with the active duty 388th FW, they also conducted the F-35A’s first combat strike.

—————-

*Al Dhafra hosts the 380th Expeditionary Wing, originally formed during OEF I in the days after 9/11. It is composed entirely of TDY units and TDY individuals from various parts of the Air Force. The 419th/388th F-35As would have constituted one (or more) of the 380th’s squadrons and been given an Expeditionary squadron number.

While I was there, we had a KC-10 squadron, a U-2 squadron, and a Global Hawk squadron. Each brought their own pilots and maintainers with them. We also had expeditionary security forces, medical, communications, and engineer squadrons, all pieced together from individual officers and airmen from all over the Air Force.

The 380th Wing staff and group staffs were also pieced together from individuals tasked from around the Air Force. IIRC I was in the 2nd or 3rd rotation to the 380th, so was the second or third Executive Officer. This was pretty early in the history of OEF, so there was still a lot to figure out. It was interesting deployment in some respects.

 

[KellyinAvon]

https://media.defense.gov/2015/Sep/24/2001304406/-1/-1/0/150924-F-IL704-007.JPGView attachment 356970

View attachment 356971
That’s a pretty nice formation.


The 419th TFW, an Air Force Reserve unit, was the last operational unit of F105 Thunderchiefs in the Air Force. The 105s were replaced with F-16s starting in 1983. Two years later the 419th won the Air Force’s Gunsmoke gunnery competition for fighters.

The 419th lists some interesting stuff on their website:

1998, Kuwait, Operation Southern Watch, 419th Wing’s 466th FS became the first F-16 unit to deploy precision guided munitions in combat.

1999, Operation Northern Watch, the 466FS became the first F-16 unit to employ the Litening II targeting pod in combat.

466 FS became first F-16 unit deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom and are credited with destroying important Al Qaeda assets, and provided close-air support to ground troops.

466 FS first to fly F-16 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In 2007 they became part of a Total Force Initiative where an Air Force Reserve Wing and an active duty wing (in this case the 388th) would co-locate and fly and maintain the same aircraft and deploy together.

2017 419th Wing joined the 388th FW for the F-35A’s first deployment to Europe in April and the aircraft’s first Indo-Asia-Pacific deployment for a Theater Security Package mission in November.

In April 2019, 419th FW pilots, maintainers, and support personnel deployed to Al Dhafra Air Base*, United Arab Emirates, as part of the very first F-35A deployment to the Middle East. Working with the active duty 388th FW, they also conducted the F-35A’s first combat strike.

—————-

*Al Dhafra hosts the 380th Expeditionary Wing, originally formed during OEF I in the days after 9/11. It is composed entirely of TDY units and TDY individuals from various parts of the Air Force. The 419th/388th F-35As would have constituted one (or more) of the 380th’s squadrons and been given an Expeditionary squadron number.

While I was there, we had a KC-10 squadron, a U-2 squadron, and a Global Hawk squadron. Each brought their own pilots and maintainers with them. We also had expeditionary security forces, medical, communications, and engineer squadrons, all pieced together from individual officers and airmen from all over the Air Force.

The 380th Wing staff and group staffs were also pieced together from individuals tasked from around the Air Force. IIRC I was in the 2nd or 3rd rotation to the 380th, so was the second or third Executive Officer. This was pretty early in the history of OEF, so there was still a lot to figure out. It was interesting deployment in some respects.

IIRC one-third of the Thud fleet was shot down in Vietnam.

 

[Alamo]

IIRC one-third of the Thud fleet was shot down in Vietnam.

That’s correct. 300+ out of 800+ built. It was both CAS/ground attack and wild weasel.

 

[actaeon277]

I

ummm



errrr


what?

 

[actaeon277]

And the nukes are like..

 

[KellyinAvon]

It is 6 June (known forever to history as D-Day.) This is the Military BS Stories thread.

While standing on hallowed ground will Slow Joe claim he lost an uncle at Omaha Beach? Not the one eaten by cannibals, a different uncle.

OK I'm done.

