military slang and sayings (Some may be mildly offensive)

[Major B]

The Scrounge: An individual who always seems to know that extra stuff has been stashed and how to get it. Generally has some knowledge of how the supply system works and knows how to exploit its loopholes. Great if he or she is in your unit, not so great if they in one near you. Tends to have several Conex containers stashed in odd and hard to get to places.

When I was a Platoon Leader at Fort Carson, I remember walking into the Commo Sergeant's closet-like office/cage in the motor pool and noticed a PRC-77 radio in a vehicle mount chained and locked to the mounting shelf normally attached to a HMMWV but now sitting on the floor of his office. It had "2-7 CAV" stenciled in large letters on the radio, which was noteworthy given that we were in 2-12 INF. Rather than cut the lock or chain, my commo sergeant has simply removed the shelf's mounting bolts and taken the whole thing. He immediately said "you don't see that sir" and I said "roger that." Next morning I had a second working radio in my track and they were both stenciled "2-12 INF" but for some reason the serial numbers on the data plate were unreadable.

 

[Timerover51]

When I was a Platoon Leader at Fort Carson, I remember walking into the Commo Sergeant's closet-like office/cage in the motor pool and noticed a PRC-77 radio in a vehicle mount chained and locked to the mounting shelf normally attached to a HMMWV but now sitting on the floor of his office. It had "2-7 CAV" stenciled in large letters on the radio, which was noteworthy given that we were in 2-12 INF. Rather than cut the lock or chain, my commo sergeant has simply removed the shelf's mounting bolts and taken the whole thing. He immediately said "you don't see that sir" and I said "roger that." Next morning I had a second working radio in my track and they were both stenciled "2-12 INF" but for some reason the serial numbers on the data plate were unreadable.

Got to love that one.:rofl::rofl:

 

[Condottiere]

Oslo: Outer Space Liaison Officer. This term has replaced “Space Cadet” as a derogatory term for an incompetent officer.

POL: Verb, to refuel, from the acronym POL (“Petrol, Oil, Lubricants”).

Captain, I've grave doubts about getting POLed by the station OSLO.

 

[Selandia]

WWII Destroyers (and any bearer thereafter, even as spaceship will i presume)
HMCS Saint-Laurent= Sally Rand
HMCS Restigouche= Rusty gutts (my favourite)
Corvettes (named after town)
HMCS Wetaskiwin = the Wet Ass Queen
HMCS Rimouski = the polish corvette
HMCS Grand-Mère =(literal translation from french) Grandmother
Grampa = the Captain (in his twenty) of Grandmother
HMSC Baddeck= no nickname ever needed

Have fun
Selandia

 

[BlackBat242]

HMS Courageous and HMS Furious: a pair battlecruisers that were build mainly for a pet project of first sea lord of the admiralty, Jackie Fisher, they earned the nicknames Outrageous and Spurious.

There is a third missing from your comment (actually the second): Glorious, known as Curious.

Outrageous & Curious were 19,000 ton (standard displacement) "large light cruisers" carrying 4 x 15" guns in two twin turrets (they were barely bigger than the Indefatigable class of "dreadnought armored cruisers", later redesignated "battlecruisers", which were armed with 8 x 12" guns in 4 twin turrets).

Spurious was a near-sister, displacing 19,500 tons standard, and designed to carry 2 x 18" guns in two singe turrets! She never actually carried both, as her forward turret was never installed, a short flight deck and hangar being built in its place before her completion. The aft turret was later removed and a longer flight deck and hangar installed aft, but retaining the original bridge, foremast, and funnel location.

All 3 were fully converted to aircraft carriers during the 1920s, with their turrets and superstructures being completely removed.

 

[Timerover51]

There is a third missing from your comment (actually the second): Glorious, known as Curious.

Outrageous & Curious were 19,000 ton (standard displacement) "large light cruisers" carrying 4 x 15" guns in two twin turrets (they were barely bigger than the Indefatigable class of "dreadnought armored cruisers", later redesignated "battlecruisers", which were armed with 8 x 12" guns in 4 twin turrets).

