+OffRoading Steve (Steve Wilkerson) If you want to join the reserves you will have to be on a contract for 6 years. if you do Active then you can choose a shorter contact
You hit the nail on the head buddy. I went from AD to RC and they didn't know how to take me. They actually told me to chill on my military bearing. It was a joke. Former 101st here.
+xXx_#420YOLOerMLG$wag69_xXx I hear you. I left active and did the reserve route too. My CO & 1SG lived in the same town as me and would come into my work. They'd call me by my first name at work and even at drill sometimes. It was hard to be like hey Joe oh I mean sir.
We had a Desert Storm era E5 and he was so proud that he got promoted back in 2000 after 11 years, I met him in 2011, and he didn't get offered a promotion packet until he was about to retire in 2012, Thats another thing, theres no board, their promotions are done completely by paper and whoever kisses the S1's ass the most.
CipherBytes exactly. We rarely have boards and unless you're piggybacking off a deployment with another unit you'll never get awards (points) for your packet.
I went to Iraq in 2003 and we had Vietnam era guys too. My company commander got knocked out by an E4 because they were drinking alcohol while they were there. The commander was relieved of his duties when we got back. He moved to another state and was promoted to major. How does that shit work.
First of all I know you were in both the Reserves and the Active Duty component of the Army but as a former Army Reservists who went to Iraq and Kosovo while in the reserves and the National Guard back to back...we get activated A LOT! If I would have stayed in my Reserve unit, I would have gone back to Iraq in the matter of 18 months after getting home. I am and was a teacher at the time. So a lot of us who are Reservists are professional working people with bachelor and advanced degrees. And a lot of us own our own businesses. On top of raising children and taking care of parents. We do our service for the love of giving back. Go Reserves.
gustavo cambron because I was trained and ready to be a soldier. And ugh.... I showed up at the reserve unit and it was nothing of the such. Pretty depressing
Any HS kids thinking of joining the service... I've seen both the active and reserve sides. If you want the true military experience, go active. Do your 4 years then go reserves after if you like. Active duty might seem intimidating but it's worth the experience.
I've done active and still in the reserve. When my reserve unit get a fng, I always ask the pvt if he/she is in school. If they're not in school, it's a waste of time being in the reserve. after one drill weekend they see the bullshit I'm talking about and stop coming to drill. Some pvt's have better paying civilian jobs and actually lose money coming to drill
@@hmoobmeeka Exactly. The only reason a young PVT should be in the reserves is to use that Army money and pursue a degree. 2x a month as an E1 is not worth it. I'm an E3 and the Guard was never in my plan at all but I'm glad I did. I'm currently pursuing my Aerospace degree and doing Rotc to go active (hopefully) as an officer.
I can't think of any year in the Guard where I had only two weeks of cumulative active duty. Curse of the reliable. BTW, I see your 50 year old E-5 and raise you a 60 year old E-4. Love your videos, all great satire is based in truth!
I agree 100%. National guard guys think active duty guys just couldn’t “hack it” in the civilian world and need Uncle Sam to take care of them. Active Duty guys think guard guys are soft and lazy...to some degree both are true.
That's why I loved my Security Forces unit, 65% of the reserve cops including myself were active police officers outside of the military so everyone knew how to shoot and did it well.
Kevin Shum I served with 3 50+ E5's from the Washington National Guard... all three promptly got out after they got home. 2 were absolutely useless, but with the wet paper bag
Actually you don't know what your talking about. Rank is hard to obtain in the guard. A lot of guys get out of the service and then after a long break get back in, to finish and get their 20 for retirement. You retire at the highest rank you held honorably, so if you got out of active as an E-7 then 10 years later reenlist, first off they won't let you keep your previous rank and secondly you still retire as an E-7.
My E5 ,54 (Guardsman) year old friend who hasn't passed a PT test in years. Volunteered twice to Afghanistan and was awarded the purple heart 4 times two in each deployment.He was old but his heart was old school infantry.He was a man's man.
I shifted to reserves and was pleasantly surprised. My unit was very busy, trained hard and frequently and deployed often. Yeah, we had older enlisted folks but they worked as hard and were more experienced than the young 'uns. My unit was so cohesive that most of us stuck around for more than a decade, not because it was cushy duty, but because we were tight with each other and trusted each other.
Division co says parade field at 1000hrs. Brigade co say brigade formation at 0930 hours. Squadron co say squadron formation at 0900. Troop co says formation 0830. Platoon leader says formation 0815. Squad leader says formation 0800, but since your squared away your ass is there 15 min prior. You just showed up to formation at 0745 for some shit that doesn't start until 1000.
Spoken so truly that I cannot help but agree more. The only thing that kept me going when this bull hit was knowing my first line said this sucked as bad as I was thinking it. He knew....he knew when the company put it out. HE KNEW! -fake cries inserted here-
My brother wanted to join the Army. I convinced him to join the reserves first, that way if he didn't like the Army he only had to put up with it on the weekend. Little did I know I would go on to be hit by a mortar in Iraq while my brother was in basic, so he qualified for WDF (sole survivor rule) and he chose to go active after getting WDF (non deployable status) and spent his 8 year contact chilling out in Virginia working alongside the Navy.
+Mark Oakley Bull shit. Once I hit Specialist, they were trying to find any and every reason to demote people because we didnt have any E-3s and lower left and the E-4s weren't going anywhere lol. If the first 4 ranks werent automatic, I doubt I ever would of left E-1.
Depends on your MOS. In my state there are only 2 slots avaliable for E5. One that is 5 min from my house which is filled and he isn't going anywhere and the other is a 5 hour drive to the other side of the state. I'm fucked unlesd I reclass which I don't want to do becausd I love my job. I'll be an E4 for life or maybe E5 for the last year or two before I get out.
After I did my active duty I went reserve because of my contract. I took one PT test in the reserves and was the one of the few that passed. My commander was awesome. He understood because was active duty once. Great dude
Sooo uhhh, yeah. The sad thing is, in real world ops, I have seen reservists out perform active duty too many times. Not in every case, for sure. But enough that it wasn't an anomaly. So props to both for risking their necks when it matters. PatMulgrew USMC 2001-2005. Senior FSR Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan 2012-right f'in now.
TEKs correct, if you're in a technical skill, reserves tends to work directly in their field on the civilian side, giving them great experience. AD guys sometimes get pushed to a unit where they don't actually work the mos they were trained for.
Reserves and Guard are really all dependent on the Unit. I just switched units earlier this year, and the new unit I am with is so much more organized than my old one was. I've done more in three months there than I did in over four years with my old unit.
I went into the reserves after getting out of the army. I was an infantryman who was used to discipline and following orders or get the hammer dropped on you. When I arrived at my reserve unit I thought I arrived on another planet the lack of training and discipline made me think I broke the law for knowing more than my platoon sergeant
Well put together and funny video. This might be true for the Army, but at my Marine Reserves unit we have a field drill every other month and we're out there from 3-5 days at a time. Our last 4 Annual Trainings have been in the sandbox with no showers or running water for 14 days. So I guess it depends on the unit. But generally, this is true... I can understand why some Active Duty personnel feel the way they do about Reservists. However, don't judge someone just by their active duty/reserves status. I have reservist NCO's and SNCO's at my unit with more combat tours under their belt than the I&I active duty First Sergeant. Many of us have respectable civilian careers and juggling that with a military career, even if just one weekend a month, isn't necessarily easy. Like I said, it depends on the unit.
It's exaggeration for sake of comedy. The reserves are nowhere near that bad and the marines aren't any different from army on the weekend warrior side.
Lol, boot is butt hurt because he was too chicken shit to do active duty in the Marines, and a usmc reserve unit got put on the spotlight for looking like garbage for a lcpl's promotion
Reservist from all branches and the national Guard suck. There are some great soldiers but those are few. I've been on both side of the fence and reserve is a fucking joke. Go active duty than back to a reserve unit and you'll see the difference
hmoobmeeka reserve is like the retirement club, just about all the higher ups in my unit are active duty burnouts, I think if you want the "military life" go active duty, if you want to not deal with fuck fuck games everyday and want to be a weekend warrior go reserve, I like the national guard because I like telling prior service recuiters recruiters and usmc reserve to go fuck themselves. I was all about active duty until I got fucked so I like my freedom
I went from Active Duty Air Force to Air Guard... Talk about culture shock... When I switched to Air Guard I met my base commander and he told me I could call him by his first name... A fucking FULL BIRD told me this shit... I just looked at him and said "No Sir... I can't do that".
