Warning Signs
There are many dangerous things in the world. And occasionally you might find yourself in a position to alert someone else to a danger that they might not be aware of. This usually happens because you have more specific experience or knowledge than the warnee, medicine but sometimes it’s just because they are drunk, commissioned, or in some other way possessing an impaired mental ability.
But one thing I have noticed, fairly consistently, is that attempts to warn people frequently backfire.
For instance, back when I was in the Army, a well intentioned NCO advised us to be careful with MRE heating pads. It turns out that the gas they give off when used is flammable, and under the right circumstances can actually be explosive.
He didn’t add the phrase “and so using it to try to blow stuff up would be completely awesome!” but we felt it was implied, and someone lost their eyebrows.
Once we were shown a list of businesses that all soldiers were forbidden to visit. The Army might as well have titled the document “All the good stuff is here. Have fun boys!”
Like many people who grew up in a colder area, I was warned not to lick lamp posts, because my tongue would get stuck.
Now I understand that all children are generally pretty stupid, and prone to doing all manner of ridiculous things. And I also get that I was probably not an exception to this statement.
But I’m pretty sure that it never once occurred to me to try licking a lamp post, cold weather or otherwise. Until the day my parents warned me about it. That day I started to wonder.
Why do they think I want to lick the lamp post? Do people like licking the lamp post? Why do people like licking the lamp post? Is the lamp post yummy? Is this one of those things that I’m really supposed to worry about, like strangers or getting lost at the mall? Or is this one of those things your parents are just screwing with you about, like the Tooth Fairy or You Were Adopted.
Fortunately for me another little boy at school had been wondering the same thing. So I got to learn two important lessons that day. The first was “Sometimes crazy things are actually true” and the second was “Always get the dumb guy to go first”.
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August 21st, 2007 at 6:34 am
That last one is an important lesson indeed. Even at such a low level as JROTC, we’ve learned a few things. Like never, ever, ever tell the Senior Army Instructor you don’t like his hamburgers at the battalion picnic. Skippy, you have captured the hearts and minds of roughly 100 easily-influenced high school cadets, who now wish to be you. Some of our more insane people have tried to randomly insert items on your list into the knowledge packet, the most hallowed text of our unit. They have failed, for that is something that probably only you could manage to pull off, much less get away with. We thank you for bringing joy to our small corner of the world.
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T'chung MayMay reply on May 21st, 2008 4:16 am:
Ooohhh you told THAT to your SAI? Wow…I feel for you, man. Our alpha company decided to attempt to hogtie our RAI in a bit of good fun. That was interesting.
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August 21st, 2007 at 10:12 am
You know, the whole lamp post licking thing? There’s no reason in the world to not do it so long as you have warm water on hand. In my experience, people pay good money to see someone else willingly do that sort of thing.
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August 21st, 2007 at 4:48 pm
“and someone lost their eyebrows.”
I have WAAAAY too many stories that end with that line.
Did you know that ratpack non-dairy creamer is highly flammable when flung over a match? Roy’s eyebrows didn’t…
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August 21st, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Here’s one: Always check with your local forrest ranger on the annual rainfall before setting off homemade grenades while playing paint ball. Headlines were flashing through our heads on that time: ‘National Guard Sets Fire.’ The person is now basically detailed for life.
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August 22nd, 2007 at 2:04 am
As one of those slimey creatures known as an amry brat and slimier still an officer brat i would like you to know that these stories and The List have brought back memories of my early childhood taht mom would prbably have prefered that i had left forgotten. now if you will excuse me i have to go see if she has done any of these…
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August 23rd, 2007 at 6:49 am
*laughs ass off*
That article sounds like it would’ve come right out of my dad’s mouth. I bet he licked lampposts as a child, rascal that he was.
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August 24th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
I’ve noticed in Civil War reenacting that if anything is flammable or explosive, it ends up in the campfire, often resulting in the loss of somebody’s eyebrows.
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David B reply on March 10th, 2014 3:00 pm:
Got that right, especially in my unit!
