Years ago, I enlisted as an infantryman in thr national guard and joined the ROTC program at my local university to pay for my degree. I quit ROTC before commissioning and this story was possibly the pivotal moment where I started wondering if I really wanted to be an officer.

So there I was at field training exercise wondering how many ticks had crawled up my legs when we ambushed the role players. This exercise had combined the ROTC Cadre and cadets from several different universities so we had Cadre from another university grading us.

We ambush them, they all fall to the ground dead from the power of our yelled "bang bang" then we start doing exactly what we had trained for the last semester to do. You know how the book anwser to check a body for booby traps is 1 guy holds the body then rolls it over while another guy covers you? I was the guy rolling the body. Did it exactly how Cadre and upperclassmen and basic training had told me to do it. Didn't think anything of it until the AAR 15 minutes later.

Instructor from another university starts laying into me about how I'm trying to play a hero and would get everyone killed. And I'm looking around a little confused because all the Cadre and other cadets are just simply silent listening to this master sergeant rant. Then he proceeds to tell us the actual real way you check a body in Iraq is with a harpoon. I thought at first I misheard him but he then proceeds to say shoot it with a harpoon then drag it a little. At this point I'm wondering if I'm a little dehydrated and hallucinating but as we end the AAR I'm listening to my classmates dead serious talk about how badass harpoon guy was and how many people he must have killed. While the upperclassmen who'd been the squad leader for the exercise muttered something when I asked "I've never heard of somebody using a harpoon before".

Since then I've asked multiple infantry veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both Army and Marine and nobody has even heard of somebody carrying a harpoon into combat. So, has anybody else been told you're supposed to shoot dead bodies with a harpoon in the army? Or is it just me?