r/MilitaryStories

Anyone who has spent any time in the military has experienced stupid.  I don’t mean being ordered to inventory something that was counted and accounted for just hours ago, or dusting something that does not require any attention.  Some of these items, however absurd, make sense later on.  I’m talking about the class of stupid that ends up being depicted in books, TV and film, and to the average civilian who has never spent a second in uniform and is absurd both on its face and in its entirety.  

I’m talking about an industrial grade level of stupid that is a trip to a parallel universe.  A dimension where the ludicrous, ridiculous and the absurd rule.  A place where logic, common sense and critical thought cease to be.  There’s the sign post up head, it reads, “deposit brain here”.     

It started from somewhere higher up, it always from somewhere higher up. The officers at the MSD received orders to have the enlisted staff to deploy with our Vietnam era M16’s and provide security for something sensitive and important…without ammunition.  Now, I honestly don’t remember all of the details about the background of the how and the why, but I do remember the details on assembling at the weapons locker and being issued our Vietnam era M16’s, complete with the little metal guard that prevented the user from switching the weapon to full automatic. 

Yes sir, Dear Gentle Reader, not only did the Coast Guard not trust its members enough to issue the rank and file with fully functioning assault rifles, now they didn’t trust us to even issue us with ammunition. Let that sink in for a moment before you read on. 

GM3 Rusty, BM3 Dave and I were standing in the weapons locker while Lt. (J.g.) Lou was issuing us our weapons and giving us directions on the mission.  When he told us that we would not be issued ammo Rusty, Dave and myself simultaneously looked at  Lt. (J.g.) Lou with a look of shock, our jaws dropped in unison. 

“Sir”, I said to Lt. (J.g.) Lou, “This is really a bad idea”. Lt. (J.g.) Lou looked at me as he handed me an M16’s and said something along the lines of orders are to be obeyed and not questioned.  I reiterated my point that this was a bad idea and then expanded that without ammo the M16’s were just clubs, expensive clubs at that. Lt. (J.g.) Lou drew up close to me and my 5ft 6in frame to his 6ft frame and looked down at me.  “Petty Officer GooBlatz, are you questioning my lawful legal orders?” 

This was more or less what I wanted to happen.  “Sir”, I replied, “I am questioning a lawful, legal order, one that is a foolish order.  Now, I had done it.  Lt. (J.g.) Lou stepped up and placed his nose to my nose.  Now, for the rest of the distraction.  “Sir” I said, “If something happens and one or more of us loses one or more of these fully automatic assault rifles because we cannot defend ourselves there will be a lot of paperwork explaining just how this happened”.   I could see a vein start to throb on Lt. (J.g.) Lou’s forehead and smell the coffee on his breath. 

Lt. (J.g.) Lou jabbed me repeatedly on my chest with his finger, he was visibly pissed and his full attention was focused on me as he spoke, which was my intent.  “Petty Officer GooBlatz you are never to question an order, especially when it is given by a commissioned officer!”  

In my peripheral vision I could see Dave and Rusty palming loaded magazines, they had understood my unspoken intent.  Once more I stood my ground to give enough time for Rusty and Dave to get at least one magazine per weapon and hide them in their pockets or wherever.  “Sir, I feel that it is my duty to point out information to my duly commissioned officers who are lawfully and legally placed in charge over me with all pertinent information so they can make the best decisions possible.” 

The vein on Lt. (J.g.) Lou’s forehead stopped throbbing and he backed away from me just enough for me not to smell the coffee on his breath.  “Do not ever  question my authority ever again!  He jabbed his finger into my chest to drive the point home. He seemed to be looking for a way out of an awkward situation, but I didn’t care, I had achieved what I wanted.

Lt. (J.g.) Lou quickly issued us with our weapons and a single empty ammo magazine that we slapped into the magazine well.  We then piled into the government issued pick-up truck, traveled to the middle of nowhere and completed the mission of standing around and twiddling our thumbs.  When we returned Lt. (J.g.) Lou let GM3 Rusty handle the detail of returning the M16’s to the weapons locker and Lt. (J.g.) Lou, well Lou was never the wiser of what had happened.   

