Transitions Into And Out Of Halt May Be Made Through Walk: Fill & Download for Free

People will cry at Army Basic Training. It won’t be who you expect it to be. Physical longevity and mental longevity are two different things. The first one I saw cry at BCT was a 30 year old man, several years older than anyone else in that platoon.Once you get to basic training, it dawns on you that your old life is no more. This is your new life. Waking up at 0430 every morning, running two miles every day, eating all your meals in three minutes, that’s your life now. You can’t just go over to see your parents anymore, even when you get out of basic training and transition to your line unit. There’s now a process you have to go through.We had guys whose children were born while they were away. We had guys get Dear John’d. We had people break down and say they couldn’t do it. They all made it though.The first time that got about all of us was about a week into it. We were marching back from chow and the DS was calling cadence. Then he started singing “I Left My Home” and we all felt it. Loved ones cried as we left, and we all missed them so much at that point. It was what tore at most of us during that time. I’ll never forget the way my mother cried as she saw me leave for BCT.The time that got me was Family Day. We were all excited to finally see our families after 11 weeks, gotten ready to see them, none of us hardly slept the night before just out of excitement. It was perhaps the most I’ve been excited for something in quite a while.We had arrived at the parade field, and were in the wood line just behind it. Our families sitting in the bleachers on the other side of the field, just out of view of us, but we could hear them. The Battalion Commander began his speech, the Chaplain gave his invocation, we knew it was game time. we marched across the field through smoke that billowed through the field, each step filling us with a bit more excitement. We arrived just in front of the bleachers, and were put at a halt. The rule after that point was that we were to stay at the position of attention, eyes looking forward, not saying a word, until our family members had found us out of the crowd and tapped us on the shoulder. Only after then were we released to our families. Keeping in mind, this was a Battalion formation of over 1,500 fresh faced, bright eyed soldiers who largely looked the same, so your family finding you could take forever, the only thing leading your family in the right direction was the company Guideon, where they still had to search through over 100 troops.Below: The position of AttentionThere I was, standing at attention, not moving, not speaking, not looking around, when families started being reunited with their loved ones. Cries of joy filled the field, passing through my ears, as people were slowly finding their loved ones out of the formation. I had been waiting probably 5 minutes when out of my peripheral vision, I saw my Fiancée walking right towards me. This was it! I was finally going to get to spend the time with her that i had been patiently waiting for, words cannot express how happy I - oh, she walked right past me. At that point, a single tear welled in my eye, as I was feeling a mixture of frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety that she would never find me. Eventually, she saw my name tape and found out it was me, but I had looked so greatly different from when I had left 11 weeks ago.There’s no shame in crying in basic training, the entire cycle is nothing but mind games. With that being said though, if someone breaks down at every single inconvenience, they may not be a combat effective member of the team.

Aircraft on the extremes of performance (GeeBee, Bell X-1, etc.) and / or mission requirements (U-2, SR-71 and almost any of the other “X” planes) are in a category by themselves. In most cases, only a few examples, or perhaps a few dozen were ever flown, by test pilots (or exceptionally well prepared pilots), and these are likely the “purist” answer to the question being asked. Nothing but respect and admiration for all of these. However…I think its also interesting to think of the question in the context of aircraft that thousands of pilots flew to almost all corners of the globe. On this basis, I submit the North American F-100 Super Sabre for your consideration.During the Korean War, the US Air Force felt that the Mig-15 and the F-86 were marginally on par for performance (Mig could turn better at high altitude, F-86 could turn better at lower altitudes, etc). The AF wanted a superior fighter, and North American submitted an unsolicited plan for the F-100, which could outrun any known fighter or bomber in the world, and promised other characteristics for air superiority.Due to wartime urgency, the AF bypassed its normal policies and procedures for procurement and moved forward with the North American proposal against the warnings of the Air Research and Development Center (ARDC), who