Spurious was a near-sister, displacing 19,500 tons standard, and designed to carry 2 x 18" guns in two singe turrets! She never actually carried both, as her forward turret was never installed, a short flight deck and hangar being built in its place before her completion. The aft turret was later removed and a longer flight deck and hangar installed aft, but retaining the original bridge, foremast, and funnel location.

All 3 were fully converted to aircraft carriers during the 1920s, with their turrets and superstructures being completely removed.

I have seen some other nicknames in print as well. They were built at the orders of Jackie Fisher, and were capable as built of around 31 knots, although in heavy seas, they took a fair amount of hull damage forward until the structure was reinforced. The other problem was that they carried battleship guns but had only light cruiser armor. The 15 inch turrets which were taken off were used to arm the HMS Vanguard, the last and probably the best British battleship. Furious, the 18 inch ship, survived World War 2, while the Courageous and Glorious were both lost in the first year of the war.

 

[Condottiere]

It was an attempted end run circumventing wartime capital ship construction limits.

Also a demonstration why sixteen inchers were big enough for battleships.

The rationale behind the light battlecruisers was to support an amphibious invasion through the Baltic.

Hindsight says more Queen Elizabeths and Admirals would have been a better option, especially if you had to convert the Admiral hulls to aircraft carriers.

 

[Chaos]

I have seen some other nicknames in print as well. They were built at the orders of Jackie Fisher, and were capable as built of around 31 knots, although in heavy seas, they took a fair amount of hull damage forward until the structure was reinforced. The other problem was that they carried battleship guns but had only light cruiser armor. The 15 inch turrets which were taken off were used to arm the HMS Vanguard, the last and probably the best British battleship. Furious, the 18 inch ship, survived World War 2, while the Courageous and Glorious were both lost in the first year of the war.

IIRC they were collectively known as "Fisher´s Follies".


As nicknames for ships go, there´s also the HMS Repulse and HMS Renown, also known as "HMS Repair" and "HMS Refit" because they spent a lot of time in the yards.

 

[Major B]

I've remembered a few more - to start some creative renaming of Operations:

Operation Just Cause: I've heard it referred to as Operation Just Because more than once.

Operation Purple Dragon: This used to be an annual joint exercise at Fort Bragg. In the name purple referred to the jointness of the exercise and dragon can from the 18th Airborne Corps patch featuring a dragon (incidentally called the Gaggin' Dragon by some). The exercise planners should have been more creative as it became known unofficially as Operation Barney.

Speaking of unit patches (and creative unit renaming):

25th Infantry Division: Electric Strawberry (their patch is a Taro Leaf outline with a lightning bolt in the center - the leaf sort of resembles a strawberry).

1st Cavalry Division: First Kevlar Division (while in command of the Kosovo mission they insisted that everyone who left base had to be in full "battle rattle" when many thought there was no longer a valid threat in the area)

6th Infantry Division/501st Parachute Infantry: The 6th ID(L) has a red 6-pointed star (Star of David) patch. In the 501st, we also wore a blue and white airborne tab over the star. When I deployed with my company to train with the 1st ID at Fort Riley, I overheard someone on the brigade staff call us the "Jumping Jews of the North."

In the early 90s, there were many who questioned the value of light infantry formations such as the 6th ID. When I first arrived at Ft. Richardson, one of the inprocessing stops was joining the officer's club and I saw two things for sale there that made me laugh. The first was a ball cap that stole the tagline from Miller Lite beer. I had a 6th ID patch on the front along with the words "6th Infantry Division Light, everything you always wanted in an infantry division, and less." The other was a T shirt emblazoned with "Too light to fight. Too heavy to run."

 

[Timerover51]

I've remembered a few more - to start some creative renaming of Operations:

Operation Just Cause: I've heard it referred to as Operation Just Because more than once.

