What’s the best prank in uniform you've seen? Comment below!

The absolute greatest joke I ever saw was one that was so elaborate and long in the planning and best part was they guy never got to see the pay off. Spc Winfree was the class clown of the battalion, he would get drunk and put his empty bottles on your door so that in the morning when you turned the handle to go out to pt they would fall off and break. He would run up and down the hallway shooting the fire extinguisher at the doors inevitably getting someone who opened the door to see what was going on. One time he loosened every single bolt on our 5 story cement stairway handrail so that the first person to touch it set off a domino effect that hurt your ears it was so loud. BUT by far his greatest trick was when he was PCSing and we were going to Kuwait and Iraq. He took his roommates canteen from his non dominant side and put a toy that grows when you place it in water, this one being a giant stegosaurus, placed it back in his stuff and told nobody. A week into Kuwait we’re filling sandbags and his roommate goes through his main canteen and opened up his spare to take a drink paused for a second and throws in down and started hitting it with his shovel, we all go to see what happened and he said something got in my canteen, we peek in and the red eyes and spiney back of a stegosaurus is looking out at us. That’s when he started cussing “fucking winfree!” He saw him with them before he left and knew it was him. In the end he had to cut his canteen open to get it out, because it was too big and never failed to curse his name every time someone would retell the story to a newbie. We all laughed so flipping heard even first Sgt was wiping his eyes from it. God bless spc winfree. I’ve never seen anyone get busted down work back up and get busted down again so many times.

Send someone to supply for grid squares, a muzzle brake for a 105, fording kit for a pinto, physiological sit up was the best of all the 1's I seen

On my third deployment to iraq, I was on the Brigade Staff serving as the ABE NCOIC (Assistant Brigade Engineer Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge ) One of the Brigade Battle Captains, who I will call CPT Foodstealer, had a very bad habit of swiping other people's food and food supplies, without asking, from the fridge that was in the Brigade TOC .

I received a care package from my mom that included a mason jar full of homemade salsa. When I opened the jar of salsa, I hurt a pop and a hissing sound and smoke lifted up in the air from the salsa. Hearing the hissing sound and seeing the smoke made me pretty certain that the salsa had not survived it's transit from central Texas to Baghdad. That is when I came up with the idea of how we could break CPT Foodstealer of his food swiping habit.

I poured out about a third of the salsa, stirred it up real good, and then put it in the Brigade fridge. A couple of days later, my plan came to fruition as CPT Foodstealer decided to swipe the jar of homemade salsa without bothering to ask who it belonged to and took it to his desk in the office directly across the hall from the ABE shop. As the ABE OIC, the Brigade's Terrain team (the guys who made and printed all the maps for the Brigade), and I watched him, CPT Foodstealer eats ALL the salsa.

As he is eating his chips and salsa, we could hear him telling the other Battle Captain that he shared his office with that he had gotten lucky and found an open jar of homemade salsa that had been in the fridge for a couple of days and it didn't have a name on it (not that a name would have stopped him from swiping the salsa), and it was Really good salsa.

After about 45 minutes after he finished eating the salsa, he jumped up from his desk and LITERALLY RAN OUT of the TOC holding his stomach. As he was running out the TOC, we could hear his stomach gurgling. I'm not sure if he made it to the porta-sh**ter or not, but he didn't return to his desk in his office for about 4 hours. When he Finally did return to his desk, he was pale, covered in sweat, holding his stomach, and looked really weak. He then told the other Battle CPT "I think I must have eaten some bad salsa or something." The other Battle CPT just laughed at him and said "serves you right for eating somebody else's food."

Most of the Brigade staff got a good laugh out of this. I know it was pretty sh**y of me to put the salsa in the fridge, knowing it had spoiled before it got to me in Baghdad and I (almost) felt sorry for CPT Foodstealer for suffering the way he did (that lasted about 5 minutes). On the bright side, CPT Foodstealer probably lost about 15-20 pounds of excess weight that he was carrying, and it DID CURE HIM of his habit of stealing other people's food out of the fridge.

