You mean they have internet access?
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Future of Marine Corps
- Thread starter FastEddie
- Start date
I remember being at Camp Buehring, Kuwait at the DFAC (eating what we then considered the best food we'd had in months compared to the boat) and some Marine joins us and says "what the hell did you guys do to get punished to be here?" to which the lot of us pilots immediately responded about how happy we were to be there - internet (wifi!!!!!!), skype, sweet gym, USO, PX, etc.
Looking back, the only downsides to being there compared to the boat that I recall were:
1. Getting anywhere was easily a 20-30 minute walk from where you already were, which forced you to really plan your time.
2. A couple of silly Army rules.
3. Toilets were all porta-potties and hand washing seemed to be less frequent than the boat; then again, I didn't have to open and then close the same door the previous 4,000 people just touched either, so at least there was that.
Except for the constant packing and unpacking all of our personal and aircraft and JMPS gear, getting to go to Camp Beuhring was generally a joy for both us and our Sailors.
Looking back, the only downsides to being there compared to the boat that I recall were:
1. Getting anywhere was easily a 20-30 minute walk from where you already were, which forced you to really plan your time.
2. A couple of silly Army rules.
3. Toilets were all porta-potties and hand washing seemed to be less frequent than the boat; then again, I didn't have to open and then close the same door the previous 4,000 people just touched either, so at least there was that.
Except for the constant packing and unpacking all of our personal and aircraft and JMPS gear, getting to go to Camp Beuhring was generally a joy for both us and our Sailors.
I gained 5 pounds in a month there despite the walking distances.
Just about anywhere is better than the boat. Honestly, I'd rather be at Camp Wilson...and that's saying something.
Yeah definitely but could you do 6-8 months at Camp Wilson?
Counting beer on tap and trips to mainside? No contest.
Unless you actually enjoy the flying at the boat. Having just spent a month at sea, I'll take the boat over languishing on some FOB any day. YMMV.
You must have some special tolerance for boat bullshit. Being in the navy and all.
It's the price I'm willing to pay for being launched off the pointy end of the ship on a glorious CAVU morning in the middle of the Pacific for a 1+15 of fucking around and calling it training (FACIT) to a good-deal day trap. TACAIR specific perspective, perhaps.
Traps aren't that exciting. And really we are talking about 4-6 seconds for a cat and 15-18 seconds for a trap. Not worth it. And that is admin shit anyways.
On land you have booze, food that doesn't suck and you aren't forced to pay for it every day. You also have internet that works and even wifi for your personal electronics and can even skype or facetime with your family. You also don't have the stupidity that is living on a boat.
On a boat you have no booze (or you get fired), the food is shit and costs you at least $10 a day. Your internet will barely load a mobile page and you can absolutely forget ever video chatting with your family. Also, surprise, time to do an EMCON / BANDCON drill and now you get no internet or email for 5 days (obviously moral was getting too high.) You have a bell at 0600 telling you that it is time to wake up, then an XO that wants to go on about cleaning stations, then all kinds of other bullshit drills all day and night, then random S-5 dudes coming into your room for who knows what, and then the Skipper needing to come over the 1MC, and on and on and on. Also, you didn't go to bed until 0300 because you are on the boat and have to get night traps so your schedule is slid to the right. And after all of that, your port visit was just cancelled and they aren't going to give you a beer day. Sounds like a blast.
On land you have booze, food that doesn't suck and you aren't forced to pay for it every day. You also have internet that works and even wifi for your personal electronics and can even skype or facetime with your family. You also don't have the stupidity that is living on a boat.
On a boat you have no booze (or you get fired), the food is shit and costs you at least $10 a day. Your internet will barely load a mobile page and you can absolutely forget ever video chatting with your family. Also, surprise, time to do an EMCON / BANDCON drill and now you get no internet or email for 5 days (obviously moral was getting too high.) You have a bell at 0600 telling you that it is time to wake up, then an XO that wants to go on about cleaning stations, then all kinds of other bullshit drills all day and night, then random S-5 dudes coming into your room for who knows what, and then the Skipper needing to come over the 1MC, and on and on and on. Also, you didn't go to bed until 0300 because you are on the boat and have to get night traps so your schedule is slid to the right. And after all of that, your port visit was just cancelled and they aren't going to give you a beer day. Sounds like a blast.
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YES. That was also awesome, coming back to the boat after a week and saying "I just ate great and saved $70 doing so? Sign me up every week!"
