guy in vr talks about their worst day as a soldier

gunners would break self-identify for like alcoholism or ptsd and they obviously weren't flying anymore on gunships rotator cuff issues back issues knee issues the gunner job itself was actually really hard on the body and it broke a lot of people people tried to get out of it but for gunners it wasn't easy to get out of we actually used to make jokes about it like the gunship flew on cancer uh the cancer rate in the gunship community is actually pretty high because we have like some of the most cancerous substances no demand on there they had air force quality or some kind of medical people come out and do like an air test while we were doing live fire on the gun ship the amount of lead in the air while we were shooting was so high that they were like you should be on oxygen literally all the time and we weren't and we didn't even with that advice towards my last deployment i felt like death when i woke up i'd have headaches near constantly irritability trouble sleeping like it felt like i was dying it was sold to you like they knew how bad it was they didn't try hiding it they just didn't care what it was doing to their bodies until it caught up with them this job is amazing enough to keep doing it until you can't physically anymore is basically what some of the old heads told you i'm trying over the peace sign for like funny years but instead it looks like i'm trying to use jedi mind tricks on you i was working at toys r us as a stalker uh not stalking but like a shelf stalker probably not a good thing to stalk inside toys r us with all the children around probably not the model employee or the guy that you would expect to end up on gunships because i was just a big stoner what was the point where you're like where you're like i'm done with toys r us because i feel like you got fire away from me i got fired from toys r us pretty sure like it factored in the fact that i showed up every day stoned to like a kid-friendly establishment i was like a year out of high school my life's going nowhere fast because i was like everyone who graduates high school they're like i'll do something in like a year and i'll be like a young hot millionaire and whatever i'm not just gonna wake up one day with like a million dollar idea i've got to start you know doing something with my life my uncle he kind of runs like a body shop one day he came to visit us and he he kind of pulled me aside he's like hey man what are you like what are you doing with your life look at your dad he was in the military your mom was in the military they're successful and i'm about to be foreclosed on my house because my body shops going under because i'm 40 years old and i can't uh my body just can't keep up with the amount of work i have to do to keep a roof over my head i actually hated the military in all aspects of it was never going to do it swore that i would not follow my parents footsteps and then that's exactly what i did my dad's like 100k plus paying job in like the government my mom was retired and she was working for the civilian sector and she was about to get like her military retirement on top of the 10 years of civilian service so she was about to have two retirements and i looked at them and i'm like wow okay they're successful and they went in the military and i have no direction maybe the military will give me that direction if it worked for my parents is your uncle okay now did he find her way back on his feet um he's still got his roof over his head but he's still doing body shop work and he's like lost all of his teeth he's kind of addicted to painkillers to like get through the day we're pretty sure he has like lung cancer and just won't go to the doctor because he can't afford it i had the whole scoop about like the military going in i was like it's gonna suck and i knew it was gonna suck i talked to my dad about it and like everyone else i knew it's gonna suck but you're gonna miss it when you're out and they were right i do miss it a little bit when i went into the recruiting office i did my asvab and it was high enough to where they like basically any job on the list you can want you can get i put load master in there i put in uh atc if you get out and you do air traffic controlling you can make a lot of money my mom told me and this is like the one thing she told me that was wrong you don't have to pick five jobs you only have to pick four i walked in there only with four jobs and the recruiter was like you only have four jobs on here and i'm like i only need four and he's like no that's air force regulation you need to pick five jobs on your dream sheet and i looked down the list nothing really jumped out at me what's ariel gunner and he's like uh i think you shoot guns out of planes and i'm like oh well okay it's my fifth pick i'm probably not gonna get it boop wrote it down in there and that was my fifth pick and then like two weeks later i got a call from the recruiter and they're like hey man you're gonna be psyched i got this job for you guess what it is and i'm like i don't know what is it and he's like aerial gunner and i'm like okay so what is that exactly again he's like you're gonna be a gunner on like hh60s or the pavlo or the ac-130 the ac-130 from like modern warfare 2 and he's like yeah man and then i got really into it i started playing modern warfare a lot more than i already had been kill streak at the top is the gunship just religiously tried to get the gunship in every game the perfect position for uh talking about gunships the fetal position i was kind of lazy i didn't do any like the push-ups or like the run before i went to basic training i didn't just smoke weed i smoked marble or reds so like i showed up to basic training like super super out of shape man couldn't do like 15 push-ups to save my life and i showed up to basic training with uh fans the little flat skater shoes they make you go out there and do a mock physical training test i came in at like over 16 and a half minutes or something like that on the run