somewhere in the back of a dresser drawer, John Sheppard has an old maroon beret
Betty asked me a question about this earlier today - I've mentioned the idea to her several times - and I think I've talked to 
sinden about it a little bit in the past, but I don't think I've ever really sat down and written out and posted anything about it, so, before the show actually gives us any background for him and I get Jossed, I present the case for John Sheppard as pararescue, and some of the possible implications of that:
This has pretty much become John's backstory in my head - I have a few reservations about it, but by and large, I feel like it fits together some of the (few) pieces of John's background and activities we've seen. I've heard there's a school of fan thought that he was Black Ops at some point in the past, but I'm not enamoured of that particular idea because A) there's really only so much you can make him Jack-point-two and B) there's no need for him to have been Black Ops - the Air Force has its own special ops division that would teach him everything we've seen him do, and that's pararescue, AKA the PJs, so called because they used to be called parajumpers. PJs are responsible for rescue operations, and they're the only US military force especially trained for infiltration and rescue of military personnel. These guys not only perform rescues in non-combat situations (they were involved in rescue operations in New Orleans after Katrina, frex), they're the ones who pull out trapped and injured soldiers from behind enemy lines, during battle, under fire, when some other operation has gone wrong or when something crashes. The rescue team in "Black Hawk Down?" Included PJs. If John's been pararescue in the past, I think that may make him uniquely qualified on the Atlantis mission to lead the kind of rescue effort we see at the beginning of "Duet," when they're taking teams onto the planet to try to find survivors of Wraith cullings, so, hey, there's a point for having him in some kind of charge when I generally think he's out of his depth as top military commander in Atlantis.
Pararescuemen (and they are all men) reportedly saw a lot of action in Afghanistan, and it jibes with the description we've heard of John's stint there - Dead!Mitch and Dead!Dex in "Home" talk about following John as he took in a Black Hawk over a bridge with enemy tanks to reach some of "our boys" in Special Ops who were pinned down and extract them; John says that Mitch and Dex were later killed outside of Kabul when their chopper set down for med-evac - combined, this sounds almost precisely like a description of what pararescue does. There's also Elizabeth's story of his "black mark" in Afghanistan in "Rising 1" - that he disobeyed an order because he was trying to save the lives of three servicemen. If he was pararescue, that provides some interesting possibilities, because leaving those guys to die would have been not only a violation of some kind of personal ethic John seems to have about not abandoning his people, but a violation of a professional one as well - and the PJ professional ethos, because they're a rescue operation, might give Sheppard some kind of common touchpoint with the Marines he eventually has to command, who say they "leave no man behind." It provides not only a personal inclination but professional training to enforce responses like rescuing the Athosians and his push to go back for the people, Athosian and SG forces, who were culled from Athos in "Rising," insisting on performing rescue operations during "Hot Zone" - and I suppose that may be one reason Elizabeth doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when she confronts him, because he only did to her precisely what he did to that unknown commander in Afghanistan that she practically dismissed - as well as refusing to give up on Ford. Caldwell ... Caldwell is right, I think, in what he says about the danger in the way John treats Ford after Ford's hopped up on Wraith juice, but then Caldwell's not a Marine, is he? He's either Navy (probably not, but he does command a ship after all) or USAF, who've been running the SG program, and even if he's USAF, there's no reason to suspect he's ever been a PJ. He's likely to be more pragmatic.
