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The Gouge

Ask the people who have been there

Gouge — the practical stuff that never made it into a manual. What load at that distance, what boots for that ground, how anybody got through the first year out. You ask, and the people who have been there answer.

Tier 1, both ways. Asking and answering both come with the paid membership and neither costs anything more — there is no add-on here. Nothing waits for an administrator either: what you write is up the moment you write it.

Ask to join What belongs here

What belongs here

  • Serving as much as after. Half of what gets asked here is happening now — a posting nobody wanted, six months on your own, a kid who has stopped asking when a parent is back. The Home Front is for a household in the middle of it, not only one looking back at it, and the same goes for the rest of the list.
  • 6 of them, and no "other". Skills & Training, Tricks of the Trade, Gear & Kit, Adjusting & Life After, The Home Front, and Career & Work. The list is what keeps this page what it is — a general box is where every off-topic question goes to be technically allowed.
  • Spell your acronyms out the first time. This place is every service and half the world. The person who knows your answer may never have heard your three letters, or knows them as something else entirely.
  • It goes up straight away. No queue and no wait. A question answered in three days is not a question answered, so this is the one page on the site where nobody reads it first.
  • Which means the report button is the queue. If something is not about service, report it and say so — there is a reason on the form for exactly that. Enough separate people and it comes off the page on its own while somebody looks.
  • Links are allowed, and are nobody's recommendation. Paste one if it helps. It stays a plain link — no video players load on this site — and links shared here are not vetted by Daggermen — use your own judgement, the same as anywhere else on the internet.
  • No votes, no likes, no best answer. Same as everywhere else here. The useful answer is not whichever one strangers clicked hardest.
  • The rest of the House Rules apply. Nothing current, nothing that identifies somebody who has not agreed to it, and nothing illegal — all of them.

We keep an eye on this page. Anything that smells off gets reported to whichever alphabet-soup agency wants it — CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6, GCHQ, SIS, GCSB, ASIO, CSIS, BND, Mossad, SBU, you name it. We’re not fussy who we call.

What each one is for

Skills & Training
The trained stuff, and keeping it. Shooting, navigation, med, driving, fitness, languages — how a thing is done properly and what it takes to stay sharp at it. Ask about the skill, not about who you did it with.
Tricks of the Trade
What nobody taught you and everybody worked out. The field-expedient fix, the habit that made a bad job bearable, the shortcut that only works if you understand why. Small is fine here — smaller than you would ask anywhere else.
Gear & Kit
What actually holds up, and what is not worth the money. Boots, packs, optics, comms, cold and wet. Say what you used it for and where — the same boot is a different boot in Brecon and Basra.
Adjusting & Life After
You, out. Sleep, work, drink, the shape of a week when nobody hands you one. What the first year is actually like and what helped. Nobody is going to tell you to get over it.
The Home Front
The people around you, serving or after. Deployments, postings, moving again, kids, partners, parents, and what coming home does to a house. Their service is not yours to describe — say what you need to ask without saying where anybody is.
Career & Work
What next, and how to get there. Quals that transfer and quals that do not, interviews, tickets, licences, contracts, and who is worth working for. Advertising work is the Muster; this is asking about it.