which is not good it's like ten something to pass uh basic training came in like super unhealthy and shitty i was like marching like this my hands swinging together rather than like doing this my ti would always like struggle what the [ __ ] are you doing like just do it naturally just walk naturally walk like a human being struggle there's this like big ceremony after you like graduate the aerial gunner course they take all the people that have graduated on stage they give you your silver wings they have like metal pins on the back sides of them the old tradition was as they punch it in those team needles would go into your chest turning your wings through blood kind of thing punch them on so hard that they'll never come off they stopped doing it because it was like hazing and there was like a big push in the air force to like not haze people anymore but my dad could do it because my dad's family he punched me so hard that i like walked back three steps on the stage so after we got done with the the landscaper and like the waterseer i went to my first duty station herbert field florida headquarters of air force special operations command and i was psyched i wasn't considered what was like permanent party yet i hadn't gotten through training to the point where they would consider me like a full-fledged member of the air force i was still on probation kind of kind of thing that was just the schoolhouse of getting into the books having to learn like technical data about guns on the aircraft what's the fire rate do you know the cycle of ops a failure to fire what are the malfunction steps to do to deal with that we've actually lost quite a few gunships in like history we lost jockey 1-4 in somalia during the blackhawks down incident we lost uh spirit zero three because they got shot down by like a man pad from the legacy there's also the lessons that have been learned on gunships you know don't fly during the daytime because you're low slow flying aircraft flying in a circle probably not a good idea to fly during the daytime when also doing that maneuver because then it's like and they can clearly just line up a or a man pad on you and just shoot you down not to say that we didn't fly daytime missions we did but like we tried not to until air force brass came down and like you're gonna fly this mission because we need you well we'll push back and we'll be like there's a good chance if we fly during the daytime that we're gonna get shot down like i hope you're cool with that and they sometimes just force on like you're gonna be flying during the day yeah they tried to get us to fly daytime when i was in kuwait and isis at this time still had 56 millimeter anti-aircraft artillery and like man pads and stuff that they had gotten afghanistan wasn't so bad we flew daytime missions there because the taliban had 23-millimeter anti-aircraft which really couldn't hit us in our orbit unless they put it on top of a mountain which they did sometimes to try to trap us in a valley i mean they never worked for them but they tried all the time through training they were telling us hey you know you know you're going to kill people right yeah yeah i mean that's what i'm here for in this job it was repeated like multiple times you're going to kill people hey you're going gonna kill people hey you're gonna kill people and then got shipped out to my first trip to afghanistan in 2011 2012 time frame when you first start out and then get you to your main base you actually live in dorms right i literally thought my dorm was cursed but i realized we were just all gunship guys the guy that uh i took his room he had a stroke 23 year old had a stroke the guy i took the room from uh the guy across from me he ended up getting near constant headaches to the point of like he couldn't function a guy down the hall started getting like epileptic seizures and the other guy at the end of the hall he shook he literally got something where he had like the shakes all the time like parkinson's i'm like the only one out of that specific time frame of guys that didn't have some neurological disorder happen to them when you're young you have a little bit of an immortal immortality complex so like i didn't expect anything to happen to me i'm like well obviously they had health problems whatever there was a point when i was in gunships where i was like you know i'm probably gonna die of like cancer and that's cool well that's pretty metal i stepped off in kandahar had like that oh [ __ ] moment i'm in a [ __ ] combat zone increased adrenaline the tunnel vision's coming in because i'm like that whole first night i walked around in like a daze there was one time where we got rocket attack every 30 minutes the taliban had set up on this ridge outside of kandahar all these little mortars and rockets and stuff they'd used ice as a timer they had figured out how to put enough ice in there that when it would melt it'd be 30 minutes when the primer would strike on the projectile then it would go off so they just knew how much ice to put in there they did that one night where it was just like boom rocket 30 minutes would go by and like all the people would scurry around base looking for a uxo or what the impact side of the the rocket was once they found it or they didn't find it they would give the all clear and they perfectly timed it because it took us about 30 minutes to like do a full base wide sweep for projectiles as soon as we gave it all clear the next rocket would go off it freaked me out like i'm not gonna lie okay there's probably like a rocket coming in i'll just run out to the bunker the other gunship guys they laughed at me why are you freaking out they laughed at me basically because i was like doing what i was supposed to do to go to bunker their threat tolerance was way off the [ __ ] charts they just didn't give a [ __ ] in most regards there was a time we were at chow hall and we had an incoming rocket the whole entire like pow hall drops to the floor except the gunship guys just sit there at their table just eating their