Motivational Poster Thread (warning content)

During World War 2, U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant Maynard "Snuffy" Smith was so undisciplined as a soldier that he was late for his own Medal of Honor ceremony.....
Smith was known to be cantankerous, attitudinal, and did not take well to military discipline, so he was in trouble a lot.
But then during a bombing raid over France in 1943, Smith's B-17 (on which he served as ball-turret gunner, so, maybe part of the reason for his attitude, or vice-versa) took several direct hits that ruptured the fuel tanks and cause a massive fireball that blew out pieces of the fuselage. Two crewmen were seriously wounded, and three bailed out of the crippled aircraft (they were never found).
While the pilot struggled to keep the plane in the air, Smith was everywhere at once: he tended the badly wounded men WHILE fighting off enemy fighters with the waist-guns WHILE trying to put out the fire.
And when all the fire extinguishers on board were empty, Smith finally got the fire under control by "relieving" himself on it.
When the battered B-17 finally touched down on the runway in England, it broke completely in half. The plane had been shot to bits, but it brought its crew home.
A few months later, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson showed up at the base to present Smith the Medal of Honor. The unit was assembled, the band was ready, and everyone was in place, but no one seemed to know where Smith was.
They finally found him at the kitchen scraping breakfast leftovers off the food trays into the garbage - he had been put on KP Duty for yet another infraction of military discipline: he'd missed a mandatory briefing.

 

Ya think?

 

Maynard Harrison Smith - Wikipedia

"After completing four more combat missions, Smith was seen by the medical board and diagnosed with "Operational Exhaust" and was reassigned to a non-combat clerical post with reduction of rank to Private. For a Medal of Honor recipient to be demoted is still hard for many to comprehend".

Smith died on May 11, 1984, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

The Original 'Airman Snuffy' Was Real and a Total Badass
Smith might be the first person to earn a nickname in both real life and military lore. In the civilian world, he was a rich, entitled brat living off an inheritance during World War II. When he got busted by the courts for failure to support a child, the judge sentenced him to the Army Air Forces.

In 1942, he enlisted and volunteered to be an aerial gunner, because aerial gunners got an automatic promotion to a non-commissioned officer's rank and the pay that comes with it. Nobody wanted to fly with Smith, not because it was one of the most dangerous jobs of World War II, but because Smith was not a great airman -- yet.

He hated taking orders. He displayed a total disrespect for younger men of any rank. He was just as spoiled in the Army Air Forces as he ever was as a civilian. Now he was just getting paid for it. He was stubborn and belligerent. So it took a full six weeks before he ever flew a combat mission over occupied France.

 

He will be in a home by then.

 

So far the only thing he has built back better is the Taliban.