MILITARY SERVICE REQUIREMENTS

[Ninurta]

 My second tour was with the 75th Inf. Div. yes I should have known better. 

LRRP?

.

[guohua]

 My second tour was with the 75th Inf. Div. yes I should have known better. 

LRRP?

.

Yes.

[guohua]

Hi, Mr. G. here, I knew of two in our Infantry Platoon in Vietnam in 1969.
One was our radio man, carried a PRC-77 and it had to weigh 20 or 30 pounds with the big ass battery and then the extra battery and antenas.
He carried that thru the Jungle and slept with the hand mic on his ear encase Battalion called or @"727Sky"  needed an LZ cleared.

The other gay guy was one of our assistant M-60 Gunner and he carried the Heavy ass Tripod and a M-79 with Phishet and HE rounds.
Would not have known, except myself, those two and my best friend went on R&R at Pattaya Beach in Thailand and they were inseparable day and night, especially night.
That was okay, a shock at first but we just didn't care, these two guys were very dependable when contact was made or in an abush setting just as good or better than most I served with.

The problem today I think is they've been programed to think of themselves as Victims and are owed special privileges.  
The gays of my day in the Military didn't Flaunt their gayness or demand to be treated special, they did their job and no one cared so much.
JMHO

And that is as it should be. They don't need to tell, I ain't gonna ask. No one cares. Just do your damned job - no one gives a shit where you choose to park your pecker as long as it's not in their wife.

I can see transgenders being a little more problematic, though - where would you assign them? Which ratings systems would they have to follow for PE - male or female? It has the potential to just get way too confusing, for both them and the military, and especially the soldiers who have to work and tiptoe around them.

A gay man is still a man, so you know where to assign him, and what PE standards he has to adhere to. Same for a gay woman - she's still a woman. Trans is a whole new dimension, a whole new can of worms with no straight answers - no pun intended. The military likes straight answers, and solid structure.

.

Right, That is correct, I mean when we had gay men in the Infantry with us, they kept to themselves and didn't do any limp wrist stuff, they were Tough as Nails
I can not say anything about the women in the Military at that time who were gay, but I'm sure they served just as Bravely and Died Just As We Did.
You know, a man will cry for his Mother and Father when he's hit bad and his buddies will cry with him as he dies out there in a fire fight or in a the bug infested jungle that doesn't make him or his buddies any less of a man or woman. 

I didn't work with Females there and I'm sure they did their Damn Job and Died the same as everyone else.
That is how it should be.
You are what you are, don't use chemicals to change that, well at least not in the Military, that is how I think about this Gender Binding Crap!

*handing keyboard back to the boss*

[F2d5thCav]

 My second tour was with the 75th Inf. Div. yes I should have known better. 

LRRP?

.

Yes.

75th Infantry, ranging across the countryside.  Long walks, dry rations.  Hard core, oh yeah ... o7

Cheers

[Ninurta]

Right, That is correct, I mean when we had gay men in the Infantry with us, they kept to themselves and didn't do any limp wrist stuff, they were Tough as Nails

That's a fact - not just in the military, but on the streets as well. When I was taking my police training, the instructor had been undercover in Richmond, VA, for several years, and stressed that gay guys CAN, and if given a reason WILL, whip the shit out of you. They're tough as nails, and the limp-wristed stereotype is, as I understand it, in the minority. I've been friend with both types out in the world, and truth be told wouldn't want to piss either off

You know, a man will cry for his Mother and Father when he's hit bad and his buddies will cry with him as he dies out there in a fire fight or in a the bug infested jungle that doesn't make him or his buddies any less of a man or woman. 

Those are the ones that haunt me. Oddly, the ones who had a section of skull peel away and crap splash out of their craniums just because I twitched a trigger bother me not at all. Probably makes me some variety of psychopath, or something wrong with me, but they don't. If it was them or me, I chose it to be them. End of. But the ones of my own that died crying and screaming, they come to visit occasionally. That's why I keep turning down militia positions when they're offered. I'm not sending any more fine young starry-eyed boys into that.

