Camouflage

[Gyrene]

By Brian I wonder Gyrene, do they expect you to pay for your own weapons and ammunition as well?

BTW, you didn't actually mention was the scales of pay were. How much would a Private earn, for example?

They'll charge you if you lose any of your gear issue like harnesses and ammo pouches. There's always a surplus store near a Marine base selling all that crap to departing Marines. I hated dealing with MCP (Marine Corps Property, or supply), biggest d*ck heads in the planet next to MP's.

I can't remember what the pay scale was, but I think I made a little under $1000 a month as a L/Cpl (E3) with over 3 years.

You can get a pdf file with the current pay scale here.

The only way a Marine got to save money was going on ship or on a tactical deployment where we had no place to spend our money.

Gyrene

[Brian]

Originally posted by Affentitten:

Well, that dates you, I think, considering when the Owen was phased out. I've only ever handled but never fired an Owen, I'm only a youngster.

Not at all. I was at school in the 80's. When I first joined the cadets in '83, we drilled with Enfield Mk IV's, and even some Mk III's that had 1915 stamped on the barrel! The Enfields had the pins removed and were dry-fired to teach basic rifle shooting principles, postures and so forth. They were chiefly used by the cadets for clubbing the bejeezus out of each other on exercises. (All I know is that if I ever get into a position of rifle butt combat, I want an Enfield in my hands, not one of those plastic Austrian things!) I also had my platoon doing a fair rendition of the three-step firing routine from Zulu.

In my last couple of years, when the Aussies started moving over to Steyrs, we inherited a truck load of SLR's, which were much more fun. I still smile when I remember one of our officers, who had been in arty in the regs and reserves. He decided to show us a full strip down of the SLR to demonstrate how many pieces were in a "modern" weapon. He couldn't get it back together afterwards!

I knew a young fellow who decided to do that as well. Silly boy. He'd just finished stripping it when the call came, "On Parade in 5 minutes!" He put together the externals and threw the rest into his locker. Luckily for him there wasn't a weapon inspection or they'd have figured out there wasn't anything inside.

We didn't actually have any Owens. Once when I was on a charge and relegated to cleaning up one of the Q store offices, I stumbled across a trove of field manuals that had obviously been sent as a job lot to the cadet corps after WW2. They'd probably be worth a fortune on e-bay now!

I have quite a collection of pams. I used to collect them when when they were thrown out of the unit library. I've got a few gems, such as a complete collection of "The Enemy" dating back to 1964. I've also got the very rare (now) "Pentropic" Division pam, which shows all the you beaut stuff we never bought for Vietnam.

On camps at Singleton we got to live fire M-16s on the pop-up range, and I think we were once given a demo of that masterwork, the F1 SMG.

I actually quite liked the F1. For an SMG its a light, small, handy weapon and its use of the L1a1 Butt and Trigger group is quite clever. The PIRA in Northern Ireland quite liked them, by all accounts, as well.

I recall the first time I ever stepped up to the block at the range to shoot an M-16. Each cadet had a regular army guy looking after them. I looked at my supervisor. He was a captain. I looked at his sandy beret and the "Who Dares Wins" badge. "Oh Jesus", I thought. "I'm going to look so crap." I'd never even held an M-16 before, let alone gone through any firing practise.

But he was a great instructor, and I bagged an 80% mark on the range. The best reward was him turning round to the other army personnel and boasting that "his guy" had out-shot theirs!

SAS aren't quite the man eaters most people assume. One of my recruit camp instructers was one and I've known another ex-SASR for most of my life. Both were pretty unassuming blokes but superb soldiers. Competition between instructers can get pretty intense, IIRC.

[Brian]

Originally posted by Gyrene:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr /> By Brian I wonder Gyrene, do they expect you to pay for your own weapons and ammunition as well?

BTW, you didn't actually mention was the scales of pay were. How much would a Private earn, for example?

They'll charge you if you lose any of your gear issue like harnesses and ammo pouches. There's always a surplus store near a Marine base selling all that crap to departing Marines. I hated dealing with MCP (Marine Corps Property, or supply), biggest d*ck heads in the planet next to MP's.

I can't remember what the pay scale was, but I think I made a little under $1000 a month as a L/Cpl (E3) with over 3 years.

You can get a pdf file with the current pay scale here.

The only way a Marine got to save money was going on ship or on a tactical deployment where we had no place to spend our money.

Gyrene</font>

[Splinty]

I don't know how reliable this is but I saw a special on the History Channel about the B-29 which said that the planes weren't painted because with a full bomb load they could barely get into the air. The weight of the paint was supposed to be around 3500 lbs.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Splinty:

...about the B-29 which said that the planes weren't painted because with a full bomb load they could barely get into the air.

Don't forget that to get from Tinian to Japan and back they also had to carry about 10,000 gallons of gasoline. I have read that for the first few hours after takeoff, they only flew a few hundred feet above the water. Only after they had burned off a couple thousand gallons of fuel could they begin to climb to their "operating" altitude.

Michael