Ex/serving military on this board?

Facefuzz said:
Some service there. I’d be over 20 years now. Sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed in. Few of my training party are sergeant majors now, few Staffies and plenty of sergeants.
Wife and kids changed my priorities.
It’s some commitment to do the full term and more.
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing mate. It's/was a great life and you get to meet some lifetime mates who you can rely on when things get sticky.
 
Second Mate said:
13 years in Merchant Navy. Not armed forces I know but bear in mind that proportionately more souls were lost in the Merchant Navy than any of the armed forces during World War 2. Their contribution to victory was as crucial as any.
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Yep. My grandad was merchant navy. Torpedo'd off Africa in 42. Him and one other survived. An amazing story. He was a stoker, and just popped up when the ship when down. Had a heck of a lot of guilt bless him.
Lovely bloke, was a parky in later life.
 
Lemmy_kilmister said:
True... the symbol of WW2 in this country has now become Spitfires and D Day.
(not denigrating it in any way), but the Battle of Atlantic goes largely unnoticed.

The country would have starved without the Atlantic convoys.
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There's a lot of areas of genuine heroism that are largely overlooked and becoming pretty much forgotten.

The Italian campaign, going on when D Day happened
The Burma campaign, which was made irrelevant by the Atomic bombs
The French Resistance
The Arctic convoys
The contribution of Empire troops (or Commonwealth as it's called now)

but more than ever, the real significance of D Day and the Normandy campaign is overlooked - it prevented the Soviet Union from invading all of western Europe. But we shouldn't forget that it was the Soviet Union that fought and died in millions to defeat the Axis. Sadly it's hard to see that the Soviet invasion of Germany was any better in a humanitarian sense than the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The German population was relieved of one mad dictator to have another forced on them.
 
My father in law was serving on aircraft carriers in the Arctic convoys. He never spoke much about them. I remember asking him how he ended up on an aircraft carrier. He told me he was a bicycle mechanic in civvy street when he was called up at age 18 which made him "mechanically minded". And he was too. Always stripping things down and rebuilding them. He died a couple of years ago.
 
Facefuzz said:
Some service there. I’d be over 20 years now. Sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed in. Few of my training party are sergeant majors now, few Staffies and plenty of sergeants.
Wife and kids changed my priorities.
It’s some commitment to do the full term and more.
Click to expand...

I would be on 20 years too, but I left in 2008. I was in the RAF as an aircraft engineer.

Cracking time, best thing I ever did joining up, but the second best thing I did was leaving when I did. There used to be rough with the smooth, like yearly trips going to Vegas, Arizona, Canada, Cyprus or wherever to balance out the trips to Kuwait and Qatar. That system used to work well, but by the time I left it seemed all the good stuff had stopped or was stopping, to be replaced with relentless trips to the gulf.
Same thing with the pay, it started out with decent rises, then you hit a brick wall as there's tons of lads ahead of you with loads of time in, that are just not going to go anywhere. I couldn't wait around for that, there were too many opportunities to take.

Loads of lads I know have only gone up 1 or two ranks, and little pay rise in the time since I left, and most only stayed in for their pension, but that was a good 15 years away for a lot of my best pals. I didn't see the point in waiting for the pension when I could double my wage instantly, and it's only gone up since. Nearly every lad that left the same time as me is now earning more than the top pilots and their squadron bosses, about 30% are earning more than the a top band Air Commodore.

I know a lad on Trident and haven't seen him since Christmas or just after, so I bet he doesn't even know this coronavirus is going on.
 
Haha. Vegas and Arizona to weigh up Qatar and Kuwait. Had it good you lads.
I had fallingbostal and if I was a really good Boy I got to go to sennelager.
I did go to Kuwait. 4 days r and r!!!
 
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