I still don't cry - or if I do, I don't get caught at it. My son caught me once, and Grace may have - but if she did, she was kind enough to never mention it. When my son caught me, it was enough to turn him from joining the military himself. He was pretty gung-ho up to that point, and after it, it was like flipping a switch. No mo gung-ho.

I didn't cry when my dad died, and he was my world. Still haven't, and it's been 22 years in a couple of months. Tears are reserved.

You are what you are, don't use chemicals to change that, well at least not in the Military, that is how I think about this Gender Binding Crap!

*handing keyboard back to the boss*

Yup. What I don't understand is the need of some folks - on either side of the equation - to make an issue of it. Folks is folks, and I see no need to put them in boxes, nor do I see a need for them to put themselves in a box, and then crow about it. I'm neither intimidated nor creeped out by gay folks, and don't understand why anyone is. If they are secure in themselves, why would someone else be able to give them the willies? 

When I was in high school, I spent a summer at a college learning computer programming. This was back when BASIC was the main language, you still used line numbers to process the code, computers filled up an entire floor of a building, and IBM punch cards were the way you communicated with one. There was a gay guy there, a flamin' limp-wrister, who was ostracized by all the rest of the guys in the dorm. Even then, I didn't understand it. I was the only one who would go sit in his room and talk with him. Now, no shit, he did the mud masks and facial peels and the whole nine yards, and that took some getting used to, but after a few hours of talking, all that crap just fades into the background. You get used to it, it's just the way he was. He never once made any kind of advance on me, Just a scrawny kid, no threat of any sort. Sharp kid, had a pretty high IQ, could talk on most any subject including astronomy, programming, and physics.

Some of the other guys - we were all teenagers at the time - thought they'd give me a ration of shit and make me join their anti-gay club, but I shut that down pretty fast. I just told them they could handle their world, and I'd handle mine, and that I gave no shits what they thought of me - but, that if they wanted to give me any shit over it, that was the time, and we'd get this ball rolling. Then I just shut up and gave them "the look" and waited. Ever one of them looked like I had just slapped him, and walked away without even muttering. Couldn't even look me in the eye.

Fuck 'em. Folks is folks. You take 'em as they are, or you don't bother 'em at all, and just let 'em get on with their thing without you.

.

[guohua]

Yup, I agree.
  @"Ninurta" 
Before I hand this back to the woman with the Whip, Yes, My Lovely Wife.
My Friend, We've All Shed A Tear and Some More Than Others.
The Ghost, yes I'm Haunted By My Friends That Gave All, Yes I see them in my dreams.
One day one of my old friends who died to young will hold out his hand for me and I will walk among Real Men Again, be them gay or straight, they were and are my friends.

*Wipes away tear mutters to self to be strong and hands keyboard to the boss*

[F2d5thCav]

Yup, I agree.
  @"Ninurta" 
Before I hand this back to the woman with the Whip, Yes, My Lovely Wife.
My Friend, We've All Shed A Tear and Some More Than Others.
The Ghost, yes I'm Haunted By My Friends That Gave All, Yes I see them in my dreams.
One day one of my old friends who died to young will hold out his hand for me and I will walk among Real Men Again, be them gay or straight, they were and are my friends.

*Wipes away tear mutters to self to be strong and hands keyboard to the boss*

Fiddler's Green.

Cheers

[Ninurta]

 My second tour was with the 75th Inf. Div. yes I should have known better. 

LRRP?

.

Yes.

75th Infantry, ranging across the countryside.  Long walks, dry rations.  Hard core, oh yeah ... o7

Cheers

DRY rations? Mostly cold, but dryer than normal, I reckon. Canteen cup coffee "fortified with vitamin C". If you were lucky, you had a little canteen stove to heat the coffee water on. If you were even luckier, you had a trioxane bar to break a piece off of to heat it with. Learning how to make icing for the cake out of the creamer and sugar packets that were supposed to be for the coffee, just to make the cake a little less dry...

