shavetail

shavetail

1. slang A newly commissioned officer in the US Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps, especially a second lieutenant. Derived from the practice of shaving the tail of untrained pack animals. It was the shavetail's first mission, and he realized he was in over his head. They court-martialed the shavetail for disobeying the admiral's orders.
2. slang By extension, any person who is inexperienced in a given field, industry, profession, etc. Why don't you give the case to the shavetail we just hired? It will be tough, but it will put her abilities to the test. Some of the older employees resented the fact that a shavetail like me was promoted through the ranks of the company so quickly.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

shavetail

n. a second lieutenant; a noncommissioned officer in the army; any inexperienced person. (Military. From a nickname for an untrained mule that is marked by a shaved tail.) Who’s the shavetail dancing with the colonel’s daughter?
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • three sheets
  • three sheets in the wind
  • three sheets to the wind
  • first loser
  • make (one's) beard
  • war paint
  • a change in (one's) stripes
  • whittle (something) out of (something)
  • whittle out of
  • a skosh
References in periodicals archive
The shavetail then added bulwark but all we did was to look around at each other.
A last visit with Charlie Galvan at the veterans' medical center
He was an officer--a shavetail lieutenant--and in charge of a battery of artillery.
Hardwick, William H. Down south; one tour in Vietnam
Yale was a shavetail on the front lines during the Korean War (while others such as myself basked in luxury at an air base in Japan), and it was an established fact that during an American assault on T-Bone Hill Yale had picked up some hot North Korean lead in his tokhis.
"What is a Kamisar?"
A few actually add to the history of the profession of arms, and one such is Shavetail: The Odyssey of an Infantry Lieutenant in World War II (St.
Editor's shelf
Just 48 years before, when I was a newly minted shavetail and Pioneer Platoon Leader, I too had to load all the wheeled and tracked vehicles of an entire battalion on rail flatcars, when I'd never even seen one close up.
The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 Persian Gulf War
Assigned to barracks, the shavetails discovered that American manhood was quite an assortment.
Ten-hut! Hair shorn, run ragged, and treated with no respect, ordinary Joes became war-winning GI Joes at boot camp