Re: Toys from Jane's...

In most cases, such mishaps fall into two
catagories...

1: lack of training.  in the marines, they drilled
things into us again and again for just such a
reason....so that when all else fails, what you are
trained to do comes most naturally.  Civil war
soldiers were not well trained in most cases.  Playing
paintball is another example of what happens when
there is not proper training.  Beleive me, you will be
surprised how much you can do if it is drilled into
your head....in combat, it's almost as that yout
training takes over and you don't even realize that
you are doing the right thing.	Many many many times I
would switch magazines for my m-16 without even
realizing I had done it.  Firing of the m203 grenade
launcher can become so automatic that you can go
through many many more rounds then you think you
could.....it's all about drilling these actions into
you so far that they become second nature.

2: Mental breakdown....while I don't have personal
experience with this, I know it happens.  How much or
how little complication there is to a combat action is
irrelevent in this case.  Your own example is a
perfect example......someone loses it and keeps
holding down the trigger long after he is out of
rounds.....the action of holding down the trigger is
as simple a combat action as you can take....it's not
the action that's the problem, it the soldier having a
mental meltdown.

I know that I carried multiple types of grenades and
was always able to choose the right one when the time
came.  I suppose the biggest factor as to whether you
would want multiple types of ammo, or any other
decision involving complicating the combat soldiers
life, would be how good is the training and the
discipline of the unit.

--- mreindl@pacbell.net wrote:
> 
> 
> Andy Cowell wrote:
> 
> > > Roger (getting tired of the "stupid grunts"
> comments, and I'm an
> > >	       ex-squid.)
> >
> > That's not how I took that comment at all.
> 
> Nor I.  I think he's just giving fair
> acknowledgement to the fact that combat is
> stressful enough without having to introduce more
> into the mix.  Admittedly, I've
> never (thankfully) been in that situation myself,
> but being an historian, can think
> of plenty of examples of troops being affected by
> stress in combat conditions (such
> as soldiers in the Civil War who kept reloading
> their weapons without ever firing
> them, or the replacement in Aachen (WWII) who kept
> trying to fire his weapon after
> he'd burned through the entire clip.	The closest I
> can come to it is playing
> paintball, which I've done for about the past
> ten-twelve years, and I still do
> stupid stuff like forget to take the safety off if I
> don't do it before the
> shooting starts. :)
> 
> Mark
> 
> 

=====
Thank You,

Shawn M Mininger

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