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August 24th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
if you don’t want to be detailed again do it too well. For instance, don’t ever dump 2 gallons of JP8 into a burn pit to minimize time. Not only do you give away your position, but you tend to piss off the 1st sgt!
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August 28th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Well, as a food inspector, we were told that the best way to make sure the creamer packets were still good was to set them on fire.
…..The test scores required for this job ensured that a lot of rather smart people were doing too many things involving setting things on fire….
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August 28th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Oh, this ratpack creamer was LONG past its alleged expiry date. Heck, the chocolate bars had curly writing on them and had reputedly been ordered by the Shah of Persia, but delivery had been cancelled due to a guy returning from an extended stay in France… and there we were, eating them in the mid-90s.
Incidentally, non-dairy creamer and Coke – very, very nasty combination, but a good way to teach people to secure their stuff!
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August 31st, 2007 at 9:30 am
Ahh… good times. Like the time where our SGT taught us all how to smoke with a sealed gas mask on… or how to improvise CS gas with tobasco sauce and an MRE heater… or how to sleep during the pre-dawn perimeter guard while faking consciousness during a training exercise… does finding out the hard way that an MLRS FCP with water in it will zap the shit outta’ ya’ if you try to test it on the station count? Yeah… station tells you to turn it on…makes you jump backwards a few feet…. fun times.
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David B reply on March 10th, 2014 3:03 pm:
“…SGT taught us all how to smoke with a sealed gas mask on…”
“…finding out the hard way that an MLRS FCP with water in it will zap the shit outta’ ya’ if you try to test it..”
Firstly, How the hell do you smoke in a gas mask, and secondly, what is an MLRS FCP?
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September 10th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
How the hell do you smoke with a sealed promask on? Inquiring minds want to know!
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Snyarhedir reply on January 24th, 2011 4:56 pm:
Forget it; tobacco is evil!
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September 11th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Things are so different now. When I was 12 (1977) I had a friend whose father was a welder. In his “yard” there were assorted things you’d find in a welder’s junk yard… old cars, metal tubes, etc.
Now, back in the 70’s a common pastime was to take a tube (say, a tennis ball can), punch a hole in the bottom, squirt in some lighter fluid, drop in a tennis ball, and apply flame to the tube near the hole. This is a rudimentary “potato cannon” and can launch a tennis ball some distance.
My friend and I thought we could improve on the design. So we got a 3′ steel tube slightly larger in diameter than a tennis ball, welded it to a large steel base so it would stand upright, tapped a hole for an automotive spark plug, pillaged an old ignition coil and car battery. We used probably half a can of Zippo fluid. When we set it off, the tennis ball did not return to the ground for over 60 seconds. The sound of this “Ultimate Potato Cannon” attracted my friend’s father, who reacted as you might expect.
However, the reaction wasn’t about using an oxy-acetyline torch, wasn’t about crawling into wrecked cars and removing bits including toxin-filled batteries, wasn’t about dangerously using a metal drill on a round tube… nope, it was about firing a tennis ball so high that it was a hazard to aircraft, and a general lecture about setting off explosions in the back yard. The he commented on the relatively good quality of our weld. Then my friend got grounded for 2 weeks, he called my parents and I got grounded for 2 weeks.
We had no warning signs to tell us not to point the torch at each other, or that lighter fluid was flammable. We didn’t get a worst-case lecture about how we could have killed ourselves, etc. Secretly, we knew my friend’s dad really thought it was cool but had to do *SOMETHING*.
Can you imagine what would happen today if a couple kids built a fully operational cannon that could fire tennis balls (or anything else) for miles?
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September 15th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Something to add to the Skippylist…Never polish your boots with clear nail polish…Unless it’s five minutes before the Drill and Ceremony inspection, and you haven’t had time to get them shiny, and you need some instant bling…
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September 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Hmmm… I will keep the clear nail polish in mind… :P
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September 27th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Dude MRE heater pack gases are flamable??????
