What is the lowest life expectancy in the US Army?

Answer 1

Military life expectancies are typically measured from the soldiers entrance into a combat situation. It is generally believed that the door gunner of a chopper has the lowest life expectancy. This is due to the common strategy of pilots to put firepower on the target when they begin to take fire. Traditionally Hueys (the former workhorse gunship of the US Army) and later Black Hawks are fitted with machine guns on both sides, mounted in the doors. The crew chiefs typically is positioned behind the pilot, while the door gunner is positioned on the opposite side of the chopper. As the helicopter enters combat, the pilot turns the door gunner toward incoming fire, putting himself furthest away from it at the same time. Making the door gunners life expectancy ring in at about 16 seconds.

Those who accept this as the lowest life expectancy, however, would be wrong. From 1963 when the first firing battalion was deployed as the 4th Missile Battalion 41st Artillery in Schwäbisch Gmünd, West Germany until the last were withdrawn in October 1988 (the last were destroyed in 1991), Pershing Missile Crewmen maintained the shortest established life expectancy of any MOS in the US Army; 30 minutes before the declaration of war. Odds were that if the weapons had been fired, any Pershing soldier in a firing battery on European soil would have died with the destruction of his equipment at the hands of friendly troops to prevent capture of the equipment by enemy units or by Soviet attack in retaliation for a launch.