The Tanker Gods don't care about CSM's logic and skepticism.
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This is a tank gunnery story. Now, my first gunnery was rough. So rough my NCOs all told me "This is the worst gunnery you'll ever see. This is absolute garbage." I think they jinxed me, because every gunnery I've shot has been worse than the one before. My experience with gunneries has been a constant downward spiral of "okay I know it can get worse, but fucking how? What's next?!" This is a short part of the last one.
Soldiers are a superstitious bunch of fucks, as we all know. There's overlap, but the infantry have many superstitions I've never heard and we have superstitions they don't, with the differences resulting from experiencing the field very differently. It's sort of like how I've never seen a tanker blow a gasket over untaped straps on a ruck, but we also generally prefer duffles and dislike large rucks because we can fit duffles nicer in a burrito roll (tarp wrapped and ratcheted around our bags, stored in the bustle rack).
One of these tanker superstitions is that you can't wear tanker boots unless you've shot a gunnery and qualified first go (Q1), in any of the 4 positions on the tank. Most older tankers know it with stricter requirements, like you have to shoot distinguished or if you Q1 and then Q2 at your next gunnery you can't wear them until you Q1 again, and some really old (usually retired) tankers insist you have to go on a combat deployment on your tank or you can't have them. The details vary over time, but the key thread is that tanker boots must be earned, and it's bad luck to wear them otherwise. And the really superstitious say if you wear tanker boots while shooting table VI, you'll Q2.
Another tradition/superstition is eating steak and eggs after Table VI, the qualification table. You don't touch steak until you have qualified, and you don't get any if you didn't Q1. If you break the rule, the superstition goes that no matter how good you and your crew are, you'll Q2, and sometimes you hear that if you're already a Q2 and eat it then you'll Q2 at your next gunnery. Traditionally, the steak and eggs are cooked on a baking sheet balanced on a heat shield and cooked in the heat from the tank's exhaust, and if I'm honest it has a little undertone of sweetness, like that taste at the back of your throat when you smell JP8. Probably going to die of cancer, but whatever. Most tanker cuisine is highly questionable, and most of it is cooked in tank exhaust. I will say that undertone pairs exquisitely with toasted marshmallows, but I digress.
This gunnery was bad. We had a deployment followed by months of getting absolutely fucked with details, services didn't get completed, part orders from MCS were getting denied by higher, and we were severely hurting for some maintenance time and parts. The tanks were not good. We were rolling with a slant of about 5 on a good day, which means we generally had at least 9 tanks broken down on any given day clustered around the overworked mechanics who couldn't even get parts reliably. The few that were serviceable had a metric fuckton of other issues that weren't severe enough to pull them but were severe enough to hamper shooting well, like fuzzy sights that couldn't be focused or CROWS with an attitude problem. There was a lot of borrowing tanks to do runs, and the crews with mostly-working shit were understandably not happy about it.
I say this to make it clear that morale was low, whether you mean the army definition or the definition of literally any other motherfucker who speaks English. We did not have confidence in our unit, our equipment, or our peers, and we absolutely did not want to be out there trying to make it work anyway. Everyone was grouchy as fuck.
Then on the last night of table V, dinner was steak and eggs.
In retrospect, I understand that it was an unfortunate byproduct of having a well-meaning 19D CSM who only understood "tonkers want steak and eggs" and didn't know or especially care about the whole tradition and tried to give us something nice. A lot of us just ate MREs or stuck to the sad, wilted fruit and stale cereal cups. Not everyone did though, and there was a lot of bitching that it came at the wrong time, since it had been made clear that this was all we were getting, it wasn't going to come again at the right time.
And at the time, it really did feel like a calculated insult. It was the wrong table. It was massively overcooked by the actual cooks instead of being handed off to the resident "exhaust BBQ dad." CSM was standing guard at the chow pad harassing anyone who didn't touch it.
He'd ask if you really thought your success was linked to "eating a fucking steak and some fake eggs at the wrong time." He'd ask what you'd say if none of your crew ate it but you still Q2d. He'd ask how you expected to have the strength to shoot well after eating nothing but starchy apples and some lettuce the night before table VI. This was his general attitude every time he heard some new "tanker bullshit" like earning your boots, so most of us were already annoyed with him.
And you know what? Logically he's right. But the Tanker Gods don't respond to logic. They are vindictive and hateful, and they don't want you to be able to predict anything but your own suffering and they want you to know that you are garbage.
All of that said, a lot of crews had new joes that ate steak before they'd been warned, or people who knew but didn't care. And I'll be damned but none of those crews were a Q1 except the one whose gunner effectively cheated (he sweet-talked the outside unit who proctored table VI into giving him a comprehensive list of the ranges for every target and where they all were, and he'd been allowed to hang out in the tower where they judge us and he could see everything until everyone else had shot).
A few crews had people wearing tanker boots who'd never Q1d in their whole careers. None of them Q1d either.
A lot of crews were wearing rightfully-earned tanker boots that day. They didn't Q1.
I have senior NCOs who said they had never even heard of so few Q1s at a gunnery. It was humbling and humiliating.
I don't know why I'm sharing this. Maybe because I think crushing our superstitions just shoots everyone's pride in the head, and pride in what you do makes people actually care about not looking like shit. Maybe because I think the superstitions boil down to "Here's an immediate reward and a reason to do well" and it makes people try harder even if it's something idiotic like steak or a pair of boots that the infantry mock incessantly. Maybe because since that gunnery, there's a part of me that sincerely thinks "the Tanker Gods" might be fucking real, and they're vindictive assholes whose rituals must be observed.
I guess I'm really just saying that the infantry are mostly allowed their superstitions and platoon brawls. The cav scouts get their spurs and stetsons. So why are our stupid boots and steak and eggs so offensive?
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