10 years ago today...

[Guest WyattEarp]

No, I never was quite that stupid again.

The closest I came was entering a kick-boxing contest at Ft. Hood and facing off with a dude who was all of about 5' 6maybe7" and 110 or so LBS. I KNEW I was gonna win that one and move on in the competition. That happened to be the last coherent thought that I had that day, I cant even remember just what that dude did to me. All I know is whatever he did he did it FAST. He did end up going on to win the thing which is some condolence but I never entered another one and again hurt for days afterward.

I have the utmost respect for anyone who raises that right hand and pledges their life to our country so I dont mean to take any of that respect away from the young soldiers of today.

But I got to serve with some of them when I went back into the Guard here in TN in 04 and there were more than a few who could not even take down and reassemble their M-16s without help, some did not even know the rank structure past E-4 and some were in really poor physical shape, I have no idea how they even made it through basic.

These days the guys on delayed entry have their own special drills that they can go to and get paid to train before they ever actually leave for basic which to me is a great idea. It would be nice to be young enough to start it all over again. In 07 they were giving 15K bonus' just to become a truck driver and 25 and 30K for some other jobs. I thought that I did well in getting 25 hundred for going infantry.

Back in the 70's when I started out there was no way that a person could complete basic training and infantry school and not be in top notch shape physically, a person would be re-cycled until they could pass all the testing. Some of the smaller guys were some of the toughest we had.

Physically it seemed we were all tough as nails.

But mentaly?....I did join the Signal Corps thinking I would not be going to the woods so often:rolleyes:

And those NCO's back then told us that we had it made compared to what they had been put through. I never really believed that until much later after seeing how some (certainly not all) of the younger soldiers were.

It is sad that with two wars going on one would think the standards would be higher but the opposite was the truth. They dropped the ASVAB passing score from 51 (I think) to 31, yet when I worked with the recruiters I sent guys to test who came back with single digit scores.

But my family and I thank each one of you who have ever served and we Pray daily for those who are still serving and for those who live with the wounds and scars of their sacrifice.

And with that I will stop the Hi-Jacking of this thread.....Promise:)

10 years ago I was 10 years younger and at that point in time still tough as nails and dumber than dirt. Amazing how much difference a decade can make while some things remain the same.

no need to promise to stop hijacking Sgt. Joe, that's what this thread is for! Good old stories from our military days. anyone else can feel free to share too!

[strickj]

Seems just like yesterday. Man was basic fun!!!! Miss those days!

Were you ever in the Army or just in basic?

[Parrothead]

10 years ago--i was a in high school. It was right after 9/11 and guns=devil. I loved shooting in the boy scouts. I lost contact with it until i went to ETSU. I attended the marksmanship with Aaron Henely and feel in love with shooting again. I took my HCP class at ETSU and i have carried a gun from that time on. I cannot say enough for Aaron and the principles he teaches. I suggest his class to EVERYONE that i know attending ETSU.

[Guest WyattEarp]

Were you ever in the Army or just in basic?

Basic and AIT. never made it into the Regular Army outside of a training battalion. shattered my left foot in AIT, ended my Army career.

[Guest NYCrulesU]

10 yrs ago...damn.

I was on "vacation" in the "resort town" of Kandahar. All the sun and sand you could want. 101st ABN DIV 3rd BDE/187th INF REGT 3rd BN.

Hard to believe a decade has gone by. I try to have selective memory to anything before my daughters were born in 07 & 08. Makes life more peaceful.

[Guest Sgt. Joe]

no need to promise to stop hijacking Sgt. Joe, that's what this thread is for! Good old stories from our military days. anyone else can feel free to share too!

OK then, I didnt even realize that it was you who started the thread, I just dont like to drift off topic in folks threads although it is easy for me to do. And as far as story telling goes some of my oldest friends have always called me the "Story-Teller". Having moved around all of my life I was seemingly always somewhere new and telling someone about where I had just come from.

So Yea then I'll tell ya a couple old Army stories.

I'll call this one Lt. Opie.

Lt Lambert was his name but this guy looked just like Opie Taylor from Andy Griffith except that he was probably 6.5 / 6.6 or so tall and about as big around as my leg. Long and lanky is a start but dont quite get all the way there in describing this clown.

Opie was a West Point Grad and a very fresh "Butter Bar" when he got to us. Evidently at the time they were not teaching much leadership or personality stuff at WP or he had been asleep during those classes because he took to chapping people's hides as soon as he got to us from the Capt on down, no one liked him nor his attitude.

