Dumbest thing you had to do in the Military?

Spray paint the target portion of a urinal white to hide years of water stains and piss crystals.

First flush made the urinal look worse than the hard water stains and urine crystals.

Good old USMC “forgot” to pay the portashitter company to come clean them. They were about to overflow from all the crap and MRE trash (who the hell even eats in one of those things) inside. They made us wrap up with gloves and contractor trash bags and clean all the MRE trash out of them to “make room” until they could get the damn things clean...

Spray painted a large parade field of brown grass (hot TX summer) OD green before formation for a visiting general. Those Ft Hood parade fields were sweltering in the summer sun.

Any kind of change of command, like a dogface gives a shit who a general is.

Getting done with a firefight that lasted 18 hours, then getting mortared and rocketed basically 2 days every hour or 2. Battalion 6 and 7 come out to inspect our position and to survey the terrain... When they get csm lines up all the nco's myself included and wants to know wtf we have unauthorized ta50.....we were one of the first units to get fielded ocp (multicam) quite literally right before we boarded the plane and he was not aware they did this apparently...after our sheepish LT finally gets the balls to say something, csm tore into him for not having his ranger handbook with him in his cargo pocket... Then the turdburgler really had a coranary when he found out that none of us nco's had the battalion playbook in our cargo pockets...I was waiting for a half right face when the taliban decided it was time for our shelling appointment...battalion 6-7 and security detail got out of there so fast you couldn't even see him by the time the second mortar hit...never came out to see us again lol

Umm let's see there is the time some dumbass e2 "lost" his PLB in Afghanistan and we were literally going hands across Afghanistan police calling the entire jcop for 2 days when it was located under his vehicle seat...

There was also the high speed time we ripped into country with a unit and our battalion couldn't find our connex that just happened to have our NVGs in it among other things... But...there we were...3 mother freaking am conducting a 12 click presance patrol with 2 sets of NVGs for entire platoon borrowed from the unit we were replacing......we got lost 3 times, half of us fell into a wadi at least once...our point man got seperated from the rest of the patrol with the terp and thought he was leading the platoon but didn't realize we stopped in a security halt to try and fix our comms and he continued forward leading a squad of ania back to base.

He literally led the entire ania squad back to base... When he got there he though we beat him back... the headquarters guys said 1sgt was a "tad upset" never seen an officer cry before but I did later that night when the rest of the platoon wondered back into the jcop an hour or so later...

Ahhh the reindeer games....

When I was at Aberdeen Proving Ground for AIT we had a some guys who liked to get drink and then get into fights on the weekends. To prevent this we spent one weekend sweeping the rocks off of a road, and another weekend raking leaves out of the woods (it was October).
Good times!!
DW

@deltawiskey Bull shit, no mother fucker that ever visited Aberdeen ever in the history of humankind had nearly enough testosterone to slap a fucking mosquito let alone get into a fight. Maybe you fucktards were ruinng the pillows with your nightly pillow fights.

Just thought of another one... Conducting stand to just incase the injuns attacked at dawn

Who was it that put up the picture of the shirtless soldier mopping up the quad in the rain?

Corrected.

Never in the military, but I enjoy the stories being posted.

Sean the Nailer said:

Who was it that put up the picture of the shirtless soldier mopping up the quad in the rain?

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Me.

I have many stories about dumb shit during my time as a Squad Leader, but this one is by far my favorite

While in the 82nd Airborne during EIB training a specialist lost his PEQ-15 out in Area J. So anyways this occurred on the eve of a four day weekend. CSM made it clear “I don’t give a fuck about your four day and I don’t give a fuck about your wives, I already talked to IG so let them call!” In other words if we don’t find the PEQ-15 our four day isn’t happening. This began on a Wednesday. We comb the Area J miserably searching for this item no luck finding it that day so we are shipped back to the Company CP.