had not been able to conduct a review of the design. Reference: The F-100 Super Sabre as an Air Superiority Fighter on JSTORA “technically difficult” aircraft is unforgiving of miscalculation, error or just plain misfortune. The following RAND study indicates there were 324 fatalities in the F-100 from aircraft “mishaps”. The next closest is the B-47 at 174 fatalities. Interestingly the F-80 and F-84 had higher “mishap” rates, but much lower fatality rates (these may be partially attributed to the extraordinary transition from propeller-driven aircraft to Jets).Trends in U.S. Air Force Aircraft Mishap Rates (1950–2018) (RAND Corporation Provides Objective Research Services and Public Policy Analysis)“More than 889 F-100s were lost in accidents out of 2,294 built, killing 324 pilots.” America's Supersonic F-100 Super Sabre Had Some Big Flaws | The National InterestThe Chief Test Pilot for North American Aviation, George S. Welch was killed in an early F-100 test flight. He was Medal of Honor nominee and most well known for being one of the few US Army Air Corps pilots to take off and engage the enemy during Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.“12 October 1954: North American Aviation Chief Engineering Test Pilot George S. Welch, testing the ninth production F-100A-1-NA Super Sabre, serial number 52-5764, made a planned 7.3 G pullout from a Mach 1.55 dive to verify the aircraft’s design limits.A Boeing B-47 Stratojet crew flying at 25,000 feet (7,620 meters) reported that Welch’s F-100 winged over and began a rapid descent, passing within four miles (6.4 kilometers) of their position and diving at a very high speed. The aircraft appeared to be under control but then suddenly disintegrated.The Super Sabre had encountered Inertial Roll Coupling. It went out of control and then disintegrated. Its nose folded over the windshield, crushing Welch in his seat. The vertical fin broke away. The ejection seat fired but because of the supersonic speeds the parachute was shredded.” Reference: Chief Engineering Test Pilot Archives - This Day in AviationPerhaps the most legendary pilot of all time (Bob Hoover) worst accident was in the F-100. Here is an interview by the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in 1983:"…I guess the worst one was in the prototype of the F-100. It was the first airplane to fly with the J-57 engine, which was subject to compressor stalls. No one knew what compressor stalls were back in 1954, but we learned in a hurry. In this particular engine, the stall was so violent, your feet would come right off the floor. If you ask any pilot who ever sat up on top of the J-57, he'll tell you it's like sitting on the barrel of a 75mm cannon and having it go off. Fire comes out of the air intake up front just like a cannon . . . it's the most startling experience you've ever had in your life!”"The particular flight in question was to have been the first one during which we fired the 20mm cannons on the F-100. I had taken off from Edwards, heading north toward Inyokern, and at about 42,000 feet I got one of those explosions. I brought the throttle back, thinking I had a fuel line separation and was getting a combustible mixture inside the engine compartment that was torching off. This didn't do any good, however - I kept getting the explosions, so I stop-cocked it, shutting the engine down.”"Now, in all our work with the engineers before we flew the F-100, we never considered the possibility of landing the airplane without an engine. With a wing loading of over 77 pounds per square foot, we felt the sink rate would be too great to make a survivable landing.”"But everything was looking so good to me that I just said that I thought I could manage it - in spite of what had been agreed upon. So, I whistled back toward North Base at Edwards, and still had 20,000 feet when I came over. I was in really good shape, I felt, so I set up a steep turning approach and brought it around to final. Again, everyone was telling me to bail out, but I said, 'No, I'm going to stay with it - everything's looking good.'”"They said they would get the emergency equipment moving, then asked how it was going on final. 'Oh, it's going great - it's a piece of cake!' "I had the gear down, but then as I began to flare, the controls froze - the power system had gone out. I was doing 285 knots . . . and I said, 'I've lost it!' That was the last thing I said." When I hit, the airplane just absolutely crunched itself flat .. . it took out the gear and it hit so hard that the instrument panel came right down on my shins. The impact blacked me out for a moment or two and when I cleared up, I was back in the air - about 200 feet – and standing on the left wingtip. Like the F-86, the F-100 had a mechanical rudder, so I stood on it and by the time I hit the ground the second time, the right wing caught and slammed the airplane down really hard. It stayed down, though, and began to spin around. It made a couple of turns before