A bit of irony in life . . .
A couple of evenings ago I was sitting alone in my vehicle at a checkpoint, waiting for the guards to do the things they do to protect those inside the NEC (new embassy compound) from people like me in the event that I was not actually me (for this I am grateful because often I'm the one inside - so I don't mind the waiting). Suddenly a flood of thoughts came rushing through my head and I realized I had a great posting. I won't try to get this down in the order it came to mind - it would make no sense at all - but rearranged a bit, it makes for a pretty good story.Most of you will recall that exactly 20 years ago the US was conducting Operation Desert Storm here in Iraq. And exactly 20 years ago I was in the Army. I should have been there (here) but for a series of really bizarre flukes. I didn't want to go to war (no sane person does), but I was willing to serve and tried my best to make it happen, but luck fell in my favor and it didn't. I'll give a short version of it here, but someday just ask and, with a couple of beers, I'll give you the long version of it.
Saddam invaded Kuwait on the day my unit mobilized for a 2-week exercise at Fort Hood. As folks drove in at 4:30 am, the news was all about the Iraqi army pouring into Kuwait. While we were waiting to roll out on exercise, everyone was talking about whether we'd make it to the National Training Center to train in a couple month's time or whether we'd wind up in Kuwait. But that morning we rolled out to do what the best military units do, which is train.
And by roll, I mean roll. Most of you probably don't recall what I did in the army. Technically, I was a voice intercept operator; in actuality, I was a glorified track mechanic. (You probably think I'm digressing, but not really - and I've been a bit shy on photos lately so I get to insert some photos, for those of you who only read my blog for the pictures.). I was trained to operate a system (Trailblazer) mounted on this over-sized, underpowered Vietnam-era artillery ammo carrier. This is what the track looks like.
The thing does not have a steering wheel - it has two levers and a gas pedal. Pulling back on either the left or right lever acts as a brake on the respective track. (Imagine driving this thing through the narrow streets of a German town, a BMW parked on one side and a Mercedes parked on the other with about 6 inches of clearance on either side! That was a blast.) Now, this variant of the Trailblazer system was so bad, that given any number of google image searches, I couldn't find actual photographs of the system as I knew it. I did find photos of models, so I'm using them for this story.
The Trailblazer had a hutch mounted on the back of the track. Think rolling dinosaur. Think rolling, decrepit dinosaur. It was everything we could do to keep the thing running, and then some. My buddy John got his system to Germany in REFORGER 1990 just to have it die and sit on the side of the road for a whole week (he got to know the locals real well and ate a lot better than the rest of us).
On top of the hut was this huge antenna. The photo here shows the system mounted on a truck (even more underpowered), but it gives you an idea of what it looked like deployed. By the way, our life expectancy in combat once our antenna was sighted by the enemy was minutes (we probably would have lived longer if we had painted a giant bulls-eye on the top of our hut).
Add to this the fact that you can't plug this sophisticated intercept system into an electrical grid when you're running out in the woods. That meant that we had to tow a generator. A big generator. And what does a big generator need (as everyone in Baghdad knows from looking at what's next to all the generators around here)? Fuel. Lots of it. We learned to sleep with earplugs in because we'd run ops 24 hours a day during exercises (with the white noise sound of the generator in the background and the sound of my heart beating in my ears because of the ear plugs, it was like being in the womb, I usually slept like a baby). Of course we had to tow the generator along with system. Thus, our glorious Trailblazer system looked like this when we were moving:
So a few days into the exercise we were told to do a jump (move locations). Kuwait had fallen, Saddam had stopped moving forward, and things were back to normal out in the field. We were up on a plateau (think Arizona mesa, but at 1/10 the size) and needed to get down to a near-by road. My First Sergeant thought he found a short cut to get down to the rendezvous point that would save us 45 minutes of driving. It entailed going down the side of the plateau instead of staying on a flat trail. We scouted it out and I asked, "Can you do it in a Humvee?" "Just came up it, that's how we found it." "Well, then I can go down it." Famous last words.
