During WWII the Life expectancy of a combat engineer was 32 seconds in a combat environment. How do the military evacuate civilians from a country? These troops search out and destroy the enemy and respond to calls for help when other units stumble into danger. Five Seconds to Live-The Life Expectancy of Radiomen In The - SOFREP Their recon mission sometimes results in them fighting while vastly outnumbered. In my 1st tour I was with 65th Engr Bn 25th Inf Div and was in direct support of the Wolf Hounds Inf Bn. The materials were in turn given to theOffice of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, upon the museums closure at Fort Belvoir when the Engineer School moved to Fort Leonard Wood. But theres still something very different about 23 percent of a relatively small army not coming home to 10 percent of an entire nations young men not coming home. Card payments collected by DeltaQuest Media Limited, company no. It has a cyclist company and a company of the Army Service Corps attached. When the dust settled, the top of that jungle draped hill was bald and riddled with tree stumps, fallen trees, and exposed rock. The average life expectancy for a male in America is 75.5 years. You are some incredibly dangerous dudes for our enemies to have to deal with. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone who has actually BEEN a Combat Engineer could tell me a little about it, a first hand desription about it, as opposed to the fluffed up explanation the Army would give me. You are some incredibly dangerous dudes for our enemies to have to deal with. This section highlights information about where 12b combat engineers work. In combat, some jobs are dangerous based on the value attached to them by the enemy; combat medics, who patrol alongside riflemen, definitely fall into this category. I know its kind of silly but one of the reasons I want to enlist is to blow lots of things up. They know that every time they go into battle, they are putting their lives on the line, and yet they do it willingly, because they believe in what they are fighting for. "When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you; "And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad, "Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts, "That drive them out to jabber among the trees.. Using the latter figure, he points out that this was 8.4 percent of the 8,375,000 men mobilised (one in 12) during the war and 1.53 percent of the British population, which is listed as having been 45,750,000 in 1914. Women (around 74 years had a higher life expectancy than men (around 70 years). The Most Dangerous Jobs in the World. Nov 14, 2019 26 4. Benefits Though pay is not outstanding, especially for E-1, there are several other benefits provided by the U.S. Army: Medical Insurance Vacation Time Retirement Special Pay Housing: Allowances for living expenses, utilities, and maintenance. Please enable it to continue. I am still disappointed (pissed off) that after 30 days in the bush the 11B received the Combat Infantry Badge. 2017 Cookie Notice units. When he did so, he says he had half expected to be court-martialled, though instead received a medal for his efforts. For the men, there were 78,758 cases of field punishment, which, divided amongst the more than 5 million men who served in the Army (it was largely an Army procedure). By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. The other extreme was also a huge problem: The trenches were invariably ankle-deep in mud, and often the level grew much higher. Thank you so much for watching and supporting the channel! The average age of an employed 12b combat engineer is 34 years old. Former RAF aerospace systems operator, Richard West, who now runs Propeller Team Training, said he often worked in remote mountain sites, like the Falkland Islands. We all repelled onto the top of that hill from CH-47 helicopters. 58,148 were killed in Vietnam, 75,000 severely disabled, 23,214 were 100% disabled, 5,283 lost limbs and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations. Yet, as noted, they only made up between 43 and 32 percent of the Army in 1916 and 17, respectively. 2023 DeltaQuest Media Limited. Owned and operated by CharityUSA.com, LLC. This article is an updated version of an earlier article originally published on 6 October 2015 and contains contributions by staff writer Hayley Ramsey. Admit that you still chant "Jerry! Source: U.S. Veterans Eligibility Trends and Statistics, 2015 The most common degree for 12b combat engineers is high school diploma 36% of 12b combat engineers earn that degree. The documentary series The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century features footage of men with all manner of strange maladies, such as a one who compulsively cowered under a bed at the mere utterance of the word bomb; another man with a strange facial tic caused by his having bayoneted an enemy soldier in face; and a former serviceman continuously shaking from head to toe, utterly unable to walk without a cane. The journal is ranked 1529.18 in the SJR (Scimago Journal Rank). 12b or c, our skills are very interchangeable. The Office of History maintains copies of these slides and captions in its research collection. In low-income countries, life expectancy is 18.1 years lower than in high-income countries. Employees with the 12b combat engineer job title have their preferences when it comes to working for a company. And finally, because we know that about 20 percent of the infantrys losses were in the form of dead, that means that our Tommy on the Western Front would have had a 24.64 percent chance of being killed (his 123.2 percent chance of becoming a casualty multiplied by .2). By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Alongside their construction and engineering roles, they are also the go-to experts on munitions, mines and demolitions, as well as having to fulfill all the other traditional duties of soldiering. In one way or another, all military jobs are (or have the potential to be) dangerous. The movement we heard never materialized into an attack. They are usually at the tip of any advance and, therefore, meet the brunt of whatever resistance is lying in wait for them. What Statistics of the Military Effort reveals is that, as the war went on, the share of it being fought by the infantry, and other combat arms, decreased considerably. Vietnam/index Clodfelter says that 26.4 percent of them were killed, and 20 percent of Oxford students who served were. Maybe Ill do an update on engineers. It shows the total number of men up to that point who had been unlucky enough (or, perhaps lucky, depending on whether they wanted to get out of the line) to be