vets and medical stuff

[farmbif]

I was never in military, had to register for the draft but never got drafted.
I was reading yesterday that when you join armed forces they make you into a pin cushion making you get as many as 17 vaccines for all sorts of stuff.
is this what really happens?

[ourflat]

To some degree yes! Now the SOD is mandating COVID-19 jabs so you will see a mass exit of members leaving the service in lieu of the jab.

The mobility lines were a real pain too!

Frank

[richhodg66]

No, you won't.

They started mandating the Antrax series several years before I retired. There was a lot of crying but the bottom line, everybody got it. Same thing with mandatory flu shots every year.

Yes, if you are in the military, you are expected to go to some pretty noxious parts of the world and live in pretty spartan conditions and as such, it's in your interests, and the mission, to not get sick. The gammaglobulin shots (spelling?) we got before Desert Storm was intended mainly for hepatitus I'm told, but sure seemed to prevent a lot of other stuff.

[CastingFool]

I still have my shot record, somewhere stored away. Lol

[richhodg66]

I still have my shot record, somewhere stored away. Lol

Yep.

I find it surprising how many people seem to not understand that your health is imperative to mission readiness in the military, it isn't like a regular job. If you can't do what is required of you, mission failure can result and people die because you couldn't function.

Besides shots, you are required to get in a dentist's chair and get an exam once a year or you are automatically non-deployable and your chain of command will make it painful for you until you get in that dentist's chair. A sad chapter of my life was an unfortunate time spent as a battalion S-1 in a direct support field artillery battalion in a unit in Alaska that liked to pretend they were RDF. How many people in your command were non deployable for whatever reason was a stat that people took pretty seriously all the way up to Division and when Private Snuffy was CAT IV dental, people got excited. Same for hearing tests.

When you take that oath, you belong to the military and your physical well being is important to them. If you go out and get hurt due to doing something stupid, they can and will punish you under the UCMJ, seen it happen. If you're not willing to deal with this, stay out of the military.

[bakerjw]

The only out of it is to investigate the vaccines and decline on religious grounds. Many vaccines are manufactured using fetal cell lines. If one is seriously pro-life, taking a vaccine manufactured with those cell lines certainly goes against ones religious convictions. It would be akin to forcing a Jew to eat pork.
With the Covid treatments, the J&J one uses the PER.C6 cell line and the AZ one used HEK293.

Ethical alternatives are out there, but Big Pharma only cares about $$$$$.

[zarrinvz24]

When I entered the USMC they brought all the interns over from Naval Hospital to practice drawing blood. It wasn't pretty and I had some pretty bad bruising. So to answer your question, Yes. It is almost an assembly line of sorts. Take 2 steps forward, shot in both of your arms. 2 more steps, another 2 shots.

[Alstep]

Once you raise your right hand and take the oath, you're gov't property. You do what you're told and go where they want you.

[gwpercle]

I was never in military, had to register for the draft but never got drafted.
I was reading yesterday that when you join armed forces they make you into a pin cushion making you get as many as 17 vaccines for all sorts of stuff.
is this what really happens?

When my daughter started Louisiana State University in 1991 ...30 years ago ... she had to show proof , from the doctors office , that she had gotten 14 vaccines ... 30 years ago ... 14 required vaccines ... I remember there was ... mumps , measels , chicken pox , ruebella , polio , meningitus , encephalitus , diptheria , tetanus , pertussis ... that's all I can remember , and I don't know what's been added !
I can tell you this .... as soon as the Covid Vaccine is fully approved and vetted ... it will be put on the Required Vaccine List ... and LSU will not be the only school .
Required vaccines are nothing new ...not if you have any children who went to public school in Louisiana.
Gary

[gwpercle]

Once you raise your right hand and take the oath, you're gov't property. You do what you're told and go where they want you.

At least it was in the old Army ... this new Army ... didn't they change a solder from a he to a she because he couldn't cope with being a soldier ? That don't sound like the 1967 Army !
Gary

[FISH4BUGS]

I was raised in the military and every new posting we got shots up the wazoo. Too many to even remember what they are.

[Larry Gibson]

In my many years in the Army I got many shots of various vaccines and some several times over the years. There were quite a few in basic and you had no choice and even the gamma globin shots at Fort Ord during Infantry training in early '65. Off to Asia in April '65 got me more and in SEA Asia other shots. More vaccines and boosters in the years that followed to other "exotic" places in the world. As mentioned the soldiers health is of the utmost concern to command, especially when on a Special Forces A-Team. Even had to get another smallpox inoculation prior to deploying to Iraq in '04.