Operation Purple Dragon: This used to be an annual joint exercise at Fort Bragg. In the name purple referred to the jointness of the exercise and dragon can from the 18th Airborne Corps patch featuring a dragon (incidentally called the Gaggin' Dragon by some). The exercise planners should have been more creative as it became known unofficially as Operation Barney.

Speaking of unit patches (and creative unit renaming):

25th Infantry Division: Electric Strawberry (their patch is a Taro Leaf outline with a lightning bolt in the center - the leaf sort of resembles a strawberry).

1st Cavalry Division: First Kevlar Division (while in command of the Kosovo mission they insisted that everyone who left base had to be in full "battle rattle" when many thought there was no longer a valid threat in the area)

6th Infantry Division/501st Parachute Infantry: The 6th ID(L) has a red 6-pointed star (Star of David) patch. In the 501st, we also wore a blue and white airborne tab over the star. When I deployed with my company to train with the 1st ID at Fort Riley, I overheard someone on the brigade staff call us the "Jumping Jews of the North."

In the early 90s, there were many who questioned the value of light infantry formations such as the 6th ID. When I first arrived at Ft. Richardson, one of the inprocessing stops was joining the officer's club and I saw two things for sale there that made me laugh. The first was a ball cap that stole the tagline from Miller Lite beer. I had a 6th ID patch on the front along with the words "6th Infantry Division Light, everything you always wanted in an infantry division, and less." The other was a T shirt emblazoned with "Too light to fight. Too heavy to run."

You were at Fort Rich? I was there from 1975 to 1978 when it was the 172 Infantry Brigade (Light). Are they still doing the winter field exercises near Fort Greely? Our parachute infantry battalion was the 1st/60th, commonly referred to as the Worst of the Sixtieth. My unit was the 172 Support Battalion. That was a cold drive at 40 below from Fort Rich to Fort Greely.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

I've remembered a few more - to start some creative renaming of Operations:

Operation Just Cause: I've heard it referred to as Operation Just Because more than once.

Operation Purple Dragon: This used to be an annual joint exercise at Fort Bragg. In the name purple referred to the jointness of the exercise and dragon can from the 18th Airborne Corps patch featuring a dragon (incidentally called the Gaggin' Dragon by some). The exercise planners should have been more creative as it became known unofficially as Operation Barney.

due to a deliberate policy of choosing random words out of a dictionary for op names (to avoid political overtones), most of our ops have obscure words for titles that don't lend themselves to nicknames. exercises follow a pattern of using a specific word associated with the unit, normally related to unit badge or traditional nickname (for example 1 div used "rhino", 3 div used "iron" etc).

Here are a few. in compliance to UK policy, op and exercise names are shown in all caps to distinguish them


op TELIC (the deployment to Iraq): as it was planned over Christmas 2002, it was apparently nicknamed Tell Everyone Leave Is Cancelled.

Op BARRAS. A hostage rescue mission in Sierra Leone, after a patrol of the Royal Irish managed to let themselves get captured. The SAS and paras tasked with actually carrying out the mission felt in was suicide, and called in "operation CERTIAN DEATH"

exercise FLYING FALCON: in planning, a very normal signals exercise, but its execution was so botched by multipled, repeated mistakes that it rapidly became known as FLYING ▮▮▮▮▮▮UP.


units:

3rd Royal Tank Regiment: the Armoured Farmers (unit recruited mainly form the West country, a proverbially rural area)

the Royal Green Jackets (and other light infantry regiments, like the Rifles): the Black Mafia ("black" form the use of matt black buttons on uniforms instead of the shiny brass ones everyone else had, "Mafia" form the way the RGJ seemed to have an exceptionally high number of senior generals come form it)

London Scottish: the Cockney Jocks ("cockney" and "jock" are standard nicknames for Londoners and Scottish, respectively.)