 

[actaeon277]

 

[actaeon277]

And then, there was this time, when I was explaining to the Captain that the Pre-Critical Checkoff was done correctly, even though I used the wrong paperwork.

Option 1) I did the procedure the way I was supposed to (with a 2nd operator to verify). Point by Point, word for word. Following it exactly.
Which is wrong, because we had the wrong paperwork.

or

Option 2) I did the procedure (with a 2nd operator to verify), but instead of following word by word, I did the 62 procedure from memory.
But my memory was good.

or

Option 3)
There is no option 3.
Only option was to say option 2.
then, when the Capt. pulled out the procedure and told me to read off the correct way, from my memory, the section that the paperwork was wrong on... while he verified what I said with the correct procedure.


Also..
remember that filling out the wrong paperwork meant that we had to go topside for radio traffic, to signal Naval Reactors (NR) and tell them what happened, in which case, no matter what my answer, the Captain would be "pooped" on by NR.
So, he's probably not happy to start with.
But.. I read off the procedure from memory... correctly.

And then, the procedure that takes about 4 hours for a beginner, that was done in 2.5 hours...

 

[actaeon277]

Same Captain then said, Petty Officer actaeon, you and Petty Officer #2 did this... this time.

Who did the paperwork on the startup BEFORE last.
Capt... that would be myself and Petty Officer #3.

Petty Officer actaeon, weren't you the one that broke my High Accuracy pressure gauge that we had to have specially flown out to us.

Yes sir.. That was myself and Petty Officer #4.


Petty Officer actaeon, I'm going to have to start keeping you by yourself. You are contaminating my crew. You've just listed almost the entire Reactor Controls Division.


Yes Sir.

After all, what else am I going to say.
The man made the "call" to NR.
Received instructions to SHUTDOWN the reactor in the middle of the ocean, and then conduct a normal long form startup, with the CORRECT paperwork, AND an officer to supervise... just in case.
And that the procedure should probably be closer to 4 hours, in case anyone was questioning if it was done right.

And, because I admitted fault, and didn't lie on stuff... I managed to keep from having my head cut off.
Of the 2 Captains I served under.... he was the BEST.

 

[Alamo]

So random memory belches up out of nowhere…

I conclude the meeting for my source selection team, and they happily rush for the door. As soon it opens the lieutenant who has been waiting impatiently outside rushes in and blurts those fateful words:

“Sir I really need to talk to you!”

O happy day.

He explains that my secretary and one of the Navy civilian engineers got into a huge screaming match and threatened each other over the use of a copier.

This is a joint program office, staffed and run primarily by the Air Force, but with considerable representation from other services. In my particular branch or team, I have as direct reports an Air Force GS05 secretary, several Navy civilian engineers, a couple Air Force lieutenants (engineers), and an Army major. I think the Army guy was Signal Corps(?), and he didn’t really report to me for anything other than administrivia. He had to be someplace on the org chart, and I had half of the GPS user equipment devices (receivers), and he was the Army’s project officer for the PLGR, so he ended up in my branch.

I also had numerous other people matrixed to my source selection efforts. They didn’t report to me for official evaluation purposes (although I had a big input), but they perform tasks we needed done for the source selection. Contracts, Logisticians, Finance, etc. Mostly Air Force civilians.

So this is basically a big office building full of people doing office type work. Important office type work, developing, and buying GPS equipment for the entire department of defense, lotsa dollars, paperwork intensive.

This includes copy machines. We were just getting into networks and email and so forth but the computers are still mostly being used to print final documents like orders and contracts and such, which then of course had to be copied several times.

So there was this big industrial grade copier in the hallway, and it had a wee little problem: the paper feed on it didn’t work properly. There was a request in to get the copy guy to come fix it but of course, that takes time, this is the government. So most people knew that if you wanted to copy, a big stack of paper, walk around the corner to the other hallway, where there was a different copier.

My secretary, who is about as useless as they come, and was, in fact, in the process of being terminated for falsifying her time sheets, something that my predecessor had discovered and initiated against her. However, being the government, and her being a civil servant, this took a long time. I inherited the problem, and we were basically just waiting around for the ONE lawyer on base who reviewed all these things to verify that all was in order before she got the acts. This took months, maybe close to a year?

