American Sniper
- Thread starter Paranoia
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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What was that? About the only reason I can imagine is to keep regular infantry from being annoyed/disgruntled when they see seals and the like act like prima donnas and the rules dont apply to them.
Personally I just rolled my eyes when I saw the seals on the fob due to their behavior. I know we did a mission were they tagged along with us to Al Asad and the gunner in their vehicle didnt wear a kevlar, just a backwards baseball cap. They all rolled around with longhair and beards like they were about to go assault tora bora or some retarded shit. Even the EoD guys who are not high speed low drag operators walked around with full beards and long hair.
Homsar
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Recon was stupid too when I was in Fallujah. Long hair, never wore gear, tanned on the roof tops without most of their gear. Finally the complacency caught up and 2 recon teams were killed point blank at night and we had to go into rivercity at the time and shut down all Com for a few days
Nothing more annoying than implementing River City since someone always had a change in the configs since the last one and it would break the whole thing. The reason for it would make you mad at yourself for being annoyed with it since your problem was so minimal compared to why.
I had to set a few recon Marines straight for being utter slobs when we were traveling back from a simple backyard op in Australia. They were in cammies rolled up to their mid forearm, flip flops on, and no shave. This was at a layover in a public airport. They tried to pull the badass recon that had been drilled into their brain as an E-3. I grabbed their SNCO as he walked by who was mostly ok and he embarrassed them more than I ever could. The only time I ever used my rank like that. Their arrogance knows no bounds only because they are told that.
Pollo
Silver Knight of the Realm
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I'd rather deal with bad attitudes, huge egos and piss poor grooming standards than do another battlefield hand off with Rangers who decided to whack an Afghan officers wife during an OP.
Three deployments (1 15 and 2 12 month Army ones, not those faggot 6 month Marine/Navy/Air Force ones) and having been co-located with task forces of all shapes and colors, I just gave up doing on the spot corrections. I get cross eyed looks anyways since I'm a Warrant.
Pssh I did 13 months straight in the Marines but because I was HQ so we had to overlap all the battalions.
They were stoic because it was new programs very secretive. The reason you go to BUDS and not SEAL school is because then people thought you did underwater demolition only. Back then you kept your mouth shut about what you did, you went around the base trying to look like everyone else not trying to grow a Duck Dynasty beard.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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When it comes to seals at least, there is a very simple reason; how you become a seal. You go from being a civilian to bootcamp to buds to a seal team, essentially you come into the military being a rockstar. On the other hand for the Army's equivalent(special forces group) you have do 4 years first as infantry or closely related MOS. In that first 4 year enlistment in the past decade you would of done a combat deployment or two and considerable training. Similar thing for the Marines and marsoc, 99.9% of the time they will only consider people who have 4 years and a few deployments under their belt. So seals are rockstars from the start with zero experience to back it up, while if youre army/marines you have to have real world experience for a shot at joining marsoc/fsg. Movies like this and Lone Survivor(that movie was terrible and literally the complete opposite of what happened that day) are the result of that hyped up rockstar mentality.
Overall though I its probably due to the massive amount of information out there now. 20+ years ago no one knew what the hell seals or sfg did, now after 13+ years of war and fighting along side them everyone knows them and knows what they do/are capable of. Truth be told they arent exactly any better than a regular infantry unit they just have a different mission compared to infantry. So because of that seals/sfg/marsoc all end up with more specialized training and gear and pull so they get to do whatever they want for a large part but overall at the end of the day a lot of what theyve been doing during the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan could of easily of been done by a infantry unit.
Case and point(and really shows how pointlessly dumb the military can be) is the whole lone survivor fiasco. The tl;dr of it is a marine infantry battalion was forced to work with navy seals for an extremely simple and straight forward op. Due to the fact that seals are on their own program and only answer to themselves it resulted in them being pointlessly destroyed and subsequently half of their rescue team.
I liked it, although it felt very bleak. I appreciate that it didn't have some political agenda. It was pretty straight forward.
Void
Experiencer
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Pretty much this. Even though I've been wary of biographical movies ever since Private Parts made me think maybe Howard Stern wasn't a massive asshole, I thought this one did a pretty good job of showing how he wasn't necessarily the best at all aspects of his life, but he sort of had a driving need, and it tied the whole thing together well. I'm sure the movie played up his good aspects and, like all of us, I'm sure he had a shitty side, but I thought the movie did a good job of balancing most of it without being preachy.
Also, until the credits I had no idea that was Sienna Miller. She looked completely different than I remember.
I will say that the real life funeral procession stuff at the end hit me a lot harder than I would have expected. Like the guy or not, when hundreds/thousands of people line the freeways and overpasses, and your funeral celebration is held in Cowboys stadium, that's a pretty big deal.
As an aside, I cannot recommend strongly enough that anyone who has been in the forces, is thinking of joining, knows anyone in/joining watch the following documentary :
Big Phoenix
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Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
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I was thinking the same thing reading through this thread.
Bunch of non-Special Ops guys telling war stories about the time they were near some SEALs. Just giving you shit though...
I'm kind of disapppointed that this movie isn't apparently very good. I had high hopes for it since it was more in line with my time in, as opposed to Lone Survivor since I never went to Afghanistan.
I bet in the next decade there will be some really good war movies to come out. The 80s had some amazing Vietnam flicks.
McQueen
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Big Phoenix
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This weird quasi veteran worship thats going on now. Hurt Locker was fucking terrible, like off the fucking walls 100% unrealistic depiction of what was going on in Iraq yet it won.