British Army infantry Major. I've done both armoured infantry and light infantry and have served in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Uncle was an infantry Colonel during the Cold War, one grandfather was an Royal Engineer Warrant Officer (OR8) in Burma during WW2 and the other was an RSM (OR9) in the Royal Tank Regiment who fought through North Africa.

I guess it's in the blood...

Not interesting?

Lemme tell you about my first assignment as a brand new EOD troop. There I was, fresh out of EOD school. A steely eyed defeater of ordinance. Knowing no fear and totally dedicated to the mission. :salute:

I get to my first duty station. 2701st EOD squadron, Hill AFB, UT (the best kept secret of the whole Air Force)

What was my first job? The job that the Air Force trained me for 9 months to do?

I was to take a pile of gas cans (about 10) and strip off the International Orange coloured paint and then paint these cans with International Orange coloured paint. Evidently there is a difference between civilian International Orange and Air Force International Orange. So much for the concept of International.

These cans were cylindrical. I was to use my issued K-Bar knife to scrap the paint off. For some reason there was no grinder/wire brush or even sand paper.

Let's go back to our geometry class in High school. Does anyone know what a Tangent is?

When you take a cylinder (gas can) and if you place a straight line (knife blade) against the side, the tiny, itty bitty point of contact between the can and the knife is the Tangent.

This means that for every scraping I was removing about a micron width of paint. :doh:

Being new to this whole military thing, I decided to ask my NCO

1. Why was it important to remove International Orange paint only to reapply International Orange paint?
2. Why was I using probably the most inefficient method to remove said paint?

I quickly became aware that whether an E-2 understood why something was being done was not important to the military.

Ahh the good ole days in the military, boy they sucked. :D

Oh come on Plat, tell your own stories!


Now i feel compelled to come loose with one, so people don't think every person in the AF sits his ass in a chair. (which is.... mostly... true)

First time I ever saw anyone seriously F'ed up, was on a job you wouldn't think much could go wrong. We were pouring 300 by 300 foot ammo pads for the army to park their patriot missle batteries on. These included grounding points, and were surrounded by built up earthen berms. A pad this large is done in sections, done intermittently. Each run would be about 20 or 30 feet wide. The idea is, after the run dried, you'd use that existing run for concrete forms, and ride the power screed right over the 2 or 3 day ole concrete. (Nobody probly knows what im talking about, so i'll skip this )

Anyway.... We did some concrete runs the previous day and were removing the metal form work. They can be very heavy. (in some cases as much as a few hundred pounds) It was about 0700 in the morning, we had already had our morning formation and roll call, trucked out to the job site and started to work. So with sledge hammers and such we started to pop the forms loose, pull the stakes out of the ground, etc. It was slow going. Then a couple of the more experienced horseman got one of those bright ideas that shoulda, coulda, woulda, but didn't.

I was grabbing a sledge and was going to help these guys that had gone over to the otherside of the run. I had the impression we were gonna break into two crews, and since the one they were forming had less people, i went there. Turns out one jumped into a forklift, the other started spotting for him. I shrugged, figured they didn't need my help, i turned around and started walking back to the other crew to pitch in. What happened next i saw out of the corner of my eye. Just some movement, and one guy down on the ground.

To make a long story short, what they were doing was using the forklift to pop the forms loose. They had already popped two or three forms and were going right on down the line. Pretty sweet! Saves a ton of work. What happened next though, was on the 3rd of 4th form, the forklift operator, slid the fork a little bit too far under the form, so that the tip of the fork was under the pad. The operator gave it the juice, the form didn't budge, so he pulled back on the stick more. The concrete gave way, the form came flying up, and hit the spotter right smack in the face. This is the part i saw out of the corner of my eye, and I had just passed by them moments before.

The spotter was a SSGT. Blood was coming out of his head like someone pulled a drain plug on an oil pan. He looked up basically asking "WTF?", and i think at that moment we were all a little stunned. I kid you not, his eyes were closer together. It was like a cartoon where someone got punched in the face and it left the impression of the fist... only this wasn't any cartoon. All i remember thinking was "Dear god, nobody tell him what he looks like or hell go into shock". Someone handed him a towel to stop the bleeding, but that didn't do much. Our medic's were on another job. We didn't have one on site. Luckly some army personnel were nearby and saw the whole thing. Had a couple of army medics running their asses off to help our guy.

He was medivacced to Hawaii. We never saw him again. I think he lived, but his skull was fractured in two places. The blood pool he left was as if someone had spilled bucket of exterior paint. It was thick, and when it tried, it cracked into large "plates" of dried blood. Kinida reminded me of a bottom of a dried up river. The Project manager intentionally left it just like that for two or three days as a reminder. That was his "saftey lecture". After about two or three days, someone finally had enough and through several buckets of water over it. That stain never did come out, no matter how much we tried to hose it off.

In retrospect, if they had used chains to latch onto the forms, none of this would have happened.

Yikes! I have only been authorized to operate a very limited number of heavy equipment, but they pounded this into us.

When operating heavy equipment, if at first you don't succeed STOP!

They taught us that if anything does not "work right" with heavy equipment, stop and find out why. Don't try to power through it.

This tragic accident reminds me of a tragic accident that happened at Osan AB, South Korea in 1988.

The building we were in had blast doors. These were steel and concrete doors that dropped vertically to cover the entrances to the building. These were normally kept retracted and for safety, two safety bars were extended to physically block these doors from dropping and killing someone.