So you can imagine how motivated she was. And the icing on the cake was that under the civil service rules, once we had a proposed punishment against her, we could levy no other punishments until that one was resolved. Didn’t matter what she did, we could not formally punish her in the any manner until the current issue was resolved. Basically, I just left her alone in her tiny little outer office and hoped she wouldn’t commit suicide or go postal or something that would be a lot more paperwork.

But for some reason, she came up with something that had to be copied, so she went to the copy machine, dropped it in the hopper not knowing that the feeder didn't really work, hit copy, and went to the little girls room.

Along comes one of my Navy civilian engineers with something that he wants to copy. He was a very quiet, meek really, very conscientious, polite, and studious Vietnamese guy. He and his brother had been in Vietnam as teens when the Commies took over, and they tried to escape at least three times. Once their boat foundered and they just got washed back up on the shore, another time, pirates caught them at sea, took everything they had, and they ended up having to go back to Vietnam, but the third time was a charm, and they got picked up by somebody who took them to the Philippines. Eventually they made their way to the United States, he learned English, went to university, got an engineering degree, and got hired by the Navy.

He gets to the copier, sees a stack of stuff in the hopper that’s not going anywhere, and he sets it to the side so that he can manually copy whatever he’s working on.

Along comes my useless secretary, and she sees what he’s done. Being high strung, always under stress about her imminent termination, and generally just too tightly wrapped, she starts screaming at him about it. My normally meek, polite, studious engineer blows a fuse and starts yelling back at her because of course, it was stupid to leave a stack of paper in a paper feeder that doesn’t work.

And it went downhill from there.

I interviewed various witnesses, and apparently it was quite a row. She called him a “boat person”, which was technically true, but she wasn’t using it in a technical sense. She also told him that her “Chinese husband“ would get him, maybe with a knife? That part was a little unclear. He yelled back at her, and apparently used some American slang term he had learned that did not reflect favorably on females. And so on.

And of course, I can’t just tell everybody to shut up and get back to work because damn near everybody in the building heard this happening. I have to do a formal investigation because unkind things were said about various nationalities and sexism and so forth. And also, of course, I could do absolutely nothing to my secretary formally. I did tell her to stay in her office and don’t copy her personal **** on the copier.

When I had to counsel the Navy engineer, he was completely mortified that he had lost his cool, and that he had embarrassed himself and me and the Air Force and the Navy and the Vietnamese people and pretty much everybody else under the Sun. I wagged my finger at the him, told him to stay away from my secretary, even if he had to walk the long way around the building, and with any luck she’d be gone in a couple months. Wrote an official memorandum for record documenting my investigation and counselings, and filed it away just in case until I could throw it out once I got orders for another assignment.

The things we do for God and country.

 

[actaeon277]

So random memory belches up out of nowhere…

I conclude the meeting for my source selection team, and they happily rush for the door. As soon it opens the lieutenant who has been waiting impatiently outside rushes in and blurts those fateful words:

“Sir I really need to talk to you!”

O happy day.

He explains that my secretary and one of the Navy civilian engineers got into a huge screaming match and threatened each other over the use of a copier.

This is a joint program office, staffed and run primarily by the Air Force, but with considerable representation from other services. In my particular branch or team, I have as direct reports an Air Force GS05 secretary, several Navy civilian engineers, a couple Air Force lieutenants (engineers), and an Army major. I think the Army guy was Signal Corps(?), and he didn’t really report to me for anything other than administrivia. He had to be someplace on the org chart, and I had half of the GPS user equipment devices (receivers), and he was the Army’s project officer for the PLGR, so he ended up in my branch.

I also had numerous other people matrixed to my source selection efforts. They didn’t report to me for official evaluation purposes (although I had a big input), but they perform tasks we needed done for the source selection. Contracts, Logisticians, Finance, etc. Mostly Air Force civilians.

