Last Modified: August 13, 2000

Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by US Air Force pilots and the replies from the maintenance crews. "Squawks" are problem listings that pilots generally leave for maintenance crews.

Wooden Ships and Iron Men. From "Oceanographic Ships, Fore and Aft", published by the Oceanographer of the Navy. It has to do with a cruise of the 204-foot frigate USS Constitution, commonly known as Old Ironsides, in 1779. It reads:

Here's the latest in our irregular series of reports on some of the things that our sailors and Marines have done to themselves recently.

a. The LTJG got into an argument with here Ensign boy friend, crawled out the passenger window of his car while they were still moving, then leaped into the oncoming traffic lane where she was run over several times and died instantly.

b. Smoking's hazardous to your health--that's a given. But it's especially dangerous if you step out onto the second floor smoker's ghetto, light up, take a deep drag, cross your arms, lean back against the wooden railing, it breaks, and you crash to the ground twenty feet below--and land on your head. The MWR worker, who did exactly that, fractured his skull so badly that doctors fear he will be totally disabled for the rest of his life.

c. Worrt! Worrrrttttt!!!! Tatatatat! 'Tis autumn and the voice of the chain saw is heard in the land. This first class was pruning his tree with an electric chain saw which, as all (uhhh! Uhhh! Uhhh!) REAL men know, is not a chain saw at all. Nope. S'more like something you might give your kid for Christmas. Kinda like the little boy's equivalent of one of those Easy-Bake ovens. I mean... think about it. They both look something like the real thing, but neither one of them puts out near enough smoke or stink to fool anybody over the age of six. But it's all he had. So he ties this big limb off--to keep it from falling on his neighbour's house--and he's up on his ladder, gradually chewing his way through a ten-inch thick branch with it when, at about the nine-inch mark, the branch commenced to sway and pinched the chain saw to a halt. Hmmmm. So, he wiggles the saw free, climbs down, repositions the ladder, climbs back up, and re-engages the branch. Only this time, because of where he had to set his ladder, he's holding the saw in his left hand. After a while the saw gnaws all the way through, and the branch--which is tied off, remember--suddenly begins to swing....toward our woodsman. Whoa! Well, he sees this thing coming and jumps off the ladder to keep from getting knocked on his can. But, he's not quite fast enough, see. And, while he's still airbourne, the branch smacks the saw (did I mention this thing is still running?) and jams it into his chest where it slashes through his chest wall, tears through his brachial artery, then rips upward into the underside of his chin! Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't seen nothin' yet! We left this guy up in the air; he hasn't landed! Whump! There it is! Good News: He lands on his feet! Bad News: The branch is still bearing down on him and, as he turns to make good this narrowest of escapes, his left hand--a little weaker, you know, a little less able to control the flailing saw--let's that whirling chain saw blade (yes, kiddies, it was stilllllll running) drop onto his right bicep, where it slashed through skin and muscle and through the medial nerves in his upper arm--right down to the bone. And you wanna know something else? Are you ready? This guy was a professional tree surgeon before he joined the Navy. The docs are still harvesting nerves and veins out of his legs and transplanting them into his arm and his chest so he can lead some semblance of a normal life. Hey. Think about it. Chain saws! All those wood chips and all that sawdust and all that blue smoke and the noise of that two-stroke engine....uhhhh! Uhhhh! Uhhhh! And while you're thinking about that, think about this: Neighbors found a Lieutenant Commander dead in his back yard. He'd been there for some time; killed when a branch from he tree he was trimming fell on him and crushed him.

d. A Seal brought a sample home from the office, figuring to play a little joke on his civilian roommate with it. So he gets home, reaches into his kit, digs out a (self-declared-war-surplus) flash-bang pyrotechnic, pulls the pin, then lobs this grenade toward the chair wherein his unsuspecting roommate is sitting--transfixed by the tube. Funnnneeeee! Well, it could have been funny, you know? I mean, really. Seriously. Guaranteed lots of laughs. If only it hadn't gone off in close proximity to, and at a co-altitude with, this guy's ear and inflicted second and third degree burns to the roomy's face and damaged his eye, it would have been really, really, funny. Know what I'm sayin? And the sailor? Oh, he's okay. Not a scratch. But then...his roommate's not out of the hospital yet.

