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I have no idea what you guys are on about, every operator type guy I ever met had tons of bad tattoos on the forearms and legs that were visible in normal casual clothing. They don't get face, hand, or neck tattoos because of military regulations, not because they are squeamish about showing off.
I just read American Sniper and like a good 10% of the book is dedicated to describing in great detail the bar fights that Kyle and his SEAL colleagues got into. There's an extended story about a townie bar in, I want to say Arizona?, where SEAL teams kept going for training and getting into wars with the yokels. Actually right next to the part where he talks about getting tats after his deployment.
Which again pretty much matches my real life experiences with such guys.
In fairness, SEALs have something of a reputation of being the idiot frat boys of the special forces world. Pretty much every negative story I've heard about US special forces was about the SEALs.
Probably comes from them being able to walk in off the street and sign up, rather than the more usual system of only allowing applicants that are already in the military.
After reading about BUDS a few times, I have a personal theory that SEALs are a little extra retarded, because their failure scenario is so different from their success scenario.
If you join the Army with the goal of becoming a Ranger, but don't make it, you will probably still be an infantryman. You'll still get to do like 80% of what you would have done anyway, the combat and personal violence and the shooting and the toys, just without the rarified status and the special missions.
If you join the Navy with the goal of becoming a SEAL and fail to make the team, you're going to be doing something completely different, on a ship or on a base. A totally unrelated job.
You have to be kind of stupid to go in for that bet.
Huh, that’s interesting, I totally would have thought that the Marines would be the way more natural fallback but apparently not.
No, Marines have their own special forces and the fallback for that is usually 'normal getting shot at' jobs like machine gunner and infantry grunt. IIRC the most usual path into force recon is to try to transfer from normal light infantry anyways.
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It would be, but to try out for the SEALs you've already enlisted in the Navy so that's pretty much the way it goes for many people who turn out to be only 99th percentile athletes rather that 99.9th percentile.
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Yeah, I don't know, chalk it up to small sample size I guess. I only know a couple of these guys and they're both pretty relaxed and have no tattoos at all. I'm obviously aware that plenty of soldiers have tattoos, but I get a completely different impression than I do from the face and knuckle tattoo guys on that front as well.
I'd certainly agree that I bet the average guy with knuckle tattoos is more likely to get into a fight than an average SEAL, and that a SEAL is unlikely to get into a fight he doesn't want to get into.
But I think they're much much much more likely to want to get into a fight than the true average man.
Yeah, I think that's correct as well.
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