KState_Poke22

I disagree. He said multiple times that he mostly lucky that he got so many kills. He said that he was just in the right place at the right time for many of them and that any other SEAL in his place would have had just as many kills.

And thank god he is. There is no one out there who will and if those people have an out of regs stache they cannot be trusted to safely operate their aircraft! He should get a retiree medal! Preferably one that is higher in precedence than any combat medal. You can't even begin the count the number of lives he's saving by embarking on this noblest of journeys!

Well of course they just show the AF assets. They're imbedded with an AF unit and the point of the show is to chronicle what that unit of PJs went through on that deployment. It would be a different story if the show was about MEDEVAC/CASEVAC in OEF as a whole, but it's not.

I made it almost 4 months deployed with a highly out of regs stache before finally getting chiefed. I'm rather proud of that.

That award is for drone operators across the services, not just AF.

What's funny is the parts of NYC burning are taken straight out of a video game...

It's about way more than just "meeting the standards,". Here's another well written article by a female Marine. I'd like to see your response to this. Some advice on women in combat from a female veteran POSTED AT 5:01 PM ON JANUARY 27, 2013 BY JAZZ SHAW Yesterday’s column on women in combat elicited a number of passionate responses from both sides. Some of them came from proponents of the move, frequently citing alternate motives on my part. These ranged from “trying to keep women pregnant in the kitchen” and “Republicans want to lock women in the 1950s” to whichever variant of the GOP’s “war on women” you’d care to name. Many others lent a more sympathetic ear. One in particular, though, caught my attention. It was from one of America’s female veterans who served in Iraq, delivered with a first hand, been there, done that background. The Marine in question – who for purposes of publication will go by the pseudonym of “Sentry” – had previously submitted this history and opinion as a comment at National Review, but her story was compelling enough that I checked into her background, contacted her and decided to republish it here in its entirety. I offer the following as a third party testimony to stand your scrutiny on its own merits. I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream. We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit. First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy. I saw the male combat units when I was in Iraq. They go outside the wire for days at a time. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate in front of each other and often while on the move. There’s no potty break on the side of the road outside the wire. They urinate into bottles and defecate into MRE bags. I would like to hear a suggestion as to how a woman is going to urinate successfully into a bottle while cramped into a humvee wearing full body armor. And she gets to accomplish this feat with the male members of her combat unit twenty inches away. Volunteers to do that job? Do the men really want to see it? Should they be forced to? Everyone wants to point to the IDF as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men? Regarding physical limitations, not only will a tiny fraction of women be able to meet the male standard, the simple fact is that women tend to be shorter than men. I ran into situations when I was deployed where I simply could not reach something. I wasn’t tall enough. I had to ask a man to get it for me. I can’t train myself to be taller. Yes, there are small men…but not so nearly so many as small women. More, a military PFT doesn’t measure the ability to jump. Men, with more muscular legs and bones that carry more muscle mass than any woman can condition herself to carry, can jump higher and farther than women. That’s why we have a men’s standing jump and long jump event in the Olympics separate from women. When you’re going over a wall in Baghdad that’s ten feet high, you have to be able to be able to reach the top of it in full gear and haul yourself over. That’s not strength per se, that’s just height and the muscular explosive power to jump and reach the top. Having to get a boost from one of the men so you can get up and over could get that man killed. Without pharmaceutical help, women just do not carry the muscle mass men do. That muscle mass is also a shock absorber. Whether it’s the concussion of a grenade going off, an IED, or just a punch in the face, a woman is more likely to go down because she can’t absorb the concussion as well as a man can. And I don’t care how the PC forces try to slice it, in hand-to-hand combat the average man is going to destroy the average woman because the average woman is smaller, period. Muscle equals force in any kind of strike you care to perform. That’s why we don’t let female boxers face male boxers. Lastly, this country and our military are NOT prepared to see what the enemy will do to female POWs. The Taliban, AQ, insurgents, jihadis, whatever you want to call them, they don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions and treat women worse than livestock. Google Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca if you want to see what they do to our men (and don’t google it unless you have a strong stomach) and then imagine a woman in their hands. How is our 24/7 news cycle going to cover a captured, raped, mutilated woman? After the first one, how are the men in the military going to treat their female comrades? ONE Thomasina Tucker is going to mean the men in the military will move heaven and earth to protect women, never mind what it does to the mission. I present you with Exhibit A: Jessica Lynch. Male lives will be lost trying to protect their female comrades. And the people of the US are NOT, based on the Jessica Lynch episode, prepared to treat a female POW the same way they do a man. I say again, I would have loved to be in the infantry. I think I could have done it physically, I could’ve met almost all the male standards (jumping aside), and I think I’m mentally tough enough to handle whatever came. But I would never do that to the men. I would never sacrifice the mission for my own desires. And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if someone died because of me. - Sentry

Being able to serve in the military or serve in front line combat roles is not a right. Bottom line. It is a privilege and the purpose of having a military isn't to make sure no ones feelings are hurt by being left out, the purpose of a military is to defend your f*cking country, defend its interests abroad, and (in the case of our military especially) whether right or wrong to help defend and help our allies across the world. If an over arching policy hurts combat effectiveness (like women in front line combat roles has been shown to do in many examples) then it should not be enacted. Period.

Speaking of Green Berets, any of you who have read Yellow Green Beret (vol 2 I think) have seen a perfect example of why women in frontline combat roles is not a good idea.

The Marines already tried this, they put women in their Infabtry Officer Course to test it out....and every single one of them failed out. There's a great interview (can't find it now) of a female Marine officer who was logistics I think but was running convoys and getting in firefights and doing frontline infantry stuff, she said she was in every bit as in shape as the males yet by the end of the deployment she was completely beaten down and her body just couldn't take it.

I've been trying to figure out that song for the past year! Zero Dark Thirty flashbacks and now this, I feel like I'm right back there...

Awesome! I thought it was pretty cool doing circles above San Fran at 1500 ft but I think 60,000 feet is quite a bit cooler...

Ambien will get you much better sleep than alcohol will by far. That being said, I would trade my Ambien for booze in a heartbeat.

I disagree. Somebody has to fly nights, and when you're coming back to your room when the sun is up to go to bed....sometimes it's difficult to sleep. Especially when you first start that kind of schedule and your circadian rhythm isn't caught up.

I normally cut them in half as well. Even when I don't though I wake up feeling f*cking great and wide awake.

For Air Force the one I hear most often is shoe clerk, or shoe. POG is mostly a Marine thing I think. And I base about 70% of that on having seen Generation Kill...

A great reading list put out by the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Some of them apply only to the USMC and no shit platoon leaders but there are a ton of good reads on it. https://guides.grc.usmcu.edu/content_mobile.php?pid=408059&sid=3340387

We definitely need a ban on assault pl...I'm drunk.

I would argue that much debauchery can and should ensue after drinking a ton in the middle of the day.

"I really don't know what that is, but I think I need it" Awesome quote, I can't believe I didn't hear about this at the time.

You sir, win an award

I guess the MC-12 could do that and do it well....it's just an underuse and mismanagement of something that would be better suited supporting the mission across the globe.

Free throw or not I'm fairly certain the basketball goal stays fairly stationary. I've never played anything above intramural though so I could be wrong...

I'm skeptical if Iran will actually take this seriously.

That looks like a metric shit ton of metal