Military

Military Experts

I get so sick of people claiming to be experts with firearms because they earned a ribbon in the military. Let be give you a great example of that:

To support his supposed opinion, he makes the appeal to authority, claiming, well…

The Coast Guard pistol qualifier consisted of 30 shots taken from 3 yards out to 15 yards, with every shot worth up to five points. Expert requires the shooter to score 143 points or more, or about 96% of the scored shots earning the maximum of 5 points. So how hard is that? Here is a picture of the Coast Guard target.

The colored zones are worth from 1 to 5 points. The target is 25 inches by 40 inches. The 5 point zone is 8 inches by 14 inches, making the maximum 5 point area much larger than the IDPA 8 inch -0 zone. Here is where the course gets easy. A total of 48 shots are fired, and the best 30 of those shots are the ones that are scored. The rest of them are considered “practice shots” and are essentially scored as mulligans.

DistanceTotal rounds in published sequence
3 yards12
7 yards12
15 yards24
Total48

So to REALLY take a look at what it takes to be a Coast Guard pistol expert, the shooter fires 48 shots. Of those, only 60 percent of them have to hit the center of the target. The shots have to be fired in a certain about of time:

DistanceStringTime
3 yardsDraw and fire 24 sec
3 yardsDraw and fire 24 sec
3 yardsFire 2, reload, fire 210 sec
3 yardsDraw and fire 4, including a hand transition8 sec
7 yardsSame four strings4, 4, 10 and 8 sec
15 yardsDraw and fire 24 sec
15 yardsDraw and fire 24 sec
15 yardsDraw and fire 48 sec
15 yardsFire 4, reload, fire 420 sec
15 yardsKneel and fire 820 sec

I want you to note that not one of those stages says, “Draw, rack the slide, fire two.” Instead, he uses as an example, a Coastie shooting himself in the leg as his reasoning for not carrying one in the chamber. I pray this one is satire.

By Divemedic, ago

Navy Food

There is a lot of press on the Navy and the conditions on its ships. Let’s talk about a few of them:

Water

  • An aircraft carrier makes about 400,000 gallons of water per day through distillation. The total amount of water used is not just for personnel use. Water use is prolific.
  • Galleys: Preparing roughly 18,000 meals daily, beverages, washing produce, cleaning equipment, and operating dishwashers.
  • Laundry: Several thousand people generate an enormous daily laundry load. This includes the main ship’s laundry, uniform washing, linens, towels, and medical laundry.
  • Aircraft maintenance: Fresh-water washing removes salt from aircraft and engines to prevent corrosion. The Navy considers this mission-essential even during water restrictions.
  • Steam catapults: Roughly 200 gallons’ water-equivalent per launch. One hundred launches would represent about 20,000 gallons.
  • Reactor and steam plants: High-purity makeup water replaces losses in the propulsion, electrical-generation, and auxiliary steam systems. Most water circulates repeatedly, but leakage, sampling, maintenance, and steam losses require replacement.
  • Medical and dental spaces: Sterilizers, scrub sinks, laboratory work, patient care, and sanitation.
  • Ship cleaning and sanitation: Galley decks, berthing, heads, workshops, food-service spaces, and garbage-processing areas.
  • Closed-loop machinery systems: Air-conditioning chilled water and other cooling or heating circuits normally recirculate their water, but require makeup water.
  • Potable-water-system maintenance: Tank cleaning, flushing repaired piping, testing, leakage, and maintaining tank reserves.

During my six years living on a carrier, we were constantly placed on water restrictions. There were days when we couldn’t shower. We heard a constant round of complaining from the CO that he wanted us to use less than 22 gallons per person, per day.

For that reason, the Navy has special shower heads for enlisted showers that require you to hold down a stiff button to get water. Showers that simply run like the ones in your home are referred to as “Hollywood showers” and are not permitted.

Food

The food on submarines is top notch. While the food on aircraft carriers isn’t as high quality, it’s still plentiful. There were multiple dining facilities. Let me demonstrate:

  • There are three dining facilities for officers (called wardrooms) onboard. I never worked or ate in any of them, so I can’t give more details than that.
  • The Captain’s mess is for the commanding officer to have private meals with anyone he invites to dine with him.
  • There is a similar dining facility called the Admiral’s mess for the embarked Admiral and his invitees.
  • There is a chief’s mess for Chief Petty Officers (E-7 through E-9)
  • There are three different dining halls for enlisted crew members (E-1 through E-6) called the mess decks: Forward, Aft, and the Bar (which was connected to and adjacent to the Aft mess decks)

The forward mess decks specialized in fast, grab and go items like hamburgers (sliders), hot dogs (rollers), cereal, boiled eggs, sandwiches made of ham, egg, and cheese, and other quick options.

The aft mess decks were for hot meals. There were usually multiple options there- two or more main dishes to choose from, sides, vegetables, bread, and dessert.

