I would have thought they would have been your best friends - building all those lovely targets for you to aim at
well its a result of these silly military heritage, this friction between engineers and artillery...both are ranked rather 'unmanly' and unheroic branches by infantry and other 'macho' branches gettin all showtime in movies and other fiction. So offcourse we 'lower' soldiers keep fighting over the most lowest part in the great ranking of military branches...dont know if this is universal, but least it is universal here in finland. We had some nasty marching tunes involving infantrymens wifes and their dogs and an engineer and gunner doing some nasty things to them (you can imagine wich one scored wich...

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Also pretty much tells the most lengendary toilet inscription: "cows like green; gays like purple and women likes red!" The branch colours in finnish army goes like; green for infantry, purple for engineers and singal and red to artillery and so on...
Like in my brigade, some eigth years ago, an artillery conscript ordered pizza from nearby pizzeria to the garrison gate. But it ended up that bunch of artillerymen find out that there's some engineers pizza waiting in the gate. So these geniouses decided to fetch the pizza by themselves, couse the 'dogs' (MP, the most hated form of military...at least from conscripts point of wiev) wouldnt care or know who ordered the pizza. Well you can imagine what followed. A riot broke out between engineers and artillery as a groupfigth in the garrison's sporttrack and what a christmas it was to the dogs...:nono:
well anyway, my cousin was serving back then in the artillery and he told it to me (i was rather young back in then) and suprisingly the story was still around when I entered into same regiment! As result of that incident, all other battalions and regiments conscripts were allowed to go on evening leave outside of the garrison, exept engineers and artillery...well not so big misschieve, the garrison was middle of woods, nowhere to go in 40km's radious, but still. So thats why i dont like the refering to military engineers. In finnish language the word engineer is corrupted to 'insinööri(insinoori)' but it aplyes to the civil engineers or engineers as occupation. The military engineers are called 'pioneerit' as pioneers.