My experience, before they started activating the Guard and Reserve every other month, was that 2 weeks and 1 weekend ended up being about 90 days a year. I'll grant the proficiency of Guard combat arms units don't match Active, trigger time is important. OTOH, Reserve and Guard Engineer, Maintenance and Medical units are generally FAR superior to their active component. Did you let an Active Duty dentist work on you if you had a choice? In the Engineer units that I served, the equipment operators had a decade or more of real world experience in addition to the nine weeks that the Active guys get at Leonard Wood. Same with the mechanics, decades of real world experience verses some 19 year old with 8 weeks of advanced training.
+Larry Cable This is extremely true. Yes, the Reserves can be a little behind on some tasks and in military proficiency. However, we are force multipliers. We are typically heavily experienced in our careerfields and can bring additional skills that Active Duty cannot. Your example of Engineers is spot on. I had many operators who could run circles around Active Duty operators. They had a lot more time in the equipment than AD did. Heck, even my my operators who did not do it in the civilian world were able to get more stick time per year than active duty units due to having a TA on-site and simulators for when the weather was too bad to operated (not that bad weather is ever an excuse as an engineer). Another example is within our other units. You may have a Soldier who is in supply, but his civilian job is contracting. You now not only have a trained supply specialist but someone who can run contracts and be certified as a COR when overseas. One of my former medics was a paramedic in an area that has a lot of trauma runs. He definitely was more proficient than most Army medics who only deal with the on-post stuff. The Reserves bring a lot more to the fight than most even consider. The truth is that the Army would not run without the Reserves and Guard, further the combat capacity would suffer even more just by the sustainment provided from the Reserves. However, this video is still funny as hell!
+brian lane Nope. I am actually a PS NCO that commissioned (BTW....old pic in my profile). Try deploying without the Reserves providing Engineering and Sustainment support. It won't happen. We provide the majority of it for operations abroad. I guarantee that my Engineers are more proficient than almost all AC Engineers. They typically do their job a lot more frequently because they do it daily at their civilian side. Even those that don't do it on the civilian side get more time on projects than most on Active Duty. Frankly, we are the force multipliers that ensure mission success. The AC does not have the capacity any longer due to many key sustainment tasks and other tasks being pushed to the RC.
+Mark Oakley The Regular military hasn't had the capacity to operate without the Reserve and National Guard at least since Vietnam. On the Air Force side, those being supported have no idea if the pilot and crew are active or reserve. Most of the Air Force transportation pilots are in the reserves and a hell of a lot of Guard pilots fly combat missions on a regular basis, about half the A10's are in National Guard units. Even the notion that the Army Guard combat units were greatly deficient needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The regular Army hammered a Guard Brigade for a poor performance at NTC, but I had been engineer support for the OpFor just prior to that when the 1st Cav rotated through. Got their ass kicked every iteration, one so badly that the brass made them redo the mission. Of course, all the advantages are to the OpFor, they are there for two years, know the terrain and have done these same missions over and over.
+Larry Cable totally agree. Just stay the fuck away from us when the job is done. Worst soldiers I've ever come across but damn the best earth movers ive ever worked with..
+Crafty Veteran That usually depended on the leadership in the units and just how much active time they get. The Guard engineer unit I was associated with was very busy, lots of keep ups and CAP missions, plus the regular stuff the states come up with for engineer units, and were generally pretty fair troops. OTOH, I've seen Guard and Reserve units that make you point very well. But again, not every Regular Army unit is the 101st or 10th Mountain either.
When I was AD '83-'86, no deployments, 2/3 of the year in garrison, working weekends happened but was rare. PT at 0400? No more like at 0600. Off most days by 1630-1700. MOS 16S Redeye/Stingers. It was pretty chill, as long as you went with the program.
active duty soldiers tell me to go reserves. then reserve soldiers tell me to go active duty I ended up doing reserves because If you have a GED and make less then a 50 on the ASVAB then you have to go reserves. or wait til you can take the ASVAB again. I made a 49..I said fuck that, I just want to get life started, so I did reserves.
it honestly depends on what you want to do w your life. Reservists generally have a plan of some sort for their lives (school, work, career, family etc) AD...well, i tell ppl... if you wanna go Ad dont have a girlfriend/boyfriend, spouse kids, job, friends or life.... kiss that all goodbye. Active duty is great if you dont know what the fuck youre doing in life or youre single.
1st month into the North Carolina national guard after 11 years active duty. It took 6 days to get 300 people qualified on weapons. My platoon sergeant got 11 first try... Then 17... Then 21... Then on the 5th day... 25! The entire company was like this. They looked at me as if I was a god! Me, an E-5, ended up retraining all the bolo's
I was in the National Guard Infantry.. We did PT almost every morning even during drills. 90% of drills we would go to Ft Lewis or Camp Rilea & do actual infantry shit. Sleeping in the woods, MRE'S, MOUT, or OP FOR for the active duty guys. We were also mostly air assault qualified & often flew in blackhawks & chinooks. Out of our 100+ guys in the company I would say an average of 5 guys would fail the pt test. I deployed twice & they continue to deploy on about a 4 year cycle.
+Reaper Kezia The Army Reserve only has support MOS. So don't expect much from them when it comes to PT and Infantry related skill. The closet MOS to combat is 31B aka MP. On the other hand Civil Affair are in the reserve. CA is special operation and most are airborne. CA is hands down the most fit MOS and CA are the most DEPLOYED MOS in the reserve. Am with the 450th CA Battalion. So please give the reserve some respect.
+TrizerFlame Some of them got out and after a while decided to get back in (usually they already retired from their civilian careers). I had a freaking VIETNAM vet in my unit that just retired back in September 2015! My father got back into the Guard, where he has more schooling than most staff NCO's. The buddies he use to serve with back in the early 90's are Sergeant Majors now LOL. There is another saying in the Guard, someone has to die for you to get promoted, this is true for my father but he doesn't fail his PFTs like these 20 year old youngins....its sad
My brother is a CIB Sargeant who agreed to join the reserves when he got outta the army and he regrets it worse than cancer. He wants to stop all of them in the mud. When you ask him about the reservists he gets angry and says he just wants to deploy again instead of dealing with those shitbags.
Got a 54 yr old E-4 that can’t pass PT and continuously busts tape. Somehow he believes that should have no bearing on his attempt at E-5 because “I work during drill” when all he does is fuck off on his phone and eats like Godzilla. It frustrates me to my core. From an AGR trying to go active.
50 year old e=5 is one thing, at least h's an NCO. In one of my reserve units, there was a dude that was an E-4 and entered duty when I was 3 years old. This dude was an E4 for over 20 years.
I have been on both sides as well and still in the Guard. I have seen everything talked about in this video!LOL When I was in the 82nd 290 was the minimum standard!!!!LOL
Active duty 10 Mountain(triple duece).Also National Guard Infantry.We had MUTA 9's which means we started drill Thursday through Sunday.Always in the field.Pogues are Pogues AD or reserve.Imfantry leads the way.
The reason I chose the reserve is to have a choice with my deployment. You can volunteer to deploy as often as you want, but you can also have a civilian career.
Training? Hmm, I was an MP in the National Guard. Every person in the unit was a cop, real life training, seven days a week. No active duty unit could compete. Plus, our unit was deployed six times more than any active duty unit. While deployed in Iraq, (Our fourth deployment since 9/11) the Army Times came out with the article about active duty soldiers and how only 30% had even deployed once.
With Reserves it all kinda depends on the unit. The Engineer unit I was in won the Itschner Award for the Army Reserves and we were busting our ass every drill weekend doing something. Our 12Ns were actively cutting, leveling, and surfacing a road at our home post while the 12Bs were performing Route Clearance, Area Clearance, Engineer Recon, MOUT, Demo range, explosive breaching range, and/or crew served/individual weapons ranges. So there is at least one high speed engineer company in the Army Reserves.