Non-TACAIR perspective, but I enjoy the boat (to an extent). I liked the camaraderie; I actually got better sleep on the boat than a tent full of maintainers who play video games all night and apparently have never heard of headphones, and similar to what Brett said, whereas a lot of helo guys get their rocks off by the brown-out landings, I truly enjoy just nailing the wheelboxes on a small boy, or even to the carrier (but I always really enjoy the focus and skill of landing on a small boy). I also like VERTREP, and call me crazy, but that 5.0 mid-day plane guard line with P/M/C in between launches and recoveries I always liked too - it's fast paced, requires 15 minutes of briefing, have to really watch the fuel and the time-distance calculations since the small boys are never where they were "supposed" to be according to CAG OPS, I get to land on ships all day, maybe get a box lunch here or there, on the lines with no P/M/C I can pretty much go wherever I want and do what I need to do for training, do a hot-seat to a hot-seat, come back to just when the rest of the squadron is going down to supper, debrief for 5 minutes and get to put a 5.0 in the log book. It's a good day! Whereas in Camp Buehring (warning! RUN ON SENTENCE approaching!), you'd argue with your friends over who needs access to JMPS more, then you'd finally get done, JMPS crashes the whole computer and your powerpoint for your Level III magically didn't save to the share drive, so you re-do everything and now it's 10 PM and you have a 0700 brief, you get angry when the printer isn't connected right, then it connects but it's out of ink, you find the new ink cartridge and know the JMPS-O will yell at you for using it since funds are so tight apparently, get to the tent at 1130 full of dust, take a shower, come back, try to fall asleep but the night shift maintainers are just coming back now so they are all riled up and play video games and get on skype for the next several hours, wake up at 0600, rush to the DFAC, realize the line is too long, get back to the tent to get in the gator that you were promised the pilots would get (1 for pilots, 1 for maintainers), but you realize that it's gone, ask the Det-MO where it went, to which he replies "ah shit man, I let AT2 have it so he could drive to the DFAC and back. I guess he took it to the flight line too. Sorry bro." Now, you do a fast paced walk to the flight line to get there 15 minutes later and 15 minutes before your brief. Phew, you made it! But, naturally one of the DHs on the flight stayed in that line at that DFAC so he could eat and then you start 15 minutes late as if that would have been OK for you to have done, you do an awkward time hack that is half because if you don't do it the SWTI will critique you for not doing it, and half to emphasize that the DH was late. The next 40-minutes to an hour you give a brief, then spend about 10 minutes getting grilled. Then you go preflight, find out the other helo is down, maintenance patches it up 30 minutes later, and you go do a 2.0 ASUW card. When you return you shut down, and debrief for 45 minutes and of course, the SWTI AW in the room finds every nit-pick detail you nail you on even though he has little clue what was actually happening in the cockpit at the time, but his fellow SWTI brethren DH jumps on those points too. Then, out of no where you get told "yeah so overall, pretty good flight," and realize you passed. Cool.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Camp Beuhring, but it's all perspective. It had its downsides too, at times. At the end of the day, it was a good way to stay fresh in the overland missions and a good morale booster if for nothing else, just to do something different than to be on the boat for 10 months.
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I wouldn't complain about the day because your systems aren't working - when you have your system working, you can get an actual mission drop, brief, and execute in around an hour.
I disagree. Traps are pretty damn fun. Maybe when you're on cruise and they become routine you forget how much so. Cat launches same thing; though they're not challenging they're definitely satisfying.
I do get tired of the "the boat is admin" speech. What is everybody trying to accomplish with that line? I hear it everywhere and it makes no sense. We're supposed to be proud of flying from the ship, not scoff at it. That's what much of the tradition is about in our culture. Living on the boat sucks. I agree with you there.
Are you trying to say it doesn't deserve the same respect as tactics, because I'm pretty sure the boat kills more people and crashes more planes than the enemy.
Now Brett - I suspect your current billet and collar device may have a little bit to do with the enjoyment you are experiencing, no?It's the price I'm willing to pay for being launched off the pointy end of the ship on a glorious CAVU morning in the middle of the Pacific for a 1+15 of fucking around and calling it training (FACIT) to a good-deal day trap. TACAIR specific perspective, perhaps.
I get that. And of course what I wrote was designed to be humorous and is obviously from a JO perspective only. We got valuable training there for sure and it was a good morale booster, especially for our Sailors. But, packing up, unpacking, and repacking all your JMPS hardware every Monday and return to the boat every Thursday is going to lead to inevitable issues with the equipment. That, and at the time, JMPS 1.0 is what we had, which, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but had plenty of kinks, like pressing the "delete" button (a common thing to want to do, right? I want to delete my route segment and make a new one!) would end up crashing the entire program and sometimes the entire computer. And of course, it's the mid-level JOPA guys setting it up because the young-ins aren't schooled on it, and senior JOPA just says "figure it out," but seems to forget that none of us had any networking experience, ever.