In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people that I would have otherwise never come in contact with, to that level.
And in my opinion, this is a very healthy thing.
One thing I'd like to share that cracks me up, all these years later. Pardon the forthcoming ramble.
I had been handling guns from a pretty early age, but I was still looking forward to training on the M-16.
Well, at least in the early 90s, there is exactly one (1) day of weapons training in USAF basic training.
In the morning, we got on a bus and went to the ass-end of Lackland AFB where the gun ranges were. We then received our weapons, with no ammo in sight, and 'trained' on them in several hours of classes.
Note, this classroom was just a classroom, with desks, with the normal classroom density. And so 50 young men and women were sitting at desks with M-16s. And, on various cadences, we all held them up, put the clip in, simulated chambering a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
But we had to aim...kind of up and to our left. Because we were never suppose to point the weapon at another person we didn't mean to shoot, loaded or otherwise.
It was an absolutely absurd scene.
Many of my class-mates were openly afraid of handling these weapons, and it showed.
After lunch we marched, weapons slung, over to the firing range. We were to each fire sixty rounds that day. The first thirty were warmup/practice. The second 30 were for qualification. We each lay supine with the weapon on sandbags. Only then were each of us handed three rounds each, which we pushed into the clip. And then we fired those three rounds.
The young lady next to me was terrified of guns, and had never touched one. I noticed that she was closing her eyes before each shot.
After we fired our 30 rounds into the targets, our final scores were calculated. My target had 30 holes tightly grouped in the middle. But there was another hole, off all by itself, right on the edge of the target.
Somehow I managed to score 31 out of 30 that day, though it was recorded as 30.
The young lady next to me repeated 'gun day' twice more, with different flights (groups), before she qualified.
Sorry for the ramble!
The real punch line came when I asked my training instructor, later on, why we bothered with only a single day of weapon training.
He laughed out loud and said something like, fuck if I know. Think about it, Diederich. What do you think would be going on if Airmen were forced to actually use their weapons against an enemy. The war would already be over!
Indeed! The USAF: where the best chance of direct enemy contact comes from becoming one of the few tens of thousands of officers who actually venture into enemy territory on occasion. The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.
Yeah, I thought the same thing when I joined as a 3C0x2 in 99. 10 years later I was still a 3C0x2 (3D0x4 by then I think, I got out shortly after the AFSC changed), but I was attached to an Army infantry unit (3-1 INF) in Afghanistan as part of the ILO, or in lieu of, program where they would take an Airman from a similar career field in lieu of a soldier. They later renamed it to JET, joint expeditionary tasking. I experienced direct enemy contact as an enlisted Air Force computer programmer. About half of our 80-person team was AF, most in on-the-fob support roles like services and supply, but the mechanics, medics, and civil engineers that were out with us every day were all AF, and all enlisted except two of the CE folks.
This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel.
For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.
During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia.
An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle the occasional drunk and disorderly.
He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training.
Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
> Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
That was my experience doing state-side law enforcement at a Space Command base - night shift was especially fun for the weird calls, like complainants worried about "satellites orbiting San Bernardino County" and the "glowing red airship" suspiciously near some antenna arrays with the usual air collision beacons. The usual response was to refer them to public affairs as our office was strictly limited to a terrestrial jurisdiction.
Definitely more lighthearted than being downrange.
I saw a guy do it once at the range, but he was mainly just showing off. The position is well described in [1], which may be of interest to you if you're not solely poking at the grandparent commenter's having confused 'supine' with 'prone'.
> if you're not solely poking at the grandparent commenter's having confused 'supine' with 'prone'
In my experience, people commonly use "lie prone" to mean basically any position, but nobody knows the word "supine" except in its technical meaning contrasting with "prone". Thus, I thought this was worth clarifying; I'd be happy to assume that someone using "prone" in a context that heavily suggested another position just didn't think of "prone" as referring to any position in particular; that seemed like an odd assumption for "supine".
Do you have a suggestion for wording the question so as not to sound insulting?
I'm not sure I do; I read it as smart-alecky because that's what it would have been had I written it, but on reflection I don't suppose you meant it that way, and I didn't intend to suggest in my response that I thought yours insulting.
I suppose I did come off a bit unduly bitchy, though, and I'm sorry for that. Some weeks go by in a moment; others feel like they drag on for months. This last was one of the latter sort, but there was no call for me to go and take that out on you.
Did your M16 have a .22 insert so you did rifle practice with .22 shorts for ammunition? This apparently helped Lackland save money but meant shooting practice was a lot less fun than some of us had hoped. (We had .22s at home to keep the woodchucks down.)
On the other hand the rifle disassembly and cleaning was taught by a woman who knew the weapon inside and out. She was excellent and a lot more soldierly than any of the dweebs in my flight.
We were using the real deal ammo, though we heard talk about how they were moving to the smaller rounds.
Right...it was my experience that the actual teachers and trainers were pretty cool compared to the TIs. Fortunately, our two primary TIs were among the most chill. Our sister flight's senior TI was terrible.
In the RAAF basic training we have our weapons for almost two months, at all times. We have to piquet them at night and weekends, hang them up when we shower, have them slung when we brush our teeth... Clean them daily, do all our marching drills with them. But we still only fire live rounds for one day! Weapons are a total pain to care for I never want to own one myself.
In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people that I would have otherwise never come in contact with, to that level.
And in my opinion, this is a very healthy thing.
One thing I'd like to share that cracks me up, all these years later. Pardon the forthcoming ramble.
I had been handling guns from a pretty early age, but I was still looking forward to training on the M-16.
Well, at least in the early 90s, there is exactly one (1) day of weapons training in USAF basic training.
In the morning, we got on a bus and went to the ass-end of Lackland AFB where the gun ranges were. We then received our weapons, with no ammo in sight, and 'trained' on them in several hours of classes.
Note, this classroom was just a classroom, with desks, with the normal classroom density. And so 50 young men and women were sitting at desks with M-16s. And, on various cadences, we all held them up, put the clip in, simulated chambering a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
But we had to aim...kind of up and to our left. Because we were never suppose to point the weapon at another person we didn't mean to shoot, loaded or otherwise.
It was an absolutely absurd scene.
Many of my class-mates were openly afraid of handling these weapons, and it showed.
After lunch we marched, weapons slung, over to the firing range. We were to each fire sixty rounds that day. The first thirty were warmup/practice. The second 30 were for qualification. We each lay supine with the weapon on sandbags. Only then were each of us handed three rounds each, which we pushed into the clip. And then we fired those three rounds.
The young lady next to me was terrified of guns, and had never touched one. I noticed that she was closing her eyes before each shot.
After we fired our 30 rounds into the targets, our final scores were calculated. My target had 30 holes tightly grouped in the middle. But there was another hole, off all by itself, right on the edge of the target.
Somehow I managed to score 31 out of 30 that day, though it was recorded as 30.
The young lady next to me repeated 'gun day' twice more, with different flights (groups), before she qualified.
Sorry for the ramble!
The real punch line came when I asked my training instructor, later on, why we bothered with only a single day of weapon training.
He laughed out loud and said something like, fuck if I know. Think about it, Diederich. What do you think would be going on if Airmen were forced to actually use their weapons against an enemy. The war would already be over!
Indeed! The USAF: where the best chance of direct enemy contact comes from becoming one of the few tens of thousands of officers who actually venture into enemy territory on occasion. The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way.