Never fail. I train 1 month out when I know I have to go in. Most of the time we inventory the same shit we inventoried the previous month. I regret not going active...
I’m a 91Fox reservist. I was in Ft Hood for AT and the active duty guys were amazed at how much I knew about guns and how well I did my job. Only 2 days a month yes, but when you’re fixing a few hundred guns in those 2 days.. yea. You learn some shit.
My old unit was TFI so we worked hand in hand with the guard, the full time guardsmen were the best because they had been working on the same shit for the last 10 years, the weekend warrior counterparts were dogshit, fuckin deployed with one dude who knew less than 10% of the equipmemt we were responsible for, he had been at that unit for 6 years and was promoted to E-5 while we were deployed. After we got home he commissioned and went to the unit his dad just retired out of as the wing commander.
Got a kick out of this though I will say it really depends on the unit and the individual. As a reserve Marine infantryman for 6 years my unit typically did the same amount of work in 2 days that I had done in a week at infantry school. We also had guys in my unit that could run any active duty Marine into the ground in any event. We actually had a cpl what was about 250-300 lbs who always ran a sub-18-minute 3 miler (while puking all over himself the last 100 yards). Then we had an E-3 who literally fell out of every unit run we ever went on. But he could disassemble a SAW in 17 seconds and put it back together in about 90 seconds and apparently always knew how to get that weapon running again if it ever went down in a firefight.
I just found these...My ribs hurt from laughing so much..I went from AD to NG, now that was the biggest joke. These guys called each other by their first names and it blew my mind. I blew out my knee and failed the one PT test they gave me in 2 years, and it was only the run I failed. They sent me a letter of intent to discharge. I went in to the CO's office on the next drill and put the letter on his desk, I told him that I had a DD214 that says Honorable on it and I didn't need his State paperwork crap. Told him my knee blew out and that was the reason I didn't pass. He said it was their policy, I told him to take the position and stick it and I wouldn't be coming back due to their process I was in my rights to refuse drill due to their letter of intent. Two months later I get an Honorable discharge in the mail from the NG...lmfao what a joke.
I used to 'poach' the heck out of the Reserves and convert them to active duty when I was a recruiter. It got so bad that they changed the policy for release of Reservists to enlist active duty from the O-3 level and made it the first O-6.
They say, "You'll be back." But you only wish it were that easy. Going to Reserve to Active means you better know a foreign language or be in good enough shape to be able to go to the SF pipeline and either pass it and go be a badass or fail out and stay on active duty.
I too have been on both sides of the fence and I have to say that reserves the name should be changed. I always was raised to believe that when you keep something in reserve it was something you wanted around and was as useful. can you think of the first last or any time when you heard some one say or you personalty felt comforted by the sentence here comes the reserves? or thank God we have the reserves for support if anything happens........ .. me neither!
+Tj Aikens I know many. Overseas, if you wanted any engineering, mechanical, medical, or logistics task completed with a high-level of proficiency, you were better off if the Reserves were covering those areas. It is easier for the Reserve Soldiers to maintain higher levels of proficiency when they do these jobs daily. I don't know many who perform exclusively their MOS specific jobs on a daily basis in the Army, and many do not even do it with much regularity. Reserve Engineer units were mentoring Active Duty units in Afghanistan due to the serious difference in competence. Usually those who I find talk the most against the Reserves and Guard have never deployed, or if they have, they did not pay attention to what was going on around them.
The real fun part is being a DOD Civilian, Reservist and Combat Veteran doing better in concurrent federal roles than those at least 10 years younger on Active and/or Reservist status.
+Geoffrey Miller Same here bro I spent 8 years AD Army hated most of it. Now in the Reserves working for the VA hospital doing Administration shit, Reservist, collecting VA from being blown up twice in the same damn mouth. Also was able to go get certification paid with my TA with burning a whole in my post 9/11.... No offense to the AD soldiers but with the right clearance and MOS in the Army you can pretty much make between $40-65k working for the federal gov.
Some of this is a dependent on the unit. My unit is a mess and is non deployable due to its severe lack of bodies to get anything done. The soldiers in the unit weren’t that motivated either. I thought that all the reserves were like that until one day I drilled with a new unit that was super high speed. I learned more about how to function in the army in those 2 days of drill with that unit than a full year in mine
My Reserve Unit has Remedial PT for all failures on Drill weekend, yah, I know, you're not going to get them passing on two days a month, but if you want to not pass your PT test then you get to get up extra early both days and be doing PT in the grass by the front door when everyone else shows up for sign-in.
The 50 year old E-5 isn't such an strange thing... Rank is hard to obtain in the guard. A lot of guys get out of the service and then after a long break get back in, to finish and get their 20 for retirement. You retire at the highest rank you held honorably, so if you got out of service as an E-7 then 10 years later reenlist, first off they won't let you keep your previous rank and secondly you still retire as an E-7.
It all depends on your unit and where you’re based out of, as an Air Force Reservist 2001-2007 (Prior Active Navy 83-89) We were based at an active duty Airbase so our weekends were spent doing real world missions in addition to our training. And in addition to our two weeks of training, there were lots of opportunities for additional TDY’s throughout the Country. It also depends on your MOS (Career Fields) We were Air Transportation (Aerial Port Squadron) So There were lots of cargo and passengers needing to be moved. But I can imagine if you’re not on an active duty base and just meeting in an armory or compound how boring and lax it can be.
As a 92F Reservists doing first 2 week AT, didn't even get to set up FSSP, instead drove to the PX... four times. 2nd 2 week AT in the same year... folded Laundry.
Idk about ARMY but the Navy does not pt poolees. There office is right next to the Marines I have never even seen a Navy member the whole time I was there. My recruiter asked their guy if they wanted to get both offices to pt together and he flat out told my recruiter no because he doesn't want them to know we actually pt our guys.
In the National Guard, you get free in state tuition.... so you KEEP all of your GI Bill money.... I have friends that retired from the Guard as E4s..... never went to school, never passed PT or HT/WT.... still bitch when they don’t get promoted, that cracks me up... National Guard still deploys, and we do stateside mobilizations, I have two mobilizations (airport after 9-11 for eight months and Ft Irwin for 22 months to backfill 1/11 & 2/11 when they went to Iraq) and three deployments (2x to Afghanistan and once to Kuwait).
Not in the GUAM ARMY NATIONAL GUARD, FIELD TRAINING EVERY MONTH! Only one person in my company failed. In my company there's about 130 people so I think we're doing alright ... And our PT is fun👌
I too have seen both sides of the fence. AD Army 1988 to 1995 National Guard 1995 to 2015. During this time I had 4 deployments. Guard was easy and laid back until 9/11 then things got serious, Huge improvements in training, equipment, and personnel standards. Some lost rank due to poor performance , some gained rank due to outstanding performance. The good old boy network regained control and reverted back to the buddy system for promotions after a couple years but it was good while it lasted. The best advantage the guard had over AD was when we were sent into a brand new FOB which was nothing but dirt walls and a few bunkers we didn't have to wait for enginers or KRB to get the place livable because the guard is not only soldiers they are also plumbers, carpenters, welders, electricians, and many other skills that come in handy, Also the guard soldiers were much better shots on average than AD. Reserves will never be on par with AD but you have to respect them and what they do with 90% less training and mostly used worn-out handed down equipment.
It was a shock going from basic training to my Guard unit I got smoked so they could prove how tough they were as CBRN unit because it was AT. I won't take my NCOs seriously ever but I still pretend to because I am disciplined and I want them to sign my papers to switch to active duty
Actual reserves 2 weeks "training" in 1991: a week in the field on Tenkiller lake with bbq's every night. An actual cabinet marked "training films" that was full of porn tapes, and watched every evening by everyone from e1 to captain 🙂. 2nd week in barracks at Camp Gruber, same bbq's every night and "training film" viewing 😩. 0 training accomplished except for the few of us who volunteered for MOUT training and the driving course to get licenced for the "new" hummers.... which the unit had exactly 0 of 😩
really depends on what kind of unit it is, in aviation most of the reservist are working on the aircrafts as civilian employees getting better experience being a mechanic, the active duty guys where most stop working on aircrafts after they become E6 and by the time they retire they forgot everything, now he is a 40 year old that retired from the army trying to become a contractor with subpar skillset only good at telling back in my days stories
I was reserving the Marine Corps and I'm in the guard now and yeah it really fluctuates. If you have Stellar leadership you're going to have Stella the soldiers and that's a magnified in the reserve units.