On the flip, depending on how well-flavored with angst you like your Sheppard, this means Sumner's death/mercy killing has the potential to be that much more personally and professionally devastating to John. Yeah, he kept Sumner from more suffering and ensured the Wraith wouldn't be able to get information out of him, but damn. Not only did he NOT manage to rescue Sumner, he killed him. [This is, in fact, one of the things I've been struggling to deal with adequately in Sheppard's section of Descansos, the story about "the wall" - that's the first in a string of people Sheppard's unable to rescue, including an entire planet of people in "Letters From Pegasus." (I suspect a great deal of his snappishness to Teyla in that ep is because he's being pragmatic and practical against his instincts, values and training, and what we get because of that is an unhappy, irritable Sheppard. It doesn't help that Teyla keeps pushing him to do A) what his instincts would tell him to do and B) what she's seen him do, time and time again, including with her own people in "Rising." It doesn't surprise me that she seems to find his decision not to help incomprehensible - it's not his normal behavior and not what she'd expect from him.) And eventually all this inability to save people culminates in a suicide run into a hiveship with a nuclear warhead in a desperate, futile, last-ditch effort to save Atlantis. The PJ motto is "That others may live," after all.] I suspect this is a big reason - maybe the key reason - Everett's absolution means so. much. to John - he's hearing from someone who is a surrogate, a stand-in for Sumner, someone who's been at precisely the point Sumner was at when John made the decision not to try to rescue him, that he made the right decision.
Despite the candy-ass attempt to break a stick over his knee in "Condemned," the other thing that makes me think of pararescue is the way he goes commando on Kolya's ass when the Genii try to take the city in "The Storm/The Eye" - the training PJs get is incredible, and it's another way that John might be able to command the respect of the Marines he has to order around. PJ training has a huge washout rate ... which, dammit, I can't find right now ... but I want to say something like 80 percent. I've seen an estimate that only about 2/3 of available pararescue slots are filled because enough people can't make it through the training to fill them all. They get some of the same training that Navy SEALS, Army Rangers and Marine Force Recon get; training includes a 10-week physical conditioning and weapons indoctrination, three weeks at the US Army Airborne school in Fort Benning, four weeks at Army Combat Divers school and a 20-week specialist course that includes combat tactics, field tactics, survival, evasion and insertion/extraction training. The full training regime runs almost a year and half.
One thing that leaves me with reservations is that PJ training also includes a 24-week paramedic course, and I don't think we've ever seen much indication that John's got any particular scope of medical knowledge, although there are a couple of little things that may indicate some kind of ability to think on that level - he's the one who has the idea to "kill" him in "38 Minutes," for instance. I'd have to scrummage around to see if there was anything else that could indicate any medical training.
sinden about it a little bit in the past, but I don't think I've ever really sat down and written out and posted anything about it, so, before the show actually gives us any background for him and I get Jossed, I present the case for John Sheppard as pararescue, and some of the possible implications of that:This has pretty much become John's backstory in my head - I have a few reservations about it, but by and large, I feel like it fits together some of the (few) pieces of John's background and activities we've seen. I've heard there's a school of fan thought that he was Black Ops at some point in the past, but I'm not enamoured of that particular idea because A) there's really only so much you can make him Jack-point-two and B) there's no need for him to have been Black Ops - the Air Force has its own special ops division that would teach him everything we've seen him do, and that's pararescue, AKA the PJs, so called because they used to be called parajumpers. PJs are responsible for rescue operations, and they're the only US military force especially trained for infiltration and rescue of military personnel. These guys not only perform rescues in non-combat situations (they were involved in rescue operations in New Orleans after Katrina, frex), they're the ones who pull out trapped and injured soldiers from behind enemy lines, during battle, under fire, when some other operation has gone wrong or when something crashes. The rescue team in "Black Hawk Down?" Included PJs. If John's been pararescue in the past, I think that may make him uniquely qualified on the Atlantis mission to lead the kind of rescue effort we see at the beginning of "Duet," when they're taking teams onto the planet to try to find survivors of Wraith cullings, so, hey, there's a point for having him in some kind of charge when I generally think he's out of his depth as top military commander in Atlantis.
