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To: Darksheare
"Someday, when you're like 59 or something," Bellisario said, "I'm going to call you up and say, 'Gokey! Wake up!"

Cripes, sounds like my old unit at Fort Drum doing the insane 24 hour operations for three days straight.

After two days, we were so bombed out from lack of sleep, that a midnight fuel stop turned into a nightmare.

I had a battalion commander who believed in fighting his three-tank headquarters tank section as both a combat reserve *fire department* for any problems one of his line compant platoons got into, or as their replacement should one be knocked out, a far cry from the usual use of HQ company's tanks as a TOC guard force or for battalion combat trains escort. And often, our boss would also have one tank from each of the three companies attached to HQ tank section, giving us six tanks total, plus, sometimes, a pair of the four 4.2 mortar tracks in the battalion, and/or M114 scout tracks, and often a AVLB scissors bridge that had dropped it's load as a backup recovery vehicle; sometimes a medic track too. HQ tanks was sometime a real lethal little task force around our bunch, a far cry from the usual 2-tank *fighting pair* now commonly used.

So we sometimes drove a bunch. And once on the third or fourth night at it, on an icy German mountain road, the old man was concerned about his driver possibly nodding off th sleep, with quarter-mile dropoffs or worse to the sides on some of the road. Just to make things a little more entertaining and keep me alert, I was ordered to knock down every other kilometer marker post along the route, about 10 miles worth. I didn't doze off, and neither did any of the others following me. But OMG, did we ever pay, both in replacement costs and paperwork, afterward.

100 posted on 12/04/2003 8:52:06 AM PST by archy (Angiloj! Mia kusenveturilo estas plena da angiloj!)
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To: archy
*!!!!*

Ouch.
Every other kilometer marker, oh that's evil.
Guy I spoke to talked about coming from an SP unit, seems everyone dozed off at the wheel, and missed a turn.
The leading vehicle of one of the gun sections stops short and gets rear ended by it's own ammo vehicle because it's driver is in a sleeping zombie daze.
103 posted on 12/04/2003 10:15:50 AM PST by Darksheare (Ignore the wombats, they're a diversion! My 3 million psychotic chinchilla army is the real threat!)
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