coming to a halt. "I was unconscious from that point, but revived when they chopped a hole in the canopy and fresh air started coming through. I told the rescue people not to move me because I thought my back was broken. I wasn't sure about my legs because I was experiencing so much pain, it was hard to pinpoint its source.”"They didn't move me until a doctor got there . . . and I explained to him why I thought my back was broken. Dick Johnson, a test pilot for Convair, had broken his back a few months earlier in a F-102 and had described to me how it felt — like a soft grapefruit or orange, a liquid, squishy lump growing rapidly at the point of the break. As soon as I came to, I could feel the same sort of thing up between my shoulder blades. It was causing me to have trouble breathing. "The rescue crew took their time and lifted me out of the airplane still in the seat. At the base hospital, I was X-rayed and the report was, 'No, it isn't broken - you can get up and walk out of here.' I told them I didn't feel like walking - that I still thought I had a problem. I told them I wanted to be brought back down to LA for a second opinion.”"They did it, and soon I was being checked into Good Samaritan Hospital. They rolled me over on my side and took an X-ray ... and, sure enough, found a diagonal break - one that couldn't show up on the head-on (or back on) shot made at Edwards. Boy, that was the smartest decision I ever made. If I had tried to walk, the vertebrae might have slipped along the diagonal break and cut right into my spinal cord!”"The doctor at Good Samaritan said, 'It's a miracle you didn't follow the doctor's advice and walk out of the place.' At any rate, I was out of business for a while after that." Reference: http://thorp18.com/forum/sharedFiles/2/bob_hoover_F-100.pdfAlso I highly recommended, Bob Hoover’s book “Forever Flying”, he talks about the F-100, the design problems and George Welch’s misfortune as a result. I had the honor of meeting him (what a Gentleman) at an air show once.The “Sabre Dance”. “The Sabre Dance occurred if the pilot pitched the nose too high during takeoff or landing. The wingtips would stall and the center of lift would move forward in relation to the center of gravity, thus causing the nose to pitch even higher aggravating the wing stall. Inertial coupling would cause the aircraft to yaw to the left or right and was unrecoverable. A Sabre Dance of First Lieutenant Barty Brooks on January 10, 1956 was caught on film”. (Note, video shows the actual crash, so viewer be warned). https://youtu.be/UPkqTsZmBRc Reference: F-100 History - Friends of the Super Sabre10 January 1956 - This Day in AviationDeadly Sabre Dance (historynet.com)I hope you can forgive me if part of my opinion is guided by a lifetime of hearing stories from my Father. Dad had over 2000 hours in the F-100 “Hun”. His first Active Duty tour was in France and England in the late 1950’s. He got out of the AF in 1961 and came home to be “back on the farm” and was recalled a year later just before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 (he was one of the 1500 fighter-bombers sitting on alert at Homestead AFB in Florida with targets in Cuba when Kennedy and Khruschev “were working things out”). From there Dad went to Turkey (with tactical nuke targets in USSR), and from there he was in the first US fighter squadron to land in Danang, Vietnam in May, 1964 and flew some of the first land-based missions of that war. A long way from the farm in Oklahoma where he thought he was going to be after he served his first tour…This is Dad in Chaumont, France in 1958.Flying over Libya and Med in the background.When I was a teenager Dad taught me how to fly in a 1946 Aeronca Champ and before he passed away in 2016 we flew together hundreds of hours in a variety of civilian (and one military aircraft), so we had many opportunities to discuss the topic.The F-100 without a doubt was a fire breathing beast of a dragon. If you mastered her she was magnificently capable, but still very, very unforgiving. If you were pulling positive G’s, you and wanted to roll, you kept the ailerons neutral and used rudder. If you were pulling negative G’s, you kept the rudder neutral and applied aileron in the direction desired. Landings were always white knuckle, with a 2 knot reduction on approach speed for each 1,000 lbs of fuel used, but not too slow or you run the risk of the dreaded Sabre Dance, too fast and you go off the other end of the runway (this was also possible if you were on-speed but the drag chute didn’t deploy). Too many stories to share here, but this set of experiences and observations heavily influenced my view.No offense to any commercial pilots or aircraft designers out there, or the skills and performance standards they’ve achieved. If there is anything approaching the F-100’s records I’d welcome hearing from you.Apologies in advance for my newbie mistakes in all aspects of submitting, formatting, etc. on my first Quora input.

