Posted on 12/29/2013 5:56:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The Marine Corps has delayed the requirement for female Marines to do three pullups because most women have so far been unable to pass the test.
For 40 years, male recruits were required to perform three pullups to prove their upper body strength for combat, where they would need to carry heavy equipment and potentially lift themselves out of mud walls.
Starting Jan. 1, female recruits would have been required to do the same.
But 55 percent of female recruits could not complete all three pullups, compared to just 1 percent of male recruits who could not, so the requirement was delayed.
The Marine Corps made the announcement without fanfare on Twitter and its TV show, the Corps Report. Currently, female Marines only have to hold their chin above a pullup bar for 15 seconds.
This suggests a need by the Marine Corps to hide the fact that equality in combat may not be possible, though some female Marines are able to pass the test. So far 13 have done so.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
Might as well eliminate running too as a requirement. Makes you all sweaty and stuff. Who need it?
Hey Jane...I'll carry Greg. You can carry Joe.....Sorry Charlie....We'll have to leave this one behind.
Never mind Jane...I'll carry them both. Just grab the lunch bag.
The few, the proud, the weak, the gay....
I worked with a woman who drove a truck as an Army soldier in Iraq. She was an unabashedly open lesbian. She “volunteered” for three years and saw plenty of battle action and IED’s. She was a total head case with such severe depression she was committed to in-hospital psychiatric care by the Army medical people. (My company held her job open for a year, then finally, she apparently told them she wasn’t going to get out.)
Now, I appreciate her service. However, here’s the thing. She blamed the Army for her condition. It didn’t matter that she’d volunteered and gone back two more times. Everything that was wrong with her was the Army’s fault and she was very angry at the Army. Apparently, she had something to prove. Well, she did in fact prove something.
3 is the minimum. As I recall 20 maxed it, and you better do 20...
It is as possible as taxing yourself into prosperity. Or standing in a bucket and lifting yourself up by the handle.
Progressive wet dreams are very dangerous in the real world.
by Vin Suprynowicz
Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year.
Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween?
It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty.
Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today we struggle to envision — or, for a few of us, to remember — how the world must have looked on Oct. 26, 1942. A few thousand lonely American Marines had been put ashore on Guadalcanal, a god-forsaken malarial jungle island which just happened to lie like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago — the very route the Japanese Navy would have to take to reach Australia.
On Guadalcanal the Marines built an air field. And Japanese commander Isoroku Yamamoto immediately grasped what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart Yanks from a position that could endanger his ships during any future operations to the south. Before long, relentless Japanese counterattacks had driven supporting U.S. Navy from inshore waters. The Marines were on their own.
World War Two is generally calculated from Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. But that's a eurocentric view. The Japanese had been limbering up their muscles in Korea and Manchuria as early as 1931, and in China by 1934. By 1942 they'd devastated every major Pacific military force or stronghold of the great pre-war powers: Britain, Holland, France, and the United States. The bulk of America's proud Pacific fleet lay beached or rusting on the floor of Pearl Harbor. A few aircraft carriers and submarines remained, though as Mitchell Paige and his 30-odd men were sent out to establish their last, thin defensive line on that ridge southwest of the tiny American bridgehead on Guadalcanal on Oct. 25, he would not have been much encouraged to know how those remaining American aircraft carriers were faring offshore.
(The next day, their Mark XV torpedoes — carrying faulty magnetic detonators reverse-engineered from a First World War German design — proved so ineffective that the United States Navy couldn't even scuttle the doomed and listing carrier Hornet with eight carefully aimed torpedoes. Instead, our forces suffered the ignominy of leaving the abandoned ship to be polished off by the enemy ... only after Japanese commanders determined she was damaged too badly to be successfully towed back to Tokyo as a trophy.)
As Paige — then a platoon sergeant — and his riflemen set about carefully emplacing their four water-cooled Brownings, it's unlikely anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to that most desperate of questions: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 desperate and motivated attackers?
The Japanese Army had not failed in an attempt to seize any major objective since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Their commanders certainly did not expect the war to be lost on some God-forsaken jungle ridge manned by one thin line of Yanks in khaki in October of 1942.
But in preceding days, Marine commander Vandegrift had defied War College doctrine, "dangling" his men in exposed positions to draw Japanese attacks, then springing his traps "with the steel vise of firepower and artillery," in the words of Naval historian David Lippman.
The Japanese regiments had been chewed up, good. Still, the American forces had so little to work with that Paige's men would have only the four 30-caliber Brownings to defend the one ridge through which the Japanese opted to launch their final assault against Henderson Field, that fateful night of Oct. 25.
By the time the night was over, "The 29th (Japanese) Infantry Regiment has lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its 2,554 men," historian Lippman reports. "The 16th (Japanese) Regiment's losses are uncounted, but the 164th's burial parties handle 975 Japanese bodies. ... The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is probably too low."
