ATTN all drivers:

If you’re approaching a busy intersection with cars waiting to turn left through your lane, and you’re turning right, put your turn signal on BEFORE you get there so they know you’re turning. Then they can decide if they have room to turn before you get there based on the knowledge that you’re not, in fact, just a fucking moron driving slow, but rather someone slowing down for a reason.

The same applies if you’re turning either way with cars behind you; turn your turn signal on BEFORE you brake. Don’t just inexplicably slow down to 10 mph and flip the turn signal on for one blink in the middle of your turn.

The name ‘turn signal’ is very aptly named, yaknow. They’re there so you can SIGNAL people that you intend to TURN. They are not there as one more box on the ‘making-a-legal-turn’ checklist.

It’s amazing how few drivers care about letting other drivers know what they intend to do. I attribute it mainly to people not actually wanting to drive while driving around, but doing other things, like texting, talking on the phone, jerking off, etc. I’ve even seen people read newspapers while driving. By that I mean they had them literally spread over their fucking steering wheels.

When I’m driving a car, that’s my main focus. I don’t text unless I’m stopped at a light. The most distracting thing I might do is change the channel on the radio or hit next on my iPod. As a result of my paying attention, I’ve avoided several accidents that would have resulted in dead pedestrians.

Take the guy wearing all dark gray clothing running across a dimly lit street in town at dusk, right in front of me, even though there was a crosswalk fifty yards in one direction and a tunnel one hundred yards in the other. I almost nailed him at 30 mph because I could hardly distinguish that there was a person running in front of me, even with lights! It looked like a shadow on the road because his clothes matched the scenery so well. An elderly driver or stupid teenage girl talking with three friends at once would have hit him for sure, and in that case, I wouldn’t have blamed them all that much.

Another time I almost creamed a pedestrian crossing in a crosswalk, but while my light was green. It was pouring rain at maybe 2 AM on route 31, and I was cruising along at 50 mph in the F150, just driving around. I was literally the only car on the road, and this guy decided to cross in front of me in horrible visibility. I had to hit the brakes and swerve to avoid hitting his dumbass. Thanks jerkoff!

Don’t even get me started on road bikes. What kind of tard rides on the (nonexistent, literally maybe 3 to 6 inch) shoulder of a busy two lane road, when right across the street there’s a perfectly usable sidewalk? Someone who is trying to make some statement, that’s who. His statement is ‘I’m a fucking moron who wants to get hit by a car when my front tire hits a bump and I move a foot to the left, right into Granny Johnson’s oldsmobuick’s grille.’

On fucking with guns… and some ideas for NCOs.

Oh, and to all of you out there that don’t know shit about taking apart the M2 but will anyway: the bolt locking block (whatever the fuck it’s actually called, idk) in the barrel extension, you know, that little block that moves up and down? It… wait for it… locks the bolt when the weapon is in battery, and the shoulder goes FORWARD. Not fucking backward.

A guy in my platoon put it back together wrong and I guess forced the rest of the gun back together. He wrecked his M2 bolt when the locking block was wedged into the bolt so hard that it severely deformed the notch the locking block goes into. Bad metallurgy or not, the gun was fine up to that point, and this guy was notorious for not giving a shit about maintaining his weapon or understanding proper procedures with the M2.

You know when I found out it failed? When we were outside a factory, taking fire, and his driver ran over to get my timing gauge from me–mid firefight–because the weapon wasn’t firing. Good job maintaining your weapon, bud. I took it apart with a hammer and judicious use of the slam-the-barrel-extension-as-hard-as-I-could-on-a-wood-block technique. Another time I had to fix his M2 in sector, at some podunk MP station that had been blown to shit. I don’t recall the exact nature of the problem, but I had to strip his gun twice and essentially put it back together by feel in the dark. I got it running again, because I knew the weapon, and almost nobody else out there did.

Oh, and for FUCK’S SAKE. Learn to fucking set headspace and timing on your M2HB. If your first line NCO had any sense, your headspace and timing gauge would be a sensitive item that you are required to secure at all times when in uniform. No loaning it to anyone else under any conditions. You can not GUESS at setting headspace and timing, and you certainly can’t just ignore it. I was helping guard this mountain retrans site once when a bunch of pogue ass truck drivers or some shit blew the covers off two fifty cals because they didn’t set headspace and timing and tried to test fire them.