e. I've always thought one of the most unattractive aspects of dorm life, or living on board ship, or in the barracks, or a condo, or any other people-hive, is noise pollution. I mean, you can kinda get used to it aboard ship. Take it from a guy who spent two cruises on Kennedy with he water brake for the number two catapult as a roommate: with just a little practice, you can sleep through the launch of a forty-plane alpha strike. But it's especially frustrating ashore, isn't it, when you're trying to log a few z's and some clown parks his boom box life-support system under your window, then cranks the gain up to a level that will bruise unprotected skin? Makes you crazy. Well, that's the situation the hero in our last story today faced, and he handled it...pretty badly, actually. But you can't blame him, really. I mean, when you're trying to sleep and you get jolted awake to find your bed hopping up and down to the bear of a song you don't like by a group you never heard of, and the windows in your barracks room are bowed inward and fluctuating from the overpressure to the point of fracture...it's pretty tough to raise the sash and call softly to your comrades-in-arms below, "I say, chaps. Would you mind te-r-r-r-r-ibly just turning the know a teensy weensy bit to the left, eh? Thanks, awfully." So he didn't do that. Instead, he threw open the window and spewed forth a stream of invective that blistered the paint on the offending Camaro. Then he slammed the window shut, flopped down in his rack, threw a pillow over his head, rolled over, and tried to get back to sleep. Didn't work. Next thing he knows--boom!--the door to his room flies open. It's the gentlemen from the parking lot, come to pay a call on the local music critic. These guys march in, grab this limp body out of the rack, and commence to stomp the stuffings out of--not him--but his semi-comatose and very surprised roommate. A 50/50 chance and they blew it. Imagine. Unwilling to let his roomy have all the fun, our protagonist hops out of the feathers and sprints toward the melee. Enroute, he makes a fist, cocks his arm way back and, upon arrival, lets fly with a huge haymaker destined for the chin of the biggest stompee. It missed. But. He did his his roommate's wall locker...and crushed several bones in his hand.

A Captain in the foreign legion was transferred to a desert outpost. On his orientation tour he noticed a very old, seedy looking camel tied out back of the enlisted men's barracks.

He asked the Sergeant leading the tour, "What's the camel for?"

The Sergeant replied, "Well sir, it's a long way from anywhere, and the men have natural sexual urges, so when they do, we have the camel."

The Captain said "Well, if it's good for morale, then I guess it's all right with me."

After he had been at the fort for about 6 months, the Captain could not stand it anymore, so he told his Sergeant, "BRING IN THE CAMEL!!!" The Sarge shrugged his shoulders and led the camel into the Captain's quarters. The Captain got a foot stool and proceeded to have vigorous sex with the camel.

As he stepped, satisfied, down from the stool and was buttoning his pants he asked the Sergeant, "Is that how the enlisted men do it?"

The Sergeant replied, "Well sir, they usually just use it to ride into town to the brothel."

This is likely programmer Urban Folklore, but still is amusing:

As any experienced programmer will tell you, software can take on a life of it's own. Sometimes, as this story from an Australian source shows, they're not just speaking metaphorically...

The Defence Science Lectures Series related a story from the head of DSTO's Land Operations/Simulation division. They've been working on some really nifty military-grade virtual reality simulators. Most of the people they employ on this sort of thing are ex-computer game programmers.

To create an extremely realistic environment, they decided to include things like trees and animals. For Operation Phoenix out near Katherine, the latter included kangaroos. In particular, they had to model kangaroo with realistic movements and reactions to helicopters (since hordes of disturbed kangaroos might well give away a low-flying helo's position). Being good little programmers, they looked to see if they could find pre-existing programming that demonstrated a similar behavior pattern. They decided to steal some code which was originally used to model infantry reactions under the same stimuli; they simply changed the mapped icon, the speed parameters, etc. and had instant-kangaroos.

The first time they went to demonstrate this to some visiting Americans, the hotshot pilots decided to get "down and dirty" with the virtual kangaroos. Screaming in at low-level, they buzzed the unwary kangaroos and watched them scatter. Visiting Americans nodded appreciatively... then gaped as the kangaroos ducked around a hill and launched about two dozen Stingers at the hapless helo!! The programmers looked rather embarrassed at forgetting to remove the "defensive response" subroutine from the infantry coding!

The Americans left muttering comments about not wanting to mess with the Aussie wildlife.

As an addendum, simulator pilots from that point onwards avoided kangaroos like the plague, just like they were meant to do...

Airman Jones was assigned to the induction center, where he advised new recruits about their government benefits, especially their GI insurance. It wasn't long before Captain Smith noticed that Airman Jones had almost a 100% record for insurance sales, which had never happened before. Rather than ask about this, the Captain stood in the back of the room and listened to Jones's sales pitch.

Jones explained the basics of the GI Insurance to the new recruits, and then said: "If you have GI Insurance and go into battle and are killed, the government has to pay $200,000 to your beneficiaries. If you don't have GI insurance, and you go into battle and get killed, the government only has to pay a maximum of $6000."

"Now," he concluded, "which bunch do you think they are going to send into battle first?" 

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