#combat arms

Springfield M1903-A1 

That basically sums up my entire military service: 14J is a combat arms MOS, but we don’t typically see ground combat and we aren’t really in war zones. We only get to do something if someone starts shooting missiles around.A thought: I personally consider South Korea to be a Not Safe deployment given North Korea’s vicinity. I mean, we get hazard duty pay there like we do when deployed to a combat zone. Like I don’t even think I got HDP when I was in the Middle East because it wasn’t a combat zone. I was there when Kim Jong Un took over and we were basically on hard lock down for two months because we were so concerned over what he’d do once he found everything at his disposal. We’re a combat arms MOS, and we’re doing our job real time when in Korea, but just because nothing is happening...does that really mean we’re not doing anything? Does it really mean we’re safe? Just a thought.

Beyond that we spend most of our time maintaining our equipment and training and most of all, waiting.We go to work around 6am, do PT for an hour or so, then get released to eat and shower and come back around 9am and do whatever is assigned for us that day. 

 We take inventory and do PMCS (preventative maintenance checks and services) on our vehicles and equipment. We might get classes or lectures or study for upcoming examinations. We sometimes have appointments during the work day as well. We clean, we volunteer for details, we do busywork. Basically we’re dependent on our command to give us instructions on what to do and we’re just bodies to do whatever task is asked of us.

Every other month or so (or sometimes every month if your unit is bored) we have a field exercise, which can last from a few days to a month. Field exercises are basically just war games: we pretend we’re at war and we go through all the steps that entails. We form our crews/teams and we get our assignments and go to a war time schedule, sending faux reports and engaging simulated enemies.

It might not be so bad if at least our field exercises were fun, but our war games aren’t very realistic, at least they weren’t in Air Defense. They have to simulate several months of war time in an hour, so we wind up getting a ton of random nonsense thrown at us just to see how we react. They shoot twenty pretend missiles at us with two minutes warning to simulate several months worth of attacks and then judge our actual war-time competency on how fast we take out a threat that has a 0.00000000001% chance of actually happening, and then because those “battles” are over so fast they wind up having us run these high-stress low-realism exercises over and over and over again for hours to eat up time. Of course the systems aren’t meant to engage in such incredibly bizarre and unrealistic battles so they wind up glitching and going down which means we get to waste time troubleshooting while being yelled at for breaking our equipment. Honestly I don’t even know how much tax payer money is wasted on fixing equipment that got broke during an unnecessary time-wasting exercise. I don’t think you want to know either.I experienced the same thing while on RSOP. We’d run the same drills over and over until even our NCOs were sick of it. We’d waste time pounding old ground rods with a sledgehammer, made a game of it: the one who got it in in one hit won. It gets boring after a few hours but when it’s your only method of entertainment...

Sometimes we wind up with nothing to do at all and our leadership has us spend the whole day cleaning the same room over and over again, buffing and waxing the same floors again and again, or reorganizing storage containers we reorganized a few weeks ago, or god forbid a few days ago. Some people specifically sought out even mundane duties like shredding documents. Everyone begged to be put on arms room or commo room duty because then at least we could go in there and actually do something. My unit was very reluctant to admit that it had nothing for us to do. It wasn’t entirely uncommon for us to show up for work at 9am and sit there on stand by waiting for orders that are supposedly coming until 5pm. I’m not kidding we’d show up they’d say “hang out here until you get orders” and then they’d leave and they’d poke their heads in every now and then to make sure we were still there and then they’d just leave us there for hours instead of like. idk...releasing us until we were needed?? But that suggestion is blasphemous. It teaches us patience to wait, you know, teaches us character. Sitting for hours with little to no mental stimulation, enjoyment, or comfort. It’s good for us. And after all, they remind us, we’re getting paid a salary to just sit there and do nothing, aren’t we?This is often why soldiers will prefer to be deployed and will waive their dwell time after deployment so they can get back over there. You’d be surprised how many soldiers would rather be deployed than be in the position I just described to you. You get paid better when deployed and you usually aren’t expected to do as much time-wasting bullshit, and note that I say “not as much,” not “none.” I can’t say specifically but I can say vaguely that we did have a very moderate concern during deployment that we handled just fine, and I can say with complete confidence that our numerous, numerous, numerous exercises had not helped prepare us for it in any way.I can’t say this is the same across the whole army of course. Our reclasses -- soldiers who used to do other jobs before they took up their current one -- would tell us all the time that their old units never wasted as much time as Air Defense does. I think it’s the fact that there are so few missiles for us to actually shoot, making so few chances for us to actually do our job; it makes the higher ups stir crazy, makes them want to keep us working hard on nothing so at least they feel productive.  

As always I encourage those with differing experiences to share and for those interested to check the notes of this post just in case!

-Kingsley

“1st Lt. Hanna Rozzi (lower left) sits with her Bradley Fighting Vehicle (sic) tank crew. Rozzi is only one of 137 female armor officers in the Army. (Courtesy photo)”

“1st Lt. Hanna Rozzi, a platoon leader assigned to 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division preps a fuel line before loading during port operations at Kaiser Hafen port in Bremerhaven, Germany, Feb. 2, 2019. After graduating from West Point’s Class of 2016, Rozzi became one of the Army’s first female officers. (Sgt. 1st Class Robert Jordan)”

“1st Lt. Hanna Rozzi heads a ball during a match with South Korea in the 2019 CISM Military World Games in Wuhan, China Oct. 19, 2019. Rozzi served as platoon leader for the 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Team. She recently served as military aide to Maj. Gen. Scott Efflandt, now the deputy commanding general of III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas. (EJ Hersom)”

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