wounded two or three times. Theipval Memorial near the Somme (image: Paul Arps). and our Both served in A 2/18 1st Infantry Division For some reason, the written word of this article was somehow deleted and lost. Copyright 2023 We Are The Mighty. We went on a ton of missions in Iraq and did not build 1 bridge. Its a long-established truth of war that an army is only as capable as the supply lines which feed it; therefore, vehicle convoys are an attractive and relatively easy target for enemy fighters. As stated, that was 55 percent for everybody on the western front, so 2.24 times 55 gives a 123.2 percent chance of becoming a casualty. Most military flamethrowers use liquid fuel, typically either gasoline or diesel, but commercial . It is not possible to know for sure from the sources used exactly how many individual men were wounded, but it can be fairly well guessed at. Not only do the forward observers have a lack of combat support, but there are also no supply lines, and things can go very wrong very quickly if caught. While riflemen often receive support from tanks and aircraft, they ultimately have to rely on their own skills and training to complete their missions. Here are 10 of the most dangerous: Pararescue jumpers are basically the worlds best ambulance service. . Fortunately, the vast majority of the wounds sustained were recovered from, at least physically. 548227, reg. Both have received training in the OSUT (One Station Unit Training) program. So to work out the odds of our Tommy coming to harm if hed been in France or Belgium during the war, we must add 42.9 to 32.88 and divide by two to give a rough estimate of the average proportion of the Army taken up by the infantry over the war. It was common for the water to be at least a foot deep and hardly rare for it to reach a mans thighs. As the revisionists have pointed out, this is no lost generation, but the impact becomes clearer when the figure is put into perspective. No, Delaying Retirement Won't Cause You To Die Sooner - Forbes Its dangerous enough to expose yourself to small-arms fire and IEDs when rushing to treat a wounded colleague, but when youve got a target on your back attached by enemy fighters who understand the psychological effects of taking out the only immediate means of life-saving treatment then things get a whole lot scarier. It was truly impressive. The infantry gets a badge, but the engineer beside them doesnt. PDF Combat engineers in Vietnam: tine first year - 19engrvn.org The only details provided to support this view were as follows: a. Flamethrower - Wikipedia When a disaster strikes, they frequently provide assistance in areas that are dangerous or difficult to access. After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that: 1.5% of 12b combat engineers are women and 98.5% of 12b combat engineers are men. For the remainder who lived, it seems very likely that almost all of them would have sustained some kind of wound during their time in France and Belgium, and some more than one. But a certain subset were not. Best Ways to Deal With Workplace Stress. The British lost 704,208 dead in the Great War, and if they were to form up in three ranks and march at the standard British army speed of 120 thirty-inch paces to the minute, they would pass in one day, fifteen hours and seven minutes. Just how many of Tommy and his compatriots in the other services did not come back alive? But what we saw there on that mission was some tough, highly skilled engineers doing their thing and doing it with precision, speed, and skill. Today we have Mike Stedman (a former 12B) talking about his MOS 12B (Combat Engineer) and what to expect should you choose this specific job in the Army! Not that many females are physically fit to preform it is much more than that. They can come from the air, the land and from the water. They play an important role in all aspects of heavy equipment and construction operations, and they are the Marines most experienced professionals. SEE ALSO RE: Life-expectancy of pilots during war. Two drunken idiots kicking off every six months or so and picking a fight with their sergeants, for example, might well account for the entirety of its use within a given battalion over the whole course of the war. Help? For the Royal Navy, Statistics of the Military Effort does also list its casualty rates on page 339: 32,208 killed, consisting of 2,342 officers and 29,866 other ranks. Another Recon platoon, or maybe some Marines from the 9th, or the 26th Marines would provide the security for the engineers who would be doing any of the longer-term construction up on that isolated hill in the jungle. Marine Corps COOL Taken together, these all add up to 1,685,257. An officer of the 19th London Regiment told how it once took him three hours to make his way up a communication trench 400 yards long.. The SEE is used to rapidly dig. Radiomen in the Vietnam War faced a 5-second life expectancy Sure, We are supposed to be the Experts on Mobility, Counter-Mobility, and Survivability Missions, but that is too wide a gap in whats the difference. Immediately, its easy to see that 83,203 is roughly 10 percent of this total (10.69 to be precise). This was complicated by how long it took the military to get up-armored vehicles to all units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sheep feces (gross). An official website of the United States government, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters Website, About the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters Website, Vietnam So Many Years Later: Remembering Army Engineer Activities in Southeast Asia, 1966-1972, Deactivated Nuclear Power Plant Program (DNPPP), Regional Environmental and Energy Offices REEOs, Industry Information Re: COVID-19 Support, Strategic Sustainability Performance Plans, Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity, G-1 Reserve Component Augmentation, Office of Human Resources Directorate, Hosted by Defense Media Activity - WEB.mil. I did my share of Mounted and Dismounted Patrols with the Infantry, and RCP, and a host of other things. So and so forth. The job satisfaction rating for Combat Engineers is 4.2, which is higher than the average for all occupations combined. Forward observers are, therefore, highly trained and independent, and subject to a notorious selection process, with only a select few being deemed qualified for the task. This article is more than 3 years old. Its difficult to handle, as youre always worried and waiting for them to contact you to let you know theyre okay.. Aside from the incendiary devices that they have to disarm, recover or destroy, they are also exposed to the same small-arms and IED threats as everybody else.