There I was...#6, continued.
The fellows on the VTR, (Vehicle, Track, Recovery), the M-88 were working feverishly on the center guides of their tracks. The VTR is like a tank...it travels on tracks that go the whole length of the vehicle and are about four feet wide.. The weight of the vehicle, about 60 tons, is distributed on the track through a series of wheels called road wheels. The road wheels are split and ride over the center guides to keep the track on the wheels. The center guides are like a two pronged spike about six inches high and each prong is roughly an inch to an inch and a half in diameter...sort of tapered a little. There is a center guide on each section of track. Okay.
The VTR, like everyone else that night, lost traction coming down the hill and did pretty much the same thing I did, they got pointed toward the snow bank on the left side of the road and gunned it to stop the slide. In order to get traction they reversed about every eighth or nineth center guide so instead of sticking up to guide the road wheels, they pointed down and stuck into the ice and snow. Brilliant. And it worked like a charm. Except. When they got down off the hill, they were so tired they decided it wouldn't hurt anything if they moved on to the maintenance bivouac area with the guides reversed, there was still a lot of snow on the ground and they considered it sort of a safety thing.
It wasn't so bad while they were on the snow pack...even on the paved road they were just poking holes in the asphalt. But in the village of Wildflicken, where the roads are back to cobblestone, they had to make a left turn and head up the hill on the other side of the valley. In case you don't know how this works...any tracked vehicle doesn't have a steering axle...they turn by braking one side of the vehcle causing the other side to "race around" causing the vehicle to turn...the inside track slides in place. The center guides dug into the cobblestones and tore them out and shot them all around the intersection like a machine gun. I don't know what the final tally was, but I know that when we drove through the village the next morning there were several shop windows boarded up, houses with boarded windows, and several cars with dings and broken glass.
Well, we had money to manuever in those days, and that's how a lot of it got spent.