My son wants to join the Australian Army Reserve, as a rifleman.
After doing all the recruitment steps and being ready to sign up, he was told a month ago that there wouldn’t be any vacancies for riflemen for a year.
There were a few other current vacancies for non-combat or combat support roles, which don’t interest him. (Stupid little prick! I told him to get a job in the Pay Corps where he’d be warm; dry; safe; never have to do picquet duty; and be surrounded by government money which isn’t all that well accounted for, but he knows better. :D)
I am astonished that our Army is so blessed that it doesn’t need one more rifleman for twelve months.
Meanwhile the services are bleating about not being able to recruit people.
Is it the both the Reserve and active force that is full up or did they give him options to go into the full time Army?
Are their vacancies in the other reserve branches? For instance, I have no idea about the Royal Australian Air Force, but I’ve begun exploring possibly joining up with the US Air National Guard or USAF Reserve as ground combat Security Policemen, with duties not unlike being in the infantry. Except you sleep in a nice warm bed and have mostly excellent garrison facilities over the field as one is defending a nice comfortable air base that is paved and has showers, instead of some muddy hill in tents…
I think that is a sign of the times, my son was turned down from the Marines, Air force and Army because of his tattoos. The navy would take him but the didn’t have the job he wanted available. As things get tougher in the economy more people move to the military and it shows…they are not hurting for new recruits to the basic fields.
The military is a great place to start your career and people know that. I joined the Air force in 1977 as a crash fire fighter with a high school ,diploma…and today I make more than twice what my wife does and she has a college degree.
Tell your son to wait the year or take the job that will train him in heavy equipment…those guys make good money.
I don’t know if the regular army is full, but he wasn’t offered that as an alternative
I don’t know, but my son’s not interested in them. He might share my view that at least when you get shot in the army you don’t have to contend with the fresh problem of being shipwrecked or hitting the ground from 30,000 feet as well as being wounded.
Sounds quite civilized. Apart from the air base being a nice big juicy target and being shelled and bombed.
It could be the recession, but it might have something to do with the Reserve being integrated into the regular army and having a fixed establishment which has been reached in some corps.
We’re not short of regular army deployments at the moment, from various peacekeeping type operations to combat and other forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the risk of sounding callous, two vacanices have come up in Afghanistan in the past couple of weeks, but they’ll be filled from the regular army.
He was offered a combat engineer position, which was the nearest thing to a combat role, but he’s an apprentice carpenter and doesn’t feel like joining the Reserve to do pretty much what he’s doing 5 to 7 days every week.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the recruiters can get any number of riflemen but not too many trade trained people, so they structured things to encourage him to join as a combat engineer. The Reserve is clearly keen to get trade trained people as it has a very good apprentice training scheme which puts reserve soldiers with civilian employers. And, believe it or not, they’re currently looking for apprentice carpenters. http://www.defencereserves.com/aspx/Apprenticeship_Scheme.aspx Or maybe I’m just too cynical about armed service recruiters, who as we all know have always been honest beyond reproach.
Tattoos have become very popular here in the States with the younger generation, anything racist or gang related isn’t tolerated. In my sons case…it was quantity of tats…even though I asked him not to do it, he went and got one arm sleeved, from the wrist to the shoulder. why should he listen to his old man…what do I know.
Here in Los Angeles…the younger fire fighters and policemen were getting lots of tats so now LAFD and LAPD have a tattoo policy with new recruits. The older guys if they have them now have to wear long sleeves all year long.
Another popular thing to do now here with the younger bucks…is shaving your head…don’t ask me why, I guess it looks cool or makes you look tough…
Nothing looks tackier than some fat sheila in her fifties or sixties with a fresh tattoo, usually on the tit, neck, shoulder or above the bum, where the top of her thong sits on a ridge of wobbly flesh.
Why should you be any luckier than the rest of us ignorant dads?
That and those near shaved military cuts favoured by US cops are popular here with a lot of our cops. Just makes them look like wannabes to me, not that I’m going to say that when some uniformed bonedome pulls me up at a booze bus.
I know in the U.S. Army recruiters can get bonuses for filling positions that are in higher demand so perhaps that is why they are trying to push him towards another MOS. Just a thought because they tried that with me but they won’t go so far as to lose a recruit just because they can’t get him into the position they want to fill.
Something else to think about, Combat Engineers do build lots of things but they are also the ones tasked with blowing up bridges and usually are the lucky ones that get to clear mine fields.:shock: (Assuming that Combat Engineers fill the same niche in the in the Australian Army as they do in the U.S. Army) It may not be a nice cushy job by any means but it will be quite different than what he is doing as a carpenter.
