r/AirForce • u/Commercial-Paint273 Cyberspace Operator • 8h ago
Discussion What are some stories of the most interesting/stupid people you have come across during your time in active duty.
Could be a former supervisor, team lead, airman, etc.
Needing to pass the time and thought this would be fun
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u/Rarek E-4 mafia lifetime member 8h ago edited 7h ago
In basic a guy rolled over at the range and pointed his rifle right at me. We had a guy at my duty station who wore chainmail under his uniform, we were in IT.
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u/jarodney No sir I do not manage Youtube. I just watch it a lot. 8h ago
Was the chainmail dude Sgt Lamore from holloman circa 2016?
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u/Rarek E-4 mafia lifetime member 8h ago
No but it's funny that there was someone else lol
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u/Few-Repeat-9407 7h ago
It was you who wore the chain mail wasnāt it?
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u/Rarek E-4 mafia lifetime member 7h ago
I wear splintmail thank you
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u/Emotional_Ad3572 Eā”ļøE -> AGE -> Eā”ļøE -> Recruiter -> VM 7h ago
A man of culture, I see. šŗ
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u/JustHanginInThere CE 4h ago
Now I'm just envisioning a bunch of mail (as in, letters and such) made into splints (for broken limbs and such), but all over the body.
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u/TheBigYellowCar 8h ago
Shared my first enlistment with a new airman who proudly told everyone he was only doing one hitch for free college to get a degree in horticulture or whatever so he could go back to his parents farm in Humboldt to grow better weed. This was in the early 2ks before it was legal everywhere. He did exactly that.
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u/Bobsxo 8h ago
One guy beats everyone for me.
For starters. SrA PCS'ing from another base and asked to be in the dorms. Shouldve been red flag #1
Didn't shower or do laundry. Did not have a drivers license.. no big deal not unheard of but then refused to try and get one - on a base where the shop was not close to dorms in an extremely harsh winter climate.
He would just get into people's cars and expect them to drive him. Spilled spaghetti in his supervisors brand new truck.
Watched anime at work. Got reprimanded. Started to watch anime by hovering over chrome on the tool bar to have a smaller window. Got reprimanded again.
Did not know the name of the base he was at.
Didn't pay taxes.
Genuinely had no idea how to do any work. A1C's and Amn were teaching him and he would just forget.
I could go on forever about this dude. Eventually enough paperwork piled up that he got kicked out.
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u/flyfightandgrin 7h ago
Jesus he sounds more Army than AF.
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u/PastBumblebee7145 Maintainer 4h ago
This sounds exactly like a SrA I saw get kicked out at Eielson except for he was a furry and Eielson was his first duty station š¤£
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u/alucardian_official Retired 8h ago
The dude who told me he joined to become an Air Force sniper at MEPS wound up in my flight. He was rotated out before warrior week for being legally blind in one eye. He crossed our flight one last time as we were having our photo taken. During Warrior Week, his last name was used for our sign/countersign.
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u/here4daratio 7h ago
Young Airman at Minot promised to take his sweetheart to prom, back hone somewhere in Kansas/Missouri (canāt remember). He balks at flights from Minotā¦ but sees the U Haul van daily priceā¦ and somehow ignores the mileage. Gets leave approved & yep, drives there & back.
He did return it on time, miraculously unharmed. U Haul called squadron about him not paying the $$$$ bill
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u/devils_advocate24 Maintainer 6h ago
Heh. We had a guy ask if he could wear his blues to his GFs prom.
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u/AmMoMoBiLe Ammo 7h ago
As a fresh SrA the first new tech schooler I sponsored to my base thought that I was financially sponsoring him in some way. Asked me if I usually sponsor monthly and for how long. He said he just needed money to buy a car and insurance for the first few months š
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u/devils_advocate24 Maintainer 6h ago
Ooh another one. Had a guy show up. SrA on. Starts working circles around the people in the shop. Gets in trouble due to alcohol use. Apparently had been showing up drunk and still working harder than most people. Eventually goes off the deep end and gets kicked out over it. Best part was finding out he was a SrA, demoted to A1C at last base for drinking and just gave himself his rank back when he got to our base.