I (a 50-year old white woman) was there in June/July 2009 with another woman (a 25-year old). We were not with a tourist group. While out looking for birds of paradise, we had an "incident" in Ambua, not far from Ambua lodge. Our vehicle was ambushed by 5 Papua New Guineans with masks and machetes. One carried a rifle. Inside our bus was just our Papua New Guinean driver and guide, and us two women. It was very clear that these masked PNG men wanted to rob, rape and kill us. The only thing that saved us was that our guide owned the land we were on, and in PNG land ownership is everything. He spoke to the "bad guys" (called "raskols" in PNG Pidgin) and essentially told them if they touched any of us, his family would come and kill them and all their families. They backed off. In fact, our guide subsequently told us that he'd tried to kill a man (a man that had murdered his mother...) He explained that he hacked up the purported murderer with a machete, but he somehow survived. Our guide made it clear that if he ever saw the man again, he would most certainly murder him. It was actually worse than that, but I won't go into all the details. It is well-known in PNG that if someone, say, murders one of your own family members, then you should feel compelled to murder the murderer. If you can't find the murderer, then it's fair game to kill another of the murderer's family members (brother, sister, child, etc.) It happens all the time. On the flight to Ambua we met a group of Doctors without Borders doctors who explained to us some of the work they were doing. They said they had to deal with an horrific amount of severe domestic abuse... women coming in holding their own intestines, bleeding heavily from machete slashes, and so on. The reported rate of domestic abuse is about 50%, but in actuality it's about 100%. Google "domestic abuse PNG" and you'll see what I'm talking about. Every single day we collected extreme stories of violence, abuse, rape and death. A white helicopter pilot we met said that someone shot at his chopper with a rifle and nearly brought it down a few years ago, missing a critical engine component by 1/4". Walking through small villages (sticking close to our guide) my female friend and I experienced an unnerving feeling that we'd never encountered before, and both of us travel a lot. The village men all looked us us as if they thought we might be very tasty meal (and I mean that not in a cannibalistic sense, but in a sexual sense). I will never, ever forget that feeling, because in was utterly frightening. Our fears were not mitigated in any way by our black PNG guide, who, while we were walking through the village with him, admonished us sternly to stick close to his side, and never let go of him. A black PNG woman we met told us that outside her village, she was too terrified to travel. She would only go where her "wantok" were. ("Wantok" is Pidgin for "One Talk" -- i.e., people who speak the same language.) Which in reality translated to the fact that she was afraid of violence against her in any community outside her village. It is nothing short of an understatement to say that PNG fosters an extremely violent culture. It is further exacerbated by animosity towards whites who come in with mining, logging or other natural resource extraction companies, and, as the locals see it, take everything out (gold, oil, natural gas, etc.) and give precious little back. We were there for 3 weeks, sometimes traveling on our own. We met few whites, as we went "off-season" (we were not there during the time slots when the "Sing-Sings" are held). The only whites we met were doctors, mining personnel or Christian missionaries. On a private chartered flight to the north of PNG, I chatted with one of our Christian pilots, a Canadian man. I asked him if he worried about living in PNG and if it was dangerous for him. He smiled, shook his head and remarked that "you don't come to Papua New Guinea unless you have a very strong belief in Jesus Christ." A part of the problem for white tourists is many of the people in PNG view the whites as being categorically rich, and thus having the solution to their problems. There is a bit of a "cargo culture" mentality there; another friend who went to PNG in 2007 landed in Ambua and her plane skidded on the slippery runway. When it came to a halt at the end of the runway, slightly askew, the PNG crowds surrounding the airport rushed the plane and tried to steal all the plane's luggage. Her 80-year-old mother traveling with her was absolutely terrified. This same woman wanted to buy PNG carved wooden art pieces in Port Moresby, and, out of necessity, had to hire a bodyguard to escort her to the artisan shops there. On our flight out of PNG to Australia, an Australian businessman remarked to me that, in his opinion, the chief desire of every PNG man under 40 was to rape a white woman. Based on what I saw and felt, I would have to say there could be some truth to that. A white man I know went to PNG in 2008 or 2009 and he was very nearly raped by 3 men in Port Moresby. When we got to Australia, every single Australian