After sleeping on the floor at the company as well as the rest of the battalion because obviously at this point we are in lockdown we wake up the next morning to begin the search again. When I say ever single motherfucker in the battalion was out here I literally mean everyone the only individuals who were not on line searching were the CSM and the BC and they were walking directly behind us like they had a cattle prod.

After searching for hours the CSM loses his fucking mind and calls in all the NCOs and the BC calls in all the officers and they rip into us. No luck. CSM says “Every mother fucking E4 and below is gonna get on line and hold fucking hands and walk this area till we find the God damn PEQ”. So that’s exactly what we did leaders walked in a line behind the soldiers to ensure they were actually looking. Majors, Captains, 1SGs literally everyone is looking for this damn thing.

Just before sundown when the search for the day would be ending and our four day walking the line with almost 1,000 troopers on line an eruption of screams reminiscent of the scene from Braveheart overtake the woods yelling and screaming and it gets louder and louder one of troopers next to me yells “he fucking found it!!”.

Our four day was saved. How the kid found it nobody knows he picked it up out of the bottom of a draw in a puddle of mud. Miserable two days but we found the damn thing. It was that day that I realized sometimes dumb shit works ??.

Below is the proof

Huskydriver said:

Getting done with a firefight that lasted 18 hours, then getting mortared and rocketed basically 2 days every hour or 2. Battalion 6 and 7 come out to inspect our position and to survey the terrain... When they get csm lines up all the nco's myself included and wants to know wtf we have unauthorized ta50.....we were one of the first units to get fielded ocp (multicam) quite literally right before we boarded the plane and he was not aware they did this apparently...after our sheepish LT finally gets the balls to say something, csm tore into him for not having his ranger handbook with him in his cargo pocket... Then the turdburgler really had a coranary when he found out that none of us nco's had the battalion playbook in our cargo pockets...I was waiting for a half right face when the taliban decided it was time for our shelling appointment...battalion 6-7 and security detail got out of there so fast you couldn't even see him by the time the second mortar hit...never came out to see us again lol

Umm let's see there is the time some dumbass e2 "lost" his PLB in Afghanistan and we were literally going hands across Afghanistan police calling the entire jcop for 2 days when it was located under his vehicle seat...

There was also the high speed time we ripped into country with a unit and our battalion couldn't find our connex that just happened to have our NVGs in it among other things... But...there we were...3 mother freaking am conducting a 12 click presance patrol with 2 sets of NVGs for entire platoon borrowed from the unit we were replacing......we got lost 3 times, half of us fell into a wadi at least once...our point man got seperated from the rest of the patrol with the terp and thought he was leading the platoon but didn't realize we stopped in a security halt to try and fix our comms and he continued forward leading a squad of ania back to base.

He literally led the entire ania squad back to base... When he got there he though we beat him back... the headquarters guys said 1sgt was a "tad upset" never seen an officer cry before but I did later that night when the rest of the platoon wondered back into the jcop an hour or so later...

Ahhh the reindeer games....

Click to expand...

Ranger hand book. What BN?

DaleGribble82 said:

I have many stories about dumb shit during my time as a Squad Leader, but this one is by far my favorite

While in the 82nd Airborne during EIB training a specialist lost his PEQ-15 out in Area J. So anyways this occurred on the eve of a four day weekend. CSM made it clear “I don’t give a fuck about your four day and I don’t give a fuck about your wives, I already talked to IG so let them call!” In other words if we don’t find the PEQ-15 our four day isn’t happening. This began on a Wednesday. We comb the Area J miserably searching for this item no luck finding it that day so we are shipped back to the Company CP.

After sleeping on the floor at the company as well as the rest of the battalion because obviously at this point we are in lockdown we wake up the next morning to begin the search again. When I say ever single motherfucker in the battalion was out here I literally mean everyone the only individuals who were not on line searching were the CSM and the BC and they were walking directly behind us like they had a cattle prod.