  

The MSD Series, Part Seventeen…Denied!

This is one of my father's stories from his first few hours in Vietnam. Some of the errata is probably incorrect, but as I'ma need a séance to get the details straight, you get this from my memory banks.

So, October-ish 1971. Pop is a USMC pilot, flying the LEGENDARY A6-A, to go and bring peace and democracy to North Vietnam (and possibly also Cambodia and Laos...). He initially is flying from Cherry Point, NC, with an ultimate destination of Da Nang, if memory serves. Being that this is 1971, there are surprisingly no direct flights from CONUS to the Republic of Vietnam. So, dad's travel path is something along the lines of this -

Cherry Point > San Francisco > Hawaii > Guam > Da Nang. (There is/are/were entirely likely other stop-overs in this trip, but you get the general gist). All told, Pop is on a series of planes for 30+ hours, with naught but the drone of the engines to entertain him.

Pop finally lands in Da Nang, gathers his luggage, and is eventually shown to his quarters in one of the USMCs FINEST quonset huts. In his words, dad squares his shit away, does the needful as quickly as possible, grabs a rack, and promptly passes the fuck out.

Some time later, Pop is rousted by one of hunger/bodily functions/shouting, wakes up, and stumbles outside to see people running around like madmen putting out fires, with smoke drifting across the airfield. Dad asks a nearby service member exactly what is going on, as he's in the land that timezones forgot at this point.

Pop is then informed that he had just slept through a whole-ass NVA rocket attack at the other end of the airfield. Pop is surprised by this, as he DID NOT BUDGE from his rack during ANY of this. He *DID* quickly learn that when he heard the incoming calls/sirens, to grab his pillow and blanket, and roll UNDERNEATH his bunk to continue sleeping in the future.

Pop only spent about 5 months in Vietnam before the Marines were pulled out in early 1972, and spent the rest of his tour in Iwakuni as a legal assistance officer, or something of that ilk. There's a good story from his time there as well, but that shall wait for another day.

I used to be proud of the grease on my hands and the weight of the uniform. As a soldier in the Singapore Armoured Regiment, I spent my youth looking after heavy steel, making sure our tanks and our men made it back from the punishing heat of outfield missions. I navigated trackless deserts with nothing but a paper map and a compass, cleaned weapons systems until they were flawless, and trained until my muscles burned just so I could carry a wounded comrade to safety. I knew what duty meant. I knew what sacrifice meant.

Then, the sky fell.

A horrific fall from height completely shattered my ankle. In a single second, I went from a capable armour trooper to a broken man, helpless on the floor, forced to leopard-crawl through agonising pain just to reach my phone.

When the civilian services arrived, they treated my life like it was sacred. The police dispatched a patrol car to ensure I was safe. The civilian paramedics handled me with a gentle, fierce urgency, talking to me, keeping me conscious, and rushing me straight to the hands of trauma surgeons. What followed was two months of dark, bedridden depression where I had to painfully, slowly relearn how to place one foot in front of the other.

I was still trapped in the thick of that brutal recovery when the military called for our mandatory annual reserve duty—what we call Reservist.

I pleaded with the unit officer. I told him the absolute truth—my leg was still encased in a heavy cast, and I couldn't even stand without physical aid. His response was a cold, mechanical shrug over the phone: "Just come in anyway."

On my first day back, I dragged my cast into the medical centre. The military system had full access to my public hospital records, my surgical notes, and my X-rays. But the Medical Officer—the military doctor on duty—didn't see a wounded soldier. He saw a liar. He saw a ghost trying to skip out on his line.

To test his theory, he reached down, grabbed my casted, broken foot, and pulled it hard. "Does it hurt?" he asked.

It felt like someone had driven a white-hot iron poker straight through my shattered bones, tearing up through my calf and exploding into my chest. The agony was so violent, so sudden, that my vision went completely black, then flashed a blinding, terrifying white. A massive, choking wave of adrenaline flooded my chest just to keep my heart from stopping. I couldn't even scream; the breath was ripped right out of my lungs.