Frankly, in all those years I never saw a single serious reaction to any of the shots/vaccines/inoculations.

[dannyd]

Don’t know what they do now but we got shots for everything. But that 1,200,000 units of Bicillin sucked the most.

[richhodg66]

"Frankly, in all those years I never saw a single serious reaction to any of the shots/vaccines/inoculations."

Niether did I. During Desert Storm, they issued these pills you were supposed to take which (as I understood it) were supposed to help the atropine injectors do what they were supposed to do in the event you had to use them. Took the first round of them a day or so before going north, made me pretty nauseous. They put out reminders every six hours on the command net as I recall, I took them one more time, not as bad second time, but when we crossed the berm on MOPP 0, I figured the NBC threat was nil so I quit taking them and after a couple of days they said to quit taking them. Honestly, that was the only time in 24 years of service I questioned any substance the Army told me to take.

[sundog]

Richhodg66 post #5, true. I expanded my 'education' really fast when I went to an aviation battalion as the Ops NCO. Try putting together an overseas deployment with the right kind of people who are mission qualified. Any soldier on any day qualified and the next day not, for a myriad of reasons. The S1 becomes one of the king pins. Shot records? Yeah, a really big deal!

[richhodg66]

Richhodg66 post #5, true. I expanded my 'education' really fast when I went to an aviation battalion as the Ops NCO. Try putting together an overseas deployment with the right kind of people who are mission qualified. Any soldier on any day qualified and the next day not, for a myriad of reasons. The S1 becomes one of the king pins. Shot records? Yeah, a really big deal!

Being a battalion primary staff officer is the cross you must bear as a junior captain and mine was as an S-1, probably the worst one, and I had the misfortune of doing it in a battalion that got ear marked to furl its colors as part of a reorganization so the workload multiplied 100 fold. Miserable time and when I left and got back into an ops type of role, I was much happier, but I will say this for the experience; I learned an awful lot about bigger picture and behind the scenes stuff that go on and never realized how big a stick I wheeled in the organization. Besides the XO and CSM, I was about the only guy who could walk right in to the Battalion Commander's office and stop what he was doing to take care of something emergent and important. Nobody likes being a staff puke, but they do, in fact, make it possible for the guy or gal in charge to do what they need to do.

[contender1]

Back when I was young & dumb,, and joined the Army,, I didn't think anything about getting shots. And yes,, the Army made sure we got a lot of them.

[1hole]

Once you raise your right hand and take the oath, you're gov't property. You do what you're told and go where they want you.

Roger that.

When you take the oath you're "in" and nothing about it requires your consent; that's the way it has to be to function. But you do belong to Uncle Sam and, as a valuable item, they don't want people dying from a lack of care so they really aren't bad. (Even scrawny girls live through it these days!) For how many shots, there is no count. There is a standard batch you take early on and more later if you're being sent into a nasty part of the world.

The young people who give the shots have to be trained too and some injections do leak a little but I never heard of anyone dying from a few shots; we took 'em and lived with it. I once watched the wobbly guy in front of me collapse from fear but even he lived.

The blue skin patch from a leaking shot is only discolored due to an internal leak, it's not a bruise in the proper sense. The blue
itself is harmless, it doesn't last forever so forget it.

[Kraschenbirn]

Was discussing this with a couple of other vets not so long ago. Not only was I inoculated against about everything in the disease dictionary during my two tours in 'Nam but when working for the USAF as a CIVILIAN during the H1N1 ('Swine Flu') scare of 1976 we were bussed from our office to the base hospital with the directive: "get your shot or don't even think about coming in tomorrow morning"...and, sure 'nuff, next morning AF Security Police at the gates were checking for vaccination slips. Btw...for those of you missed out on this little fiasco, within 48 hours, 40% of base personnel were experiencing "adverse reactions" to the vaccine. A few years later, a doctor who had been in residency at a large hospital in 1976 told me that, afterward, it was estimated that, nationwide, the vaccine had killed more people than the H1N1 flu strain.

Bill

[snowwolfe]

The only out of it is to investigate the vaccines and decline on religious grounds.

Declining on religious grounds only works if you can prove you belong to a religion that prohibits vaccinations. You can't just wake up one day and say I decline for religious grounds. Your point has to be valid.