Quote:
Originally Posted by Legbreaker
When I was acting as enemy, one of our favourite "tactics" was to sneak up in the middle of the night with a camera and take a picture from just a few metres away. The flash would blind anyone with their eyes open, and I don't recall a single photo (once developed - this was pre digital cameras) showing the sentries to be awake.
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It's beyond infuriating how unwilling to govern themselves so many soldiers are. It's not just the enlisted men, either. At the MI school, I'd go out as OPFOR when one of the classes of new MI lieutenants was in the field. The only time I failed to walk into the perimeter unchallenged was December '95 when the West Point graduates stayed up all night singing Christmas carols. In the field.
Can't say how many times during training I woke up for my shift more-or-less after it was supposed to start. No one had awakened me. No one was awake. It's a bad feeling when you know the unit has its pants down in the field.
The most serious incident of this sort happened in Iraq. One of our guys, whom we nicknamed the Narcoleptic Ranger, fell asleep behind the machine gun in a watch tower overlooking Checkpoint 12 in the Green Zone. How often this had happened in the past, I can't say. However, a staff sergeant working for the battalion staff sergeant major had been making the rounds to check on the sentries and discovered the Narcoleptic Ranger and his supervisor asleep. The Narcoleptic Ranger was asleep on his feet. He had the gall to express dissatisfaction with receiving an Article 15. I'd have put him in jail, and I actually liked the guy (he had been in my fire team when we started training). I also never would have gone down with him on the gun.
My first line duty NCO said to me that the Rangers were nothing more than what the infantry ought to be. I asked why every unit wasn't more like the Rangers, then. He told me that getting grown men to live up to their commitments and responsibilities is very, very difficult--even in an all-volunteer Army. The years since then have only served to prove him right.