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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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I have a lot friends and family who served. I think its hilarious the way everyone but people who have been in service hold up the image pushed by recruitment efforts and Call of Duty and the like.
From everything I've been able to tell it's one of those "it's boring and sucks until its very very very NOT boring and then it can REALLY suck."
And I hope that doesn't come across as dismissive or something. It's meant to be the opposite. It seems absolutely more brutal to me and probably why it's not the part that makes the movies. Sit around in difficult conditions until some horrible fucking shit breaks the monotony... that sounds insane.
I have a friend whos a firefighter. Usually they're doing cooking, cleaning the truck, whatever... until they're watching a kid fucking die or something.
Fucking write poems, do some coloring books, fucking whatever gets your through it lmfao.
If you have a good unit then most of the military experience is hanging out with your friends all the time.
Except for the 5am PT every morning, and at 7am when you've got to get your truck ready at the motor pool, or 8am when you've got special duty to set up the range, or 9am when there's a 2 hour briefing about keeping your hands to yourself and having a designated driver.
Lunch at 11am is usually alright, except the base you're at has the worst DFAC you've ever seen.
That range you helped set up? It's at 12am, and it's fun to blast away at targets thinking about how much weapon cleaning you're going to do tonight.
There's a lot of leftover ammo, but you only had to shoot 2 magazines, so your rifle isn't going to be that hard to clean. (Any vets know what's coming next?)
First Sergeant says we can't waste ammo, if we don't use the 10,000 rounds they give us, they will only give us 5 rounds next time.
So the next several hours is spent in the sun, loading more rounds to mindless blast in the general direction of targets on the range.
7pm rolls around, it's quitting time. Just kidding, night land nav, time to stumble around around in the dark with shitty NVGs and try to find all the points scattered throughout 2 miles, using nothing but a compass and a map.
Except nobody ever gets all the points, so everyone gets together at the end to share the points they found.
10pm, now it's quitting time, except wait, some moron has lost their night vision goggles, so instead of going back to the barracks, everyone is going to spend the night on the land nav course until it's found. In the morning it's found right next to one of the vehicle tires.
Those are the general events of a somewhat easy day in a combat unit. A day without overnight watch, hours of formations and drill ceremony, 30km ruck marches, endless briefings, flipping landscaping rocks because first sergeant doesn't like the side you flipped everything to last month, etc etc etc.
It's definitely not the same as combat situations, but in my experience in emergency medicine, you really do learn to love boring. I'd much rather sit around doing crossword puzzles, playing solitaire, and meticulously restocking the department than have 3 back-to-back codes in a pediatric level 1 ER.