When the blindness cleared, he just casually told me to put my cast back on. I was completely broken. I couldn't walk, I couldn't stand, I couldn't even balance. If my bunkmate—my brother in the trenches—hadn't come down to the clinic with me and literally carried my dead weight back to the barracks on his back, I would have been left stranded on that cold linoleum floor.

Years later, I found out that the same military doctor was arrested for beating and abusing his girlfriend. It made perfect sense. Cruelty was just part of his DNA.

That first day triggered a years-long psychological nightmare. Every single reserve cycle turned into a Kafkaesque loop of bureaucratic apathy. I had metal plates holding my joints together, surgical screws pinning my bones, and an ankle that throbbed with a relentless, biting fire every second of the day.

Yet on paper, the army stubbornly maintained I was PES A—our highest classification for front-line combat fitness.

They expected me to march. They expected me to run. They expected me to jam a swollen, metal-riddled foot into stiff combat boots. Every new, young doctor I encountered looked at me with immediate disgust, assuming I was just chao keng—our local military slang for a malingerer shamming an injury to dodge field time.

During one cycle, a young, arrogant Lieutenant Medical Officer demanded I scale my agony on a neat little checklist from one to ten. Exhausted down to my very soul, living with a knife twisting in my bone twenty-four hours a day, I looked at him and said, "Sir, my ankle is fucking pain."

He flew into a rage, screaming at me for being disrespectful to his rank. He didn't care about the agony. He cared about his paperwork, his authority, and his sterile little checklist.

A deep, poisonous bitterness took root in me. I sat there being lectured by kids who had never smelled diesel or spent a week eating dust outfield, staring at local officers who glared at me like I was absolute scum. They were completely blind to who I actually was. They didn't care about the blood, sweat, and youth I had already poured into the armour regiment. This degradation was my reward.

The breaking point finally came when I dragged my broken body all the way to the Armed Forces Medical Board.

I sat alone in a chair, facing a panel of about five local Captains Medical Officers. They stared at me with those same familiar, condemning, cynical eyes. I felt entirely defenceless. But at the centre of the panel sat the reviewing officer: a Caucasian Colonel.

The room was heavy with a suffocating, silent judgment until the Colonel did something no local officer had done in years. He actually looked at me.

He watched the profound, uneven limp as I struggled into the room. He studied the stark reality of the X-rays showing the metal cages holding my leg together. Then, he looked at the panel of glaring doctors.

Breaking the silence, he spoke a few quiet, but powerful, words that completely shattered the room's hostility: "It seems as obvious as day that this soldier is not fit for combat. Why are we making life difficult for him?"

He turned his eyes to me, his voice softening into something I hadn't heard in the army for a decade: humanity. "I am giving you a permanent medical downgrade and permanent medical excuses. Please, go home, rest well, and focus on your recovery."

I sat there, completely stunned. The room blurred.

I reached into my bag to offer him the thick stack of civilian medical certificates and documents I had brought as armour to defend myself, but he gently waved them away. "No need," he said quietly. "We have all the history right here in the system."

The juxtaposition still haunts me to this day. When I needed help most, the civilian emergency services rushed to save my life. But the military? The institution I had protected, the one I had sweated and bled for, demanded more blood. They aggravated my wounds, dismissed my agony, and treated my broken body as an inconvenience to their quotas.

If there is one truth I brought back from that ordeal to share with veterans anywhere, it is this: In the military, only you can protect your life, and only you can safeguard your health.

Do not squander your body, your future, or your long-term well-being for the hollow praise of an over-glorified uniform. Do your duty, give them what is legally required, but make it your ultimate, unyielding mission to return to the family and loved ones who actually care about you.

Completely in one piece.

Inspired by this comment

I think a lot of us tend to attach our entire identities to our professions. For me, it was "being" a Soldier. The facade of the uniform became a shield to hide my true self behind, and over time, who I actually was ended up getting completely buried under that role. If you stay in any rigid system long enough - for me, it was 25 years in the US Army - you emerge into the broader world not really knowing who you are anymore.