There’s a distinct lack of training in my old unit when it comes to weaponry, and probably throughout the Army. I’m not sure why, since soldiers don’t do shit in garrison but make-work and stupid administrative stuff for the E-7s and up. 80% of the time, we just stood around. Why would you wait until you got to motherfucking Iraq to train AT ALL with the M2HB? I know why many NCOs don’t train their soldiers: it’s because they are untrained themselves. Wrong fucking answer.

When we got to Iraq, there were exactly two people in my platoon that knew anything at all about the M2HB. One was armorer trained, and the other was me. We were in the same squad, both PFCs. At that point we had both been in the army maybe a year and a half. How is it that we were training SGTs and SSGs on the care and feeding of the M2HB?

To all combat arms NCOs out there, listen up: your soldiers need to know their weapons so well they can take a pile of parts from each weapon in the squad, mixed together, and put each weapon back together properly. Don’t be too ‘proud’ (read foolish) to seek out training yourself if you don’t know something. Encourage your soldiers to become experts in stuff they find interesting that applies to your field, and then have them teach your other soldiers what they learn. Don’t assume you know better, either. Let them teach you as well.

Soldiers have to want to learn stuff, so motivate them. Hold contests for prizes that will make them want to win, and keep your word. Want your guys to know the M240B? Teach them all about it in detail, and test them. PVT Snuffy can do a four point safety check, strip, reassemble, and perform a functions check faster than the rest of the team? Give him a three day weekend. Well, more realistically, I would use a points system or similar and let them earn extra days off occasionally. Sell the idea to your platoon sergeant. Fuck, hold intersquad and interplatoon competitions, with the winners getting four day passes. Your soldiers need to be motivated to learn, and that knowledge may save their lives–or yours–some day. Competition yields a higher level of excellence.

None of my NCOs did this stuff. I had a few excellent team leaders who WOULD have, but they weren’t allowed to by shitty squad leaders or PSGs. As a consequence most of my learning was out of interest, professional pride, or plain self preservation. For example, what kind of infantryman can’t field strip and reassemble an M9 in under a minute, blindfolded? I mean, that one is fuckin easy! There are only four major parts! The first time I tried it, I did it in like 34 seconds. The spring can be a real bitch, and it takes a bit of practice. By comparison, I think my best time ever doing my M240 routine–not blindfolded–as mentioned above was under 90 seconds. I want to say one minute, eight seconds, but I’m sure it was under 90 seconds. There’s a trick to getting the barrel locked in, but I practiced one day in an outpost in Iraq for four hours straight, until I started to get blisters and my squad leader came out to cry about the noise I was making because he wanted to sleep.

Familiarization with your weapons (among other things) is absolutely fucking key to success in the infantry. Too bad soldiers get promoted more for their dick sucking skills, PT scores, and how much their leaders LIKE them, rather than their knowledge, leadership, and mastery of MOS-relevent tasks.

Oh, and for the badge chasers and rank nazis, I define success in the infantry as increasing the likelihood of you and your subordinates surviving in battle, not how many promotion points you can rack up by cheating in correspondence courses and perfecting your deep throat technique at night with your girlfriend’s dildo.

Two shot burst and the M4

I always wanted a two shot burst option on my M4, rather than a three shot burst. Reason being, Army research be damned, three shots WILL start to pull off target. Also, you have to squeeze the trigger through the whole burst; releasing the trigger mid-burst will mean your next trigger pull will only yield the rest of that burst. So your fire might be 2-1-1-2-3-2 instead of 3-3-3-3, unless you’re thinking about pulling through the burst.

Who wants to train for two different trigger pulls depending on the circumstances? Fuck that.

Two shots feels a lot more natural to me, since keeping the trigger squeezed that long feels like normal followthrough anyway, where holding through the three shot burst feels wrong. Normal infantry doctrine calls for firing two shots on the target with the poodleshooter, and the two shot burst option would be an automatic double-tap at closer range.

