I'd like to establish this node as a repository for urban legends dealing with and propagated by people in the military. If a friend or family member who was (or is) in any branch of the military ever told you an hilarious anecdote that was based on more brilliance, irony, or humor than you believed that person to be capable of, then chances are they were just passing on one of these urban legends.
I'll lead off with a couple that I know about.
Stealing Firing Pins from Air Force Security
Almost everyone in the US military (save for the actual
Air Force Security guys themselves) thinks that these guys are idiots. Or so it would seem by how many times I've heard this story. The basic premise is to accuse the security guys of being half witted guys who shove their guns in other people's faces indiscriminately, and who like to lounge on the job. The tales usually involve a few short claims of harassment from these guys to explain the motive, followed by the claim that the storyteller opened up one of their M-16s and removed its firing pin when they found the security guy napping on the job.
Filing Fly Paper Reports to Headquarters
To demonstrate (and ridicule) the grotesque bureaucracy of the US military, this urban legend describes one clever guy who played a trick on the clerks back at HQ. Using one of the many reports he was required to send in periodically as a template, he invented his own fictitious report form for reporting how many dead flies were found each week on the fly paper strips in his facility. He made up some random name/number for the form, and started mailing the reports into HQ. Several weeks or months later, he heard from his buddies at other facilities that the dumb clerks at HQ had no idea his reports were bogus, and they started asking people at all of the other facilities why they were neglecting to file similar reports.