Only a few hurdles this morning, and then things smoothed out til checks were run. Did my prelim reports last night to find potential problems...fixed them early, and the fixes held today.
At ROTC summer camp at Indiantown Gap, PA, our Drill Instructor was an E-7 veteran of two tours in Vietnam. He had credited the Army with saving him because he thought that without military discipline, he would have ended up in prison. He loved talking about his experiences in Nam, to include explaining how much fun it was to garotte some pajama-clad VC he had encountered on patrol. “That little c***sucker sure squirmed,” he laughed. In addition to the standard, by-the-book Army training, he gave us his own private course on VC tactics.
On our field training exercise before graduating, we were up against an armored cavalry unit that had just come back from Nam. For our first assignment, our platoon had to get off helicopters at a landing zone, march a few miles, sneak up on their encampment and take it. The armored cav squad had a sniper waiting in a tree to slow us down and warn the encampment that we were approaching. But we moved with such stealth and speed that we got to the encampment before they could deploy the sniper. We caught the squad eating lunch, so it was a short fight. Later, we got word that we had pissed off the cav lieutenant colonel who was running the exercise. Our DI seemed awfully proud of that.
That night we were supposed to go on a night march and trigger an ambush. Because of an eye injury I had sustained earlier that day, I was not with the platoon but behind the scenes with the cav light colonel who was running their side of the exercise. He was not a nice guy – in fact, he was one of the most vicious officers I encountered in my entire Army experience – and he got nastier as the night wore on. He became more and more agitated because of reports that our unit had not come by to trigger his ambush.
I wanted to say, “My platoon went through your ambush with such stealth and speed that your men didn’t even notice us. They probably thought it was the wind. If this had been Nam, we would have snuck up behind your people and garrotted the whole lot of them.” Of course, I kept my mouth shut.
The captain running the ambush assumed it had been called off and told his men to pack it in for the night. The colonel was absolutely livid and screamed at the captain over the radio to get his men back on line, and then my platoon was forced to march through the ambush zone again to trigger it.
The next night we had to deploy a defensive perimeter and prepare for an attack by the cav. Our DI had taught us a VC tactic where they would send a small patrol to attack an American unit, withdraw, attack again, withdraw, each time pulling the Americans closer to a full blown defensive perimeter which would open up on them. Our cadet CO of the evening decided to pull this trick on the armored cav. We got their squad right up to the edge of where we would have opened up on them and blown them away when a cavalryman screamed, “Abort! Abort! It’s a VC trick!” He must have had a flashback. They withdrew, the attack never came, and I knew that somewhere, some poor captain was getting reamed by that light colonel.
The next morning we set off to take a hill. Normally this would not have been a big deal with our platoon pitted against a squad, but the light colonel was so steamed that he told us that instead of attacking a squad, our departure would be held up until he could reinforce that hill with an entire platoon. If we didn’t take the hill we would march twenty miles back to our barracks instead of riding in trucks. But we moved with such stealth and speed that we took the hill before he could reinforce it. His people never knew what hit them.
By the time the exercise ended, I saw two very different reactions.
Our DI said, “I would give my left nut to take you guys into combat.”
The lieutenant colonel was in a fog, muttering, “Somewhere in that unit, there’s an evil mind.”
One sees all kinds of things as duty officer, patrolling the battalion area in the middle of the night. One duty I was required to perform was to check the locks of various buildings to make sure there hadn’t been a break-in.
As I approached this particular “temporary” wooden building of World War II vintage, I noticed a skunk with her kits foraging on the lawn by the entrance. When I approached, the mother skunk went into her dance to warn that she was ready to spray. She stood her ground, and I could not get to the door to check it. After a while, I gave up, returned to battalion headquarters and wrote in the log:
“Could not check building. Was repelled by skunk commandos who had it locked down tight.”
Sounds like it wasn’t too bad a day over all. Fixes held and checks are out. I imagine you’re ready for an early bedtime tonight!
Our signal battalion had a command post exercise along with Group HQ, and we went off to the evergreen woods of Fort Lewis for a few days. Problems were to be sent down from Group for us to react to.
Because nothing was going on, I as the Battalion S-1 decided to go on a solo hike through the woods down to the Nisqually River. Our S-3 went hunting, and our XO went fishing. When I got back, I found that a problem had been sent down while I was out in the woods in dereliction of duty. I was worried and asked my SP4 clerk, “What happened?”
“Aw, nothin’, LT,” he said. “We just applied the solution and sent it back up to Group.”
I learned just how unimportant an officer could be.
That night the CO sent me off to the PX for a beer run, the S-3 roasted his grouse, and the XO roasted his trout. While everyone else was eating at a field mess tent run by Group, we sat down in our tent for a feast.
Life sure is tough in the field!
There was something called a Health and Welfare Inspection that consisted of lining the troops up outside the barracks while MPs went through the ranks and the building with drug-sniffing dogs. Prior to sending in the dogs, the troops were told that if they turned in contraband, it would be confiscated, but there would be no repercussions. If the dogs found something, however, there would be criminal charges.
We had a kid from San Francisco, who upon hearing this information, pulled several bags of marijuana out of his left pocket and tossed them on the ground. He pulled several more bags of weed from his right pocket. He pulled more grass from his left rear pocket. He pulled more from his right rear pocket. He opened his left shirt pocket and deposited more marijuana on the ground. He opened his right shirt pocket and deposited yet more bags of weed.
As adjutant, I was standing next to the battalion CO while all this was going on. He had a wicked sense of humor, and a glance at him told me he was on the verge of laughing.
The kid un-bloused his left boot and tossed some more bags of grass on the ground. He un-bloused his right boot and tossed yet more bags on the ground.
I could see that the CO was about to lose it.
Then the kid opened his shirt and tossed bag after bag of marijuana onto the ground, making a pile that was rising to the height of his knees.
Seeing that the CO was about to break up, I tapped him on the arm and motioned him to the side of the building out of sight of the troops. About halfway down the path, he began laughing so hard he bent over double. Tears were rolling down his eyes. I couldn’t help it, and I began to laugh uncontrollably.
I said through my laughter, “He lost a lot of money today.”
The CO was barely able to say through his laughter, “How much of him was human, and how much was grass?”