After searching for hours the CSM loses his fucking mind and calls in all the NCOs and the BC calls in all the officers and they rip into us. No luck. CSM says “Every mother fucking E4 and below is gonna get on line and hold fucking hands and walk this area till we find the God damn PEQ”. So that’s exactly what we did leaders walked in a line behind the soldiers to ensure they were actually looking. Majors, Captains, 1SGs literally everyone is looking for this damn thing.

Just before sundown when the search for the day would be ending and our four day walking the line with almost 1,000 troopers on line an eruption of screams reminiscent of the scene from Braveheart overtake the woods yelling and screaming and it gets louder and louder one of troopers next to me yells “he fucking found it!!”.

Our four day was saved. How the kid found it nobody knows he picked it up out of the bottom of a draw in a puddle of mud. Miserable two days but we found the damn thing. It was that day that I realized sometimes dumb shit works ??.

Below is the proof View attachment 7007071

Click to expand...

Annnnnd that's why we are supposed to tie shit down on the weapon cuz of clownshoe events right there.

Volunteering to test jump a dragon.

Chow calls

regnar375 said:

Ranger hand book. What BN?

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Lol lowspeed high drag 1st bct 4id. Our colonel was tabbed and so was our LT and he wanted all the line LTs to have the ranger handbook on them at all times outside the wire no joke most retarded guy ever.

Huskydriver said:

Lol lowspeed high drag 1st bct 4id. Our colonel was tabbed and so was our LT and he wanted all the line LTs to have the ranger handbook on them at all times outside the wire no joke most retarded guy ever.

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We didnt carry a Ranger handbook with us in the Ranger BN.

Many many a fight starred on VD drive with num nuts who graduated Ranger School cslking themself a Ranger!

Huskydriver said:

Annnnnd that's why we are supposed to tie shit down on the weapon cuz of clownshoe events right there.

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Yep, total fucking moron.

regnar375 said:

We didnt carry a Ranger handbook with us in the Ranger BN.

Many many a fight starred on VD drive with num nuts who graduated Ranger School cslking themself a Ranger!

Click to expand...

Obviously you didn't... Thats why it was retarded he was making his officers carry it...also equally retarded was ordering the nco's to carry the battalion sop/playbook in our stupid ass cargo pockets. Ate the freak up

I/we literally blew up roughly $35M in brand new server/IT/voice equipment that had been sitting around in the heat for 3+ months in a connex box off of the flight line at OAI because someone back at CENTCOM got a magic spaceship ride at the 2001 Odyssey VIP room in Tampa and a MOD was issued on that contract for a different equipment package.

Probably the most stupid thing I can think of was an instruction written by our HQ. they were pissed that some dudes weren’t getting all their upgrade training done as fast as they should have been. These are guys who have been through a 2 1/2 year training pipeline just to get to a unit. It was really difficult to get this stuff done because we were normally TDY 280-300 days a year and 90% of this training was irrelevant. Anyway, group writes an order stating that the ENTIRE career field/MOS, even guys who were totally good to go on training, was not allowed to do anything (range time, mandatory training, pre deployment training, etc) until at least 75% of the guys were good to go with this stupid upgrade training.
We promptly ignored it and kept training to accomplish the actual mission and just made group happy on paper.

2nd best.
Had a Sgt who didn’t like me during training so he started lying to the instructors and making up stuff trying to get me kicked out of training. As a result I ended up working every weekend for three months in the middle of a ball busting training and selection school either packing for the field or pressure washing a fleet of vehicles in the snow. I eventually figured out what was going on and talked to one of the instructors about it and cleared some things up. After that it was like you flipped a switch. No more problems whatsoever.

ajv35XX said:

Good old USMC “forgot” to pay the portashitter company to come clean them. They were about to overflow from all the crap and MRE trash (who the hell even eats in one of those things) inside. They made us wrap up with gloves and contractor trash bags and clean all the MRE trash out of them to “make room” until they could get the damn things clean...