My job was as the section chief of the Radio Teletype section and our two rigs were assigned as the Net Control Stations for the 1st Cav. Div. We were the voice of the General. "Voice of Command" was our company's motto and I still love it. I had kinda been thrown into being the section chief not long after I graduated from AIT because of the three NCO's that should have been the Chief, one got out of the Army as his time was up, another got reassigned to Ft. Bragg I believe and the third guy went on leave to Germany where his German wife was at and never did come back, he was AWOL big time. I ended up in charge of a dozen men within about 60 days of arriving there, I was at the time only a PFC or E-3 and just a few days over 20 years old.

I had been told to meet with the Capt and 1st Sgt that morning and had no idea what I had done so wrong to warrant such a meeting. When I asked them "Why Me" I was told that I was the only School Trained operator in the bunch and therefore it had to be me. The Ratt section I later learned was the dumping spot for those on their way out for various disciplinary reasons but how I transformed a good number of those folks is it's own story.

All but a couple of the other members of the section technically out ranked me at the time. They gave me AJ (Acting Jack) stripes which were just like the ones I had worn in basic as a squad leader, an arm band with E-5 stripes on it. When I was promoted to E-4 pretty quick thereafter they changed my AJ stripes to those of an E-6 which was what the section leader was supposed to be. Honestly the whole idea initially scared me to death. Being a squad leader in basic was one thing but a far different thing than being in charge of a commo team for a Gen. in a Div such as the 1st Cav. So You Bet, I was scared. My wife gave me the words that I needed at the time but again that is all part of another story. They gave me this information on a Friday that the next Monday my world was gonna be different. I had the one weekend to try and soak it all in but I never did imagine the way it would all end up working out.

I was told by the 1st Sgt to be in the Section Chief's meetings in the mornings in the TV room from now on. The first day that I went I was promptly kicked out and chewed out by one of the other section chiefs who did not want to hear what I had to say. So I was waiting outside the door for the 1st Sgt to come conduct the meeting and when he saw me outside the room rather than in it, he also chewed me out. I explained what had happened and he took me inside and told the rest of them that I was indeed going to be the section chief and for them all to treat me as such. Some took that better than others which was understandable since this was not long after Vietnam and some of those guys had earned their stripes over there. I eventually won them all over but for some it was not an easy task.

Our mission Mon-Thur was to report to a TOC (Tactical Operations Center) which was no more than a fenced in and locked concrete pad near Div HQ and open the teletype net each day. We sent out a daily letter from the General to each of 14 other stations within the Div. and then received a status report from each of them concerning the status of all their signal equipment. We were not allowed to shut down and go home until we had all those reports every day. All just simple stuff but the Gen. was a commo freak who really loved those Ratt Rigs and this mission superseded anything that the company had going on, on any given day except Fridays. I dont think Generals work on Fridays.

At times it was really funny how the 1st Sgt would stand at morning formation and say over and over again that the company was going to do something that day and that even if you were dead that there was no way that you were going to get out of doing whatever it was, yet he still ended the formations by calling everyone to attention and then telling the Ratt Team as we were called to fall-out. We were not going to be doing anything except going to perform that mission for the Gen. no matter what the rest of them were doing. Anything important like going to the range we had to do on Fridays.

Once I had taken over I started making changes to how things were being done, the main reason being that I wanted to have dinner at home with my wife at a decent hour. One of them that took me going all the way to the Battalion Commander was that I was going to start taking both of the rigs and the entire section every day so that #1 I had a back-up if one rig had a problem I did not have to come back to the motor-pool to get the other one and #2 so that I could better train the operators that had not been to the school, that was as I explained to the Col one of my main responsibilities. I won that first battle because my argument was sound, but it was not easy. When I had first arrived only three men were being sent and the rest of the team was being given the crap jobs that no one else wanted to do.

Also, and what I really did not like was that this simple mission had been stretching out to as late as 9PM and later on some days with the average time finished being about 7PM. The reason being that there are a lot of things that have to be perfectly right in order for encrypted radio teletype communications to work properly. If you were sending me a Msg and some other station started tuning in their rig on that frequency it would mess up your Msg, or garble it up as we called it and the whole thing had to be done over. There were many other things that had to be just right but someone tunning in late was a major cause of the malfunctions and extra time that the assignment was taking.

