The Hurt Locker...it makes me hurt

[G26ster]

When did the Airborne tab become an "individual" tab? In my day the tab was part of a unit shoulder patch for units designated Airborne as an entire unit (i.e. 101st Abn Div., 82 Abn Div., and 173 Abn Brdg.

It didn't.

No change since you left.

I see there is now a Sapper tab. Hmmm, again, in my day, the only sappers we ever saw were dressed in black and headed through our wire at the firebase. Interesting.

[skub]

My son-in-law-to-be is Sapper qualified, so I've been studying up on it. It is a qualification below "Ranger" and involves passing a 28 day course at Ft. Leonard Wood (In one of the classes I heard about, less than half passed).

Here is an Wikipedia article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapper

... and a video...

[youtube][/youtube]

[fecnik]

not to threadjack...but i would like to know how realistic the HBO series "Generation Kill" is. Has anyone seen this?

[txrr]

Ok Ill bite on this one. Does anyone actually believe the anti-military /anti-gun elitists who control the content of Hollywood films is going to portray the truth? You couldn’t pay me enough money to sit and watch the “Hurt Locker.”

[skub]

And they seem to value "creativity" above all else.

[Texas Dan Mosby]

Does anyone actually believe the anti-military /anti-gun elitists who control the content of Hollywood films is going to portray the truth?

No.

Not at all.

[3dfxMM]

When did the Airborne tab become an "individual" tab? In my day the tab was part of a unit shoulder patch for units designated Airborne as an entire unit (i.e. 101st Abn Div., 82 Abn Div., and 173 Abn Brdg.

That is exactly how it is still. There are quite a number of Soldiers who wear the Airborne tab as part of their unit insignia who aren't airborne qualified. Especially at the 101st since they only sport the Airborne name for historical reasons. They are not on jump status.

[3dfxMM]

My son-in-law-to-be is Sapper qualified, so I've been studying up on it. It is a qualification below "Ranger" and involves passing a 28 day course at Ft. Leonard Wood (In one of the classes I heard about, less than half passed).

I think it would be more accurate to say that it is a different qualification, rather than below. Both Sapper School and Ranger School are leadership courses. They just go about it a bit differently and put emphasis on different things. Any Soldier sporting any one of the tabs earned it through a lot of hard work and probably a good bit of pain and suffering as well.

[G26ster]

When did the Airborne tab become an "individual" tab? In my day the tab was part of a unit shoulder patch for units designated Airborne as an entire unit (i.e. 101st Abn Div., 82 Abn Div., and 173 Abn Brdg.

That is exactly how it is still. There are quite a number of Soldiers who wear the Airborne tab as part of their unit insignia who aren't airborne qualified. Especially at the 101st since they only sport the Airborne name for historical reasons. They are not on jump status.

Agreed, as I was in the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) in RVN as an Army aviator. The "Airborne" is part of the unit patch.

[Purplehood]

I agree with most of the points, but never having been in the US military I'm not sure what your SOPs are.

Annoying issue #3: When outside the wire you do not drive around in a lone vehicle. I couldn't believe it when I saw these guys in the movie driving around in their HUMVEE with no accompanying vehicles. They drove around empty desert.

As a rule, I would agree - lone soldiers make easy targets for either killing or kidnapping. However...

We had a base out in the desert north of Baghdad and west of Tikrit protecting engineers who were disposing of munitions stored in Saddam's bunkers - we had literally zero soldiers on that camp, so we had to be totally self-sufficient as far as security was concerned. This mean that, if you weren't on a PSD detail doing a run to Tikrit, Mosul, Baghad or wherever, you were looking after the engineers doing disposal on-site or at a small remote base a few miles away - or doing wide desert recon around both, looking for trouble.

I'm not going to go into any detail but often it was just me and a single Gurkha - and we ended up spending the night out in the desert on a number of occasions (it was necessary, I'm not going to go into why). Not the most comforting thing to do, but we often had to perform balancing acts and make impromptu decisions on the spot which flew against our SOPs as long as it was for the greater good.

I think that what annoyed me about the movie is that the Bomb disposal unit made a practice of playing Lone Ranger throughout. As you accurately point out, there are times that you just have to accomplish the mission. The clowns in the movie were just playing too much Cowboy for my taste.

[Purplehood]

One thing that bugged me was the hero's willingness to just do things solo, off-the-cuff and keeping his team in the dark - I'm surprised he only got a fat lip.

Exactly! After a mission or two that guy would have been leaving on missions by himself.