This video is so true. I left active and went reserve. I'm currently in process of going back to active but the reserves lost my paperwork....so it's taking some time.
I was chair force, therefore I don't have the creditably of other services. That being said, a few month's a year, the reservists, around March, would fall in, in the parking lot. They dressed right and did their calisthenics. It seemed kind of funny to me. I have great respect for those people, but living inside and living outside makes a difference...
All depends on the individual. If you're doing 20 years in active duty or just doing 4 years in your contract and it definitely wasn't for you and you didnt wanna deal with all the politics and leadership bs! And you wanted to transition into the civilian world yet you still want the benefits of the military than the reserves or guard is the smart logical option. Think about it. You can even do 20 years as a reservist or guard and collect your pension at 65. And also collect your civilian pension. Thats 2 pensions. Or you were never active duty and just a reservist or guard. You do one deployment and boom! You got your veteran status. Get that dd214 form and dip!. You can use your veteran status for other government civilian jobs. Give you a major boost on getting hired. Those jobs pay way more. Or depending how many times you deploeyed as a reservist you can use your G.I bill get payed with b.a.h while going to school. Theres so many smart ways to go about it. The dudes that clown reservist and guard I don't blame them. Its because they live for that lifestyle. They love that environment. Promotion ceremonies, mandatory PT, that comradeship,brotherhood, the life time bonds. And I respect that. But its not for everyone. If its not for you than you can play it smart and just go reserves or guard. Get what you need and flip it.
Served 5 years active. When I was in Iraq I got in trouble with my unit so they voluntold 10 of us to attach to a national guard unit who was down a few men. We patrolled with them and that shit sucked. We got lit up every time we went out. Bad guys see that NG patch and know what time it is.
Go reserves on Drill Sergeant side. Minimum PT score is 290, train every weekend and we do at least one AT a year and it's normally 3 weeks. So not every reserve unit is lazy. Hell my Combat Engineer unit was same as my Drill Sergeant one.
I hadn't passed a PT test in 5 years and I still deployed to Iraq in 2003. I guess PT tests don't matter. I was my Company's H8, recovery specialist. I did every single recovery for my company during the entire deployment, and then some for a few others that needed the help. Our company level motorpool did all its own third shop work because our actual active duty third shop sucked balls. We had active duty soldiers coming to us for help because our guys were mechanics on the Civilian side of things. Our guys didn't steal from one another, we could keep all our shit unlocked and out in the open without worrying about it. Active duty guys were all klepto-fucking-maniacs that would steal anything that wasn't bolted down, including parts off of vehicles. A bunch of buddy fuckers is what they were. I deployed with guys I knew for 6 or 7 years, not some strangers that I met a month ago. My reserve unit was an extended family.
ACV - At 2 weeks of duty a year, how long do you think it took that 50 year old man to make E-5 ? Was he a dedicated reservist, or was he doing it for a paycheck and just hanging on ?
Well reserves in the marines are pretty intense. We learn just as much as active duty marines in a weekend than they do in a week. At itx 2 years ago and 2/23 was number out of every company in that training cycle. So the reserves aren't as bad as everyone says it is
When I was in the Reserves, I had to make up a PT Test I missed and my Motor Sergent set up a time on a weekday to do it. He took me out to breakfast, pulled out the score card and said, "So... how many pushups? 44 sound good?" Easiest P.T test ever. :) After I got out, I reenlisted in the National Guard. They did PT every drill weekend.... in the form of letting us loose at the gym for an hour. "Should I work on my run? Naaa... I'll play basketball."
Every little sound effect pushes me slightly closer to the edge of insanity.
*ping
swash*
Because it's so fucking annoying?
Jimmy Holm That's the point
Jimmy Holm i don't even notice it was there
My reserve unit's PT was playing two hand touch football for 20 minutes. Seriously considering switching to Active
As long as that's what you sign on for with your contract.
+OffRoading Steve (Steve Wilkerson) If you want to join the reserves you will have to be on a contract for 6 years. if you do Active then you can choose a shorter contact
It depends on the unit. We die everyday in pt at my unit.
+Tao Liu Because you don't work out during the month.
Andre Batris Lol, fleet PT is the same.
You hit the nail on the head buddy. I went from AD to RC and they didn't know how to take me. They actually told me to chill on my military bearing. It was a joke. Former 101st here.
+allaround008 Hooah
+Michael Westmoreland Former 502nd line medic over here, and I feel your pain.
+xXx_#420YOLOerMLG$wag69_xXx I hear you. I left active and did the reserve route too. My CO & 1SG lived in the same town as me and would come into my work. They'd call me by my first name at work and even at drill sometimes. It was hard to be like hey Joe oh I mean sir.
101st CAB, Fort Campbell life
@@elmSTREETnasty I was an 1/502 Line Medic... First Strike! Welcome, Brother! :)
"50 year old E5"??? In 2005, my second tour in Iraq, I was with the 1/623d FA out of Kentucky... we had a VIETNAM VETERAN E5!!!
We had a Desert Storm era E5 and he was so proud that he got promoted back in 2000 after 11 years, I met him in 2011, and he didn't get offered a promotion packet until he was about to retire in 2012, Thats another thing, theres no board, their promotions are done completely by paper and whoever kisses the S1's ass the most.
CipherBytes exactly. We rarely have boards and unless you're piggybacking off a deployment with another unit you'll never get awards (points) for your packet.
Our sister company had a 'Nam vet who was a specialist. Started out in the USMC as a draftee and reenlisted to go fight in A-stan.
letthebutthurtbegin .
I went to Iraq in 2003 and we had Vietnam era guys too. My company commander got knocked out by an E4 because they were drinking alcohol while they were there. The commander was relieved of his duties when we got back. He moved to another state and was promoted to major. How does that shit work.
"I got nothing but time, I got 10 years left." 😂😭😭😂😂 died
Lol
Yeah, 90% of my drills where just us sitting around watching Mat Best videos
+Beardsley McBeard that sounds like the best drills
+Oliver O'Keafe during my drill weekends all we do is chill in the quad cons
what's the cut off age for joining the reserves ?
35
+Brandon Ryals it's 32 now
First of all I know you were in both the Reserves and the Active Duty component of the Army but as a former Army Reservists who went to Iraq and Kosovo while in the reserves and the National Guard back to back...we get activated A LOT! If I would have stayed in my Reserve unit, I would have gone back to Iraq in the matter of 18 months after getting home. I am and was a teacher at the time. So a lot of us who are Reservists are professional working people with bachelor and advanced degrees. And a lot of us own our own businesses. On top of raising children and taking care of parents. We do our service for the love of giving back. Go Reserves.
You're like the unicorn of reservists.
SANDY MILLER 100% agree
When did you go to Kosovo ? I thought Kosovo was closed to deployments in 99 only Bosina was open after that ?
@@tonyh2181 More than you may think.
@@louis54b Was in Kosovo in 04 and 12. We were replaced by active duty in 12 so it's still going.....not sure why.
Shocked the shit out of me when I finished basic and AIT and then showed up at my first reserve unit.... I wanted to dig a hole and cry.
lol. ditto
Yup!
why?
gustavo cambron because I was trained and ready to be a soldier. And ugh.... I showed up at the reserve unit and it was nothing of the such. Pretty depressing
Oh, wow. Thank you for your feed back
what the fuck is with that arm movement
it's to remind you he's a combat veteran
You'reInAComa he has light spasims😂😂😂jk
Shteinshtein Jewbacca Shekelburg thats the whole point he does it lol to piss you off
Any HS kids thinking of joining the service...
I've seen both the active and reserve sides. If you want the true military experience, go active. Do your 4 years then go reserves after if you like. Active duty might seem intimidating but it's worth the experience.