Click to expand...

In the area where I work there is a base that just inside the gate is a porta potty.

Because I work on the road it's a decent place to stop to take a piss without dealing with stuff other than being in a porta potty.

Anyway the GI/Marines training there are forever throwing shit in the shit.

Dunking Donuts cups, Cope cans, Chem lights.

Always wondering if the chem light person is looking for a dropped cell phone - I hope so.

We had an order come down to take the back cap off of our mag lights every day to reduce "gas build up"

Didn't happen to me, but a wing commander ordered the grounds guys to kill the dandelions on the football field. Their SQ commander told him the weed killer would damage the grass, but he was adamant. A month later they had to re-sod the field.

The DFC said:

We had an order come down to take the back cap off of our mag lights every day to reduce "gas build up"

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I still have a copy of the directive we had to comply with in preparation of Y2K.

Work and not get paid

We had a guy in my section who always HAD to be the eager beaver. We took all the jumpers out one day to do their thing, and had some high Brass come and jump with us. Everything went well until they were all safely on the deck getting all their shit squared to get back into the trucks. I had told my guys to stay with the trucks and leave it alone, but this guy couldn’t help himself. Went over to try and assist the guys with their parachute rigs and in the process manage; to pick up a pack by the reserve pull and deployed the reserve. The ass chewing that commenced....

This has to be one of the dumbest things Ive seen in the military....



Followed by this......

On USN LPDs, there is a grated ramp that runs from the well deck up to vehicle stowage. After debarking from LCACs and LCUs, vehicles traverse up the ramp. Of course, much of the retained sand falls through the grates. Since our training sessions were ending early, somebody found some work for us to do.
We were tasked with removing all of the sand underneath the grates. When we first started, the job was easy. There was enough headroom at the forward end of the ramp that we could stand and shovel the sand into barrels. The headroom got lower and lower as we progressed aft to the beginning of the ramp, closest to the well deck. By the time we got to the start of the ramp, where the confines were tightest, we were lying flat and using spoons to reach the sand in the deepest recesses. We then dumped spoonsful of sand into buckets, and passed the buckets to the guy behind us, because there was not room for two of us to be in the same space at the same time. This was a half day job for three days.

Oh man, so many BT,DT's above! Never spray painted a parade field (that one is definitely contender for number one on here already!) but I know a guy who had to cut the 82nd ABN parade field with a quote, "Leave it to Beaver lawnmower bro!" and he was given a file to keep up the blades. In summer. Damn.

I had to pick up leaves too, one by one by hand, I also hated the change of command formations, once they had us fill sand bags and box in the assembly area in front of the company. It's Ft. Lewis, it rains. A lot. So it turned into a foot deep pool. They filled it in with gravel and then it was just mushy gravel. Eventually the bags disintegrated and they had someone else tear 'em out and spread out the gravel. What a fucking mess. Wet gear and wet asses for two years assembling out there.

The absolute best didn't happen to me, but at Ft. Benning, you know how all the porn is hidden behind the sinks in that open wall back there? A really thin person can climb back there? All sorts of abandoned contraband. Some had been there for nearly twenty years and this was in early 2001. Anyway, I'd graduated and was staying at my old basic unit waiting on orders for the Stryker units after dropping ABN (LONG story). It was very chill, come and go as I please. So I'm sitting there talking to one of the new privates who is cleaning his rifle before I went out that night and I saw the DS's from the company next to us come down yelling and one dumped a garbage bag full of fuck mags and various liquor bottles with various amounts in them as well as tobacco and candy. Mostly titty books. He'd found 'em during an inspection BEHIND the damn sinks! He held 'em accountable for that, which was wrong IMO, but some of it was new. Not much.

