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I know a guy whose father was in the army back in the early 1960s, and one of their infantry training schools involved a simulated night-time exercise in which they had to go out into the woods, set up a perimeter around a base camp, and keep the "enemy" from infiltrating the camp.

This guy apparently had a friend among the officers who knew how the "enemy" was planning to carry out their operations that night, so he tipped this group off with a warning: "They're going to creep through your area between midnight and 3 AM."

What this guy didn't know was that this same officer had issued a challenge to the infiltrators and told them that the forces defending the perimeter would know where and approximately when the attackers would try to sneak into the base camp. The "enemy" was apparently a phenomenal group of soldiers, and they didn't appreciate the officer's meddling.

The defenders in that sector dug their trenches, set up their trip wires, warning devices, etc., and hunkered down for the night. Midnight came and passed, then 1 AM, then 2 AM, etc. Nothing happened all night, and the infantrymen were convinced that the officer had been jerking their chain just to keep them on edge.

When the sun rose the next morning, each of the guys in that squad had an orange spot painted on the front of his helmet, courtesy of the vaunted "enemy" who had paid a visit during the night and passed them by without making a sound.

There was an Air Force Col in our Army office. Being the only Air Force, he was often the subject of pranks.

One summer afternoon around quitting time he couldn't find his cover. He turned the office upside down.

Finally, one of our SFCs said "Sir, have you checked the freezer?" Sure enough, there was his cover, frozen solid. As he walked across the hot, Texas parking lot, the ice melted and soaked his head.

One of my fondest memories of command in the Army came on my first night with my new Armor unit.
I bunked in with the troops at a training area because we arrived late and I was replacing a Commander who had been offered a position at a military school. Not to many people knew I was the new Commander yet.
Not unusual for a friday night 3 troops came in late, Drunk and turned on the lights in a 50 man bay. I told them to cut out the lights. In typical fashion one said to me to F*ck off.
Quickly the lights went out and I heard one ask the other who the a**hole was who had told them to turn out the lights. I will never forget the moan when the guy next to them said, that's the new Commander A**holes.

Here's a story that goes along similar lines although it's not done by the military. I've heard it the "woodpecker" myself. Radio hams do battle with 'Russian Woodpecker'

This one is probably a military urban legend, although debunking them is next to impossible;
During the Vietnam war, Russian "trawlers" sailing near Guam and using state of the art radio intercept equipment used to observe B-52 take offs and warn Hanoi. The NVA forces frequently moved out of the target area shortly before the bombs arrived. These "trawlers" used to sit off the end of the runway in international waters. We made several official complaints about these tactics, but the Russians kept doing it. Our pilots were angry about this, one decide to do something about it. On the next mission he took off and after gaining enough airspeed, broke from his flight plan. He banked his B-52 to a low level pass right over the Russian "trawler". Before he passed over the boat, the pilot opened his bomb bay doors. The whole aircrew said it looked like an anthill with what must have been the entire "trawler" crew jumping overboard. The B-52 buzzed the boat at low level, the pilot closed up the bomb bay and continued on the mission.

I was talking to a guy the other day who said that when he was in the Navy (in the early to mid 1990's) he and other sailors would play games/tricks with other military forces. He also said that they would jam the radar of commercial Russian planes for a little while until they could see the airliner go off course and then they would give them their radar back.

Hey, these guys didn't accidentally shoot down a TWA flight over Long Island Sound by any chance, did they?

I don't know if this will qualify as a true military story.

I was enrolled in Army ROTC my freshmen year of college (1981) and we had a field exercise combined with the local National Guard unit. The NG had spent the previous day setting up a course that included rappelling, rope bridge river crossing and a slide for life.

Some of the NG must have had a "little" experience because they were really into the activities, they kept jumping off the picnic tables doing something they called a PLF and doing a thing called an Australian Rappel and while on the slide for life they would yell something that sounded like "Rainjerrrr" and release, falling into the middle of the river...

It came time for the slide for life for the ROTC students...

The students would slide to the bottom and be stopped by one of the NG. They had to stop you or you would bottom on the edge of the river.

Well, I was feeling pretty cocky after several trips down the rappel line and several river crossings and seeing the NG guys having a blast...I wanted to fit right in...so as I went down the slide for life I yelled the only thing I could think of..."FRESHMENnnnn"...I'm not quite sure what happened next but the only thing I remember was the NG soldier stepping away and waving at me as I augered myself into the mud on the rivers edge.

Then it was time for chow...we formed up and were dismissed, but first were orderd to strip to our t-shirts. The uniform of the day required a white t-shirt under the OD shirt...well, the only white t-shirt I had was an Ocean Pacific shirt with a big, blue dolphin in the center of the back...oh yeah, I had cut the sleeves off earlier that summer...so, I obeyed the order and striped off my OD shirt. The NG guys thought that was a riot...one even came over and said they were promoting me to honorary FNG...

BTW, the lunch we were issued was C Rations packaged sometime before I was born...