mashed potatoes or whatever the [ __ ] combat pay was pro-rated for like hostile fire stuff and you could pay more for getting shot at as it went on and it's like score they shot at us so was there a lot of talk there about the politics of it back home there was there were guys that wanted to talk to politics about it at that time i was kind of young and i was kind of disinterested we would talk about like how we funded the taliban to fight russia it was kind of karma that we would have to fight the enemy we created kind of thing so let me set this up i don't know if they were qrf a quick response force but they were all like a convoy and they were driving up the side of this mountain there's a sheer drop off like right here to the valley below above it there's like this cresting ridge where below the alpine level so there's trees up here too the convoy is going and an rpg hits the the lead vehicle in like the tire well the tire explodes but like everyone inside inside if it's fine they're meant to withstand explosions so like these guys dismount from this convoy and they're just shooting out the ridgeline it all happened really quick i was like on the 105. you think like these shells are pretty dumb they just explode on impact right the pg 45 actually had a radar in it and when you shot it these two little like cylinders in there would match up and it would basically form a battery that would start powering this radar and it would start sending out pings 15 feet above ground it would explode it would send out like this umbrella shrapnel that was like 0.22 caliber size approximately 14 000 pieces of it well that was what it was supposed to do what it actually did was it failed the radar failed i don't know if like it was just faulty or if it sat in inventory too long so this thing smacks straight into the middle of the tree and just rips it apart and the tree falls over and it crushes two insurgents that were right below it taking shelter and firing from it my first death was by tree i killed a tree and then two people under it i went to my room and i was like i was ready to process i put some music on and i just like laid there and i was waiting for i don't know some kind of human emotion because you know you watch hollywood movies where like someone kills someone like for the first time and they're like they're like shook up about it i was sitting there and on my bed listening to this music and i was just like is it weird that i don't feel anything what's going on here i should feel some kind of way about what just happened but like i don't and i think over the years i've come to realize what it was i was like told you're gonna kill people you're gonna kill people you're gonna people kill people i had already had like internalize that message and like accepted that that was gonna be the conclusion that's what i was gonna do do you ever think just like as you're going about your civilian life back to the lives you've taken there was a mission in the helmand river valley on that same trip and if i'm going to tell this story i want to tell it in its entirety the helmet river valley was always kind of like a hot spot obama had like authorized this general for like a troop surge one final push in afghanistan but because the war was ending they had started tightening up the roles of engagement making it harder to you know shoot enemies but also like specific targets were like near impossible you couldn't shoot a building without direct authorization from like the guy in charge of all of afghanistan i had been flying these helmet river valley missions for like five days in a row and i wasn't expecting anything to happen because nothing had happened the five days previously this ground party of marines with their jtac they pushed down this little dirt road this whole town that they were going into was kind of like sunken below the typical uh elevation of like the surrounding area at the end of the road there was like a wadi like a creek and on the side they had like a little bit of the wall of the uh like this town as soon as like the first guy crossed that wall into the town he started getting up lit up by this two-story mud brick building from like the top window there was nowhere for these guys to go rules of engagement at the time was like if they could get out of there don't engage the enemy just like let sleeping dogs lie whatever they went up to the right they'd go up that embankment and their backs would be to this guy who's shooting at them if they went back up the road they'd lose the cover of the wall because they basically walk up above it and if they went into the creek there was no guarantee that there wasn't a window on the other side of this two-story that could just shoot them while they were crossing this creek these guys were just stuck here behind this this mud brick wall with these aks it was basically turning this wall into swiss cheese while they were behind it losing their cover i'll never oh god this mission's hard to talk about um it's the only time i've heard a joint task air controller like lose his cool over the radio he called up and he was just like if you don't get rounds down right now we're gonna die and it's like and i'm not doing justice to how it sounded because there was like a crack in his voice and it was real like you could hear like the the sheer panic in this dude's uh voice is just the crack of and everything i had to sit there and watch because like these guys were in a building and we're not allowed to shoot buildings we tried to tell the the ground force commander like hey these guys are taking accurate fire they can't retreat we need to shoot this building and he's like i'm not giving you my authorization to strike that building if there's civilians in there that's on my head we had an internal discussion on the crew like we could declare self-defense for these guys but if there's any civilians in there we weren't willing to really accept that risk to put that on our own heads we had to get in touch with headquarters back in in bagram and