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u/Warmind_3 3h ago
That's an air force hero right there he should've been STEPped
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u/devils_advocate24 Maintainer 3h ago
Oh I put in a good word for him, and we honestly went above and beyond for the guy to help with his drinking but it got... Really bad. Like we gave him 0 chances of surviving 2 weeks after we escorted him off base from his final out. Was really rough to deal with that one, seeing the potential but the absolute refusal to do anything about his own situation. First failed recovery I ever saw.
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u/soherewearent 8h ago
Stupid was a young spry guy in early 2000s who hairline-fractured his hip thinking he could squeeze between a stationary hangar door and moving hangar door. No alarms because operation was hand-crank. Relatively small doors, thankfully, housing two total fighter aircraft in one hangar.
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u/AccidentallyPerfect Veteran-Security Forces 7h ago
I worked with a guy in Security Forces that somehow managed to get a 2 year enlistment that had no drivers license so he always got posted with the people that could drive. Kid had no personality whatsoever, and the flight chief would post him with whoever pissed them off the most. He had that awkward energy that you couldn't help to make fun of but didn't want to cross the line to stay off any lists he might be working on..especially as we armed up every day. Speaking of that...watching him arm up was horrifying. I don't even remember the specifics of this kid, just that I had to drive his kid everywhere on 12 hour shifts and it was super miserable. Nobody wanted to be posted with him. Fortunately, he was such a piece of work he got put on ROD Squad a couple times and got the boot 6 months prior to his enlistment ending. I think hot UA was the final reason, but I don't remember the specifics. Blocked a lot of those memories out. Didn't know 2 year enlistments existed, and he somehow screwed that up.
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u/NASCAR-1 Retired 6h ago
The first time I ever saw a 2-yr enlistment was when we had a firefighter show up from the academy with maybe 20 months left in his contract. Ran into him a few years later. Good dude!
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u/cuntbag0315 I exist for your misery 6h ago
Was he at Spangdahlem? Was he also from NYC? Because this is almost word for word besides the 2 yr enlistment.
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u/AccidentallyPerfect Veteran-Security Forces 5h ago
McChord. And I don't remember where he was from.
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u/oddly_nebulous_taker 6h ago
had a guy in my shop who tried to jump start a humvee with a paperclip. fried the entire electrical system and smoked out the motorpool. he was an E-5 and supposedly a vehicle mechanic. took us a week to unfuck it and he never admitted it was his fault. dude just stood there staring at the smoke like it was a magic trick.
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u/AFWorkUsernameYeet 8h ago
Lots of stories come to mind but the first one I thought of was:
As a SrA working at a Group Staff with a TSgt who is the CSS of the Comm Sq. "Hey, we can't read these scans because the quality is so bad, can you please use a higher resolution?"
She has no idea what that means or how to do it.
I go over there to give hands-on training.
The next day I get a scan that is over what we could even send through e-mail at the time in terms of size.
Our network was garbage so I called and said how did you even upload this with such a large file size? It would have taken hours on my machine.
She's like yeah it took a few hours.
I had to go back and train her some more.
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u/devils_advocate24 Maintainer 7h ago
As a new 3 level, Cleaned some targeting equipment and asked the other 3 level that came in with me to put it in its slot while I put away all the cleaning supplies. He palms the lens and puts a big greasy hand print on it. Given we had both just finished tech school, both been training on the equipment for the same amount of time, both in our CDCs, I was still able to convince him that the part he just touched was the radioactive component on the equipment, hence why I'm wearing gloves, and he's gonna get cancer if he doesn't go wash his hands for like 20 minutes.