Cavalry regiments, in general: The Donkey Wallopers

Duke of Wellingtons: the Duke of Boots


9th/12th Lances: the Three Quarter Prancers (formed by an amalgamation of 9th and 12th lancers, hence the title. standing joke was that NATO standards meant they would need to change their name to decimal, ie the 0.75 lancers)

 

[Major B]

You were at Fort Rich? I was there from 1975 to 1978 when it was the 172 Infantry Brigade (Light). Are they still doing the winter field exercises near Fort Greely? Our parachute infantry battalion was the 1st/60th, commonly referred to as the Worst of the Sixtieth. My unit was the 172 Support Battalion. That was a cold drive at 40 below from Fort Rich to Fort Greely.

I was there from 93 to 96, assigned as 1st BDE/6th ID S-3/Air then went to the 501st as Asst S3 until I got command of B Company. It was a great tour though when I got my orders I was pretty disappointed. I grew up in Alaska (my Dad was in the Coast Guard and he retired in Juneau) and I joined the Army to see the world and got sent back to Alaska instead.

You think the drive was cold? When I was on BDE staff we jumped into Ft Greely (Donnelly DZ) when it was -30 ambient. I was a JM and when I did the outside safety check my face got covered in frozen snot. On that jump our FSO lowered his ruck early then drifted over the trees getting his ruck hung in one and the canopy in another. Looked like a hammock but about 15 feet off the ground. He was borderline hypothermic by the time we got him down even though we jumped in full ECWCS plus overwhites and VB boots.

My barracks as company commander of B/1-501 used to be the building for C/1-60th. There was still a mural in the dayroom with the unit name on it. Our sister unit at Ft. Rich then was 1-17 IN (the Buffalos).

 

[Major B]

Cavalry regiments, in general: The Donkey Wallopers

That's my new favorite term for tankers.

Reminds me that when I was at the Command and General Staff College I heard "There is no horse so dead that you can't beat it one more time."

 

[Major B]

There is a traditional prank of sending a private off to look for a box of grid squares in which everyone who the private asks will send him off to see someone else. One phrase to describe such a futile quest is Magical Mystery Tour.

I've participated in several since, while I was a cadet doing training at Fort Leonard Wood I witnessed a drill sergeant sending one smart alec trainee off to find a box of grid squares. This particular trainee did not know the difference between intelligence and wisdom. He was intelligent and quickly figured out he was being pranked so he found a 1:50,000 map and cut each square of the map grid out, put the pieces in a box, and brought it back to the drill sergeant. For the next few weeks he learned it was unwise to demonstrate that he was smarter than his drill sergeant.

Most of these I witnessed but one I initiated:

While doing maintenance to turn in tracks after a training rotation to the National Training Center I sent my driver looking for a can of squelch so we could check our radios. He was gone for hours. Don't feel bad for him - he deserved it. My Platoon Sergeant called it "poetic."

At Fort Carson when I was a company XO, a private came in my office looking for some "fallopian tube" so he could draw oil samples. I sent him to the support platoon leader who "might have some."

When I was a TOW Platoon Leader and we were preparing to go out for a live fire, my Platoon Sergeant sent someone looking for "back blast bags" explaining that the missile's back blast was HAZMAT so we needed the bags to prevent environmental contamination. That kid almost missed our departure time.

When I was a Brigade S-3/Air officer, a specialist came to me for the drop zone keys. I told him the CSM had signed them out. I still wonder if he lived.

When I was a company commander, my First Sergeant sent someone off to get canopy lights because we were going to do a night jump and you can't check canopy without a canopy light. He ended up going all the way over to Elmendorf Air Force Base to see if the Air Force had any.

Are there any others?

 

[Chaos]

There is a traditional prank of sending a private off to look for a box of grid squares in which everyone who the private asks will send him off to see someone else. One phrase to describe such a futile quest is Magical Mystery Tour.

I've participated in several since, while I was a cadet doing training at Fort Leonard Wood I witnessed a drill sergeant sending one smart alec trainee off to find a box of grid squares. This particular trainee did not know the difference between intelligence and wisdom. He was intelligent and quickly figured out he was being pranked so he found a 1:50,000 map and cut each square of the map grid out, put the pieces in a box, and brought it back to the drill sergeant. For the next few weeks he learned it was unwise to demonstrate that he was smarter than his drill sergeant.

