The FReeper Foxhole Studies the "Four-Deuce" Mortars - July 25th, 2003

various- listed at end of post

[Soaring Feather]

Oh no!! My gosh we are haunted I fear!!

Some gremlins in the works!!

[SAMWolf]

When I was in the line company with 81mm Mortars, we got to fire an illum mission for a battery of howitzers.

Man what a rush! We were dropping illum rounds as fast as we could and the howitzers started hitting the target almost as soon as our first round went off. Talk about impressive firework show, it did show how puny our 81 mm HE really was but the 11b's always knew they could call in their mortars a lot faster than the big guns.

[Valin]

You're old enough to remember the race between Teddy and Jimmy.
President Ted Kennedy! shudder

"tragedies" for the Kennedy's And a godsend for America.

[SAMWolf]

Good morning Fiddlstix

[SAMWolf]

Good morning Manna

[Darksheare]

Hmmm..
Sounds like they were doing some kind of work on the lines then.
(We don't have cable modem access near me, the local cable company, when asked about cable modem internet access, said: "You can do that?" They also said that they were not going to offer cable modem access in my area because they "didn't see a demand for it." We do, however, have DSL.)

[SAMWolf]

Thanks for the profile on the "Big Tailed Beast"

It's always so sad to hear that there are either no or so few flyable planes left.

[SAMWolf]

Morning Feather. Hope they solved your ISP problem

[SAMWolf]

Morning HiJinx!

Deflection, elevation, charge.

[SAMWolf]

You hated the cammo netting too??? What a pain in the a$$ that stuff was!

[Darksheare]

My unit got chewed out once.
Our max rate of fire for the M119 was supposedly 8 rounds a minute or some stupid garbage like that..
Well, in one minute we'd pumped out 10 rounds out of a 12 round mission.
The OC's went bizzak on us, screamed that there's no way we could safely do that, or be able to see if the bore was clear before the next round.

They didn't accout for teh nice breeze that had been blowing at that point, nor did they figure that we were blowing up into the tube so that the breeze pretty much sucked the smoke out.

We fired a self illume mission once as well. No-one wanted to fire illume for us, so we did it ourselves. We put all four guns up at high angle, fired our illume in twos, and then cranked like MoFo's down to low angle to fire under our own illume. Once again, the OC's wen bizzak on us for that. Said we couldn't do it, it wasn't 'safe' or some such. Our gunners said, "Bring it on!" and promptly did it again.

Ahh, the fun stuff.];-)

[SAMWolf]

You're old enough to remember the race between Teddy and Jimmy.
President Ted Kennedy! shudderJimmy was bad enough, I can't even imagine Ted as President.

[Darksheare]

Yeah.
It's always fun to frost over the Smoke.
Or make the veins in his forehead pop out.

[Darksheare]

Grummylins in the computers?
Don't feed them!

[SAMWolf]

The best part of the 81's was not having much Brass around the line Plts.

With the 4.2 being part of a HHC, we had all kinds of Brass hanging around making life miserable.

[Darksheare]

Ugh.
We were lucky that our HHC brass were pretty cool.
We would have preferred tham hanging around to our own Captain!
(We had the LTC show up one fine morning and hop onto the gunline unannounced. He walks up to my section chief and says: "Chief, where do you want me?" Being teh equal opportunity harrassers that we were, we had the LTC doing #1 man, Gunner, Assistant Gunner, running powder to the pit, and assisting the Ammo Team Chief. He even helped emplace the howitzer on the next move. And he loved every second of it. Mumbled somethign about 'not being allowed to play with the toys back when he was a Captain.' or something like that.)

Cammo netting. UGH!
We had a guy get his helmet and webgear caught in the netting while we were putting it up.
He got yanked clear off the ground by the stuff. Lucky he didn't get his neck broke. The OC's wouldn't let us ground our gear to put up the nets.

[Darksheare]

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/row/d-30.htm

I think this is the Russian howitzer that's sitting in Sill's museum. The D-30 2A18M 122mm towed system.

[Soaring Feather]

It isn't often there are problems, but when a problem does occur everyone goes nuts!!

When the storms hit there was a lot of damage throughout upstate causing many people electrical and cable loss.

[SAMWolf]

The OC's wouldn't let us ground our gear to put up the nets.

Same problem here, always getting canteens or some pouch caught up in the netting. I hated messing with that stuff.

[Soaring Feather]

Doing great now SAM! Going to go to lunch with my Finn/Swede friend, she is a hoot.