We packed up and started the jump. In about 5 minutes I get to the edge of the drop off. I'm thinking, "This is like the roller coaster . . ." nothing visible but air. I start inching forward and the track tilts downward - I can now at least see where I'm going. And I stop for a moment. It was a lot steeper than I thought it was. LeTaw (she's a whole separate story I won't go into) says, "Well, that's not so bad!" I'm thinking "Yeah, well the bad part hasn't started yet." I inch forward again and keep inching. Finally the generator tips over the edge and we start sliding downhill. I'm pulling back on the track handles as hard as I can, realizing that I don't have a good grip with my feet on the floor (and trying to avoid the gas pedal - gravity was driving this thing now, it doesn't need any help), and LeTaw is screaming her head off. We slide. And slide. And slide. And finally stop. We're about 25 feet down the trail, and I start assessing.
I look up and see the whole convoy beside the road watching me come down this hill. Great, I'm never going to live this down if I screw up. I look at the trail; it's wide but I see two erosion ditches snaking down its path. I missed those on the scouting trip. They're the type of ditches that if you're hiking you want to avoid lest you break your leg. The type of ditches that if you're driving a track you have to avoid lest you throw a track. That means not only do I have to go downhill, I have to make a couple of sharp turns, one left, one right to cross the erosion ditches as squarely as possible so I don't wind up needing a tow truck to get me out of there (and how was a tow truck going to do that?).
Oh, and the screaming, it hadn't stopped. More assessment. "LeTaw, move into the center seat, buckle up, put your feet on the dashboard, close your eyes and shut up!" It was not a request. Ann calls it my sergeant's voice, the boys know it well, and whenever even a hint of it is in my voice when talking to Ann, I'm in kimchee up to my neck. It worked, LeTaw moved over, buckled up and stayed silent. I didn't look to see if her eyes were closed, I was more worried about getting down the hill without rolling the track (which is why I wanted LeTaw to move away from the window - I was driving so I was stuck, otherwise I would have sat in the middle seat). Then I followed my own advice and put my feet on the dashboard so I had better leverage when pulling back the track levers. I took a deep breath and . . . .
Well, I inched my way down the hill, made my two switch-backs to cross the erosion ditches and eventually me and my Trailblazer made it to the convoy. At some point LeTaw must have opened her eyes, but she still wasn't saying anything. My First Sergeant came up to me and said, "Guess that wasn't such a smart idea, was it?" "Nope, but we managed didn't we?" "Yup. Thanks." But like so many times in the army it was hurry up and wait, the convoy sat there for another hour. Then we got new orders - head back in, we're cleaning up the tracks and getting the Trailblazers ready for war.
That's how it started a bit over 20 years ago. 522 MI BN got ready to go to battle, and instead of us they took our equipment. Then they took our personnel. I eventually wound up crossing the street over to 1st Cav towards the end of Desert Shield. We knew the fighting was coming, we just didn't know when. The main body of 1st Cav had already deployed. I knew a few of the guys in the 312 MI BN, we had trained on the Trailblazer system together, so I wanted to get there and settle with time to get to know other folks. In combat it's good to have friends.
Things didn't work out that way. Thanks to orders that didn't require me to report to 1st Cav for a few weeks, to a Sergeant Major that didn't want to bump me and another guy up in the deployment process so we could get to our units a week earlier (even though we'd done everything we were going to do that first week anyway), and to other unknown delays, I didn't deploy. On the day we were supposed to get our flight information, I'd gotten my head buzzed, I'd gotten my shots, Len was paying my bills, I was living off one pair of jeans and two shirts and at our briefing we were told to wait a day. Next day they said we weren't going, the Army had enough soldiers in the Southwest Asia Theater of Operations, thank you very much, and we needed to find ourselves jobs. That was fine with me. A short while later, Desert Storm started.
So as I pulled out of the embassy checkpoint, it dawned on me that I am doing now exactly what I was so happy to not be doing 20 years ago. I'm here in Iraq driving a . . .
Go figure!