While flying C-141's out of McGuire AFB NJ one of our missions was to fly Presidential support missions. These missions mainly consisted of carrying White House communication people and equipment that was needed by President Nixon when he went on international trips.

On one of the missions I was lucky enough to fly was one when Nixon went to U.S.S.R. in 1972. Our leg of the mission was to fly from Tehran Iran to Kiev. Eventhough it's true English is a truly universal language in the world of flying it was not spoken behind the Iron curtain. For us to accomplish our mission we had a Russian pilot fly with us to work the radios. When we showed up at the airplane in Tehran for our pre flight we notice several of our instruments had duct tape covering them. We soon learned this was a prank by our flight engineer to pimp our Russian pilot. Sure enough it worked like a charm. The Russian pilot would politely ask us about our instruments and we would just as politely tell him. He would then repeatedly ask about the instruments that were covered with the duct tape and we would always tell him they were classified. It worked like a charm. To this day I laugh at the debriefing he went through and what he must have told his comrades about our classified instruments covered with duct tape.

My favorite boot camp story is between an Asian American recruit in my unit and the biggest, meanest black drill sergeant you could imagine; the famed Sgt JJ Thomas at Ft. Knox, KY. And of course the instructor hated each and everyone of us. He called this guy "Gook", and "Gook" said very nasty things about SGT Thomas.

We were on the LAW (Light AntiTank Weapon) and AT 4 range and were firing live rounds one day.

Before you pull the trigger (push button) on these bazooka-type weapons, you are supposed to look behind you and shout the warning "BACK-BLAST AREA! BACK-BLAST AREA! BACK-BLAST AREA!" before letting loose, as to not kill anyone with the tremendous back blast these weapons generate.

Well, Gook got in the hole with DI Thomas and armed the weapon with the instructor right next to him. They hated each other with a passion. Upon finding his target downrange, and scanning behind him for dangers, the recruit shouted as best he could the warning, "BACK BLAST AREA!".....but unfortunately, being engrish impared, the recruit sounded to us like he was screaming "BLACK BASTARD! BLACK BASTARD! BLACK BASTARD!"

The next words we heard were "What he hell did you just say "Gook"? And the recruit dutifully said "BLACK BASTARD!...of course saying "back-blast area" but sounding very very wrong. Of course to us, including the one very pissed of instructor, a physical fight ensued inside the foxhole with the partially armed and extended LAW falling outside the hole and two guys going at it.

It was funny as hell because of the tension between all of us, but we kinda missed SGT. Thomas because he was sent to another unit for the stunt. "Gook" and I later went through OCS and came back to SGT Thomas and told him he was the best DI he had ever seen and appreciated his help.

Here's to you DI Thomas!

1LT DC BRYAN- Little Rock, AR

One of the best I heard was about a chief petty officer that constantly warned his men about the dangers of sex while on liberty. You could ctach some serious stuff.

The guys got tired of hearing his speech knowing he had a regular honey ashore so they got ahold of his skivies in the laundry and soaked them in bleach, dried them in the extractor (dryer), soaked them in bleach, dried, etc., etc.

The hospital corpsman was in on the joke. Needless to say the chief devloped a hell of a rash after putting on his clean shorts from the laundry. When he went to sickbay the corpsman told him he'd never seen anything like it but it looked like a severe case of some sort of VD.

The chief got sent ashore to the base hospital and missed movement when the ship pulled out.

Then there were the cops in San Diego that used to ticket sailors driving off the base until someone used a ship's fire control radar to smoke the cop's radar.

One of the country music stations in Norfolk used to get drowned out by a ship's WRT-1 emergency transmitter tuned to the station's frequency.

Just another day at the office.

"Looking for good Military stories (tricks played on other military forces or civilians)"

Well, the trick that I saw played wasn't on either military forces or civilians, but on Soviet bureaucrats.

It was the early 1980's. Reagan was President and the Soviets were still our enemies. I was a mere kid running a bulletin board. That was before the internet was popular or even viable outside of research facilities and universities (and military bases). People dialed in to bulletin boards back then on an individual basis.

But I owned this particular hacker board, and ownership has its privileges. One of the private email exchanges on it between some hard core phone phreaks (you'd probably call them "hackers" today) was about an insurance scam that was legal to play.

The hackers had discovered that the Soviet embassies wouldn't accept large unsolicited packages from the West (might have bugs or bombs or drugs in them, I guess), but they didn't follow Western rules and wouldn't return said packages, either. Who knows, perhaps they blew them up or sent such packages off to some agency for study, catagorization, processing, or storage.

But the hackers claimed that the Soviets were getting stuck paying off the insurance on said packages for diplomatic reasons. The email even had the address of two Soviet embassies, including one in Poland, and mentioned that you could insure international packages for $5,000 back then.

Then one of the later exchanges had the hackers discussing a killer sound system that they had just purchased with their windfall.

Apparently the Soviets got stuck paying off several of those claims, too. The email chain that I watched would have been tough to fake. They were talking about this scam, their windfall money, and various items that they kept purchasing... over a period of two years.