Pararescuemen (and they are all men) reportedly saw a lot of action in Afghanistan, and it jibes with the description we've heard of John's stint there - Dead!Mitch and Dead!Dex in "Home" talk about following John as he took in a Black Hawk over a bridge with enemy tanks to reach some of "our boys" in Special Ops who were pinned down and extract them; John says that Mitch and Dex were later killed outside of Kabul when their chopper set down for med-evac - combined, this sounds almost precisely like a description of what pararescue does. There's also Elizabeth's story of his "black mark" in Afghanistan in "Rising 1" - that he disobeyed an order because he was trying to save the lives of three servicemen. If he was pararescue, that provides some interesting possibilities, because leaving those guys to die would have been not only a violation of some kind of personal ethic John seems to have about not abandoning his people, but a violation of a professional one as well - and the PJ professional ethos, because they're a rescue operation, might give Sheppard some kind of common touchpoint with the Marines he eventually has to command, who say they "leave no man behind." It provides not only a personal inclination but professional training to enforce responses like rescuing the Athosians and his push to go back for the people, Athosian and SG forces, who were culled from Athos in "Rising," insisting on performing rescue operations during "Hot Zone" - and I suppose that may be one reason Elizabeth doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when she confronts him, because he only did to her precisely what he did to that unknown commander in Afghanistan that she practically dismissed - as well as refusing to give up on Ford. Caldwell ... Caldwell is right, I think, in what he says about the danger in the way John treats Ford after Ford's hopped up on Wraith juice, but then Caldwell's not a Marine, is he? He's either Navy (probably not, but he does command a ship after all) or USAF, who've been running the SG program, and even if he's USAF, there's no reason to suspect he's ever been a PJ. He's likely to be more pragmatic.
On the flip, depending on how well-flavored with angst you like your Sheppard, this means Sumner's death/mercy killing has the potential to be that much more personally and professionally devastating to John. Yeah, he kept Sumner from more suffering and ensured the Wraith wouldn't be able to get information out of him, but damn. Not only did he NOT manage to rescue Sumner, he killed him. [This is, in fact, one of the things I've been struggling to deal with adequately in Sheppard's section of Descansos, the story about "the wall" - that's the first in a string of people Sheppard's unable to rescue, including an entire planet of people in "Letters From Pegasus." (I suspect a great deal of his snappishness to Teyla in that ep is because he's being pragmatic and practical against his instincts, values and training, and what we get because of that is an unhappy, irritable Sheppard. It doesn't help that Teyla keeps pushing him to do A) what his instincts would tell him to do and B) what she's seen him do, time and time again, including with her own people in "Rising." It doesn't surprise me that she seems to find his decision not to help incomprehensible - it's not his normal behavior and not what she'd expect from him.) And eventually all this inability to save people culminates in a suicide run into a hiveship with a nuclear warhead in a desperate, futile, last-ditch effort to save Atlantis. The PJ motto is "That others may live," after all.] I suspect this is a big reason - maybe the key reason - Everett's absolution means so. much. to John - he's hearing from someone who is a surrogate, a stand-in for Sumner, someone who's been at precisely the point Sumner was at when John made the decision not to try to rescue him, that he made the right decision.
Despite the candy-ass attempt to break a stick over his knee in "Condemned," the other thing that makes me think of pararescue is the way he goes commando on Kolya's ass when the Genii try to take the city in "The Storm/The Eye" - the training PJs get is incredible, and it's another way that John might be able to command the respect of the Marines he has to order around. PJ training has a huge washout rate ... which, dammit, I can't find right now ... but I want to say something like 80 percent. I've seen an estimate that only about 2/3 of available pararescue slots are filled because enough people can't make it through the training to fill them all. They get some of the same training that Navy SEALS, Army Rangers and Marine Force Recon get; training includes a 10-week physical conditioning and weapons indoctrination, three weeks at the US Army Airborne school in Fort Benning, four weeks at Army Combat Divers school and a 20-week specialist course that includes combat tactics, field tactics, survival, evasion and insertion/extraction training. The full training regime runs almost a year and half.
One thing that leaves me with reservations is that PJ training also includes a 24-week paramedic course, and I don't think we've ever seen much indication that John's got any particular scope of medical knowledge, although there are a couple of little things that may indicate some kind of ability to think on that level - he's the one who has the idea to "kill" him in "38 Minutes," for instance. I'd have to scrummage around to see if there was anything else that could indicate any medical training.