If you’ve never used a burst fire rifle, you also get to deal with weird, variable trigger pulls with the burst sprocket in place. Removing it and shimming the hammer leaves your trigger consistent. It also yields fully automatic fire on the burst setting! I don’t know if it’s safe, since the trigger group may wear out prematurely or break, but it’s good to know how to do it. Yeah, I had lots of spare time in Iraq, and fucking with guns was a good way to use it. If your armorer asks how you fucked up your sear, you didn’t hear this from me.

Military triggers suck anyway, though. That whole trigger squeeze thing? Yeah… it doesn’t work with standard issue M4s. Seriously. What you need to do with an M4 is kinda slap the trigger, not gently squeeze it: I went from shooting my Rock River and Armalite AR-180B, both with RRA match triggers, to shooting my issue M4, and I couldn’t group for shit because I would try to use my normal trigger squeeze and it would feel like I was dragging the trigger through a brick wall, taking sometimes 10 seconds or better to fire a single shot. When I went back to ’slapping’ the trigger, I was dead on again.

Regarding automatic fire with a light rifle: It is almost never necessary. I would rather issue the M4 with a regular two stage, semi-auto trigger with a decent trigger pull instead of keeping burst fire. There’s a reason we have the M249 you know… just put your team’s SAW second in the stack and if the team leader or whoever is on point gets wasted or shits himself at all the hajj he finds behind the door, you’ve got a machinegun right there.

Do NOT put the LMG on point, however, because the worse sound in the world when the enemy is at bad breath distance is ka-CHUNK.

That’s the sound of the bolt falling when nothing else happens, be it a misfeed, jammed belt, whatever. It’s easy to jam a light machinegun belt when you’re wearing shitloads of web gear, or have a dirty or kinked ammo belt. I had to fill in for a SAW gunner in the other squad one time, and this genius had a three point sling on his 249, with a strap laying tight over his ammo belt. Um… WTF? I had to cut that dumbass’s sling off and climb over walls and shit and lug around the 249 with no sling whatsoever. Thanks, dick knuckle. I guess he never worried about actually, you know, getting in a firefight. I wonder what he did when we were in firefights? I’m glad I was in the other squad.

Are you fucking kidding me?

My entire cable connection (TV and internet) is trying hard to choke to death on its own vomit or something, here, and it’s pissing me off.

Anyway, I’m never writing because I’m too busy living my life right now. I spend all my time working on my Jeep and watching the Yankees. They’re kicking some serious ass right now.

I just had to write something now though, because a certain law out of the Texas legislature came to my attention tonight, and it raised even more fury in me than usual.

Check it out.

So for all you residents in the coastal regions of Texas, you get to worry about getting arrested, and by extension possibly killed for resisting arrest, if you dare violate an evacuation order. Simply put… what the fuck are legislators thinking?

All laws are backed by deadly force. That’s how it works, folks.  There are only two ways to get someone to do something: persuasion and force. The government can almost never persuade people to do things (bribes are excepted), so it must coerce them.

How many of you know about the incident in Philadelphia in 1985 when 11 members of MOVE, a radical group that became a pain in the ass for their neighbors and thus the Philly government, were burned to death after the police dropped a fucking bomb on the top of their house? Five of the eleven killed were children. Oh, and the fire they started with their bomb burned down all the pissed off neighbors’ houses too… I hope their insurance policies were paid up.

Need I even mention Waco? Yeah, I know, David Koresh was a rapist pedophile false prophet blah blah blah. I won’t get into the smear job the .gov did on the Branch Davidians, because it’s not relevant. I don’t care if he was summoning Japanese tentacle dick demons in the basement to triple penetrate every woman and child in his flock nightly… how the fuck is it considered a proper solution to kill all of the people they were supposedly there to protect from the mad pedophile?!

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The only tool the government has in dealing with people is force. Get it? All laws are backed by deadly force.

There is no compelling me to leave my property. I’m sure glad I don’t live in Texas anymore. It would suck to get the death penalty for defending my property with lethal force from the government thugs who came to force me off of it, for my own good.

The government in this country does not serve the people. Wake the fuck up, America, before it’s too late. Or is it already…?