A few of the mods are talking about taking us dark June 12-14 with the other subs to protest the API changes. All hell is breaking loose on the reddit moderator council subreddit right now, and quite a few other subreddits representing hundreds of millions of subscribers are going dark.

If you aren't clued in, Reddit is going to start charging a ridiculous amount of money in July for API access...

Funny minor mishap back when. I was G2G scholarship back in the 80s, the "Army of Excellence" era. I couldn't participate in the SMP program b/c of scholarship rules/status at the time, but I was able to get orders to jump with a local LRS company. For being the guard, this unit was pretty high-speed; they had recently deployed to the UK to train with SAS. I knew some other cadets who SMP'd with...

A warning before we begin this little journey:

This is going to be a long one. So grab your cup of whatever you prefer, sit down and get comfortable. You are going to be here awhile. Second warning, if you make it all the way to the end of this dissertation of mine you are going to find yourself closing your browser and saying to yourself, "That guy is as full of shit as a Christmas Turkey!". And...

Things woud be one way for a year. Everyone would go by a specific baseline. Then one day - things changed and some person wouldn't get the memo. So they would do things how htey had been done for a year. Then they would get gaslit and told things were never done that way.

I started to question myself so I kept a notepad in my pocket. I'd write down dates and exactly how something happened. Then...

If you are struggling, please see the suicide prevention numbers at the bottom of this post.

If you are looking for Story of the Year and other type posts, links are at the bottom of this post.

Apologies for being a day late. Between the end of the school year and waking up sick the day before yesterday, I'm off my game.

Reminder: New monthly winner awards are Community Award for 1st place,...

Shortly after 9/11, my unit was sent over to Germany to backfill the active duty troops and run force protection details. Our lives turned into a very mundane process of perimeter patrols and working checkpoints.

On our days off, we would generally barbecue and drink beer. One particular day off, I believe it was a Saturday, I was bored and decided to go see what the USO had as it was located...

When I had just come out of basic, I went on to vocational training as a signaller (today I think they call them comms. specialists). One of the Platoon Commanders, let's just call him Jake, was a very fair and competent officer (Lt.) with one major defect:

He had a terriblememory when it came to the names of items. He could remember what things were called with time and effort - but he needed to...

My dad related this story to me when he was quite old, never said an awful lot about his WW2 days.

He was on the beach at Dunkirk for four days, didn't like the Stukas unsurprisingly. On one of the days him and a buddy were told to take a truck and go to pick up some wounded from a barn a way back from the beach, they had a BrenGun carrier with them. They got there safely although he did say they...

Here's a story I'm sure many of you have different versions of, but I'll go first & then you can drop a funny combat poop memory here too.

2011, Afghanistan. Our unit was hunting a particular shadow governor in Jalalabad, and we got wind that he was in a little village south of the city. We NEVER did daylight ops - we were almost exclusively a point target raid organization. In this particular...

In the late 80’s, I finished Army basic training and was sent to an Air Force Base for my advanced training as an intelligence analyst. Our training was done in a windowless classroom inside a secured facility.

On our last day of class, we finished very early. The Army instructor tells us once we completely clear out the classroom and clean it, we will be done for the day. Tell a bunch of Army...