So this is basically a big office building full of people doing office type work. Important office type work, developing, and buying GPS equipment for the entire department of defense, lotsa dollars, paperwork intensive.

This includes copy machines. We were just getting into networks and email and so forth but the computers are still mostly being used to print final documents like orders and contracts and such, which then of course had to be copied several times.

So there was this big industrial grade copier in the hallway, and it had a wee little problem: the paper feed on it didn’t work properly. There was a request in to get the copy guy to come fix it but of course, that takes time, this is the government. So most people knew that if you wanted to copy, a big stack of paper, walk around the corner to the other hallway, where there was a different copier.

My secretary, who is about as useless as they come, and was, in fact, in the process of being terminated for falsifying her time sheets, something that my predecessor had discovered and initiated against her. However, being the government, and her being a civil servant, this took a long time. I inherited the problem, and we were basically just waiting around for the ONE lawyer on base who reviewed all these things to verify that all was in order before she got the acts. This took months, maybe close to a year?

So you can imagine how motivated she was. And the icing on the cake was that under the civil service rules, once we had a proposed punishment against her, we could levy no other punishments until that one was resolved. Didn’t matter what she did, we could not formally punish her in the any manner until the current issue was resolved. Basically, I just left her alone in her tiny little outer office and hoped she wouldn’t commit suicide or go postal or something that would be a lot more paperwork.

But for some reason, she came up with something that had to be copied, so she went to the copy machine, dropped it in the hopper not knowing that the feeder didn't really work, hit copy, and went to the little girls room.

Along comes one of my Navy civilian engineers with something that he wants to copy. He was a very quiet, meek really, very conscientious, polite, and studious Vietnamese guy. He and his brother had been in Vietnam as teens when the Commies took over, and they tried to escape at least three times. Once their boat foundered and they just got washed back up on the shore, another time, pirates caught them at sea, took everything they had, and they ended up having to go back to Vietnam, but the third time was a charm, and they got picked up by somebody who took them to the Philippines. Eventually they made their way to the United States, he learned English, went to university, got an engineering degree, and got hired by the Navy.

He gets to the copier, sees a stack of stuff in the hopper that’s not going anywhere, and he sets it to the side so that he can manually copy whatever he’s working on.

Along comes my useless secretary, and she sees what he’s done. Being high strung, always under stress about her imminent termination, and generally just too tightly wrapped, she starts screaming at him about it. My normally meek, polite, studious engineer blows a fuse and starts yelling back at her because of course, it was stupid to leave a stack of paper in a paper feeder that doesn’t work.

And it went downhill from there.

I interviewed various witnesses, and apparently it was quite a row. She called him a “boat person”, which was technically true, but she wasn’t using it in a technical sense. She also told him that her “Chinese husband“ would get him, maybe with a knife? That part was a little unclear. He yelled back at her, and apparently used some American slang term he had learned that did not reflect favorably on females. And so on.

And of course, I can’t just tell everybody to shut up and get back to work because damn near everybody in the building heard this happening. I have to do a formal investigation because unkind things were said about various nationalities and sexism and so forth. And also, of course, I could do absolutely nothing to my secretary formally. I did tell her to stay in her office and don’t copy her personal **** on the copier.

When I had to counsel the Navy engineer, he was completely mortified that he had lost his cool, and that he had embarrassed himself and me and the Air Force and the Navy and the Vietnamese people and pretty much everybody else under the Sun. I wagged my finger at the him, told him to stay away from my secretary, even if he had to walk the long way around the building, and with any luck she’d be gone in a couple months. Wrote an official memorandum for record documenting my investigation and counselings, and filed it away just in case until I could throw it out once I got orders for another assignment.

The things we do for God and country.

I hate dipsh**s ruining it for good people.

Which is why I usually got in so much trouble for making their life difficult.

 

[Nazgul]

Not sure this reflects well on me or not.
SGT Don was on duty after we returned to the States from a 6 month cruise. Everyone that rated it went on leave. The ship went into a sort of holding mode for a week or so, not really doing much to let the crew decompress. Not much going on. I didn't have anything at home so delayed going on leave.