It was Vietnam graduate LRRPs who taught me the fine art of Ranger patrolling in squad and fire team sized units. Nowadays, I think they send them out mostly in company strength or larger, but LRRPs were a special breed. I had a cousin who was in Co. C, 75th Inf, who sat on a rooftop in Beirut for 17 hours in the early 80's when they blew up the Marines. Whole company sat there, for 17 hours, then got pulled out. never got the GO. It was supposed to be a retaliation raid.

Surving LRRPs are pretty rare. There weren't that many to begin with, and they had a high attrition rate. I used to have a t-shirt with the Recondo School logo on the upper left chest. Only had one guy ever stop me - it was in a court house and he was in a suit - and ask me if I knew what "Recondo" was. I did. I even had the t-shirt to show for it.

.

[drussell41]

I know nothing about the military. Aren't there non-combat support roles that these people would be completely capable and qualified to perform?

From what I can see of various encounters in Iraq/Afghanistan, people in support roles can be thrust into battle conditions pretty quickly.   I'm specifically thinking of one woman who was just a a driver in a convoy when they came under attack and attacks into things like the Green Zone.   I agree with the Marines, "Every Marine a Rifleman".   If you can't do basic warrior skills, you shouldn't be in a war zone.   Things can happen quickly and unexpectedly. 

If you're talking about putting them in positions in CONUS or allied countries, that would be okay except flexibility is a good thing.   If you need an X, it would be nice if X could be stationed anywhere versus just places where it's safe.

If people who can't meet military requirements want to serve, there's always DOD civil service.  It's what I ended up doing.

[F2d5thCav]

@"Ninurta"

I was told it meant "reconnaissance commando" but that was years after we had departed Vietnam.

Did get to try the LRRP rations.  I guess in some ways MRE's were modeled after those.

Yeah, the long-range ops are hazardous.

Cheers

[F2d5thCav]

@"drussell41" 

Heck, even the Civil Service people can find themselves in harm's way now.  And contractors -- lost a bunch of those guys in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Uncounted losses, most of them prior-service people.

Cheers

[Ninurta]

@"Ninurta"

I was told it meant "reconnaissance commando" but that was years after we had departed Vietnam.

Did get to try the LRRP rations.  I guess in some ways MRE's were modeled after those.

Yeah, the long-range ops are hazardous.

Cheers

Yup, that's what it means. They ran a Recondo School at Ft. Lewis up until about 1978, and as far as I know now still run one out of Bragg. Small classes, and only run 5 or so classes a year.

I never ate any LRRP rations, but from what I understand they were a freeze-dried mess packaged like MRE's. I reckon that would cut down on weight, but you still had to hydrate them or choke, which meant carrying more water or purification tabs. I ate a lot of C-rats, which were somewhat wetter, but you paid for that wet in weight. Ate a lot of them cold, right out of the cans. Still have a P-38 to open them with on my keychain.

.

[F2d5thCav]

@"Ninurta" 

Yeah, I used to love the canned fruit in C rations.

LRRP rations were very dry, drier than MREs.  They needed water for sure.  Cut back on one thing and another requirement increases, it seems.

Also liked when the C-rats had cigarettes.  Being a non-smoker, they made for good trading.  Some were very careful about their rations, making sure the "green eggs and ham" were available for breakfast (smiling).

I did a tiny bit of patrol training.  Amazing at night how someone can walk right by and not realize someone else is there.  Not so amazing was almost getting trampled by cows when we wandered into a pasture and spooked the herd into a stampede.  

Cheers

[Ninurta]

@"Ninurta" 

Yeah, I used to love the canned fruit in C rations.

LRRP rations were very dry, drier than MREs.  They needed water for sure.  Cut back on one thing and another requirement increases, it seems.

Also liked when the C-rats had cigarettes.  Being a non-smoker, they made for good trading.  Some were very careful about their rations, making sure the "green eggs and ham" were available for breakfast (smiling).

I did a tiny bit of patrol training.  Amazing at night how someone can walk right by and not realize someone else is there.  Not so amazing was almost getting trampled by cows when we wandered into a pasture and spooked the herd into a stampede.  