we met was horrified that we'd visited PNG, and we heard more than once, "you went to PNG... and you survived?" If you do go to Papua New Guinea, here are some tips: a group tour is probably the safest bet. DO NOT go out alone at night, whether you are male or female. Always stay in a gated, guarded hotel, and avoid Port Moresby altogether, if you can. In fact, all of the hotels we stayed at (some in small towns) were very heavily guarded by men with guns, surrounded by fences, razor wire, guard dogs, the works. That should give you some indication of the problem. Some American banks will get you PNG currency if you request it weeks in advance of your trip, thus obviating the need to visit a bank whiles in PNG & change money, which may be risky. I used US Bank in California, and that worked really well. If you do go into a bank in PNG, take at least one trusted PNG person with you, preferably a man. If you must travel overland, carry "raskol money" tucked into a pocket... something that you can barter for your safety with if your vehicle is overtaken by raskols. I highly encourage you to read Four Corners by Kira Salek. While I don't think PNG is quite as dangerous as what Ms. Salek encounters, it will definitely give you a sense of the danger involved.I should point out that when we first arrived in PNG our guide, a PNG man, could not hide his contempt of us when he spat out at us, "we value 3 things here in Papua New Guinea: Land, Pigs, and Women. In that order." The subtext was very clear to us: how dare we (2 white women) make him (a PNG male guide) work for us. I think it would have been a different situation entirely, if we were in a group, headed by a male.Am I racist? Was my friend racist? I don't think so. She and I have both traveled to numerous African countries and we never encountered anything remotely like this. Did I ever feel that the men in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana, South Africa, Madagascar (and so on) wanted to rape me? No, never. My friend lived in rural Africa for several years, and had no real problems, and felt safe. Were we group-ist? Perhaps. We came away with the impression that Papua New Guinea was a place that was still, in some respects, rooted in the Stone Age, and the transition to the "Modern Age" was not going at all smoothly. Not all the men we met gave us reason to worry, but my overall impression was that one should be very, very careful here, and that some men did indeed have bad intent, certainly the ones that surrounded our vehicles with machetes and a rifle. Our observations about the women in PNG were ones that engendered both sorrow and respect: they have extremely very hard lives, and those who do well have encountered serious roadblocks. Many of the adult PNG women we saw had a sort of beaten-down look that I had never seen before.While my telling of all of the above is accurate to the best of my abilities, I would still have to say that traveling in PNG was stunning and fascinating. We saw and witnessed so many amazing sights and things that I couldn't even have imagined. A trip to the Karawari (low-lying rainforest area, along a tributary of the Sepik River) was exquisite; it was like traveling back in time to a stone-age culture. Both my friend and I thought it was not dissimilar to the strange, unearthly world of the movie "Avatar." Nibbling on hot-off-the-fire sago palm pancakes; photographing native dances, unusual and colorful insects, men and women with extensive decorative scarification; visiting shrines filled with human skulls; discovering phosphorescent trees in the dead of night in a rainforest are just a few of the brilliant experiences that stand out. If you are interested in anthropology, it seems like a trip to PNG is a must-do. Despite the fact that we had first-hand experience with violence (we saw a bus get its front window smashed by the bad guys with the machetes and the rifle -- our guide told us that the raskols would surely rob them all, and might even kill them, but the bus managed to get away), it never occurred to either me or my friend to leave PNG. It is an amazing place. One thing to note: it is rather difficult to see wildlife here, unless you have an "in" with something like a special birding group or some research scientist who is working there. We did not see any wildlife of note while we were in the open forests there, and only a few birds of paradise. I really wanted to see a cassowary in the wild, but one did not materialize. My sense is that most of the wildlife has been hunted out. We did go in search of tree kangaroos in the Torricelli mountains for numerous hours, and over a substantial amount of terrain, but saw none.One final note: I think we'd have had a much different experience if we'd been in a group, and a group headed by a man (preferably a man from PNG, or a non-PNG man who is a trusted person by the PNG groups you interact with). If you somehow get into a group situation where someone in the group has earned the trust of the local groups, travel to this country would probably be a much better experience than what we encountered.