The bar was what it sounds like- a buffet option where salads, a taco bar, a baked potato bar were available. Sailors could assemble those items with common toppings.

Here is the schedule for the enlisted dining:

  • 0100-0330: The forward mess decks open for “Jet setters,” a meal of boiled eggs, cereal, and egg sandwiches.
  • 0400-0800: Breakfast on both the forward and aft mess decks
  • 1000-1200 The bar is open
  • 1100-1400 Lunch is served on both the forward and aft mess decks. Full lunch aft, sandwiches, burgers, and dogs as well as fries and sometimes pizza forward.
  • 1400-1600: The bar is open
  • 1600-1900: Forward and Aft mess decks open for dinner
  • 2100-0100: Aft mess decks open for “midrats” which is usually composed of leftovers from dinner, as well as cold cuts to make sandwiches.

There were choices, and as you can see, there was somewhere and something to eat 19.5 hours per day. In addition, there were multiple stores for sailors to purchase snacks, chips, candy bars, etc.. The Navy calls that stuff “geedunk” and it is sold onboard. The third deck has the ship’s “mall” where things like soap, uniform items, stationery, geedunk, and other things can be bought. It’s on the 3rd deck, next to the post office. Six floors higher, on the 03 level, there was the “Seven-11” where geedunk was for sale. It was located next to the ship’s barber shop, which offered free haircuts. On the second deck, next to the video arcade between the personnel offices and the aft mess decks, there were half a dozen soda and snack machines.

You could always eat. Now I will say that I didn’t always like the food, but there was always plenty of it. Our mess cooks had a high number of Philipinos, and that caused us to eat a lot of adobo and other foods from that nation. I didn’t like that. I tried not to eat on the forward mess decks because I didn’t want to eat a lot of junk, but sometimes I did because the lines to eat aft were long, especially when the food being served aft was good.

On the nights when there was steak, pizza, spaghetti, lobster, or other popular meals, a person could wait in line for an hour or more to eat. My duties didn’t permit me that kind of time, so I would eat a slider from forward. We would get steak and/or lobster about once per month when deployed.

The food was repetitive sometimes, because the mess cooks would screw up and order too much of something. They would get creative in naming it, in an attempt to make us forget we were eating the same meal every day for a week. First it was steamship round, then Yankee pot roast, Savory Roast beef, Prime rib, beef stew, pepper steak, etc,. We once ate chicken at every meal for 14 days straight. Even for breakfast.

Once we were at sea for 45 days or longer, each Friday we would have pizza and pasta night. During that meal, each sailor who wanted it could have two non-alcoholic beers. The enlisted got O’Douls, the chiefs and officers got Sharp’s.

I was once assigned to a working party that was onloading food at the pier in Norfolk. It sucked, because we were carrying food onboard while it was snowing. Four of us ducked into an electrical load center with a box of donuts and hid in there, snacking. The issue is that we had to get rid of the evidence or we would have been caught. So we ate the entire box. There are 144 donuts in a box. The donuts were lemon filled. Eating 3 dozen donuts made me sick. I couldn’t stand the taste of lemon filling for years after that.

Did we bitch about it? Of course we did. Our command Master Chief (the senior enlisted man onboard) used to say “A bitching sailor is a happy sailor. When they stop complaining and the crew goes silent, that’s when trouble is brewing.” The difference is that today, the sailors have social media and combined with the press looking for any reason to slam the military (and by extension, Trump) the complaints are getting traction in the press.

What should the CO do? Cut off all access to social media for the entire crew. Then have the crew scrub and paint the entire ship until it sparkles, now that they have so much free time. That way, they can’t post videos of mold in the showers or dirty berthing areas because they will be clean.

When I was an E-3, I spent a lot of time needle gunning, painting, buffing and polishing floors, and scrubbing the gadoogin deck edges. In fact, about a third of your workday is spent cleaning things when you are E-3 and below. That’s the real motivation to be promoted- you aren’t a janitor any longer.

By Divemedic, ago

Oh Dear Lord

This is why our military is spending so much time whining, it’s filled with faggots. Its become a jobs program instead of a war machine.

By Divemedic, ago

Glimpse Into Navy Life

When I was in the Navy, all of the electricians E-6 and below lived in one large compartment on the ass end of the second deck (that’s one deck below the hanger, 5 decks below the flight deck) directly below the jet engine repair shop. The electricians (EM and IC) all 250 or so of us, were in a compartment that ran the width of the ship, and about 40 feet in length. We shared that space with the machinists, so in all, there were about 500 people who lived in an area of about 6000 square feet. We shared 4 urinals, 10 commodes, 8 sinks, and 10 shower stalls.

The floor above us had the jet engine shop, where they would test jet engines at full throttle, day and night. Directly below us were the two steering gear rooms, machinery rooms with loud hydraulic systems in them to turn the ship’s rudders. There was never a quiet time in that space while we were at sea.