I've done active and still in the reserve. When my reserve unit get a fng, I always ask the pvt if he/she is in school. If they're not in school, it's a waste of time being in the reserve. after one drill weekend they see the bullshit I'm talking about and stop coming to drill. Some pvt's have better paying civilian jobs and actually lose money coming to drill
@@hmoobmeeka Exactly. The only reason a young PVT should be in the reserves is to use that Army money and pursue a degree.
2x a month as an E1 is not worth it. I'm an E3 and the Guard was never in my plan at all but I'm glad I did. I'm currently pursuing my Aerospace degree and doing Rotc to go active (hopefully) as an officer.
@B DAWG hell no there'd be waaay more shitbags than the ncos could deal with fuck that.
I went straight to the guard. I wish I would’ve went active. However, I knew when I enlisted it would be twiddling of fingers at drill
Reserves sounds lazy and laid back ...I’m definitely going reserves
National guard is so much better. Not nearly as much laziness as the reserves
I’m gonna blow your minds. Depends on the unit you go to.
Or even better, join the Air Force, chess not checkers y’all.
She Woke92 you still gotta go through all the training
Promote ahead of peers.
You're wild lmao
I served 6 years active duty with the 82nd. Airborne. Was out for a while. Then went National Guard. Talk about a culture shock.
6 yrs 82nd with a PCS to FT Jackson would've been a culture shock.
Embrace the suck. Love being active duty. Next Friday is my 20th anniversary of enlistment, 13 more years to go.
Damn a vet hipped to NPC culture that's inspiring
You're either a badass or fuckin psycho. Either way, I love ya brotha. Keep that shit up
@@tonyh2181 lmao, i was tryin to figure out which one he was too
NCO or commisioned? Don't tell me you're a specialist because they might kick you out. In 13 years you retire?
I can't think of any year in the Guard where I had only two weeks of cumulative active duty. Curse of the reliable.
BTW, I see your 50 year old E-5 and raise you a 60 year old E-4. Love your videos, all great satire is based in truth!
gotta love career E4s
I agree 100%. National guard guys think active duty guys just couldn’t “hack it” in the civilian world and need Uncle Sam to take care of them. Active Duty guys think guard guys are soft and lazy...to some degree both are true.
That's why I loved my Security Forces unit, 65% of the reserve cops including myself were active police officers outside of the military so everyone knew how to shoot and did it well.
+brian lane I'm pretty sure he just meant they know how to shoot because they get a lot of training with their handguns / weapons.
+brian lane go back to cop block fuck face, nobody gives a shit
wow, cant even keep the cop hatred outta here...go away, theres no call for it here.
Ignore his dumb ass, troll ain't even worth the time.
+brian lane it's an old picture. I have a beard you washed up ass face.
I bet if we were to tie this guys hands down he wouldn't be able to talk.
50 year old E-5..... Dude must have enlisted at age 41.....
He could get demoted and if he's fifty he's non combat
Kevin Shum I served with 3 50+ E5's from the Washington National Guard... all three promptly got out after they got home. 2 were absolutely useless, but with the wet paper bag
Nihipali5 I'm not surprised. Even if they joined at 39 years old there is definitely a reason why they're still E-5s.
Actually you don't know what your talking about. Rank is hard to obtain in the guard. A lot of guys get out of the service and then after a long break get back in, to finish and get their 20 for retirement. You retire at the highest rank you held honorably, so if you got out of active as an E-7 then 10 years later reenlist, first off they won't let you keep your previous rank and secondly you still retire as an E-7.
Pd Flem yeah, we know... guard and reserve units need slots... no slot, no rank advance
My E5 ,54 (Guardsman) year old friend who hasn't passed a PT test in years. Volunteered twice to Afghanistan and was awarded the purple heart 4 times two in each deployment.He was old but his heart was old school infantry.He was a man's man.
He sounds like a liability
I shifted to reserves and was pleasantly surprised. My unit was very busy, trained hard and frequently and deployed often. Yeah, we had older enlisted folks but they worked as hard and were more experienced than the young 'uns. My unit was so cohesive that most of us stuck around for more than a decade, not because it was cushy duty, but because we were tight with each other and trusted each other.
For all the people wondering about whether to go active or reserve. Go active. I did both but active duty is where it's at.
not if you have responsibilities at home -_-!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@@travel4fun103 benefits aren't the same 🤷
@@waynesingleton5322 You get some new ones, like extra education funding, but you lose out on the best healthcare deal.
Division co says parade field at 1000hrs. Brigade co say brigade formation at 0930 hours. Squadron co say squadron formation at 0900. Troop co says formation 0830. Platoon leader says formation 0815. Squad leader says formation 0800, but since your squared away your ass is there 15 min prior. You just showed up to formation at 0745 for some shit that doesn't start until 1000.
I don't know anyone that liked it brother
Thankfully I was cav and therefor drunk most times
Spoken so truly that I cannot help but agree more. The only thing that kept me going when this bull hit was knowing my first line said this sucked as bad as I was thinking it. He knew....he knew when the company put it out. HE KNEW! -fake cries inserted here-
Back in 02, W. Bush came to visit Campbell. 1300 Division formation? Yeah, 0600 Squad inspections... stand on the Div parade field all morning...
just like it was when i was in 48 years ago
the more things change the more things stay the same
This guy is fucking HILARIOUS!!
My brother wanted to join the Army. I convinced him to join the reserves first, that way if he didn't like the Army he only had to put up with it on the weekend. Little did I know I would go on to be hit by a mortar in Iraq while my brother was in basic, so he qualified for WDF (sole survivor rule) and he chose to go active after getting WDF (non deployable status) and spent his 8 year contact chilling out in Virginia working alongside the Navy.
In the reserves someone has to DIE before you can make rank!!! Don't forget that one
+Martin Heenan That's the Guard. Right now, it is easy to promote in the Reserves.
+Mark Oakley Bull shit. Once I hit Specialist, they were trying to find any and every reason to demote people because we didnt have any E-3s and lower left and the E-4s weren't going anywhere lol. If the first 4 ranks werent automatic, I doubt I ever would of left E-1.
+Martin Heenan Reserves is easy as fuck to get promoted. Active Duty is much harder now
Just gotta wait for a slot to open up
Depends on your MOS. In my state there are only 2 slots avaliable for E5. One that is 5 min from my house which is filled and he isn't going anywhere and the other is a 5 hour drive to the other side of the state. I'm fucked unlesd I reclass which I don't want to do becausd I love my job. I'll be an E4 for life or maybe E5 for the last year or two before I get out.
After I did my active duty I went reserve because of my contract. I took one PT test in the reserves and was the one of the few that passed. My commander was awesome. He understood because was active duty once. Great dude
I like these "difference between" videos they're great
Sooo uhhh, yeah. The sad thing is, in real world ops, I have seen reservists out perform active duty too many times. Not in every case, for sure. But enough that it wasn't an anomaly. So props to both for risking their necks when it matters. PatMulgrew USMC 2001-2005. Senior FSR Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan 2012-right f'in now.
+patrick mulgrew Outperform? In what ways?
@@armannstraughter3296 I know this is a really old post, but typically in stuff that a civilian education can help. As in commo MOS's or Cyber.
TEKs correct, if you're in a technical skill, reserves tends to work directly in their field on the civilian side, giving them great experience. AD guys sometimes get pushed to a unit where they don't actually work the mos they were trained for.
@@tek1152 i think he meant utilizing their civilian skills, something AD cant or doesnt do.
Reserves and Guard are really all dependent on the Unit. I just switched units earlier this year, and the new unit I am with is so much more organized than my old one was. I've done more in three months there than I did in over four years with my old unit.
I went into the reserves after getting out of the army. I was an infantryman who was used to discipline and following orders or get the hammer dropped on you. When I arrived at my reserve unit I thought I arrived on another planet the lack of training and discipline made me think I broke the law for knowing more than my platoon sergeant
Well put together and funny video. This might be true for the Army, but at my Marine Reserves unit we have a field drill every other month and we're out there from 3-5 days at a time. Our last 4 Annual Trainings have been in the sandbox with no showers or running water for 14 days. So I guess it depends on the unit. But generally, this is true... I can understand why some Active Duty personnel feel the way they do about Reservists. However, don't judge someone just by their active duty/reserves status. I have reservist NCO's and SNCO's at my unit with more combat tours under their belt than the I&I active duty First Sergeant. Many of us have respectable civilian careers and juggling that with a military career, even if just one weekend a month, isn't necessarily easy. Like I said, it depends on the unit.
