Monday, July 25, 2016

ALTERNATE PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY

A General was conducting an All-Service-member pilot briefing
in Afghanistan one day, and he posed the question: "What would
you do if you found a scorpion in your tent?"

A Navy pilot said, "I'd step on it!"

An Army pilot said, "I'd hit it with my boot!"

A Marine pilot said, "I'd catch it, break the stinger off, and eat it!"

An Air Force pilot said, "I'd call room service and find out why
there's a tent in my room!"

4 comments:

virgil xenophon said...

Wha hoppen' to my comment? OK, to repeat: "As an ex zoomie I'll just say unequivocally in ultra hi dudgeon that I REPRESENT THAT!!" :)

HMS Defiant said...

Damn Right!

I used to store an entire prepositioned MIUW system in the Banz Warehouse in Bahrain. I used the Navy end but one day I stopped by the USAF end of the warehouse, about a quarter mile away, and learned that they had just replaced their Harvest Falcon set and also gained an enormous pre-positioned swimming pool. I laughed. Then I saw it when it moved north during the last unpleasantness.

Air Force... once I was one of them. They used to know how to do business and how to carry on.

virgil xenophon said...

PS: Just had to circle back here to say that there seems to be something in the USMC/Army mentality that loves to "embrace the suck." And I"M CONVINCED THEIR COMMANDERS WANT IT THAT WAY! At DaNang, III MAF HQ could easily have ac'd the enlisted barracks, but kept them miserable in 120 degree heat I guess so that when/if they were deployed in the field they'd be used to it. Another classic example of the USAF vs Army/USMC mentality was when an AF TACP (enlisted) (Tactical Air Control Party) or a gnd FAC was deployed to live w. the grunts. Wouldn't be more than a week before the AF types had rat-proofed their bunkers, had bartered booze & steaks for a window AC unit for the bunker wall and a generator + fuel to run it lol. The grunts were always gobsmacked...it just never occurred to them to do any of those things..lol

HMS Defiant said...

I recall a few incidents of my own. Brigadier Ivany telling me that we needed to put cammo over our site in Failaka and me telling him that the navy way was to paint it grey and air condition it.
Forced to land at McGuire AFB for the night. I sent my junior LT over to call the BOQ to get us rooms. He shouted back across half the lobby asking what our ranks were equivalent to. I shouted back that a Navy LT was the equivalent of an Air Force LTCOL.....at which point an Air Force LTCOL tapped me on the shoulder and read me the riot act.

Make no mistake. I saw it myself in the Banz Warehouse. The USAF had an 'expeditionary swimming pool' all racked and stored for when it would be needed and it was deployed several years later.

One has to admire that level of attention to detail.