Anyway, he has them pull ALL of their shit down into the company AO and set it up dress right dress like it'd be upstairs, for inspection. THEN he had them move all of that shit out to the exercise field and set it up there. For inspection. It's dirty as shit out there! And that's where they slept during this too. Wall lockers, beds, everything NOT bolted down or affixed. When I got back, they were still doing their last inspection and had moved it all back to the AO under their barracks again. And cleaned it all off. They FINALLY passed and were allowed to go back upstairs, which had also been GI'd and cleaned totally during this time. I should also mention this happened during a four day weekend, so it sucked longer for them than it normally would have. What a helluva inspection. What a Thanksgiving holiday too, huh!?

Oh, the dumbest thing of all isn't really funny, but SPENDEX. Blowing ammo through barrels as fast as you can just so they can order the same amount next year. Instead of training all year with it, it's all just blown in one big "spending exercise" where you stay at the range until it's all gone. What a fucking waste, and they don't do or say one damn thing about the shot out barrels they get out of this.

Strykervet said:

Oh, the dumbest thing of all isn't really funny, but SPENDEX. Blowing ammo through barrels as fast as you can just so they can order the same amount next year. Instead of training all year with it, it's all just blown in one big "spending exercise" where you stay at the range until it's all gone. What a fucking waste, and they don't do or say one damn thing about the shot out barrels they get out of this.

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My taxes hard at work.

Pee in a bottle.

stupidest thing i endured was as a private, put on a 1 man detail to chase squirrels away from the 504pir brigade headquarter’s pecan trees.

Polish a concrete floor in an empty barracks building. The floor was already so polished that it was as slick as snot on ice, yet I (along with a number of other fellows) had to polish all the floors in the entire building. We had those giant floor buffers that had a round pad about 2-2.5 feet in diameter...pull up on the handle and it goes one direction, push down on the handle and it goes the other direction.

I never understood who we pissed off, I guess it was just stupid "busy" work, because someone thought it was better than allowing us to do nothing.

We got new barracks in Germany the year before I left, it had no slip floors, we used a shit ton of flamable johnsons wax to make it shiny and slippery to to get it ready for inspection thus wasting the efforts to make it non slip.

Trips through a portion of the Michelin rubber plantations in 1969
We would CA into an area of the Michelin rubber plantations and jump off of the birds and go mix it up with Chuck and his NVA buddies for a week or two and have people on our side killed and maimed and fuck up a bunch of their people too.
We would set up our NDP, dig in and put out OP-LP til morning, then move on and fuck up and destroy more shit and people and take casualties on both sides. We would move through and cleared the area then find a good LZ and load up on the birds and get lifted out and shoot at the gooks moving back in as we left. Left NOBODY behind to keep things we just fought and died for secure.
We would then come back to the same area a couple of months later and do another "operation" where we moved through the same areas and could see where we had dug in before but move away from that in case Chuck had it zeroed with an 82. but nonetheless kept moving forward and "securing" the area only to get to another good LZ and be extracted and again leaving NOBODY behind to keep the area clean all the while paying "Frenchie" for damage done to trees by ARTY or other exploding things that damaged the bark of those tress.
Do that 3 times over the year you spent there in the same area and wonder why we hated our Officers who were getting their tickets punched and Frenchie who ran the plantation.

You will never find a Michelin product on ANYTHING I own, be it a car, truck or skateboard.
Regards, Foul Mike E Co. 5/7 Cav. 1st. Cavalry Div. 69/70

Too often it is "SOP", but then there's a whole new twitch called:

Foul Mike on a Skateboard

Threadworthy in itself. And your service is appreciated.

I noticed that too

Fuck them skateboards.
Used fine motorsickles, WFO, on flat tracks putting my best wheel forward, sliding sideways.

pmclaine said:

This has to be one of the dumbest things Ive seen in the military....

View attachment 7007176

Followed by this......

View attachment 7007177

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Fact.

myronman3 said:

stupidest thing i endured was as a private, put on a 1 man detail to chase squirrels away from the 504pir brigade headquarter’s pecan trees.

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That’s hilarious.