Man so many wasted years just throwing them into a coke bottle with a little water and duct taping them up, then throwing them down the hall of another units dorms
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October 8th, 2007 at 5:55 am
I have someone in the next room that almost shot down a police helicopter with a potato gun. it fired tennis balls too; but these were filled with magnesium and gunpowder. he made it using a lengh of heavy duty pvc pipe. he set it up, and then the chopper flew over. for the next few weeks, there were a lot of cars with tinted windows in the neighborhood.
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October 9th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
MRE bombs are buckets of fun. Especially while attempting to create a distraction during MOUT training. 3 heater packets, and M240B with 2 one hundred round ammo belts, and the endangered species know as the hot female battle buddy made for one hell of a distraction. I got to play Rambo with the M240B, she set off the MRE bombs. One of them ignited too soon, and caught her top on fire. It subsequently came off.
The rest of our squad could have walked up to the OPFOR and teabagged them at this point
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October 30th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
“and someone lost their eyebrows” — I had a chemistry teacher who had no eyebrows (and consequently was a dead ringer for Dr Bunsen Honeydew from The Muppet Show) because of a tragic error in judgement by some grade 11 students several years before, after having been warned of the extreme flammability of a certin chemical compound. Apparently all of the students came through this little escapade unscathed.
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November 11th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Why is it that loss of eyebrows almost always go hand in hand with hillarity?
Personaly, i didn´t lose any eyebrows, but there was a bald spot on my lower arm for a few months after a new years eve (including alcohol) firework decided to play crazy ivan with me instead of going straight up, where i wanted it to go. Belive me, those big rockets pack a punch, and are loud as hell when they are not exploding 100 meters in the air.
Leasson learned? Always check that the guiding rod of rockets is firmly attatched before setting them up to fire.
“The only thing more fun than giving your officers gray hairs, is having the officers laugh with you when they march you of for detail.”
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January 30th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Yeah, the gas from MRE heater packs in hydrogen (the little metal flakes are sodium I think).
And I gotta find out how to improvise CS gas with tobasco sauce and an MRE heater. Is it just a matter of adding the TS to the heater?
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January 30th, 2008 at 11:33 am
It’s not really CS gas, but when the TS gets into people’s eyes, mouth, and nose, they freak–associating the feeling with CS as it is the closest level of discomfort. Ahh, definately did some nasty things in AIT to my fellow students. For more fun, add pepper and such. I don’t know why I stopped pranking after training… I’m at the perfect unit to continue the hilarities.
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January 30th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
MAgic, the older style gasmasks with the drinking tube could be used/modified to allow you to smoke a cigarette. of course your water then had a wonderful tar/nicotine flavor for the rest of your ownership of that mask. and if you were unlucky enough to get one that someone tried this in, you inherited the flavor
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February 14th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
To Evolving Squid: Yes. They will try to fill the chamber with propane and load it with tenis balls that have spent the last three days in a bucket of kerosine. They will then fire it into the backyard, use too much propane, exlopde the chamber sending PVC shrapnel everywhere and burn off all their eyebrows and suffer many almost-serious (I almost lost an eye) lacerations. Luckily we did this in winter and didn’t burn anything down.
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March 21st, 2008 at 5:55 am
It’s not technically a military story, but when I was in college, we had a couple of ROTC cadets come to a party with a potato gun. Imagine about a hundred kids between 18 and 25, all wasted, shooting whatever we could fit into the gun off the top balcony.
The next day, the apartment complex issued a notice that said it was against the rules to keep a potato gun in the community….they should have let it go. Because within a month, the cops had been called out several dozen times to deal with kids who’d acquired potato guns after hearing ‘it was so cool!’ from us and ‘you shouldn’t do it’ from management.
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January 24th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
I do not intend to brag or otherwise make myself sound superior, but generally speaking, if my parents, a teacher or some other authority figure told me not to do something, I did not do it. Reading this story and some of these ones in the comments, I can only imagine how many catastrophic accidents were prevented.
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