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"And who cound forget the alligator we had at the tank wash rack."

ROFL! What a riot! Wish I could've seen that! I think of myself as a tanker, but while I was a Ft lewis I was leg infantry (Screwy Looie!).

I did have a close encounter with a Grizzly Bear one time. I was on an extended patrol (Daytime. You don't move much at night in that place) deep in the Rainier training area....where the distance between contour lines on the map is not 20 ft but 100 meters and they're squished together all the time.....I had a point guy out in front of us maybe 50 meters and we couldn't even see him because of the brush/terrain and I hear him SCREAM and then he come bookin! I mean a dead run straight back through the middle of the patrol looking neither left nor right arms pumping (dropped his weapon) hard. He was yelling the same thing over and over: "FU** IT! FU** IT!" we followed him with our eyes but suddenly swivelled back when what it was that was following him suddenly slowed and stood up on it's hind legs and snarled...a grizzly bear standing not 20 feet from us and just clearing a small hilltop ahead!

My entire patrol (section size as I recall) opens up! What a firefight! Too bad they were all BLANKS. I'm screaming this to them as the bear advances and I'm frantically digging thru my ruck for....ah yes! The ever present training munition...the CS GRENADE. I screamed : GAS GAS GAS! And everybody froze as I pulled the pin and gently lobbed it so that it landed at the critters feet. WHUFF! The gas curled upward (very little in the way of a breeze that day) and he basically ate the stuff. What I saw next you never saw on "Wild Kingdom." He started to rub his nose frantically and little mewling sounds emitted from his throat...he looked very uncomfortable! My guys started yelling to the bear: "DON'T RUB....IT ONLY MAKES IT WORSE!" I turned and looked at them in such a way that they looked suddenly embarrassed. That bear took off and disappeared. We found the dropped M16 and the point man up a tree about 200 meters from our position.

Man, I can never top your stories. But i'll give you a little taste of ft. Polk.

We were up at the Peason Ridge training area, praticing company/team operations. Peason Ridge is just north of FP and it is a huge, pretty much sparsely vegetated area. One night, at 0300, I had to give an operations order for the next day's attack. We were in a tactical assembly area, all of my 113s and tanks were on a 360 perimeter. My CP was in the middle. This ain't like lite infantry, however, the diameter of the AA must have been about 3 or 4 hundred meters. Anyway, I'm dead tired, cause we've been training up to go to NTC since forever. I'm giving the oporder inside my 113 (which you probably know, is pretty small inside) with the ramp down, using red filter flashlights. All the usual subordinates are there, XO, 1SG, mech and tank plt ldrs, FIST, ADA plt ldr (had an attached vulcan plt), stinger team ldr, AVLB section leader. So here we have myself and about 10 subordinates going over the concept of the operation when all hell breaks loose. Lots of yelling and screaming. I first thought we were really under attack by another company as part of a prank, or perhaps some gun nuts stealing weapons (its happened at ft. polk), but the loud noises don't sound human. They are really loud though. We all look at each other...WTF? Suddenly, about 30 wild dogs come charging into our vision (remember its very dark), going right for us. I'm ashamed to say that all of us jumped inside the 113 and pulled up the ramp. You can't imagine how nasty that was, we hadn't showered in about a week, and we all sweat like hell during the day. So we just sit inside packed like sardines, smelling each others funk for about 30 seconds before they leave and go who knows where else.

Course i never told my bn cmdr that my company had been overrun by a pack of wild dogs, lol.

Another thing we say on peason ridge were wild horses. I think they are called mustangs.

I wouldn't trade my time in the army for anything. where else in the world could you have fun like that.