Well...It really wasn't "in uniform" @ the time. Had a PFC that refused to was his body. BOY did it stink after a time. He got the name..."Private Stinkbug". Well...as he was asleep one morning, the others in the barracks wrapped him in a blanket, brought him outside in front of the barracks and proceeded to scrub him down with a cold hose water, Tide soap and a broom. ( He did have his boxers on.) The CO came up & wanted to know "what's happening here?" We told him, he inspected said GI, thought a bit, and told us to leave him there to "dry out in the sun for a while". Needless to say, he bathed regularly after that. cir. Japan : "1970.

1976, La Faire Vite, Field Station Augsburg, Germany where, once passed the MP-guarded lobby, the entire building (80 meters x 150 meters) was a SCIF - 1 entry point, limited emergency exits, no windows anywhere.

One Monday we received a DF announcing a major overhaul of the site's Emergency Evacuation Plan and, since we had all manner of electronics and enough classified paper to fuel a power plant, we were all Paying Attention to the new procedure. The DF also scheduled a date and time-window for a simulated evacuation, to run a 'shakedown' on the plan; the last step in the plan was for each section to take *one* burn-bag to the incinerator where the official scorekeeper would log your section and time of completion. It was a whole thing.

Comes the night (sometime on 3rd shift) of the sim and the alarm sounds. We set about pretending to turn-off dozens of racks of electronic gear & shredding operational documents, culminating in the aforementioned burn-bag.

The entire sim wasn't complete until every section had dropped their burn-bag, so we're sitting around a table just twiddling our thumbs, sharpening pencils and throwing them into the ceiling tiles. After about 10 minutes of total boredom our section chief, Jim Rusk, turned to me with alarm on his face and in his voice as he said "Richardson, did you remember to close the windows??!!!"

I was up and 3 long steps away when I turned with a scowl and asked "*What* windows, Jim?"

Everyone in the section nearly pissed themselves laughing as they fell off their chairs; and 3 months later I was still getting out-of-place references to windows from people outside our section! :)

We had a Cherry Lt, who on his first day told the Psgt to stand down that he was in charge. That evening we told the Lt that we needed riser grease and the keys to the drop zone. He worked his way up to the bridge S3. He ended up with a tube of axle grease and a key tied to a 2 1/2 wheel ring. The Co put him in his place. He was gone by the end of the week.

I used to prank people with putting peanut butter under their car door handles and we'd watch how the person reacted. The facial expressions were priceless. The face....then the inevitable slow sniff of the hand.

Had a SGM in Germany that was a big prankster and a pain in the butt at the same time. When he PCS'd, I made a phone call to a friend of mine that worked at the German customs office and told him that he had a SGM catching a flight at Frankfurt International Airport and that he has some contraband concealed some where on his body. Know what that means, CAVITY CHECK! The SGM called me from the states and cussed me saying that he didn't have any proof that I made the call, but said that was the best payback he had ever experienced.

One of the more dastardly sets of pranks I witnessed happened on the Marine Corps' birthday in 1982 at the Presidio of Monterey. The Marines, feeling their oats as well as their beer, decided that the Navy barracks was too manly for its occupants -- so they painted the anchor outside pink with white polkadots.
Meanwhile, the Air Force's canine mascot looked too civilian so they gave the poor pooch a high and tight haircut.
I will not divulge what happened at the Army barracks save that it resulted in blows, bruises and busts back down to private for Jarheads and Dogfaces alike.
Nevertheless - a good time was had by at least a few.

We worked with an Oral surgeon that did not like the pollen in the air. So he would hold his breath from his car to the door. We would be waiting for him in strategic places to ask him a question , which he would answer. Of course he would have to breathe them. After he figured it out, he wouldn’t answer but would give us the one finger salute. Had to stop when one of the bosses saw it and said he was lucky that one of the many generals on base didn’t see him do it cause that would have been bad for him. We had to stop but it was fun while it lasted!