See you try to make the conversation personal and you put words in my mouth I never said... Fall in line jim.....
I'll try one more time, then. Civilians, once they hear I'm a veteran, always ask me if I've got any "cool Army stories."
I was in for 7 years, spanning two different components and a combat deployment (rare during the 90s). As a result, I've got a lot of Army stories. Like, A LOT of Army stories. But I've learned not to tell them to civilians.
My best story involves a stray dog, some concertina wire, an OGA guy, three gunshots, and a battalion PA with a syringe. It's a fantastic story, and I tell it well. But every time I tell it to civilians, they react with horror and shock. When I tell it to fellow veterans, they're literally rolling on the floor, crying with laughter. Same story, told the same way, with two diametrically opposed reactions. Why?
Context.
See, the story's funny for reasons that are automatically and instinctively understood by vets. Those reasons involve regulations, basic combat loads, the frought relations between the Army and OGA, the Airborne mindset, and the crushing boredom that can only be understood if you've had to guard a motor pool at 0200. If you don't get that stuff, the story's not easy to understand; if you've lived it, it doesn't need to be explained and the story can be enjoyed for what it is. Because, see, you already understand the story's context.
I guess I could make a civilian understand and appreciate my story, but I'd have to spend so much time explaining all that context that it wouldn't be worth the effort. Because, see, the civilian
still wouldn't understand the story as well as the vets will.
In the many, many pages of this thread, justjim, I've noticed that you and a few other posters don't understand the context under which infantrymen make their decisions about what they carry, which in turn reflects what they value (in this case, a pistol vs more rifle ammo).
We've tried to explain it, but you don't seem interested in learning; instead, you seem interested in being "right." Notwithstanding your utter lack of qualifications to do so, you've assumed you know better than those who've experienced what, for you, is a largely theoretical exercise. So don't be surprised when we tend to respond to you with condescension and disdain.
Your opinions, like all opinions, are fine. But they're also uninformed, and they're uninformed in a thread full of guys who
are informed. Please accept that your knowledge of an infantryman's context is less than mine. That's not a slam, a flame, or any other kind of insult: it's just a fact. Because I was an infantryman and you weren't. If you don't want to try to understand our context, then we'll just keep talking past each other.
That might float your boat, but I've got better things to do on a gorgeous Saturday.