tell them what was going on and then those guys had to send a runner to get the literal commander of all the forces in afghanistan of nato then they had to bring him up to speed on what was happening answer all his questions and then get the authority or authorization from him to strike the building the entire time i'm like i'm fuming we have the capability to stop what we're watching right now and we're not using it that's what our our mission was our purpose is to save ground parties lives i was seeing red like it's the most mad i've ever been in my life going through that experience i actually know that there's a difference between like anger and like wrath that's what i was feeling like i felt like i could just rip out the side of the fuselage of the gun ship jump down out of the sky and like [ __ ] sucker punch these taliban in the face that's how mad i was like i would do something rational like that and uh so we eventually got the authorization to strike this building not two rounds into the 105 and like a couple 40s out of the 40 millimeter we get this cease-fire call and i'm like the [ __ ] are we doing let's level that [ __ ] turn it into a [ __ ] dirt parking lot then they come over and they're like uh women and children are squirting from the building which squirting just means run away that moment was like what no no no no no there's terrorists in there there's no women and children what the [ __ ] what what couldn't process it and i don't know man i've thought about that like multiple times over the course of my life it's like what could we have done to like prevent that that was a perfect ambush on their part from the setup to like where they got trapped behind the wall i think about it and i'm like the only thing that could have stopped it is if like we didn't get that push we didn't get that surge or the ore ended earlier that was that was like i don't know that was a box that we got stuck into and i i guess i came back from that trip well no i guess i came back from that trip pretty pretty messed up mentally i had had i had had this civilian casualty mission and i knew it was bad because they had to bring in medical evacuation helicopters to like take them out but i never wanted to know how many there were it was kind of like a spiral at first like the entire time i was deployed it wasn't affecting me mentally because i had like a mission to direct all my mental attention but when i came back and they after my family had visited me and left it was like the first time i'd been alone with my thoughts about that mission and i thought about it and i was like okay that's natural like it was pretty [ __ ] up at this point i'd already kind of like thought oh i guess i just don't feel remorse but truly what the real thing was is like i was like repressing it all this mission kind of like built up so much pressure i couldn't uncork it on my own i was like if i can't stop thinking about it obviously something's wrong about it i was hesitating at that point to like throw around like the ptsd word i didn't want to admit that i could have something messed up mentally with myself um i was like all right so we're going to do this my way and i went out and i bought like a fifth of a crown and i went home and i [ __ ] uncorked it because i knew it was a depressant and i was gonna drink it tap into those feelings like release the pressure on the damn and just like whatever well that was a bad move because as soon as i unbottled those repressed emotions basically bawled like a like a baby for like four hours that night uh and it didn't really stop after that i thought like i'd wake up the next morning and uh cool i had like a good cry out of my system immediately afterwards okay i'm thinking about the mission but i'm thinking about the mission because i'm thinking about how i uncork that emotion and then it was like okay stop thinking about the mission stop stop thinking about it it just bounced around in my head all day for like months it was bringing me to like my breaking point easier for me to admit now than it was then because like i was very prideful admitting that i have a mental problem was like never a place i was gonna go it got pretty dark there for a while i couldn't even like decompress what i had done before in my free time was like watch movies and play video games and like i would watch a movie and like think about that mission because there'd be like some small scene that would remind me of like what had happened in the helmet river valley or i'd play a video game and it'd be violent and i would think about you know what happened there everything led back to that mission i couldn't i couldn't go to like mental health or anything because then i wouldn't be able to fly they would take me off flying orders to deal with that felt like i would be letting down uh the rest of the gunship community or i'd be letting down the ground parties deployed and i realized now that like the air force would have always filled my slot but at the time like i felt like i owed it to like the taxpayer to the ground party to my to my fellow gunners and the the gunship community as a whole for you know i just i felt like i owed everyone without like feeling like i owed myself anything i was drinking feel sad and to not think about it at least when i was drinking like i could i felt like i was in control which really was the dumbest thing to think when i was like going through this because i wasn't in control of it at all and drinking was not helping at all it didn't matter i was just doing it anyways like i did initially try to drink with other people but i realized that i wanted to fight other people i drank around which is a new thing i drank before that and i was always happy drunk but like after this when i drank i wanted to fight my friends special forces guys that i ran into at like the bar uh and i realized that like i don't want to fight my friends and like the other people that i work with i just kind of withdrew from that party drinking because it wasn't partying anymore for me

