What’s the worst story you’ve heard from a veteran?

16 comments

1. 29 Palms. Little more needs to be said.

2. Well my FIL has been waiting for like 5 months to get reimbursed by the VA.

3. I had a friend who was in the 1457th engineering batallion in Iraq. She had witnessed an IED shortly after it exploded. It was horrendous. She didnt like to talk about it, but I kept asking until she told me the full story. Interestingly she is the reason I got my first firearm. After returning from Iraq, she carried a Taurus 9mm with her everywhere which peaked my interest.

4. “I can’t and don’t want to even tell ya some of the shit I did. I’ll just say a lot just seemed like straight up murder” my dad when we were drunk and he began talking a little about his time Vietnam. He then teared up so gave him a hug and changed the subject.

5. My grandpa was in Europe during ww2 and my grandmother live through the Holocaust. She wouldn’t talk much about it, but my grandpa said when she and her sister came across the American soldiers both of them were severely malnourished and wearing burlap sacks for clothing and the burlap had practically rubbed their skin raw, and the medic said her skin felt like paper. That’s the worst I’ve heard, and I think it’s just because thinking of someone I love going through that still makes me tear up.

6. My uncle went to Vietnam and told me this story *once* after too many drinks.

   When he first got to his forward base, he saw other soldiers had strings of dried out ears of Vietnamese they had killed, like a necklace. Supposedly Vietnamese believed that if their body was violated this way they couldn’t go to paradise.

   My uncle wanted an ear, not having one showed he was a newbie.

   One night their base was attacked.

   The plan was to drive jeeps down into prepared positions and repel the attack with machine gun and rifle fire.

   My uncle shot an enemy with his M-16, and then went out to collect his ear after the battle was over.

   The guy’s head was half blown off and my uncle immediately puked.

   Then he cut the guy’s ear off.

7. Their experience at the VA.

8. None. I’m 48 and my relatives never told me a single war story. I typically find out they were in wars and got medals when they died of old age.

9. Both grandfathers, an uncle, and a cousin have all been in military (1 Navy, 3 Air Force). The closest thing to a story that I’ve heard is that one of my grandfathers was in a band (he played sax and clarinet). I never want hear about any of their times in the military.

10. PTSD from rape by fellow servicemembers.

11. The worst stories I’ve heard were all third-hand, passed down from my wife’s grandfather to her father and onto me. He served in the German army during WWII and fought mostly on the eastern front. Its exactly the kind of stuff you read about, but sounds even worse because it comes from family history. The words that have stuck with me are “the endless waves of death”.

    I was deployed to three combat missions during my army career, and people are almost disappointed that I really don’t have any horrible war stories. About the worst I experienced was the smell of the poo pond on KAF.

12. Most of his brothers in arms have committed suicide 🙁

13. My Grandfather was a marine in WW2, deployed to the pacific. The only concrete things I know about his service was when and where he was (Mariana islands campaign in 44/45). One can make some general inferences about the nasty shit he must have saw based on a quick google search. He did tell me one, super vague, story about him and his buddies getting strafed by zero’s when they were in their foxholes, but besides that – he took it all to his grave.

    One uncle was KIA in Vietnam. Almost everything I know about his (very short) tour I’ve read in a book filled with first hand accounts of guys who were at the same battle he was killed in, again – pretty nasty shit.

    Another uncle did two tours in Vietnam. Again, only one or two stories and they were told when he was drinking, nothing super fucked up but I got the impression that the things he saw/may have done are under lock and key in his mind that he spent almost a decade worth of PTSD fighting to lock away.

    A former colleague was active duty army signal corps during the whole 1980’s south/Central America proxy war. Told me that he and a small team would go on reconnaissance missions for a week or two at a time out in the jungle. The craziest story he told me (leaving the details to be inferred) was being deep in a jungle gathering Intel on the local communist forces. He carried a radio, a side arm, and a 40mm grenade launcher as part of his kit. He “didn’t come back with all of the ammunition he carried, on more than one occasion.”

    This is all to say – as a general rule I’ve learned from friends who are vets: the more forthcoming and detailed a person is about the “crazy shit” they did/saw in combat, the more likely it is to be overly exaggerated and fabricated to a certain extent.

14. My friend confided in me the story of his squad getting hit by an IED. He sustained relatively minor injuries (not really minor but compared to the dead guys nearby minor). Several good friends were killed. He saw it all up close.

    It was enough for him to get severe PTSD, require major ankle reconstruction, severe depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and a suicide attempt.

    Hearing that takes the glamor out of war very quickly.

    Good news is he is still the funniest dude in every room and he is better, not healed, but doing great. It probably helps that his wife is a saint and his kids are absolute dolls.

15. Not a veteran but my grandma grew up Shanghai because her dad was a dentist with the marines. She said when they evacuated during the Japanese invasion it was just literal mounds of dead Chinese civilians. She was like 5 or 6 seeing this

16. My friend was in Afghanistan and he saw these young boys that were dressed as girls, wearing makeup and dresses. The tribal leaders or whatever they’re called would use these boys as sex toys, pretty much. My friend said they were briefed by their COs that they couldn’t take any action against these guys. They had to watch the boys get pulled around by these gross guys as they went around town.