Gun Advice From Anyone With Actual Combat Experience

Do Army Human Intelligence Officers (35M) see combat?

Your recruiter is being less than honest (I know, everyone is shocked).

First, there are no linguist officers. Second, you don't get much choice of branch. You go through ROTC, you give your top 3-5 whatever, branches you want (Infantry, Armor, Finance, MI, etc) and based on class ranking, scores, secret voodoo rituals, "they" decide where to place you.

Languge background may or may not help put you in Intel (I promise you you're not up to army standards for language proficiency unless you go to Brigham Young, Middlebury College or a couple of others). It might, but might not, give you a tiny edge if it's down to you and a few others.

Even if you get MI, you will NOT get Humint right away. ALL lieutenants start as 35D (All Source Intelligence). As a 1st Lieutenant you can be in a more specialized duty assignment, and you can specialize with a different AOC once you make Captain.

As for combat, it depends. MI officers are rarely out and about outside the wire as officers command a platoon or higher while linguists and humint etc usually work in smaller teams or squads and just report back to the lieutenant. For a lieutenant, there's almost no reason for them to go outside the wire. It can happen, but not likely.

When you fire a handgun, can you smell anything?

maybe a little bit, just a tiny hint, that's assuming it is in an enclosed space with no ventellation.

Now, if you are in a pillbox firing a machinegun at encroaching enemies as fast as possible, then yea you are going to smell the gunsmoke, simply due to volume of fire and enclosed space. Same with going to a gunrange, but there they try and have good ventillation, so you really don't notice hardy anything at all.

Or you could put your nose next to a gun that was just fired and inhale, if the gun was fired with a minute, you should be able to smell the gunsmoke still.


But if you mean walk into a bedroom and go 'sniff sniff...smells like a gunshot!' no way, at least not unless you were a dog or something.

It's not even something you should mention a shooter noticing during a firefight. (again, unless the volume of shooting is extremely high, like during a wartime invasion) not that it couldn't be smelled seconds after firing, it's just #1 you hopefully are concentrating on visual aspects related to shooting and #2 your other senses are being bombarded by input (noise)...and if it is actual combat, even if you are unarmed and 1 gunman is trying to kill you, the brain just ignores things like smell and even sound and fully concentrates on what needs to be done to survive. You talk to someone who has been in a gunfight, often they talk about not even hearing the gun fire, but recall very vivid visual details and everything happening in slow motion. If some writer throws in a crack about 'smelling gunpowder' during a gunfight I am going to dismiss that writer as unwilling to invest a little bit of effort into knowing what he/she is writing about.

Also, it isn't like smoking, you'd not be able to smell gunpowder on someone's clothing even if they just came from a day at the range, even though you can usually smell if a person just came from being in a smoke-filled bar.



What you really need to do is go to a gun range, rent a gun, and try it.