Actually, he did give it a bit of serious thought when he found out about blowing things up, which all well-balanced blokes always enjoy :D, but he wants to be a grunt for some crazy reason (which, admittedly, so did I at his age, but I opted for cavalry as I’ve never seen the point of walking when you can ride, and you can carry so many more items of comfort on a vehicle.).
To encourage him towards cavalry, or anything not a grunt, I offered to dig him a weapon pit in the back yard so he could sleep, eat, piss and shit in it for a week while I hosed him and his pit for a couple of hours in every twelve hours and fed him on Spam and crackers with no water apart from what was in the pit to see how he liked being a grunt. But he assured me that the modern army and modern warfare are different. True, perhaps, but not for commandos in some surveillance or far forward positions, and my son wants to be a commando. (I thought about it at his age, but the one mile or whatever it was swim in the ocean as one of the qualifying tests put me off, as I have an aversion to drowning.)
What was that that mike m said about what would his dad know?
It is very different at the moment, mainly because most modern armies are in occupying missions, which means they won’t have to spend too much time in foxholes and more in occupied buildings, transport vehicles and base camp.
It also means that you don’t have a visible, regular enemy to fight, which can be very psychologically taxing.
But at the same time this means that in a regular firefight, the modern soldier has a huge advantage over his enemy, other than in Vietnam, for example.
In Vietnam it was Soldier with modern machine gun and air support against soldier with less modern machine gun and without air support.
Now it is soldier with highly modern machine gun, air, artillery, gunship, UAV and helicopter support against militia with old machine gun (or partially even semi/bolt action).
In many ways the modern soldier has turned from the main fighting force to a force on the ground who fights relatively little and rather calls in the big toys. Why do you think there’s so few casualties compared to Vietnam, Korea, etc?
PS: Most modern armies are in very hot desert climates at the moment, so instead of showering him in rain you should build him a custom ‘hat’ with 3 UV lights constantly shining down on him. That would probably be more like it.
True, perhaps, but not for commandos in some surveillance or far forward positions, and my son wants to be a commando. (I thought about it at his age, but the one mile or whatever it was swim in the ocean as one of the qualifying tests put me off, as I have an aversion to drowning.)
That sounds more like Frogmen to me? I read about the German ones, and the shit they have to be able to do in/under water is just amazing. I’d probably drown during the first tryouts…
SAS / Commando types in Vietnam could be in static positions for days, pissing and shitting where they were into holes just deep enough to cover the smell, and doing it lying down to avoid breaking cover.
I suspect that the modern troops in similar roles do the same when inserted or patrolled well ahead of both the main attack and their troops, e.g. for intelligence, observation and fire direction roles.
Thanks.
You’re correct. He needs to experience the full range of climatic conditions, so I’ll hose him for a couple of hours twice a day and burn him with hot lights for the rest of the day, then blow fans on his wet body night.
Don’t sit by your computer waiting to receive his grateful post.
That sounds more like Frogmen to me? I read about the German ones, and the shit they have to be able to do in/under water is just amazing.
Nah, just commandos, who are army and who have to be proficient in all roles, but primarily infiltration, observation, demolition, assassination and so on in small groups ahead of or independently of main forces, so they do all the frogman, small boat, cliff climbing sort of stuff.
RAN clearance divers are the serious frogmen.
Precisely why I didn’t try out for the commandos. Also, ocean water is very cold, and they couldn’t guarantee that my missions would be limited to swimming up a heated swimming pool.
The least motivational presentation of my life was the recruitment presentation from a Major with 21/23 SAS I went to a while back. They start off by giving you an SLR full of concrete and a bergen full of rocks and getting you to run up Pen Y Fan. And that’s just the first weekend.
It did lead to the funniest military comment I’ve ever heard. After the briefing was over, we got asked “Any Questions?” After a brief silence, a guy at the back piped up “Sir, I’ve been watching Ultimate Force. If we join the SAS, do we get to shower with women?”. The disbelief on the guy’s face was priceless as we all fell about laughing. And funnily enough the guy who asked the question was never seen again…
Certainly someone isn’t right in the head if they don’t enjoy blowing stuff up :lol:
My first choice was Airborne Infantry with Armored Cav as a secondary because I had your mentality. If I couldn’t jump out of planes I didn’t want to walk everywhere when I could ride.
Modern military or not he better be ready for that if he is going to be a ground pounder. In the real world he may never encounter a situation like that but there is a good chance they will put him through it in training…
I suspect that the modern troops in similar roles do the same when inserted or patrolled well ahead of both the main attack and their troops, e.g. for intelligence, observation and fire direction roles.
No they bag it up, stick it in their bergens and bring it home with them. Gross but true.
RS, has your son considered the UK military? I know a lot of Aussies that joined our mob. Plenty of chance for action, adventure and of course ladies love an Aussie accent!