Most of these I witnessed but one I initiated:

While doing maintenance to turn in tracks after a training rotation to the National Training Center I sent my driver looking for a can of squelch so we could check our radios. He was gone for hours. Don't feel bad for him - he deserved it. My Platoon Sergeant called it "poetic."

At Fort Carson when I was a company XO, a private came in my office looking for some "fallopian tube" so he could draw oil samples. I sent him to the support platoon leader who "might have some."

When I was a TOW Platoon Leader and we were preparing to go out for a live fire, my Platoon Sergeant sent someone looking for "back blast bags" explaining that the missile's back blast was HAZMAT so we needed the bags to prevent environmental contamination. That kid almost missed our departure time.

When I was a Brigade S-3/Air officer, a specialist came to me for the drop zone keys. I told him the CSM had signed them out. I still wonder if he lived.

When I was a company commander, my First Sergeant sent someone off to get canopy lights because we were going to do a night jump and you can't check canopy without a canopy light. He ended up going all the way over to Elmendorf Air Force Base to see if the Air Force had any.

Are there any others?

Cold air for winter tires?

 

[aramis]

There is a traditional prank of sending a private off to look for a box of grid squares in which everyone who the private asks will send him off to see someone else. One phrase to describe such a futile quest is Magical Mystery Tour.

Also called a snipe hunt...

Another fun one is to send them off looking for a left-handed spanner...
or a reversed breaker bar.

in my NJROTC unit, we sent one kid off looking for a "crow inverter"... He was so new he'd not read the "Navy Slang" page of the BJM yet. (Crow is what you call the bird on your rank insignia. Or on your EGA, if you're a marine.)

A former MS3 told me once of a guy too smart... the ET3 told the FR to get him the EGA adapter off the shelf... Said FR refused on the grounds that "Marines' Crows don't need adapters"... and apparently spent the rest of the day reciting "EGA is a video mode"...

 

[Sir Brad]

When working Support for some Corp Secs we had a Mech Engineer being sent on a job, we had to get him "Field Ready" by cramming three months of Paramilitary Opps training in to six 40 Hr weeks, on the "O" Day wile we where doing his in processing between interviews, medical tests and aptitude assessments we sent him for the classics of "Elbow Grease" and "Headlight Fluid", most smart kids used it for a smoke brake or to get away from all the rigamarole for a half hour, this guy disappeared for five minuets he came back with a box of some special grease marked "For use on Flexible Driveshaft Elbows" and a bottle of "Headlight Refinishing Fluid", he'd had them in his vehicle, he was going to help his father restore a classic Jag over the weekend, we where impressed that he was able to produce the actual stuff in next to no time. He may have finished his Masters in under three years but it took him almost the rest of the day to figure out we where having a lend of him to start with.

according to a ex-Navy guy I worked with "Anchor Weights", you know the ones you use to calibrate the scales they use to Weigh Anchors on are a good thing to send FNG's after. to me it sounded like a line item I'd tack on to give me some extra Discretionary Cargo allowance.

 

[JimMarn]

As I became an older Boy Scout, we would send the younger kids out for various things.

100 feet of shoreline, so we could make a rope bridge.

Smoke shifter, so we could cook without the cook fire smoke getting in our eyes.

Wood chip vaccum, so we could clean up wood chips where firewood was being cut up into smaller pieces.

black and yellow stripe paint so we could make a warning sign. He came back around 2 hours later and told us he couldn't find any, the quartermaster building at Scout camp only had yellow paint with blue dots.

 

[Ullarsskald1957]

Left handed monkey wrench

Blinker fluid for the car

 

[Timerover51]

Left handed monkey wrench

Blinker fluid for the car

Hmmm, they actually do make left-handed scissors though. My Dad got my Mom one, and she was so used to using the right-hand scissors upside down, she never did like them. She did give my Dad a big hug though for finding them.

Should tell them to find a left-hand potato peeler.