[X] My Assistant

[Crakkerjakk]

Lets see, unit mottos... 3rd TSB(Transportation Support Battalion) "First in, last out"
8th Comm, Charlie Co, "First to go, Last to know"(unofficial)
Don't know if the 26th MEU had an official motto. Since I'm at liberty to make one up, I'll choose one from the speech the CO gave us before we went in country, "You can have libbo after we kill everyone."(Libbo=Liberty, aka time off, and the best part of being on a Mediterranean float.)

Also, a quick word on the difference between Hooah and Oorah. Hooah is what the army says. It's long, drawn out, and sounds like someone is sodomizing a drugged up pig. Who-ah. Oorah is what the Marines say. It's short, sharp, and vicious, unless we're being ironic or sarcastic when we say it. Oo-rah. Hoorah is something the navy says, I think just because they felt left out. Heavy emphasis on the H. Who-rah.

[Crakkerjakk]

*Edited to remove multiple posts*

[Crakkerjakk]

*Edited to remove multiple posts*

[Wounded Ronin]

[Angelone]

[Inu]

[eidolon]

[-Nyx-]

In boot camp/basic training my standard firearm was a G3 (the 7.62mm assault rifle the German Army used before the 5.56mm G36 was introduced), later I was issued a G36.

In basic training, we rarely fired full-auto (basically its a waste of ammo and - as it was mentioned earlier in this thread - the job of the guy with the machine gun in your group), single-shots and an occasional 2-4 shot salvo usually were sufficient.
While these short salvos were quite good to control and hit a reasonable small target area, the 5th or 6th shot and everything thereafter didn't (at least with me).

The G36 on the other hand was much more easy to control (perhaps due to the fact that I'd to learn to control the much more brutal recoil of the G3 before I shot the G36), and while the shots went of target in full-auto, too, the first ones stayed almost at the very same spot and you could "keep them together" much more easy.

Unit slogans/callings:
Panzergrenadier-Truppe (German Mechanized Infantry):
Officer/NCO: "Panzergrenadiere!"
Unit: "Dran, drauf, drüber!" (difficult to translate... "Approach, upon, beyond!" maybe...)
[both to be repeated three times]

4th Company, 12th Mechanized Infantry Battalion:
"Klagt nicht, kämpft!" ("Don't moan, fight!")

Greetings,
Nyx

[HullBreach]

Honestly I think I used 'Oo-rah' like four times when I was in. It just struck me as.... well dumb. Im all for motivation and esprit de corps, but personally I'd rather not feel obliged to act the fool for said purposes.

On the other hand, there are some incriminating pictures of me drunk, wearing a pirate hat, and sitting atop an Air Force missile-on-a-stick. Needless to say the Air Force SF's didn't see the humor in that.

[eidolon]

[Crakkerjakk]

Yeah, I didn't use Oorah too much while I was in in the non-ironical manner. Had to deal with a lot of assholes who outranked me, so there was lots of "Oorah"s that meant "You're a jackass." There were exceptions, though, notably when given the "You can have libbo after we kill everyone" speech. It was also a handy word for when people asked how you were. Instead of telling them "Outstanding, Sir!" or some crap like that, you just throw out a "Oorah, Sir" and even if there's not a whole lot of oomph behind it, they figure you must be moto.(Motivated) But I figured I'd point out the difference between the different services, since most people here probably don't know, and while doing so couldn't resist taking a dig at our brothers-in-arms that all Marines love to hate.(Thats you, army doggies ;) )

But yeah, I'm with Hull on this. Most of the people who were the most vocal about how motivated they were were the pretty boys who spent hours pressing their cammies and spit shining their boots, then looked like you just killed their mother if you told em to crawl underneath a hummer or sling some gear. Not to mention about half of em spent so much time looking pretty that they didn't even know their damn jobs, which is an unforgivable offense in my eyes.

[HullBreach]

[Wounded Ronin]

[Crakkerjakk]

Those kinds of officers are quickly corralled by senior enlisted, and taught the error of their ways. Occasionally, one of em gets high enough in rank that he can be as much of a dipshit as he wants to, but this is somewhat rare. I am speaking only for Marine officers, as I don't have the experience to comment on any other service, really.

That being said, officers sometimes have a skewed idea of what's important. Most of the units I was in, the enlisted ran most of the day to day stuff, the officers just pointed us in the right direction. Most of em seemed to spend most of their time in meetings up at battalion or checking their e-mail. I always got the feeling that officers were kinda like high priests of some obscure god. Seemingly useless, but without em warding off danger from the almighty, some big nasty would swoop down from above and swallow us normal folks whole.

Near as I could tell their main function was convincing higher ranking officers to let us have a mission. Unfortunately, although the unit I was probably in the top five in the US at what we did, our officers sucked at convincing someone to let us go do our jobs, so we spent so much time training that we started to forget what we were training for and it just slipped into mindless fuck-fuck games.

I miss being on float... that was the best part of the Marine Corps. Training your ass off, deploying to far off distant lands, and getting home to stacks of cash saved up.

Sorry, got sidetracked. Ronin: Not that common in the Corps, though it exists. The less a unit deploys, the more stupid crap they make their Marines wade through.

[eidolon]

Echo Crakkerjakk for Army officers. As usual, caveat that with my having spent all of my time in intel.

In the Army, you generally get 2 kinds of officers. The good ones, who were enlisted before going officer, and the ones that learned it all in school.

[Marmot]

Holy crap I showed up late for the military pow-wow again.

[mfb]

you hear stories about bad officers because the bad ones are the ones you notice. the good officers, in my experience, you don't remember much because they weren't ever really around--they made sure you had what you needed to accomplish your mission, and other than that they left you alone. i didn't meet many bad officers, in my twenty-year-long career in the Army (2000-2004). there were a lot of mediocre ones, and a few good ones.

[hyzmarca]

One thing about BMT is that they shove every little mistake up your ass. If your towels aren't folded right, you end up paying for it. OSC, from what I understand, is worse. Total control environments, such as BMT and OCS are a type of brainwashing. When a person is repeatedly punished for minor things like improperly ironed slacks in basic training, it isn't too surprising when that person becomes terribly uptight about such things.
At least, that's my take on absurdly uptight officers.

[Crakkerjakk]

Take an E-1, fresh outa boot, stretch boot out to over a year long, and when he's done tell him that he can tell about 90% of the people he meets what to do. Thats how you get a dipshit officer.

The smart ones keep their traps shut for at least their first year in the fleet, and just watch how the upper enlisted run the shop. The dumb ones try to tell my old MSgt what to do, and he tears the boot louie a new asshole, then sends him crying to Battalion about how the mean enlisted man with 25+ years of experience just crawled up his asshole and out his throat. Then the battalion commander tells him to suck it up and stop pissing off the enlisted.

Reminds me of the old joke. Know the difference between a PFC and a 2nd lieutenant? The PFC's already been promoted once.

But yeah, officers may be stupid fresh out the gate, but most of em wise up quick. It's easy to spot the exceptionally good ones and the exceptionally bad ones, but the vast majority of them are somewhere in between, and since the majority of my career was peacetime, it's hard to gauge the mediocre ones without a high stress situation to sift the wheat from the chaff.

[Smiley]

[Bah-leted]

[Warmaster Lah]

Well this turned into a far more interesting thread than I first believed! Wow.

[Wounded Ronin]

[Smiley]

[Angelone]

Our officers are pretty good.

EDIT- Aired to much dirty laundry. Officers aren't the only ones to powertrip though. People who make corporeal and Staff Sergant tend to be worse than officers in my experience.

[Smiley]