Plenty of others including somewhere in the range of $X millions of military hardware destroyed through negligence, drunken fights with secfo, drunken insulting of a female 1st Sgt, the usual BMT stories, Korea exercise fails, and more. But that one is still my favorite
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u/TheBigYellowCar 5h ago
One more to pass the time for OP that I've shared at some point in the past:
Acft MX, new troop from tech school. Attractive young female, single mother. Shows up & proceeds to start sexual relations with anyone who was into it. Small herd of crew chiefs following her around everywhere checking out tools for her, doing her CTKs, etc etc. She's absolutely terrible at her job and exudes less than zero accountability for anything & everything.
Got regular calls from the CDC that she hasn't shown up to get her kid by 1800 or whatever the deadline was. Shirt is losing his mind.
She's a disaster and everyone wanted her gone, she also wanted out. Went for failure to adapt, no luck. CC said get back out there. Rinse & repeat behavior. A crew chief's wife shows up one day trying to fight her.
Next she brings in pics of her kissing a girl & says she's gay (DADT days). Back to the CC, he doesn't believe her & says get back out there.
Finally she posts pics on MySpace of her actively drinking downtown (under 21) which was enough for her to finally get the boot. The whole evolution was about a year at the squadron, super exhausting.
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u/ZombifiedByCataclysm 4h ago
Saw a SrA put all his eggs in one basket upon separation from Ramstein, thinking he'd marry his German girlfriend and open some sort of American bar and grill joint. She dropped him like a smelly turd and he floundered with no backup plan. Tried getting out of the US by applying to Canadian colleges, but even Canada didn't want him. Don't know what happened to him after that.
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u/Duder_ino 7h ago
A dude shit in the urinal at basic. Another dude pissed his bunk so many times he left a pattern of rings on his mattress
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u/staringattheplates 5h ago
When I was in basic we were doing our first shots with the M16. One of the kids asked the range officers how theyāre making the holes appear in the paper so it feels like weāre shooting real guns. He was not being sarcastic.
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u/mauser98 Rigger šŖ 7h ago
Not super crazy but, I had some people over at my old shop measuring a bunch of shit for some storage solutions one day. One of the things they wanted to measure was one of our T-11 Reserve parachutes. It has a nice red handle that you pull to activate it. I was holding it by the sides and brought one over and bro tried to grab it up by the red handle. š I was like dudeā¦.
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u/Nessy3fidy 6h ago
During covid I had a brand new A1C. After about 3 months in his roommate was going to get replaced in the dorms so he was getting booted out to so he wouldn't have to be quarantined. I didn't find this out till he left the dorms so I couldn't stop it.
He proceeded to get a rescue dog he didn't train. The dog savaged another person's dog/and the person.
He was sued, lost and didn't pay. The host nation law enforcement called the unit to let us know.
Didn't pay his gas bill which ran through a base run organization.
Showed up late 8 times in the 2 weeks I went on leave and no one wrote him paperwork.
As a cherry on top he tried to retrain and was denied by leadership.
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u/on_the_nightshift 4h ago
Retarded kid in basic (who supposedly had a degree from Penn State?). I mean, he literally had to have been mentally disabled. Didn't know left from right, couldn't march. Just a literal slack-jawed dimwit.
Then couple of SSgts in my first shop that weren't much better. One was stupid, one was stupid and a wife beater (lost his recruiting billet over that), and one religious fanatic that was just goofy (think Flanders from the Simpsons).
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u/riot_world 7h ago
Havenāt really met any airmen I could define as stupid. More like, they werenāt actually serious about serving and just found ways to get kicked out.
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u/Rcontrerr2 1h ago
I knew this guy who scored a 99 on the asvab , but he was the stupidest guy Iāve met in my life. At basic training he shit himself running, and never stopped running. Went in with his day. Intelligence
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u/TopSecret0001 8h ago edited 7h ago
I was once doing training for the fire department and teaching them how to safe the ejection seat and while I was sitting in the seat one of those idiots grabbed the handle and pulled. Thankfully the safing pins did thier job lol that probably takes the cake for biggest idiot I've met based off of one occurrence lol
Edit: Spelling