Military Service (Page 1 of 18)

Yes Ive served for my country,  ive talked about my service often on AJB. I believe there are quite a few ex military members here.

I was in the Women's Auxiliary Balloon Corps does that count? 

However due to OPSEC I can only talk about what happened 25 years ago - everything else is still covered by the OSA apart from my Facing the Loaded Gun POST stories - which will of course form part of my memoirs to bore my grand children with

So my experiences in my early days somewhat mirror your own Joshua - fun times though and oh how things have changed! It was always emotional to see your highly polished boots take a flying lesson out the window - or to parade with all you kit, bed, locker and all on the parade square for a Show Parade! (then have to put it all back in your room again).

Funny thing was as I progressed through the Ranks I got it, why things were so tough in the early days. If you could not administer yourself in Barracks how the hell would you survive in worse conditions on Operations!

Its funny how you never see it that way at the time though

Cheers 

Sounds like it was pretty much the same deal everywhere - having a spare or sub contracting to someone who could do it better (for a price)! 

Unfortunately the closest I ever got to military service was being a Private in the Boys' Brigade (BB). 

I spent some time in Finland training with Arctic prepared wolf's ( land rover) the vehicles coped better in the cold than we did!

I think I've been in one of those,  but not a military variant,  and it was red,  are they a Norwegian machine?
The Russians had some serious atv's at that time,  huge machines that went anywhere.

Last edited by Chriscoop (27th Jan 2017 15:58)

Were they not similar bandvagn?  hang on...... Bv 206 is a bandvagn 206 

I was in the commando regiment and a corporal. the training was different to training for general duties soldiers and much more harder to do. I saw the man with the golden gun for the first time i smiled because part of the training we had to do was to swim in rivers which were crocodiles lived. There was a couple of boats and soldiers with guns to watch for crocodiles but they would not stop the crocodile from attacking from below in the water. it was very scary always! When i saw Roger Moore jumping over the alligators it makes me think of those times! sometimes soldiers who tried to do commando training would die on each course and some were killed by wild animals during the selection training for the commando regiment because this was done in the very wild areas. This was expected in the course and still it was done because it was to make us the toughest of soldiers. One man did died on my course while doing the 120km march through the bush for commando selection. commando soldiers have to do 120km march with no foods but only small water to do this in 48 hours or they will fail. The country is very hard with many obstacles and is tough.

I was in the United States Air Force for four years; in Administration, and then later in Law Enforcement. I spent two years stationed at Zaragoza Air Base in Spain, and got to spend about a month on temporary duty at Zweibrucken Air Base in Germany (then called West Germany), participating in the Reforger/Cold Fire Air Base Ground Defense exercise, where we defended the base from the US Army from attack in a 'war games' scenario. I got to spend time in Paris, Northern Italy and Portugal as well.

The final two years of my enlistment were at Luke AFB in Arizona, outside the Phoenix metropolitan area. After winning the Deputy Commander for Maintenance Airman of the Quarter competition, I received a back-seat ride in an F-15 Eagle...the flight surgeon cleared me to an altitude of 18,000 feet - they had to go to another squadron to find a G-suit that fit me because of my height - and I was trained on the emergency egress system (ejector seat! haha)...and then I got to see the Grand Canyon from a fighter jet in the late afternoon. He hit the full afterburner, so I was actually supersonic for a minute or two, and briefly gave me control of the aircraft. Once I gave it back to him, we did rolls, and a loop! And I didn't vomit - I still have my unused airsickness bag as a souvenir.

It was possibly the best time of my life.

Hello number24, i send you a message.

I remember the training to be fit in the army. We did very much of training to be very fit and always had to run around the camp. I think the worse exercise was when we had to push the big tire. It was a tire from a tractor and only two men to push it to each tire. They were very big and heavy and hard to make go straight. We would have to push them along the dirt road while wearing the uniforms and the helmets and the heavy pack. The road was not good and if they fell over it was very hard to get to back up straight again because they were so heavy. We had to push them three kilometers each time and sometimes more than this! I always thought that was the worse of the fitness physical training!