Freiheit Reich wrote:Bythyrona wrote:I can confirm that new recruits don't do it anymore. Just for the record, though, bayonet day went something like shouting "KILL! KILL! KILL!" and "THE BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW GREEN, DRILL SERGEANT!" at the top of your lungs while stabbing a dummy. It had been considered more of a motivational tool considering bayonets' obsolescence, though, before the training was removed.
Your memory is fresher than mine although words might vary slightly depending on drill sergeant. I told myself that it was part of the brainwashing done in basic training to prepare people to kill without being bothered by it (I expected this though so it didn't bother me too much, I viewed it as a game and not to be taken very seriously). I said things I didn't believe because I viewed most of my whole enlistment as a mostly depressing game in many ways. I am sure many other soldiers (and maybe airmen) have felt the same way. He reenlisted so he should have been used to saying things he didn't really believe by now.
Actually the bayonet is not obsolete. What happens if your rifle jams or you run out of ammo? The bayonet could save your life in combat. It can also save ammo by allowing you to kill dying enemy soldiers quickly without using precious ammo.
...actually, the bayonet
IS obsolete.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-abando ... isthenics/http://www.stripes.com/blogs/the-rumor- ... g-1.137356"The Army’s last bayonet charge happened in February 1951 during the Korean War, but there were instances during Vietnam when troops fixed bayonets during intense combat, according to the Army.
U.S. Army units have not issued soldiers bayonets for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, said Matt Larsen, the former director of the Army’s combatives program.
'The reason they don’t is because the training had nothing to do with the realities of the battlefield,' Larsen told The Rumor Doctor.
Worse yet, soldiers were bringing their own knives to the combat zone, and that proved to be dangerous they didn’t know how to fight with knives, Larsen said. Mostly, he said, soldiers used the knives as tools.
'And [when] they’re confronted with an enemy in hand-to-hand struggle, they have forgotten about it being a weapon, but the bad guy sees it on them and grabs and pulls it out and stabs them with it,' he said.
To make bayonet training relevant again, the Army got rid of the bayonet assault course, in which soldiers fixed a bayonet to the end of a rifle, ran towards a target while yelling and then rammed the bayonet into the target center. Instead, soldiers learn in combatives training how to use a knife or bayonet if someone grabs their primary weapon."
Please don't say LOL BUT MARINE CORPS STILL TRAINS ON BAYONETS, either. I'll start to get flashbacks of that Romney-Obama debate.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02123.html"You fix bayonets when you expect to need the aggressive combat mind-set that's produced by the primal sight of massed blades. You fix them when you expect to search hidden places. You fix them when you expect the fight could push you within arm's reach of your enemy -- gutting distance. In modern warfare, that's extraordinarily rare."
Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 11:02 pm