Imagine the smell of 500 men who all work 16 hour days (or more) in hot machinery spaces, all crammed into a relatively small compartment, body odor, farts, and snoring all combining with the never-ending noise of a ship at sea. There were days the smell was truly horrific. Six people were assigned to clean this compartment on a rotating basis- one E-4, and five E-3 and below. The duty was referred to as “coop cleaning.” Those six people had numerous duties, including cleaning the floors, the heads, and also doing the laundry.

In this compartment, there were twelve large laundry bins, marked “colors” and “whites.” Each person would toss their clothes into the bins- you tie your socks in a knot through the belt loops of your pants, toss them and your shirts in the colors bin, then toss underwear and t-shirts into the whites bin. Twice a week, the coop cleaners would empty those bins and take them down to the ship’s laundry for cleaning. It would usually be 300-400 pounds of laundry. Imagine the smell of the whites bin with 750 pairs of sweaty underwear in them.

When the laundry had been washed and dried, the coop cleaners would return them to your bunk (unfolded), which was easy to do, since all uniforms had your name on them, with one exception. The coop cleaners would select the pair of underwear with the largest skid mark, and post them on the bulletin board with a sign over it that read “skid mark of the week.” Since your name is on your underwear, everyone knew whose they were.

There was one particular guy who always seemed to win that particular contest. His skid marks were so incredibly large, they had to be done on purpose. It was pretty disgusting and unbelievable.

By Divemedic, ago

Wrong

Retard takes from a ‘veteran’ on social media:

Armed citizens SHOULD NOT be getting involved in gunfights involving police and criminals.

  • 1) The police don’t know you from Adam so your presence with a gun only cause more confusion and the likely hood a innocent person including yourself gets injured
  • 2) Most “armed citizens” I don’t care how many times you go to the range and shoot have no idea what it feels like when rounds are flying your way. Again its likely you would make the situation worse
  • 3) Armed citizens should only use their guns in a defensive manner. This shit isn’t a movie!
  • 4) Police have protections the average citizen does not. You shoot and kill anyone whether you are “trying to help or not” and you are civilly liable unless your life was in direct danger

Let’s address this idiocy by the numbers:

  1. Don’t try to stop criminals from engaging in spree shootings, or the police might kill you because they don’t care whether or not they are shooting the correct person. How is that an indictment of private citizens and not the police?
  2. Most cops don’t have any idea of what it’s like to be shot at. Less than 25% of cops are ever fire their weapons. It’s even lower for veterans. Even considering the lengthy GWOT, only 10–20% of all U.S. veterans have ever been engaged in combat, and most of those were IEDs or something other than small arms fire.
  3. OK, and? The same is true for cops.
  4. That’s incorrect. I can shoot to prevent someone else’s life from being threatened. I can shoot to stop a forcible felony. So that’s not exactly accurate, because real life is far more nuanced than you leftist simpletons can comprehend. Even so, cops shouldn’t be shooting people unless lives are in danger either.

Just because you were in the military doesn’t mean that you have more knowledge, legal or firearms related, than anyone else. It also doesn’t grant you rights or powers that anyone else doesn’t also have. So sit down and be quiet, adults are speaking.

By Divemedic, ago

Nope

Several members of Congress have introduced a bill that would allow current and former members of the US military’s special forces to carry concealed weapons nationwide, despite any other laws to the contrary. I’ve seen stories about this bill in a few places over the past few weeks, and I just can’t support it. The idea that we are going to pass a Federal law that grants some sort of “super citizen” status to certain people, who then have rights not available to the rest of us?

No.

I would note that all three of the congressmen who sponsored this bill are former special forces. It’s typical self serving crap that politicians vote to give themselves more rights than the rest of us. The same thing happened with LEOSA. The entire premise behind that travesty of a law was cops might run into some criminal they arrested and need to defend themselves, as if some cop from Bumfukt, Iowa has a higher chance of running into a criminal while spending the day at Disneyland in California than I would is simply ridiculous, and there is no evidence that it actually happens.

The same for special forces soldiers. They don’t need such a permit while carrying out their duties, because they are on duty. For former soldiers, there is no need for them to have more rights than the rest of us. Don’t give me the line that this will be used as a stepping stone for more bills later- as soon as cops got their special LEOSA rights, they promptly turned around and lobbied against our right to carry. I’m not falling for that one again.

If these Republicans want to expand carry rights: do it for everyone, not just yourselves and your friends.

By Divemedic, ago

Iran Intel

A pretty good discussion on the difficulties of SEAD in Iran. I trust this channel because the guy who runs it, MOOCH, was assigned to the same ship I was on during the Gulf War. Meaning, I met him in a previous life, and therefore know he isn’t some Asian fake account.

By Divemedic, ago