Cheers

I've got a case of FEMA MRE's here now. They're... different. Packed like MRE's, except the outer bag is clear, and they've got no salt and damned little in the way of meat in them. No meat, actually, that I could detect. They've got a giant Tootsie roll in every one that I'm pretty sure I can't eat, certain it would cost me some teeth. Have to carry extra salt to make them edible, but they have the heaters in them, so it's a trade off, I reckon.

I used to own the night, went anywhere I wanted with no flashlight, and never had much trouble. Some stormy nights were a little rough, as they were too dark even for me, and I would have to wait for lightning to flash to scope out the next leg of my route.

I understand about the cattle. I camped on a ridge one night, and woke up the next morning with the sky darker than it ought to be. Turns out it was a big black bull, probably weighed about 3000 pounds, grazing right over top of me. had one hoof at each of my 4 quarters, but on the ground, and not on me. I was too scared to move, as that bull was not something I wanted to spook with his hooves that close to me, so I laid still and waited to see if he was going to step into the middle of me at any point. I guess he thought I was a log, and he treated me like one - stepped over me as he stepped away. I still waited a while, and didn't move until he was nearly out of sight. Big black bull balls right over your head is not a welcoming sight first thing in the morning!

-----------------------------------------

But to get back on track:

I've been thinking about that gay guy in college, and figured out that the reason I accepted him was down to an English teacher I had in high school. She was probably the best teacher I ever had, and I dearly loved that woman. She had a son who was very effeminate - carried his books like a girl, scooted his feet and swished his ass like one, dressed "unisex", kept a perm in his hair when perms were not a guy thing. He started going to school there in the 10th grade - she brought him in from another school somewhere else, because I reckon he'd had trouble there, and she wanted to keep him close after that. That poor fella took a lot of shit, and somewhere in my head, when I ran into the other fella at the college, I determined that someone had to keep him from having to take the same kind of shit, and if no one else would do it, then that had to be me. His ma wasn't there to watch out for him.

So my attitude was probably installed in my by a high school English teacher many, many years ago.

.

[F2d5thCav]

Big black bull balls right over your head is not a welcoming sight first thing in the morning!

What a missed opportunity, @"Ninurta" , you could have had half a Corsican stew , quite the "local delicacy" I've heard.

I ran across some gay guys and girls in the Army.  They did their job and nobody much cared about their sexual orientation.

Cheers

[drussell41]

@"drussell41" 

Heck, even the Civil Service people can find themselves in harm's way now.  And contractors -- lost a bunch of those guys in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Uncounted losses, most of them prior-service people.

Cheers

True.    Contractors.....my husband was one because USAF wouldn't send him (CMSgt), so he retired earlier than he would have liked and went anyway.   When they hung the burned bodies of contractors from a bridge, it was not a good time for me.  

One of his friends was beheaded there, Ken Bigley.  He was a civil engineer who had a house in the Mansour District.  The terrorists disabled the generator, and when they went out to check it, he was kidnapped.  It haunts me.   He even had basic military training (draftee earlier in life); how much less would I hope that a completely untrained civilian would have been okay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_hostages_in_Iraq

To this day, I would be okay with the summary execution of all Al-Qaeda asswipes, along with Moktada Al-Sadr and all his buddies. The latter nearly got my husband at Al Kut. No, I don't believe in letting bygones be bygones.

[guohua]

Reconnaissance with commando style intrusion into the rear area of the N. VC command and control caves and tunnels to wreak havoc and hit and run swift attacks at night with hasty ambush sites set up with claymore mines and grenades with the fuse cut back to 1 second approximately and set to trip wires.

C-rations, we didn't have dry rations in 68 to 70.
Just the thought of a John Wayne bar or the peanut butter and crackers make my mouth water for more.
We use to trade the packs of 4 cigarettes for a brand we like with other, My favorite was the Pall Malls, Chesterfield,Lucky Strike and Marlboro was great, 
Wiston and L&M tasted like Shit and the Menthol's where easy to trade to our Black Members for maybe a pound cake or more beans and weenies.

You had everything you needed, toilet paper, tooth pick, gum, humidity proof matches and your p-38.