Channel: Syrmor

Views: 6,468,208

Rating: 4.972281 out of 5

Keywords: vr, syrmor, vrchat, virtual reality, vrchat stories, people in vrchat, guy in vrchat, girl in vrchat, anime, avatar, vr funny moments

Id: MiXZECAe094

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NeitherAlexNorAlice]

There's something so surreal that I don't think any other medium can replicate with seeing these goofy ass character avatars having deep personal stories. The dichotomy between absurdity and grounded realism is so stark, it's really mesmerizing.

[u/Shoo-eeeeee]

The part that gets me, is when he paused and his hands did a little shake. It's the moment of processing before he continues to talk.

[u/PM-YOUR-PUBIC-HAIR]

Didn't think I was gonna sit and watch the whole thing, but I did. Brings back some memories of my own.

[u/jumbotron_deluxe]

I never served in the military but I do work on a civilian helicopter ambulance. We listen to our ground services and police radio channels to stay ahead of any calls we are getting. The comment he made about listening to the fire controller calling for help reminds me of when my crew had to sit on the ground, waiting for someone to call for us to launch, as we listened to a lone police officer on the radio, heavy breathing and voice cracking, trying to keep his shit as he did CPR on the top half of a 2 year old he had witnessed literally get ripped apart by a dog. There was something horrible about hearing the scenario unfold and not being able to help. And then there is the shame of at the same time praying the ground units forget your there because I don’t want to try to pick up the barely alive torso of a child and then go home to my own.

This world is full of some fucked up shit. I hope this dude can find some peace.

[u/Theycallmelizardboy]

Holy fucking shit, that was riveting, disturbing, revealing, shocking, harrowing and that man has a lot of bravery to tell that story. I could feel his emotions through that.

It's so fucked what the military does to people's minds.

[u/xxkoloblicinxx]

When I was in the USAF I worked on F-15's. One day going through our files I found a report from about a decade ago.

The report was on chrome-cadmium dust on and around the aircraft. The findings effectively said there was so much that working the flightline was the equivalent of smoking 2 packs a day. It recommended everyone wear an N95 style mask at all times.

Worst of all was the report on second hand exposure. It recommended we wear coveralls at all times, then leave them at work for centralized cleaning to have the issued back to us when we came back to work. Because even jist being around our dirty uniforms was enough exposure to exceed the recommended maximum. So our families back home were being exposed to it every time we came home. Everytime someone's SO would wash their uniforms and coveralls for them, they'd be exposed to cancer causing dust.

And despite the recommendations from the numerous agencies involved in this study, they didn't implement a single one of their suggestions, even the easy shit like collecting coveralls, they just act like there isn't a problem and let the VA treat our cancer later.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[u/Cosmic-Engine]

“Ice as a timer”

That was happening in Iraq in ‘05-‘06. Happened to me. There’s so much I can relate to in this guy’s story, all the way up to the drinking to try to “solve” it. Gotta find part 2...

[u/MyPusyTasteLikePepsi]

Wow this guy speaks so well and coherently. Im like transfixed listening to him and watching his arms flow with the stories he's telling. It's hypnotizing

[u/goinunder0390]

I really hope we can get more attention and funding towards mental health issues with current and veteran soldiers. Far too many stories just like this.