It's exaggeration for sake of comedy. The reserves are nowhere near that bad and the marines aren't any different from army on the weekend warrior side.
Sheldon Lee
Lol, boot is butt hurt because he was too chicken shit to do active duty in the Marines, and a usmc reserve unit got put on the spotlight for looking like garbage for a lcpl's promotion
Reservist from all branches and the national Guard suck. There are some great soldiers but those are few. I've been on both side of the fence and reserve is a fucking joke. Go active duty than back to a reserve unit and you'll see the difference
hmoobmeeka reserve is like the retirement club, just about all the higher ups in my unit are active duty burnouts, I think if you want the "military life" go active duty, if you want to not deal with fuck fuck games everyday and want to be a weekend warrior go reserve, I like the national guard because I like telling prior service recuiters recruiters and usmc reserve to go fuck themselves. I was all about active duty until I got fucked so I like my freedom
Lol my guard unit takes a pt test first thing every drill. No room for fatty's in it.
I went from Active Duty Air Force to Air Guard... Talk about culture shock... When I switched to Air Guard I met my base commander and he told me I could call him by his first name... A fucking FULL BIRD told me this shit... I just looked at him and said "No Sir... I can't do that".
My experience, before they started activating the Guard and Reserve every other month, was that 2 weeks and 1 weekend ended up being about 90 days a year. I'll grant the proficiency of Guard combat arms units don't match Active, trigger time is important. OTOH, Reserve and Guard Engineer, Maintenance and Medical units are generally FAR superior to their active component. Did you let an Active Duty dentist work on you if you had a choice? In the Engineer units that I served, the equipment operators had a decade or more of real world experience in addition to the nine weeks that the Active guys get at Leonard Wood. Same with the mechanics, decades of real world experience verses some 19 year old with 8 weeks of advanced training.
+Larry Cable This is extremely true. Yes, the Reserves can be a little behind on some tasks and in military proficiency. However, we are force multipliers. We are typically heavily experienced in our careerfields and can bring additional skills that Active Duty cannot. Your example of Engineers is spot on. I had many operators who could run circles around Active Duty operators. They had a lot more time in the equipment than AD did. Heck, even my my operators who did not do it in the civilian world were able to get more stick time per year than active duty units due to having a TA on-site and simulators for when the weather was too bad to operated (not that bad weather is ever an excuse as an engineer). Another example is within our other units. You may have a Soldier who is in supply, but his civilian job is contracting. You now not only have a trained supply specialist but someone who can run contracts and be certified as a COR when overseas. One of my former medics was a paramedic in an area that has a lot of trauma runs. He definitely was more proficient than most Army medics who only deal with the on-post stuff. The Reserves bring a lot more to the fight than most even consider. The truth is that the Army would not run without the Reserves and Guard, further the combat capacity would suffer even more just by the sustainment provided from the Reserves. However, this video is still funny as hell!
+brian lane Nope. I am actually a PS NCO that commissioned (BTW....old pic in my profile). Try deploying without the Reserves providing Engineering and Sustainment support. It won't happen. We provide the majority of it for operations abroad. I guarantee that my Engineers are more proficient than almost all AC Engineers. They typically do their job a lot more frequently because they do it daily at their civilian side. Even those that don't do it on the civilian side get more time on projects than most on Active Duty. Frankly, we are the force multipliers that ensure mission success. The AC does not have the capacity any longer due to many key sustainment tasks and other tasks being pushed to the RC.
+Mark Oakley The Regular military hasn't had the capacity to operate without the Reserve and National Guard at least since Vietnam. On the Air Force side, those being supported have no idea if the pilot and crew are active or reserve. Most of the Air Force transportation pilots are in the reserves and a hell of a lot of Guard pilots fly combat missions on a regular basis, about half the A10's are in National Guard units. Even the notion that the Army Guard combat units were greatly deficient needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The regular Army hammered a Guard Brigade for a poor performance at NTC, but I had been engineer support for the OpFor just prior to that when the 1st Cav rotated through. Got their ass kicked every iteration, one so badly that the brass made them redo the mission. Of course, all the advantages are to the OpFor, they are there for two years, know the terrain and have done these same missions over and over.
+Larry Cable totally agree. Just stay the fuck away from us when the job is done. Worst soldiers I've ever come across but damn the best earth movers ive ever worked with..
+Crafty Veteran That usually depended on the leadership in the units and just how much active time they get. The Guard engineer unit I was associated with was very busy, lots of keep ups and CAP missions, plus the regular stuff the states come up with for engineer units, and were generally pretty fair troops. OTOH, I've seen Guard and Reserve units that make you point very well. But again, not every Regular Army unit is the 101st or 10th Mountain either.
nothin' but time, I got 10 years... love it!
When I was AD '83-'86, no deployments, 2/3 of the year in garrison, working weekends happened but was rare. PT at 0400? No more like at 0600. Off most days by 1630-1700. MOS 16S Redeye/Stingers. It was pretty chill, as long as you went with the program.
active duty soldiers tell me to go reserves. then reserve soldiers tell me to go active duty
I ended up doing reserves because If you have a GED and make less then a 50 on the ASVAB then you have to go reserves. or wait til you can take the ASVAB again. I made a 49..I said fuck that, I just want to get life started, so I did reserves.
it honestly depends on what you want to do w your life. Reservists generally have a plan of some sort for their lives (school, work, career, family etc) AD...well, i tell ppl... if you wanna go Ad dont have a girlfriend/boyfriend, spouse kids, job, friends or life.... kiss that all goodbye. Active duty is great if you dont know what the fuck youre doing in life or youre single.
@@MrEvldreamr girl, I already joined the army as a reservist, became active and deployed once in the past two years lol stationed up in GA
@@toast5802 Same.
@@MrEvldreamr you in GA too?
@@toast5802 nah, haha, currently in FL
1st month into the North Carolina national guard after 11 years active duty. It took 6 days to get 300 people qualified on weapons. My platoon sergeant got 11 first try... Then 17... Then 21... Then on the 5th day... 25! The entire company was like this. They looked at me as if I was a god! Me, an E-5, ended up retraining all the bolo's
I was in the National Guard Infantry.. We did PT almost every morning even during drills. 90% of drills we would go to Ft Lewis or Camp Rilea & do actual infantry shit. Sleeping in the woods, MRE'S, MOUT, or OP FOR for the active duty guys. We were also mostly air assault qualified & often flew in blackhawks & chinooks.
Out of our 100+ guys in the company I would say an average of 5 guys would fail the pt test.
I deployed twice & they continue to deploy on about a 4 year cycle.
I guess my point is the reservists must be shit compared to national guard? Maybe because we were state funded? fuck it idk
+Reaper Kezia The Army Reserve only has support MOS. So don't expect much from them when it comes to PT and Infantry related skill. The closet MOS to combat is 31B aka MP. On the other hand Civil Affair are in the reserve. CA is special operation and most are airborne. CA is hands down the most fit MOS and CA are the most DEPLOYED MOS in the reserve. Am with the 450th CA Battalion. So please give the reserve some respect.
dude just made me reconsider joining the reserves lmao
elvis pena Depends on what you want. Do you want Military 24/7 or be able to have a civilian job on the side of being in the Military.
A 50 year old E5? I've been in for a few months and might become an E4 within 3 months. How can a 50 year old be an E5?
+TrizerFlame Some of them got out and after a while decided to get back in (usually they already retired from their civilian careers). I had a freaking VIETNAM vet in my unit that just retired back in September 2015! My father got back into the Guard, where he has more schooling than most staff NCO's. The buddies he use to serve with back in the early 90's are Sergeant Majors now LOL. There is another saying in the Guard, someone has to die for you to get promoted, this is true for my father but he doesn't fail his PFTs like these 20 year old youngins....its sad
My brother is a CIB Sargeant who agreed to join the reserves when he got outta the army and he regrets it worse than cancer. He wants to stop all of them in the mud. When you ask him about the reservists he gets angry and says he just wants to deploy again instead of dealing with those shitbags.