When I first got out, I cast an incredibly broad net into the civilian job market. I submitted my resume to countless non-defense corporate openings. Not a single one resulted in even an initial interview - plenty of defense sector interviews, but nothing else. I felt completely typecast. Rather than take a job at Lockheed Martin, I set up an S-Corp as an independent consultant and picked up subcontracts under SETA (Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance) defense primes. From an income standpoint, it worked out well. But I quickly realized I was just perpetuating my time in the military, doing virtually the exact same work while just wearing different clothes. I wanted to break free, but I was stuck in a loop.

The turning point for me was diving into Steven Pressfield’s books, specifically The War of Art, Turning Pro, and The Artist’s Journey.

Reading his work, a few lightbulbs went off. I realized that my successful consultancy was exactly what Pressfield calls a "shadow career” - a profession that mimics your true calling - but it’s ultimately a safe imitation because your true heart isn't exposed. I was staying close to the military environment I knew because stepping completely into the unknown was terrifying for me.

Pressfield argues that a person's life is divided into two monumental movements: “The Hero’s Journey” and “The Artist’s Journey”. The Hero's Journey is the operational life - leaving home, entering what he calls the underworld, facing the challenges, and emerging fundamentally transformed. Pressfield says that the Artist’s Journey begins exactly where the Hero’s Journey ends. He explains that when a warrior returns from the "underworld" (the operational military world), they return as a "twice-born" soul. We can no longer fit cleanly back into ordinary civilian society because we’ve seen behind the curtain of human nature, mortality, and high-consequence conflict. According to Pressfield, the returned warrior has a specific spiritual obligation to what he refers to as “the tribe”: the hero returns to the ordinary world with a gift for the people. That gift is his or her lived experience, transformed into art. 

I realized as a returned warrior that I have a secondary mission: to put down the physical weapon, pick up a creative tool, and translate those hard-won emotional truths for the people who stayed behind.

I chose to consciously stop running from my past and instead try to connect with my "inner artist" through fiction writing and photography. It’s been the only thing that has truly helped me reconnect with my actual self. Writing a military techno-thriller trilogy isn't a post-retirement hobby for me at all; it feels like the mandatory second half of my life's mission. The fiction has been the vehicle to deliver the underlying truths of brotherhood, bureaucracy, and survival back to the civilian world.

I wanted to share this here for anyone else - veteran or civilian - who feels trapped in the golden handcuffs of a career that no longer serves their true self.

Have any of you wrestled with this specific type of identity loss, shadow career loop, or industry typecasting? If you managed to break free and nurture a creative "inner artist" to find your true path, how did you navigate that crossing? Even if you found a clear path to the civilian world - any tips, thoughts, or ideas to share that helped you get there?

My father, 89, went in for heart surgery a week ago last Monday. Because of his age I was very nervous of the possible outcomes. It was a routine insertion of a new stent in his heart. He came home like a champ. He's still here!

My dad is an amazing man who has led an amazing life and I love to share the stories he tells me. He's a tough old Marine but still chokes up at nostalgia and knows when tears are appropriate.

He was in the Marine Corps Air Wing between Korea and Vietnam. He never saw combat, but learned a lot from the education The Corps gave him.

One of my favorite stories he's told me is when he was an MP on the flight line at El Toro Marine Airbase. He had been given orders that no civilian vehicles were to be permitted on the tarmac.

Well, my dad saw an unmarked vehicle driving toward a plane and he did his duty. He hopped in his patrol car, flipped on the lights, and chased down and pulled over the suspect car.

The car came to a stop and my dad approached the driver. As he did so, the window rolled down a bit.

"No personal vehicles are allowed on the tarmac! What is your business here?

The driver responded "I'm here to see off Leutenent 'so and so' (as my dad put it.)

Then the driver rolled down the window a bit more and my dad noticed the four bars on the man's shoulder. Snapping to a salute, my father followed up with "Sir, I have standing orders not to let any civilian vehicles on the tarmac.'