Among the 90 American dead and wounded that night were all the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon. Every one. As the night wore on, Paige moved up and down his line, pulling his dead and wounded comrades back into their foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of the four Brownings in turn, convincing the Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were still manned.
The citation for Paige's Congressional Medal of Honor picks up the tale: "When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machinegun section with fearless determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed, took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire."
In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed Brownings — the same design which John Moses Browning famously fired for a continuous 25 minutes until it ran out of ammunition at its first U.S. Army trial — and did something for which the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill toward the place where he could hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to move around his flank, the gun cradled under his arm, firing as he went.
The weapon did not fail.
Coming up at dawn, battalion executive officer Major Odell M. Conoley first discovered the answer to our question: How many able-bodied Marines does it take to hold a hill against two regiments of motivated, combat-hardened infantrymen who have never known defeat?
On a hill where the bodies were piled like cordwood, Mitchell Paige alone sat upright behind his 30-caliber Browning, waiting to see what the dawn would bring.
One hill: one Marine.
But that was the second problem. Part of the American line had fallen to the last Japanese attack. "In the early morning light, the enemy could be seen a few yards off, and vapor from the barrels of their machine guns was clearly visible," reports historian Lippman. "It was decided to try to rush the position."
For the task, Major Conoley gathered together "three enlisted communication personnel, several riflemen, a few company runners who were at the point, together with a cook and a few messmen who had brought food to the position the evening before."
Joined by Paige, this ad hoc force of 17 Marines counterattacked at 5:40 a.m., discovering that "the extremely short range allowed the optimum use of grenades." In the end, "The element of surprise permitted the small force to clear the crest."
And that's where the unstoppable wave of Japanese conquest finally crested, broke, and began to recede. On an unnamed jungle ridge on an insignificant island no one had ever heard of, called Guadalcanal. Because of a handful of U.S. Marines, one of whom, now 82, lives out a quiet retirement with his wife Marilyn in La Quinta, Calif.
But while the Marines had won their battle on land, it would be meaningless unless the U.S. Navy could figure out a way to stop losing night battles in "The Slot" to the northwest of the island, through which the Japanese kept sending in barges filled with supplies and reinforcements for their own desperate forces on Guadalcanal.
The U.S. Navy had lost so many ships in those dreaded night actions that the waters off Savo were given the grisly sailor's nickname by which they're still known today: Ironbottom Sound.
So desperate did things become that finally, 18 days after Mitchell Paige won his Congressional Medal of Honor on that ridge above Henderson Field, Admiral Bull Halsey himself broke a stern War College edict — the one against committing capital ships in restricted waters. Gambling the future of the cut-off troops on Guadalcanal on one final roll of the dice, Halsey dispatched into the Slot his two remaining fast battleships, the USS South Dakota and the USS Washington, escorted by the only four destroyers with enough fuel in their bunkers to get them there and back.
In command of the 28-knot battlewagons was the right man at the right pla4ce, gunnery expert Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee. Lee's flag flew aboard the Washington, in turn commanded by Captain Glenn Davis.
Lee was a nut for gunnery drills. "He tested every gunnery-book rule with exercises," Lippman writes, "and ordered gunnery drills under odd conditions — turret firing with relief crews, anything that might simulate the freakishness of battle."
As it turned out, the American destroyers need not have worried about carrying enough fuel to get home. By 11 p.m. on Nov. 13, outnumbered better than three-to-one by a massive Japanese task force driving down from the northwest, every one of the four American destroyers had been shot up, sunk, or set aflame, while the South Dakota — known throughout the fleet as a jinx ship — managed to damage some lesser Japanese vessels but continued to be plagued with electrical and fire control problems.
"Washington was now the only intact ship left in the force," Lippman writes. "In fact, at that moment Washington was the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet. She was the only barrier between (Admiral) Kondo's ships and Guadalcanal. If this one ship did not stop 14 Japanese ships right then and there, America might lose the war. ...
"On Washington's bridge, Lieutenant Ray Hunter still had the conn. He had just heard that South Dakota had gone off the air and had seen (destroyers) Walke and Preston "blow sky high." Dead ahead lay their burning wreckage, while hundreds of men were swimming in the water and Japanese ships were racing in.
"Hunter had to do something. The course he took now could decide the war. 'Come left,' he said, and Washington straightened out on a course parallel to the one on which she (had been) steaming. Washington's rudder change put the burning destroyers between her and the enemy, preventing her from being silhouetted by their fires.
"The move made the Japanese momentarily cease fire. Lacking radar, they could not spot Washington behind the fires. ...
"Meanwhile, Washington raced through burning seas. Everyone could see dozens of men in the water clinging to floating wreckage. Flag Lieutenant Raymond Thompson said, "Seeing that burning, sinking ship as it passed so close aboard, and realizing that there was nothing I, or anyone, could do about it, was a devastating experience.'