Got a 54 yr old E-4 that can’t pass PT and continuously busts tape. Somehow he believes that should have no bearing on his attempt at E-5 because “I work during drill” when all he does is fuck off on his phone and eats like Godzilla. It frustrates me to my core.
From an AGR trying to go active.
I did PT once as a Reservist , my friend told me , he was impressed that I could lift the 5 finger shot glass that many times.
50 year old e=5 is one thing, at least h's an NCO. In one of my reserve units, there was a dude that was an E-4 and entered duty when I was 3 years old. This dude was an E4 for over 20 years.
I have been on both sides as well and still in the Guard. I have seen everything talked about in this video!LOL When I was in the 82nd 290 was the minimum standard!!!!LOL
Claymore that's what all units should be... I will honestly say, I didn't ever come close to that
Claymore I always maxed everything but the run. the run is veg around 12:30
Same here. I could never max my run. 291 was my score on active.
Claymore were you infantry?
Yes indeed
Active duty 10 Mountain(triple duece).Also National Guard Infantry.We had MUTA 9's which means we started drill Thursday through Sunday.Always in the field.Pogues are Pogues AD or reserve.Imfantry leads the way.
Roman Legion it’s POGs man.... “ Personal Other then Grunts” is what it means
The reason I chose the reserve is to have a choice with my deployment. You can volunteer to deploy as often as you want, but you can also have a civilian career.
Training? Hmm, I was an MP in the National Guard. Every person in the unit was a cop, real life training, seven days a week. No active duty unit could compete. Plus, our unit was deployed six times more than any active duty unit. While deployed in Iraq, (Our fourth deployment since 9/11) the Army Times came out with the article about active duty soldiers and how only 30% had even deployed once.
With Reserves it all kinda depends on the unit. The Engineer unit I was in won the Itschner Award for the Army Reserves and we were busting our ass every drill weekend doing something. Our 12Ns were actively cutting, leveling, and surfacing a road at our home post while the 12Bs were performing Route Clearance, Area Clearance, Engineer Recon, MOUT, Demo range, explosive breaching range, and/or crew served/individual weapons ranges. So there is at least one high speed engineer company in the Army Reserves.
Never fail. I train 1 month out when I know I have to go in. Most of the time we inventory the same shit we inventoried the previous month. I regret not going active...
You are a very entertaining guy. Deserves 10 thumps up.
I’m a 91Fox reservist. I was in Ft Hood for AT and the active duty guys were amazed at how much I knew about guns and how well I did my job. Only 2 days a month yes, but when you’re fixing a few hundred guns in those 2 days.. yea. You learn some shit.
My old unit was TFI so we worked hand in hand with the guard, the full time guardsmen were the best because they had been working on the same shit for the last 10 years, the weekend warrior counterparts were dogshit, fuckin deployed with one dude who knew less than 10% of the equipmemt we were responsible for, he had been at that unit for 6 years and was promoted to E-5 while we were deployed. After we got home he commissioned and went to the unit his dad just retired out of as the wing commander.
Got a kick out of this though I will say it really depends on the unit and the individual. As a reserve Marine infantryman for 6 years my unit typically did the same amount of work in 2 days that I had done in a week at infantry school. We also had guys in my unit that could run any active duty Marine into the ground in any event. We actually had a cpl what was about 250-300 lbs who always ran a sub-18-minute 3 miler (while puking all over himself the last 100 yards). Then we had an E-3 who literally fell out of every unit run we ever went on. But he could disassemble a SAW in 17 seconds and put it back together in about 90 seconds and apparently always knew how to get that weapon running again if it ever went down in a firefight.
I just found these...My ribs hurt from laughing so much..I went from AD to NG, now that was the biggest joke. These guys called each other by their first names and it blew my mind. I blew out my knee and failed the one PT test they gave me in 2 years, and it was only the run I failed. They sent me a letter of intent to discharge. I went in to the CO's office on the next drill and put the letter on his desk, I told him that I had a DD214 that says Honorable on it and I didn't need his State paperwork crap. Told him my knee blew out and that was the reason I didn't pass. He said it was their policy, I told him to take the position and stick it and I wouldn't be coming back due to their process I was in my rights to refuse drill due to their letter of intent. Two months later I get an Honorable discharge in the mail from the NG...lmfao what a joke.
I Am Prior Service USMC and US Army, both Active Duty and Reserve Components. I can relate to what SGT Hernandez is saying.
I used to 'poach' the heck out of the Reserves and convert them to active duty when I was a recruiter. It got so bad that they changed the policy for release of Reservists to enlist active duty from the O-3 level and made it the first O-6.
They say, "You'll be back." But you only wish it were that easy. Going to Reserve to Active means you better know a foreign language or be in good enough shape to be able to go to the SF pipeline and either pass it and go be a badass or fail out and stay on active duty.
I too have been on both sides of the fence and I have to say that reserves the name should be changed. I always was raised to believe that when you keep something in reserve it was something you wanted around and was as useful. can you think of the first last or any time when you heard some one say or you personalty felt comforted by the sentence here comes the reserves? or thank God we have the reserves for support if anything happens........ .. me neither!
+Tj Aikens I know many. Overseas, if you wanted any engineering, mechanical, medical, or logistics task completed with a high-level of proficiency, you were better off if the Reserves were covering those areas. It is easier for the Reserve Soldiers to maintain higher levels of proficiency when they do these jobs daily. I don't know many who perform exclusively their MOS specific jobs on a daily basis in the Army, and many do not even do it with much regularity. Reserve Engineer units were mentoring Active Duty units in Afghanistan due to the serious difference in competence. Usually those who I find talk the most against the Reserves and Guard have never deployed, or if they have, they did not pay attention to what was going on around them.
said no one ever lol.
The real fun part is being a DOD Civilian, Reservist and Combat Veteran doing better in concurrent federal roles than those at least 10 years younger on Active and/or Reservist status.
+Geoffrey Miller Lol nah youre just sitting at the gate getting fat and collecting that ridiculous civilian check. Good job though!
+Geoffrey Miller Same here bro I spent 8 years AD Army hated most of it. Now in the Reserves working for the VA hospital doing Administration shit, Reservist, collecting VA from being blown up twice in the same damn mouth. Also was able to go get certification paid with my TA with burning a whole in my post 9/11.... No offense to the AD soldiers but with the right clearance and MOS in the Army you can pretty much make between $40-65k working for the federal gov.
You are so right I found this out too. Dude I'am 45 and I can still get 90% on my run time. So many sandbaggers in the reserves.
This made my day! 😂 I'm looking forward to BCT in March..... Active duty here I come.
You still active on this account
Some of this is a dependent on the unit. My unit is a mess and is non deployable due to its severe lack of bodies to get anything done. The soldiers in the unit weren’t that motivated either. I thought that all the reserves were like that until one day I drilled with a new unit that was super high speed. I learned more about how to function in the army in those 2 days of drill with that unit than a full year in mine
My Reserve Unit has Remedial PT for all failures on Drill weekend, yah, I know, you're not going to get them passing on two days a month, but if you want to not pass your PT test then you get to get up extra early both days and be doing PT in the grass by the front door when everyone else shows up for sign-in.
We have a 50 year old E-4 in my unit so I understand where you're coming from.
My Guard unit didn't send me to AIT for two years then tried to give me the boot. Went Active as soon as I could.
The 50 year old E-5 isn't such an strange thing... Rank is hard to obtain in the guard. A lot of guys get out of the service and then after a long break get back in, to finish and get their 20 for retirement. You retire at the highest rank you held honorably, so if you got out of service as an E-7 then 10 years later reenlist, first off they won't let you keep your previous rank and secondly you still retire as an E-7.
It all depends on your unit and where you’re based out of, as an Air Force Reservist 2001-2007 (Prior Active Navy 83-89) We were based at an active duty Airbase so our weekends were spent doing real world missions in addition to our training. And in addition to our two weeks of training, there were lots of opportunities for additional TDY’s throughout the Country. It also depends on your MOS (Career Fields) We were Air Transportation (Aerial Port Squadron) So There were lots of cargo and passengers needing to be moved.