Without a second thought, the general said "Who do you think gave those orders, son."

My dad, being the courteous man he is, said "Right away sir. I'll be your escort."

November through March is the rainy season in California, a period of time where 50% to 75% of the annual rains fall.  During the short time of the rainy season nature springs to life with a true show of color as native plants and non-native plants that have adapted flower quickly bloom before the dry season begins and California earns its name as, “The Golden State” as the floria dies back to a golden color. 

The rainy season is also the season when a large number of pleasure boats sink, usually at their mooring dock. The California Delta is filled with pleasure boat marinas. Some of the marinas are grand establishments, others are in various states of decay, their days of glory faded along with their original owners.  A shockingly large number of boats moored at these various marinas rarely if ever visited by their owners.   And there they sit, neglected until the bilge pump fails.  The boat fills with water and eventually sinks.  

And so, it was one April day that I came into work. The skies were clear and gentle hills surrounding the Naval Weapons Station were covered in flowers and greenery. In the mornings, before quarters we had been watching on TV the ongoing drama with the Waco Siege in our common area as it unfolded.  During our lunch break we watched the assault and the fire that consumed the compound with a mix of shock and horror. Little did I know that in an odd way I was going to be caught up in the drama.

A few days later after the tragedy I got a phone call from a person who claimed they had interacted with me on a pollution investigation.  They claimed that they were watching the Waco assault on TV as it was unfolding and videoing the event also.  The man was adamant that he saw Branch Davidians members being gunned down by the FBI who were trying to surrender and the TV broadcast had been cut to prevent the public from seeing the truth.  He was absolute in his belief that his video tape of the event had recorded the truth, and he wanted to get his video tape out into the public.

For the life of me I could not recall the man’s name, or our interaction.  I put the man on hold and started looking through my boarding bag to see if there was any paperwork of an investigation to back up his claim, or at least to refresh my memory.  Nothing, I asked around the office if anyone knew the caller, once more nothing. I checked the computer database, nothing. 

I got back on the line with the caller and tried to explain to him that I could not recall our meeting, the inspection, nor had anyone else in the office had an interaction with the man.  Now the caller really went off.  Now, I personally was in on the conspiracy to keep the truth from coming out.  I had been at the siege in Texas, saw it all, and was sworn to secrecy by the FBI.  

I tried to explain to the man that I had not been to Texas since 1972 when I was the tender age of eight.  It was a day trip to Dallas!  No amount of reason was going to change this man’s mind.  I, and by extension the Coast Guard, an organization he previously held in high esteem, were part of the evil that was secretly influencing the public.

Now, Dear Gentle Reader, by this time in my career I had learned how to handle the general public, I had learned how to handle a reporter, especially the “stupid question” reporter.  What I had not learned how to handle was the conspiracy kook.  In fact, this was my very first conspiracy kook.  I am here to tell you Dear Gentle Reader that no amount of rational argument, no matter how many verified facts you present, a kook is gonna kook.  The only thing that I could think of is how to extricate myself from this phone call with some level of dignity and respect for the caller.

…Who was I kidding…

Just then Zoomer stuck his head into the bullpen and shouted that he needed help with something.  My salvation had arrived.  “Sir”, I said.  “My boss needs my help in changing the lube oil on our flying saucer”, and I hung up the phone.

A week or so later one of the reservists and I were talking and it turned out that on a drill weekend they had gotten the call for a sunken boat and so DC1 Kirk, a reservist, grabbed my boarding kit and handled the investigation.  DC1 Kirk went on to say how odd the boat owner was.  Since it was my boarding kit, Kirk gave the man one of my business cards so he could contact me for any follow-up questions. As a reservist Kirk did not have access to the database and could not enter the inspection into the records, and he was waiting until his next drill to give me the inspection documents.  I related my interaction with the man to Kirk and we both agreed that a kook is gonna kook. 

The MSD Series, Part Sixteen…Gimmie Back My Bullets