Too many to tell...............so I'll just pick one.

During my flying days in Strategic Air Command (tankers; KC-135's), we had a crew in our squadron (at one of my assignments; Dyess AFB, I think) that had an interesting make-up. The aircraft commander was a Chicago Pole (a major).........short, dark mustache, smart-ass............and his co-pilot was this HUGE black dude (lieutenant) from the Philadelphia projects. These two were just a scream together; a real (if unlikely) comedy duo.

So there they are on a flight, and a bunch of Junior AFROTC (high school ROTC) cadets are aboard for the ride. Now, this was not long after the movie "Airplane!" had come out. Each time a young, fresh-faced cadet would get his turn up front in the cabin (the "cockpit", if you will) to sit in the jump seat, the AC would give him this wonderful little guided tour of all the dials, knobs, gauges, etc., etc. Eventually, the co would say "OK, now, Johnny (or whatever the kid's name would be); I think we've taken enough of the Major's time, so............" Of course, before he'd finish, the AC would go "Oh no no no........he's just fine. Let 'im stay. Say..........Johnny...........ever seen a grown man naked?" or "Ever been to a Turkish prison?" or "Do you like movies about gladiators?"

Each time, the kid / victim's eyes would grow as wide as saucers, he'd positively blanche, and couldn't get out of there fast enough.

This happened when I was in recruit training at Parris Island in 1973. Some of the recruits got an artic camo stick from somewhere. Everyone has seen the brown/black/green camoflage face paint on soldiers/Marines' faces.

Well, the government in its infinite wisdom, also developed one that was white on one end and grey on the other. Some of the recruits got a very tall slender black recruit (whose name just happened to be "White") and they took that artic camo stick and made every visible part of him as white as a ghost.

The junior Drill Instructor for our platoon was Sergeant Robinson. Part of his shtick as the junior was to have the perpetual scowl; he was the "bad cop" drill instructor.

So anyway he came out of the DI's office and saw Private White painted white and he just about collapsed laughing, but maintaining his bearing as all good Marine Non-commissioned officers should, he staggered back into the office and closed the door first.

Walt

Two stories

In 1977 at West Point, about midnight the night before the Army-Air Force game, we stole the Air Force tactical officer's car from his quarters. We then took it over to North Area barracks, and had a car bash. The Air Force tactical officer arrived about half an hour after we started, and needless to say was freaked out. About 4,000 of us were taking turns beating on his car with sledge hammers and fire axes. He was somewhat mollified once the Brigade Commander handed him a check for $4,000 to replace the car. We had all put up a buck each for the prank.

Back in 1980, I was on a jump with my artillery battery into some National Guard base down near Starke, Florida. Before the jump, one of my buddies and I had taken some C-ration Alpo (Beef with spiced sauce), and put it into airsick bags. We had about a 1-1/2 hour flight to the DZ, and the flight was pretty rough, since we were flying trail in a 12 ship formation. About 20 minutes from the DZ, my buddy and I pulled out the airsick bags, made like we were puking in them, and then pulled out spoons and began to eat from the puke bag. Damn near the whole plane puked. Needless to say, it was a mess in there for the jump. We both got a pretty bad ass-kicking from the battery commander afterwards, but it was funny as hell.

At first, I wasn't going to add to this thread. This is my second time here so I had might as well do it.

I was a very young 18 years old, and stationed in Belgium. I was assigned as a security policeman at an alert site at a Belgium Air Force Base. The Belgiums kept aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons on alert.

At first, it was F-84s then they upgraded to F-4s. The planes belonged to the Belgium Air Force, but the nukes were owned by us. There was a Belgium guard guarding the aircraft. The American security police were guarding the nuke on the aircraft. So it was a partnership thing.

There was one Belgium guard who would come out to the post, go into his guardshack and go to sleep. He would just lean his Tommygun against the shack wall. The Belgium Officers would come along every so often and check posts. The Belgium officers were tough. One officer found a guard asleep one night and started beating the crap out of him.

Anyway, I got tired of this guard always going to sleep when he was supposed to be helping me guard the weapon system. One night I walked over and appropriated the guy's tommygun and hid it in back of the alert pad.

Then, I just sat back to watch what happened. He woke up and started looking for his tommygun. It took him a little time to find it, but he did manage to do it before the Watch Officer came out. I still get a laugh from it.

It wasn't what we did it's what we didn't do.

We had a snotty 1st Lt co-pilot who insisted that us enlisted aircrew members carry his B-4 bag and personal effects when on the ground. He acted like he had descended from royalty.

He always relieved himself during cross country flights. The other loadmaster and I crapped in the toilet and didn't flush it. We also failed to correct it's internal pressure to altitude, therefore it was internally at sea-level atmospheric pressure. This pr*ck came back to pee as usual and really pitched a b*tch about the loaded john. He had to flush it and when he did the inverted pressure did it's job. His nomex was saturated. He finished the flight in his skivvies and MA-2 jacket. He never said a word.