HOLY POO! That'll leave a mark!

Where’s that animated gif Scanners clip when you need it?

i thought marines and army were the other way around

Air Force is the best, because the enlisted stay back at base while the officers go out to get killed.

The Army has more dumbass blockheads than the Marines by volume. The Marines have more dumbass blockheads than the Army per capita.

Although the Grunts, Squids, Zoomies, Jarheads, and Coasties all have something in common - we all get to look down on the PHS and NOAA guys pretending to be military in their little uniforms and commissioned ranks and laugh at them.

What about the A&M Corps of Cadets?

Remember in grade school when you’d go out for recess and pick teams for kickball? The fat kid who got picked last? Cadets fall under him in order of precedence. EVERYONE gets to sneer at cadets.

I’m a civilian, and I laugh at the A&M Corps of Cadets. Which is why I ask. :)

When it comes to officers, there are three (sort of four) categories, at least when it comes to the Army:

  1. OCS grads. Prior enlisted who’ve gone through Officer Candidate School, usually after acquiring a college degree. Referred to as “90 Day Wonders”. Given respect because they’ve been the dirt-faced grunts in the trenches before, so they generally have some real experience.

  2. ROTC grads. The aforementioned A&M Corps of Cadets and their ilk. They play dress-up for a few years, the Army pays their college tuition and then the cadet gets commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and goes to fulfill their obligation. Having been through four years of cadet training, they USUALLY know their place in things and learn quickly.

  3. West Point grads. Fucking assholes. There is nothing more vile than a butter-bar lieutenant straight out of West Point telling a platoon sergeant, “Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure that I know the right way to do this…” - we had a platoon leader who was fresh out of West Point and thought he was the second coming of Patton. Managed to set half of a range on fire with a hand-launched flare and dislocated his knee in the process.

West Point - the only educational institution that consumes shit and produces assholes.

EDIT: and fourth - Warrant Officers. These are folks who are experts in their (usually noncombat) field, appointed by warrant to fill this weird void as subject-matter-experts, hovering between enlisted and commissioned officers. Always referred to as “Chief” or “Mister”. Generally laid-back and if in the logistics field, inevitably corrupt.

I miss LK’s perspective for threads like this.

I bought my condo from an old airforce brigadier who was a sabre and super-sabre test pilot. He seemed pretty tough, too.

Test pilots = manly, no matter how you slice it. They can grow a mustache in seconds just by sheer force of will.

heh, so did I. Especially if you rank them from stable > bat-shit insane ;)

Nope. To qualify to enter the armed forces, you have to take the armed forces qualification test. Each military branch has a different minimum AFQT score for new recruits. On top of that, the Army will take you if you have a GED, whereas the Air Force and Marine Corp typically won’t consider candidates who have GEDs instead of real high school diplomas.

Maximum points = 99.

Coast Guard: 40 pts
USAF: 36 pts
Navy: 32 pts.
Marines: 31 pts.
Army: 26 pts

That reminds me of my favorite officer joke:

What’s the difference between a 2nd lieutenant and a Private First Class?
A PFC has been promoted twice.

I had a platoon leader from A&M once. While he wasn’t f’ed in the head like a West Pointer, he definitely was bat-shit crazy.

And a 99 is easy to score for an intelligent person. >.>

No, because that intelligent person would have to be convinced that he/she would be better off in the military than in the private sector, and that is not easy.

The scores reflect your percentile compared to other test takers. A score of 99 would place you in the top 1%. The median score of all test takers is 50.

There are some free practice tests:

Yea, i got a 98 and was bugged for years afterwards.

I had an ASVAB score that would have qualified me for any enlisted job in any branch of service.

What’d I take?

The service with the lowest entry requirements (Army) and the MOS with the second-lowest ASVAB requirements (combat engineer). It was like being the smartest Neanderthal on the block and it was awesome.

Those ASVAB tests require way too much info before you can take them :(

Lie. Everyone else does. Use this phone number and address:
(512) 555-1212
1234 Main Street, Austin, TX, 78756

I’d be interested to know what you score on the vocabulary section. English is, after all, a foreign language to you.