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Yes, this is all well stated. In basic training, I ended up being very close to a lot of different people that I would have otherwise never come in contact wit

Yes, this is all well stated. 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.

hodgesrm 10y ago
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.
- Diederich 10y ago
  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.
snerbles 10y ago
> The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way. 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.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Yeah, I was aware of this, but didn't mention it. 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.

hodgesrm 10y ago

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.

Diederich 10y ago
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.

snerbles 10y ago

> The 'grunts', the enlisted, no way. 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.

Diederich 10y ago
Yeah, I was aware of this, but didn't mention it. 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.