The Net was supposed to open at 10AM, so I started making all the other stations tune up and sign in with me prior to 10AM and told them if they for what ever reason did not get signed in by 10 to not tune up at all until I called them via voice to do so, it took a few weeks to get them all on board with this idea but it did work and we all started getting out of there earlier and earlier. I had to call several company commanders in that process to make it all happen but the mere mention of the General's name works wonders on Capts. Because of this the Gen. took notice and called me into his office and swelled my head up like a darn balloon so that I basically walked on water while I was at that post.

I was given waivers of Time in Grade and Time in Service for promotion to both E-5 and E-6. I did not have the "points' required for E-5 until after I had been promoted to E-6. I had made E-6 with just a tad over three years of service which was PDQ in those days and I went from E-3 to E-6 in a bit over one year at Ft Hood. As far as I know there is still a plaque on the Div HQ walls with my name and a record time of opening and closing the Net in 53 minutes. Our average after a few months was such that we had to kill time (training of course;)) at the bowling alley that was across the street rather than go back to the company area too early in the day. It was only taking us about 2 hours to complete the assignment within a few months, but I digress.

By the time Opie arrived as our new Platoon Leader I was already walking on water in the Div. One day somehow a conversation got started with Opie and he had the gall to tell me in front of my men that he knew just as much about my rig as I did because, and I quote "We had two different 4 hour blocks of instruction at West Point on each piece of equipment, your rig is no different than any of the rest, I wouldnt be the LT if I could not do your job as well as you can" Like I said Opie was a trip to say the least at the time the Ratt Rig was the top of the line communications for the Army and as I have stated it still boggles my mind that the stuff ever worked using FM radio waves.

It took 37 steps to properly "Turn On" the rig after it was properly grounded and the antenna was attached, one then still had to tune in whatever the days frequency was in order to communicate by teletype. So as the conversation went back and forth I ended up telling Opie that I would bet him 20 bucks that not only could he not operate my rig as well as me or my men could, I was gonna bet him the 20 that he could not even turn the thing ON. I did not for the life of me think that he would take that bet....but he did.

First thing he did was to go inside the rig, it was made like a camper that fits into a pick-up truck bed. I had to stop him and should have failed his dumb butt right there and then because he did not ground the rig. When I mentioned that to him he tried to tell me that he didnt have to do that and he could not do that because we were in the motor pool on asphalt and he could not drive in a ground rod:rolleyes: I then had to show him that there were ground rods already in the asphalt and all he had to do was attach the cable. I told him that one of the guys would do that and another one would put up the gosh darned antenna for him too:rolleyes: Basically he failed twice before he ever got through the door. The rig ran on up to 10,000 volts when transmitting and while it isnt the volts that will get you so much as will the amps it ran on about 4 amps....plenty enough to kill a person quick! And YES I did think about letting him go on without grounding the rig, like I said Opie did not have a friend on that huge post, but I am not that kind of evil and I am sure I would have been blamed for it anyway. And rightfully so, it was my rig and responsibility, boneheaded butter bar or not.

After Opie did get in and close the door behind himself one of my guys asked me if I had done something to the rig so that it would not fire up. There are probably at least 50 simple things that I could have done to make that happen, a wire here or there, a switch, lots of things but I had not and told him as much. He then asked me how I could be so sure that Opie would not be able to do it....I just looked at him and said "This is Lt Opie that we are talking about ya know" which caused a huge laugh from everyone.

As I said it takes 37 steps inside to turn all the components on but if one starts at the bottom right side it is like riding a bike once those steps are memorized, miss one and it aint gonna work. After Opie had been in there 10 minutes or so I asked him if he was OK and he said that he was...he should have been finished. After 20 and then 30 minutes had gone by I told him to just come on out and I would show him whatever it was that he was doing wrong and not make him pay up.

But Opie would not have any of that and stayed in that rig for an hour and 10 minutes before he finally came out and said that he gave up, that there must be something wrong with my rig. I then went in and fired it up to prove to him that it was all OK. He then handed me the 20 bucks which brought a huge applause from everyone standing around watching all of this. I actually felt bad for Opie but it was his own attitude that had brought the whole thing on. How DARE he think that he could learn in 8 hours what had taken me 13 weeks in a self paced school that averaged 20 weeks to learn, much less the experience that I had in actually doing the stuff.

