Who is the Toughest Person on this Forum?

[C-Mag]

The toughest thing I've ever had to endure, was sleep deprivation, going without sleep for days while sustaining maximum effort and carrying out complex tasks, that was the toughest.

After a few days, you totally understand why they use sleep deprivation as torture. I wouldn't bother with waterboarding, sleep dep will break anybody in the end, it's just a matter of time.

I did 72 hours on my feet, holding my hand on a car for super bowl tickets. I hope I never experience anything like that again.

Yeah, for most people 72 hours is the limit. I think 10 days is the world record. LTC Grossman did some good work on sleep deprevation. There's short duration where a person stays awake for 3 days and then there's long duration with limited sleep over time. Back in the day 4 hours was considered the minimum for being able to maintain good function over long periods. I know from experience I can do 4 hours sleep under high stress and high activity for about 2 weeks, then I need to crash for 6-8 hours of solid sack time. It's just how my body works. In my experience most troops do pretty well over long durations with 6 hours sleep. LTC Grossman's work found that for sustained top notch performance 8 hours a night was optimum. But in the military during on going operations, no one is getting that.

Sapper school is a tough one because in the middle to late part of the course afte 2-3 weeks of little sleep you have to complex calculations for explosive charges and bridge weight capacities. It's not that the work is so hard to do, but doing those calcs after a total of 30-36 hours of sleep in 3 weeks is what kills you.

[C-Mag]

Brawling is about aggression not toughness, your aggression overcomes your aversion to violent confrontation, but you don't have to be tough, tough is about enduring, sustaining effort under duress for extended periods.

Like, the Pathfinder Course, that's tough, you have to be iron man hard to get through that, but getting into a fight and taking a beat down, that's easy.

Brawling is an interesting thing, and totally different than getting into a fight. It is a totally different mindset than a one on one fight. It's a chaotic sea of churning where at best you are in control of the 12 inches around you.

Glad you brought up duration. Most fights seem long if they go minutes. It's usually are very quick thing where the most aggressive in the fight wins.

Oh yeah, boxing is the hardest, just a fight is no problemo, but even a few rounds of boxing had me stumbling on my feet, boxing takes fighting to a whole nother level.

I got into the post smoker matches. A guy in my squad, Boggs, a golden glover from Cleveland talked me into it. Day one I sparred with him. I didn't miss any punches, they all hit me in the face.

[Smitty-48]

Brawling is an interesting thing, and totally different than getting into a fight. It is a totally different mindset than a one on one fight. It's a chaotic sea of churning where at best you are in control of the 12 inches around you.

Glad you brought up duration. Most fights seem long if they go minutes. It's usually are very quick thing where the most aggressive in the fight wins.

Oh yeah, boxing is the hardest, just a fight is no problemo, but even a few rounds of boxing had me stumbling on my feet, boxing takes fighting to a whole nother level.

I got into the post smoker matches. A guy in my squad, Boggs, a golden glover from Cleveland talked me into it. Day one I sparred with him. I didn't miss any punches, they all hit me in the face.

So tired after a few rounds, getting hit doesn't even matter anymore, by about round six or seven, getting knocked out would be fine, at least I could put my hands down, because by then, it's like the gloves are made of lead.

[Smitty-48]

When you box, you really learn why they work the body so much, after a few shots, you're not even feeling the blows to the head, it's just dull impacts, but the body blows, that's really what wears you out, that's what gets the gloves to drop, cause you can't keep them up anymore, so they can finish you off.

[C-Mag]

Yeah, I can still hear Boggs. He'd smack me, and then say, keep your hands up.
Smack, keep your hands up. But I learned a lot about foot movement.

I acknowledge a certain amount of toughness for fighters and athletes. Like doing an Iron Man or Ultra marathons. But Athletes vs Soldier or dangerous professions is nothing. When you add the threat of serious injury or death its different. Lees Army fighting most of the Civil War without shoes, that's toughness.