"Commander Ayrault, Washington's executive officer, clambered down ladders, ran to Bart Stoodley's damage-control post, and ordered Stoodley to cut loose life rafts. That saved a lot of lives. But the men in the water had some fight left in them. One was heard to scream, 'Get after them, Washington!' "
Sacrificing their ships by maneuvering into the path of torpedoes intended for the Washington, the captains of the American destroyers had given China Lee one final chance. The Washington was fast, undamaged, and bristling with 16-inch guns. And, thanks to Lt. Hunter's course change, she was also now invisible to the enemy.
Blinded by the smoke and flames, the Japanese battleship Kirishima turned on her searchlights, illuminating the helpless South Dakota, and opened fire. Finally, standing out in the darkness, Lee and Davis could positively identify an enemy target.
The Washington's main batteries opened fire at 12 midnight precisely. Her new SG radar fire control system worked perfectly. Between midnight and 12:07 a.m., Nov. 14, the "last ship in the U.S. Pacific Fleet" stunned the battleship Kirishima with 75, 16-inch shells. For those aboard the Kirishima, it rained steel.
In seven minutes, the Japanese battleship was reduced to a funeral pyre. She went down at 3:25 a.m., the first enemy sunk by an American battleship since the Spanish-American War. Stunned, the remaining Japanese ships withdrew. Within days, Yamamoto and his staff reviewed their mounting losses and recommended the unthinkable to the emperor — withdrawal from Guadalcanal.
But who remembers, today, how close-run a thing it was — the ridge held by a single Marine, the battle won by the last American ship?
In the autumn of 1942.
When the Hasbro Toy Co. called up some years back, asking permission to put the retired colonel's face on some kid's doll, Mitchell Paige thought they must be joking.
But they weren't. That's his mug, on the little Marine they call "GI Joe."
And now you know. ~~~o~~~
Plus, they might break a nail. Or create an anti-"gay" hoax.
Instead of doing this, they should immediately require remedial upper body conditioning for *everyone* who needs, or even wants, to improve their upper body strength.
They could even do it on the cheap. All they need for each station are two frames, two pulleys, rope, and 4’ sections of steel tubing, and various weighted objects to be hefted up with the “pull down bars”. If they had the materials, they could fab such a station up in 15 minutes.
Have everybody do 10 pull downs palms back and palms forward at the lightest station, and if they can do that, then they move to a heavier station for 10 reps front and back. By the time they get to the heaviest station, they are pulling down close to their body weight. If they can do 10 and 10 on that, they can easily make the standards and then some.
Half an hour of remedial every day for those who need and want it.
What are the Marines turning into? Women shouldn’t be Marines period. Soon they will defend themselves with feather boas and French ticklers.
At the Army Airborne School at Ft Benning, there is a pull up bar outside every mess hall. We had to do ten before we could eat. It made sense since upper body strength is important for steering the older parachutes. However, next to each bar was a pathetically low bar - so the women could lay on their backs while kinda sorta doing pull ups. That certainly didn’t make sense.
NO they will have powder rooms for the guys and the girls—all about equality you know!
The Dems are obsessed with ruining the military which is one of our cultures last bastions of conservatism and men being men. It’s not enough that they have effed up education, churches and other American institutions...They want to make our military into one big useless social experiment. To degrade it into an ineffectual fighting force
“What are the Marines turning into? Women shouldn’t be Marines period. Soon they will defend themselves with feather boas and French ticklers.”
As the rapid response force and embassy security, it is all over when we start “lowering the bar” for the Marines. Benghazi will be repeated around the globe...
What the F are women doing in Airborne School in the first place? The only women I ever saw at Benning and Bragg were the nurses in the Hospital. What a waste of time and money !
I once had a female JAG lawyer Captain that failed on the weapons qualification range more than 15 times. She could not hit a wall with a shotgun from 10 feet. Finally, my colonel told me "get her qualified!!! I don't care what you do, but TODAY YOU WILL GET HER QUALIFIED!! Do you hear me??" I said "yes sir". So, to get her off my range and get her qualified, I put her in her fox hole and started her qualification run. I got in another fox hole a couple of holes down with my M16 rifle. When she fired at the pop-up target, if it did not immediately fall with a hit, I fired. She had to get like 24 out of 40 shots to qualify. She qualified with 25! (It wasn't like I was going to let her get 38 hits!) She was a very happy woman. Running around telling everyone how she had finally qualified. My colonel looked at me and said, what did you do? I said, nothing sir. She hit 25 targets. She qualified. My other sergeant was over against the fence, hand over mouth, laughing. But, she was JAG lawyer captain who was never going to be in a combat situation and was getting out of the Army in a few months anyway. I sent her away happy. Oh, well, the things we do to make our officers happy.
3 PULL UPS!? I’m 55 and can do 20 pull ups or 20 chin ups. It just seems to me that an 18 year old who’s about to go through the riggers of being Marine should be required to do more.
The American people support the relaxed standards for females and always will. They see it as “common sense”, instead of favoritism.
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