But I can imagine if you’re not on an active duty base and just meeting in an armory or compound how boring and lax it can be.
As a 92F Reservists doing first 2 week AT, didn't even get to set up FSSP, instead drove to the PX... four times.
2nd 2 week AT in the same year... folded Laundry.
did 6 years active and been in the reserve for the last 2 years... absolutely hate it... glad i have 6 months left.... cant wait to go back active.
Having been active duty and reserve myself this is pretty good
Idk about ARMY but the Navy does not pt poolees. There office is right next to the Marines I have never even seen a Navy member the whole time I was there. My recruiter asked their guy if they wanted to get both offices to pt together and he flat out told my recruiter no because he doesn't want them to know we actually pt our guys.
Bro i love ur channel i cant stop watching them haha
In the National Guard, you get free in state tuition.... so you KEEP all of your GI Bill money....
I have friends that retired from the Guard as E4s..... never went to school, never passed PT or HT/WT.... still bitch when they don’t get promoted, that cracks me up...
National Guard still deploys, and we do stateside mobilizations, I have two mobilizations (airport after 9-11 for eight months and Ft Irwin for 22 months to backfill 1/11 & 2/11 when they went to Iraq) and three deployments (2x to Afghanistan and once to Kuwait).
I was a 50 year old E-4 . In OIF M 2 gunner on a 1151 . convey security. Our unit was head and shoulders better than active duty/full timers
Not in the GUAM ARMY NATIONAL GUARD, FIELD TRAINING EVERY MONTH! Only one person in my company failed. In my company there's about 130 people so I think we're doing alright ... And our PT is fun👌
I too have seen both sides of the fence. AD Army 1988 to 1995 National Guard 1995 to 2015. During this time I had 4 deployments. Guard was easy and laid back until 9/11 then things got serious, Huge improvements in training, equipment, and personnel standards. Some lost rank due to poor performance , some gained rank due to outstanding performance. The good old boy network regained control and reverted back to the buddy system for promotions after a couple years but it was good while it lasted. The best advantage the guard had over AD was when we were sent into a brand new FOB which was nothing but dirt walls and a few bunkers we didn't have to wait for enginers or KRB to get the place livable because the guard is not only soldiers they are also plumbers, carpenters, welders, electricians, and many other skills that come in handy, Also the guard soldiers were much better shots on average than AD. Reserves will never be on par with AD but you have to respect them and what they do with 90% less training and mostly used worn-out handed down equipment.
It was a shock going from basic training to my Guard unit I got smoked so they could prove how tough they were as CBRN unit because it was AT. I won't take my NCOs seriously ever but I still pretend to because I am disciplined and I want them to sign my papers to switch to active duty
I was with the the 48th Brigade Ga Guard training up for Bosnia in 2000 and had 3rd ID as our OPFOR in Ft. Stewart...
48th Brigade - 4
3rd ID - 0
Actual reserves 2 weeks "training" in 1991: a week in the field on Tenkiller lake with bbq's every night. An actual cabinet marked "training films" that was full of porn tapes, and watched every evening by everyone from e1 to captain 🙂. 2nd week in barracks at Camp Gruber, same bbq's every night and "training film" viewing 😩. 0 training accomplished except for the few of us who volunteered for MOUT training and the driving course to get licenced for the "new" hummers.... which the unit had exactly 0 of 😩
really depends on what kind of unit it is, in aviation most of the reservist are working on the aircrafts as civilian employees getting better experience being a mechanic, the active duty guys where most stop working on aircrafts after they become E6 and by the time they retire they forgot everything, now he is a 40 year old that retired from the army trying to become a contractor with subpar skillset only good at telling back in my days stories
Ive been at 2 reserve units and we have all always passed out pt tests and at my current unit we train every weekend and even augment the active duty.
I was reserving the Marine Corps and I'm in the guard now and yeah it really fluctuates. If you have Stellar leadership you're going to have Stella the soldiers and that's a magnified in the reserve units.
what are the diffence in the length of contacts for active duty and reserve? And do reserve still get full benefits?
This video is so true. I left active and went reserve. I'm currently in process of going back to active but the reserves lost my paperwork....so it's taking some time.
Here in Australia reserves deal with bushfires, floods, covid testing etc
Correct me if I'm wrong. But doesn't national guard get sent to combat more than infantry? And i
Know reserves get sent out more than active.
This is so true.
I was chair force, therefore I don't have the creditably of other services. That being said, a few month's a year, the reservists, around March, would fall in, in the parking lot. They dressed right and did their calisthenics. It seemed kind of funny to me. I have great respect for those people, but living inside and living outside makes a difference...
All depends on the individual. If you're doing 20 years in active duty or just doing 4 years in your contract and it definitely wasn't for you and you didnt wanna deal with all the politics and leadership bs! And you wanted to transition into the civilian world yet you still want the benefits of the military than the reserves or guard is the smart logical option. Think about it. You can even do 20 years as a reservist or guard and collect your pension at 65. And also collect your civilian pension. Thats 2 pensions. Or you were never active duty and just a reservist or guard. You do one deployment and boom! You got your veteran status. Get that dd214 form and dip!. You can use your veteran status for other government civilian jobs. Give you a major boost on getting hired. Those jobs pay way more. Or depending how many times you deploeyed as a reservist you can use your G.I bill get payed with b.a.h while going to school. Theres so many smart ways to go about it. The dudes that clown reservist and guard I don't blame them. Its because they live for that lifestyle. They love that environment. Promotion ceremonies, mandatory PT, that comradeship,brotherhood, the life time bonds. And I respect that. But its not for everyone. If its not for you than you can play it smart and just go reserves or guard. Get what you need and flip it.
Served 5 years active. When I was in Iraq I got in trouble with my unit so they voluntold 10 of us to attach to a national guard unit who was down a few men. We patrolled with them and that shit sucked. We got lit up every time we went out. Bad guys see that NG patch and know what time it is.
Probably my favorite UA-camr been here sense 1k subs
Not in all cases, but the 50 year old E5 is a Senior Vice President as a civilian and serves because he wants to help his community.
Go reserves on Drill Sergeant side. Minimum PT score is 290, train every weekend and we do at least one AT a year and it's normally 3 weeks. So not every reserve unit is lazy. Hell my Combat Engineer unit was same as my Drill Sergeant one.
I hadn't passed a PT test in 5 years and I still deployed to Iraq in 2003. I guess PT tests don't matter. I was my Company's H8, recovery specialist. I did every single recovery for my company during the entire deployment, and then some for a few others that needed the help. Our company level motorpool did all its own third shop work because our actual active duty third shop sucked balls. We had active duty soldiers coming to us for help because our guys were mechanics on the Civilian side of things. Our guys didn't steal from one another, we could keep all our shit unlocked and out in the open without worrying about it. Active duty guys were all klepto-fucking-maniacs that would steal anything that wasn't bolted down, including parts off of vehicles. A bunch of buddy fuckers is what they were. I deployed with guys I knew for 6 or 7 years, not some strangers that I met a month ago. My reserve unit was an extended family.
ACV - At 2 weeks of duty a year, how long do you think it took that 50 year old man to make E-5 ? Was he a dedicated reservist, or was he doing it for a paycheck and just hanging on ?
That's the most polite motivational NCO knife hand I've ever seen. #britisharmyknowbetterswearwords
Well reserves in the marines are pretty intense. We learn just as much as active duty marines in a weekend than they do in a week. At itx 2 years ago and 2/23 was number out of every company in that training cycle. So the reserves aren't as bad as everyone says it is
When I was in the Reserves, I had to make up a PT Test I missed and my Motor Sergent set up a time on a weekday to do it.
He took me out to breakfast, pulled out the score card and said, "So... how many pushups? 44 sound good?"
Easiest P.T test ever. :)
After I got out, I reenlisted in the National Guard. They did PT every drill weekend.... in the form of letting us loose at the gym for an hour.
"Should I work on my run? Naaa... I'll play basketball."