Here's one that will piss people off. I'm skeptical about the toughness of women in child birth. Women make it out to be awful. Now, I will never really be able to say, but in my experience, women complain a lot about a lot of little things. So, I put 2 and 2 together and I'm skeptical.

[Smitty-48]

Well, I was in the maternity ward when my brothers were born, and some ladies were screaming some serious profanity in there, cursing up and down, and it didn't seem like something they would normally do, I was like, whoa, you don't hear middle class white women going off like that, I mean, ever, so it did sound like they weren't kidding around.

[C-Mag]

Oh, I have no doubt child birth is painful. But on a scale of being shot or broken bones where does it land.

Aboriginal Squaws were well known for just dropping a kid and keeping working. So, if they can do it.

[Smitty-48]

The military is different tho, everybody thinks they can hack it from their perspective on civvy street, but they don't factor in the lack of control, it's very different when you don't have control and the instructors are throwing it at you at their whim, not yours.

I've reduced grown men to tears, many times, ain't no thang, we ran guys who thought they were fit, into the ground, all the time.

They show up on day one, they're a jock, they think they're ready for it, by the end of the week, they're lying on the side of the road blubbering, and you're telling them to get the fuck up, because this ain't torture, but if they don't get up, they will find out what torture means.

And you know, back in the day, we could back that threat up, wasn't like it is now, we could fuckin' torture people back then, we fuckin' terrorized them, guys were crying all over the place. Are you fuckin' crying? We just getting started, don't cry yet. lol.

[C-Mag]

Well, as you know, that's a lot of the military. Testing, pushing, breaking people, hardening them.

Frankly its one of the most enduring things about the military. Testing ones limits and abilities in the face of diversity. Knowing that once you've gone through something hard, challenging mentally and physically the people there all understand who can hack it and who can't. Who the real tough guys are and who are the posers.

I had a Bradley driver that broke. We were sitting in the Kuwati desert after the Gulf War and we got the word that we had to go to NTC. Which meant 10 weeks in the field training up and 4 weeks at Irwin. He tried to break his arm with the drivers hatch, but was too much of a pussy to get it done................. he went to NTC.

[Smitty-48]

Civvies think they know about runnin', they don't know shit, they never run like we made them run once they were at battleschool, even guys who thought they were runners, they had a rude awakening. Little different when you're running in combat boots.

Even when you're in the military, there are levels to this shit, I remember my first run with recce platoon, I was a trained soldier, and I passed the recce course, but even then I was like holy fuckin' shit, these guys are fuckin flyin', and they ain't stoppin', we are going way out into the training area here, it was like a twenty klick fuckin run, just to break the newbies in.

It's like, when you do the military iron man comp, you're setting your own pace, but they pick the fittest fuckin' officers to be the recce platoon commander, guys who run marathons for fun, so it's quite a bit more of a bag drive, when that guy is setting the pace.

It's all about the pace, civvies are used to setting their own pace, so even if they're fit, it's still a shock to them when they lose control and the pace is being ramped up by someone else, whatever they are doing, they are not in control, and the someone who is in control, is someone who could make their life a living hell if they don't get with the program, ultimately to include military prison hard labour if they really want to buck the rider.

We had one guy who went over the wall, he went back to wherever he was from, boy was he surprised when the MP's showed up to arrest him. We were thinking he would get confinement or whatever, but the Sergeant-Major said nope, court martial, and they sent him to detention barracks, oh he was sorry then, even we instructors were like whoa, that's harsh.

Pretty sure if Chadley Manning had actually realized what detention barracks was like, he wouldn't have pulled the stunt that he did, only a dumb assed kid could be so naive to pull a stunt like that, on pain of detention barracks, he's just lucky Obama had mercy on him.

If you wanna be an idealistic rebel or whatever, you'd better be ready to go all the way if you're in the military, because military prison makes the penitentiary look like a vacation spa.