I had 24 hr duty as the NCO In Charge of MARDET, we still had serious security duties to perform. Change of duty at 0800. The LT comes in late, around 0600, says "SGT Don take the Marines to PT and let them go for the day at 0900. Then he went back home. OK ! an easy day and I could get some rest.

We head out onto the pier and form up. Do an easy run, should have been 3 miles minimum, but I shortened it to 2 miles. On the pier about 45 minutes of PT, again should have been much longer. All of us put a lot of effort in it in anticipation of an early/easy day.....except one sh*tbag Marine PVT we had, a known slacker.

I asked him what was going on when every other Marine was getting it on he was just ....well..slacking. He laughed. I dismissed everyone else except him. Remember we are on the pier. I gave him the option of 50 pushups and we go or he could be written up...again. He said something to the effect of F-you.

I had enough and hit him in the face as hard as I could without damaging him. And walked off to shower.

Our SGT Major was an immensely large, impressive and scary Marine, with lots of bullet holes from 4 tours in Viet Nam. He was 6' 5" and filled a doorway with muscle. He had come in to check on the duty roster. Said dipsh*t went into his office immediately and wanted to complain about me. I was drying off and shaving when Top came into the head and wanted to know what happened. I told him, his face showed he was seriously pissed. At this point I was not sure if I had crossed the line so was concerned for my immediate future. I got into uniform and waited to see what would happen.

He came out of the office and dragged the PVT into his state room which had sheet metal walls directly adjacent to the office. He often "Counseled" Marines there, for good or bad reasons. After the door slammed we heard his very loud voice and someone being banged repeatedly on the wall. Said PVT exited in a terrified state and walked by me without looking at me. The SGT Major came out got right in my face and literally growled at me. Turned around and left. That was the end of the story. The slacker eventually got written up again for something serious, lost his security clearance and was sent somewhere else.

Top and I became good friends, he helped get me into an Officers program and we traded books a lot , pre-internet, VHS and cellphone days. I left the ship in 1977, He was later killed in the Beirut Barracks bombing in 1983.

Don

 

[Alamo]

He was later killed in the Beirut Barracks bombing in 1983.

Ugh. How sad.

I had enough and hit him in the face as hard as I could without damaging him.

I was tempted on occasion, but … officer, civilians, eh.

Eventually the ONE labor lawyer on base reviewed her termination package, approved it, and she was terminated. She appealed to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which to my knowledge never met a civilian punishment it didn’t want to reduce or overturn, and it said termination was too harsh and kicked it back. At that time there were still post-cold war reductions going on and incentive programs to encourage civilians to leave civil service. So the personnel people hooked her up with an option to take a $25K lump-sum severance and resign. Which she was bright enough to take.

I have worked with some really excellent civil servants, who were credits to the nation. But when you get a bad one you can hardly get rid of him or her with dynamite.

 

[actaeon277]

Not sure this reflects well on me or not.

Sometimes, "fan room" counseling is needed .
No matter what that "feel good" counselors say.

Not a first resort.
But definitely on the tool belt.

 

[SnoopLoggyDog]

Sometimes, "fan room" counseling is needed .
No matter what that "feel good" counselors say.

Not a first resort.
But definitely on the tool belt.

I witnessed a few wall-to-wall counseling sessions in the 80's. Always got the point across and was very effective in improving performance.

 

[actaeon277]

 

[actaeon277]

When people show the overhead view of a battleship firing, and they say the water shows that the guns are actually moving the ship sideways...
They're wrong.






Observe a side view.
You can see the water kicking up, because of the BLAST of the guns, NOT from moving the ship.

 

[actaeon277]

 

[repeter1977]

I was at military funeral at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio a while back. There were so many funerals going on that day that the firing squad would fire their rifles, right face and march directly to the next funeral, fire, march to the next funeral, lather rinse repeat. They only stopped to fire the rifles.

This reminds me, in 2005 I'd just got back from deployment to Iraq and casualties were going worse. Fort Hood had to start doing one large memorial service a month because there were too many to do individually. We were upset but also understood.