(bet you can't guess where this story is going)

There was a test of these doors. The cop in charge of these doors pushed the "down" button and the suspension drum started to unwind and lower the blast doors. At the same time the two safety bars automatically retracted.... almost. One safety bar's edge got caught on the edge of the blast door and did not fully retract. After a preset time, the drum with the supporting cables stopped rotating and shut off.

We have a two ton blast door hung up on a sliver of safety bar and that's it. :o

Now, one would think that if you were in charge of operating a blast door, and you hit the down button to deploy the door, and you found the door had not deployed, you would find out why... or at least let someone know... or let everyone know.

But not this cop. His job was to hit the button and he completed his complex mission. :damn::damn: For reasons that would be clear, the investigation team never released the name of the cop to us.

About a half hour later, Lt White is preceding Lt Col Williamson, squadron commander (true story so I use real names) though the doorway.

As soon as Lt White passes the door way, the blast door slams shut behind him. BANG! Lt White turns around and all he sees is a shut blast door, the toes of two combat books mushed up like one would expand a baked potato (his description) in place of where his Commander use to be.

Fortunately, if that word can be used here, the blast door, when dropping down, hit the Commander's forehead, glancing blow, and pushed his body back and his feet forward. A quarter of a second later and it probably would have taken his head off. :nope:

Lt Col Williamson lost the front half of his feet. But he was a tough old bastage. He got special shoes and he taught himself to walk and run. As a matter of fact, he would run the yearly PT test and woe to anyone who could not beat him when he only had two halves of a foot!!!

I lost track of him when I rotated back to the states. By now he is long retired, but probably not due to medical. He was one tough bastage. :salute:

The best saftey breifing you can ever give can be said in a two word sentence:

Complacency kills.

When you work around heavy equipment, all the time, operating power tools all the time, get used to hearing the sound of a backup horn in the background, and swinging steel somewhere.. you get complacent. Steel mind you, does NOT give. You dont realize how fragile the human body is until your working with steel every day, and You forget this is dangerous work your doing, as it all becomes routine. That's when your going to see something happen. Every accident i ever saw, heard of, or was involved in, was because I, or someone else, got complacent. My own complacenly nearly cost me a finger, a sudden case of what can best be described as "decelleration trauma", and quite literally my head.


SP's are robots. They do what their told to the letter as a matter of proceedure. That was one of the wonderful things about being an engineer - you didn't follow a hard set SOP, or TO. There were several ways to complete the same job, some ways worked better then others.

Actually he was a warrant officer, grade CWO2. Usually, warrant officers are the among the best people to have as platoon commanders, at least from an enlisted perspective. Unlike lieutenants who often have no real experience, warrant officers have considerable enlisted experience and are usually quite popular.

Not so with this guy. He was popular in the same way that a really arrogant jock is popular, which is to say he was an *******. When we were in Camp Lejeune working up for our deployment, he treated the whole platoon to dinner at Hooters, and then tried to get us all to run out without paying the bill because he thought it would be funny. That's what kind of a person he was. WTF kind of leader runs out on a bill or orders others to do the same? A bill from Hooters, no less? Those poor girls are just trying to save money for college, you know.

At the time I was only in charge of a fire team (3 other guys), but my Marines and I stuck around and paid the bill and played PR Marines, explaining that the rest of the platoon ran off to leave us with the bill as a joke. That's what kind of people we were. Good people, right? Not according to the CWO, who not only ran out on the bill and left us to pay for it, but also drove off with the vans we were using, so we had to call a cab. When we finally got back to the camp, he berated us for being, amongst other things, spineless.

That incident, and a few others, earned him the call-sign "Blue Falcon" when we got to teh Iraqs. "Blue Falcon" was a bit of slang we picked up from the Army. It means buddy-********er. The CWO didn't know that, and was immensely proud that his troops had bestowed upon him such an awesome call-sign. He was even more proud of the fact that his call-sign was to be found on the walls of almost every port-a-john on the base. At least until he found out what it meant, which is a story itself.

So yeah, that's the mother****** I got as a platoon commander.

I did. Well, we did. The whole platoon contributed stories, and I was tasked with putting them all together for our book. Unfortunately, we only made it to about the second chapter before everyone started fighting over the stories being told. Writing a tell-all book is remarkably difficult when some people don't want to tell quite all. Out of respect for my comrades, I agreed to stop writing the book.

I see your problem. Maybe a barely concealed fictional piece then? :D

That guy is a disgrace. I've known lots of warrants, and almost to a man, found those guys to be pretty level. This guy being a CW3 just proves the adage: Promote your problem. Blue Falcon fit him perfectly - it's a shame that the Blues he Falconed were his troops. Total failure in leadership.

If you ever decide to finish that book - or any, let me know - I know a publisher who can get you in print and in digital edition for Kindle, iBookstore, and NOOK pretty quick.

Oh, you mean like a standard war story?:DL I've entertained the thought, even started writing a few times, but I never got very far. The natures of the incidents I'd like to relate are unique enough that my former platoon would recognize them and probably be very mad at me for publishing them.

Also, I'm a terrible writer. I can't write anything without revising it four or five times, posts excepted. Whenever I try to write something of any length, like a book, I end up revising it until I just throw it away.


Tell me about it. Guys like him are part of the reason I'm not serving anymore. I loved being a Marine and doing all the good stuff Marines do. I loved being in the field. I loved standing watch and patrolling and all that other junk. But I don't want to be led by people like that. I don't want to be part of an outfit that lets people like him lead at all.

Thanks Growler, I appreciate the gesture. Not sure I'll ever manage to finish a book, but it's nice to have such an offer.

You'll meet some of the best in the world. You'll never forget them. They are friends for life.