But the best part was a few minutes after the crowd had gone away I called Opie over behind a Mill-van (shipping container) and gave him a verbal tongue lashing about his responsibilities as an Officer and the rules about betting with an enlisted man while I made him take back his 20 bucks.....those few minutes were golden to me and I shall never forget the look on his face when I told him that he had just done something in front of a bunch of people that could cause him some major problems if his superiors ever found out, I thought the man was gonna urinate on himself over that:D

On another occasion I think that he may well had wet himself. It was a Friday and I had promised my guys that I would get them out of there a bit early as we were going to the woods the following week for an annual test. Opie was in the motor-pool and kept just telling everyone to CLEAN their rigs. Well there is only so much that a person can do to clean the inside of a Ratt Rig. I kept telling Opie that we were done but of course he would not hear it, as far as he was concerned we could all stay there all weekend. He did not have a life anyway so he did not care and was being more grumpy than normal, likely just worried about his first ARTEP ( Army Readiness and Training Evaluation Process). Everyone in the company except him was ready to scat for the weekend.

Finally he had really chapped my hide, it was also my anniversary weekend and I wanted out of there. It didnt make a whole lot of sense to spend a lot of time cleaning things before going to the woods anyway, a smart soldier makes sure things are clean enough and does the intense cleaning after being in the woods.

Even my guys looked at me funny when I said "OK then we are going to take this son of a pistol APART piece by piece and stack it up on the ground" Now we had all at one time or another had the different components out of the rig to replace them or work on them but none of us had ever completely disassembled the whole thing but that is exactly what I started doing. I took out everything piece by piece and handed it out the door to my guys. We had a total of five teletypewriters, 3 from one rig and 2 from the other as the rigs were a bit different, both of the power supplys, two huge two piece radios taken apart of course, the encryption boxes.....everything including every cable and wire that held it all together. We made one big pile of everything from both of our rigs.

I had the guys stack it all up and then threw all the cables and wires on top of the stack of components for visual effect. I then put one man inside each rig with a bottle of windex cleaning the bare walls of the shells that were left and then went looking for Opie.

I would give anything to have a video of that man when he saw that stack of stuff on the ground, with the cables on top it was nearly a five foot tall pile of equipment and like I said arranged for his visual pleasure. The man started shaking to the point that I though he was going into some sort of shock. He kept trying to say something but it took forever for him to mutter the words "Yo yo yo you ca ca ca can pu pu pu put that back to to to to together ca ca ca cant you" To which I replied "I dont know Sir, I just told the guys that you wanted EVERYTHING cleaned, none of us has ever done this before":D:D:D

I AM that kind of evil, I am not certain but I think Ole Opie may have been crying when he hobbled away, he sure had lost the pep in his step there was not any doubt about that. I have made myself laugh out loud just sitting here thinking about how pale that man was as he walked away. It probably didnt take us 15-20 minutes to put it all back together but we never saw Opie again that day.....and ya know.....he never again asked me about cleaning my rigs.

He also kind of backed off of me and my guys after that, other than the time we stole his jeep to make a beer run from the field. I was listening to him chew me out and telling me that I was the only one who would take his jeep while my guys were pushing it back to where it had been right outside the door of the Com-Center that we were in. When I opened the door and showed him that his jeep was not gone I asked if he thought that he needed to take some leave time and chill.

And just for good measure I even suggested as much to our Capt on Opie's behalf. The Capt however was very very cool and knew I had put another one over on Opie and simply cracked up.

I have to give Opie some credit though. By the time I left Ft.Hood for Germany Opie had been moved to "A" company.

I received quite a few AttaBoy letters from Div on down in the last weeks before I left and Opie got the last laugh I guess because I never expected one from him but I was called to his office and he indeed handed me one very nice AttaBoy letter and wished me luck. He also told me that while I was good at my job that he never did like me and hoped that he never saw me again, I assured him that the feeling was mutual and the Good Lord granted both of our wishes.

I often wonder whatever became of that boy.

So there ya go Wyatt, I woke up way too early today anyway so I gave ya a story or two, I hope you enjoyed it, I sure do enjoy the memories of being so young, dumb and cocky, now days I am just old and grumpy, the former was much more fun.

[Guest Sgt. Joe]

10 yrs ago...damn.

I was on "vacation" in the "resort town" of Kandahar. All the sun and sand you could want. 101st ABN DIV 3rd BDE/187th INF REGT 3rd BN.

Hard to believe a decade has gone by. I try to have selective memory to anything before my daughters were born in 07 & 08. Makes life more peaceful.

I certainly understand that my friend, at one time my life was all Before moving to TN and Since moving to TN but my life these days is all based on Before Iraq and After Iraq. Strange how that stuff works.