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Comment by potta_coffee | Hacker News Reader

I always felt bad for you weapons guys. We had a guy in our company that barely met the height requirement. He was like, 5'3" and 95lbs soaking wet. He was a machine gunner and he humped his heart out but it was painful to watch.

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For a long time I was pretty irritated about landing in a line company instead of a mounted weapons company... but after a combat tour, where the majority of KIA was from roadside IEDs, I didn't mind walking so much. The loadout did get more and more ridiculous though - after some officer got shot in the heart through his armpit, we all got issued side SAPIs that added weight, interfered with room clearing mobility, and cut off circulation in our arms. Backpacker syndrome [0] was also pretty common.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachial_plexus_injury

At the end of a deployment, I had such severe shoulder pain that I could barely carry a weapon. Of course, the corpsman "couldn't find anything wrong". That shoulder pain is still with me. I've been to a number of doctors and therapists, but haven't found anything conclusive.

Hopefully it gets better with time for you. My complaint wasn't with pain, but numbness. I developed this problem very early on, in SOI, and kept it to myself because I knew that it would get me medically discharged. Thankfully I never had to explain to anyone why I'd go to the lengths I did in order to avoid handling grenades. After 2 years of civilian life my knees and lower back stopped bothering me, but 15 years later: my hands still feel like they're falling asleep.

I feel you. My toes went numb on a hump once and they've never fully come back. I've been out since 2012 and still have the shoulder pain and numb toes so I'm not holding out for that pain to go away.

Have your Sciatic nerve looked into. I had a pretty bad bike crash (doored going 30mph, bounced on pavement with left hip). I would have burning sensations about the size of a fifty cent piece in my upper back, numb toes, etc. After 10+ years it finally subsided. Chronic pain is highly correlated with suicide. So best to get that fixed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciatic_nerve

I just read Rob O'Neill's [1] book [2] and in it recounts an anecdote about when they were preparing to attack a building. They fired a couple of rockets at it, and were readying to attack when the guy responsible for carrying the ammo (who was also on the smaller side) asked if they could fire another one so he would have less ammo to carry back to base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._O'Neill_(U.S._Navy_S...

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operator-Operative-Mission-Changed-...

The AAR is the best:

"Okay, so who made entry on this building?" "Carl Gustav"

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