I woke up feeling well-rested, fairly comfortable, and curious. Well-rested because I had apparently slept well into the morning; fairly comfortable because I was lying across the seat of the 2 1/2-ton fuel tanker I was assigned to drive and the seat was about two feet shorter than the driver so total comfort was not ever possible; and curious because it was fully light out and quiet as only a deep German woods can be. It shouldn't have been quiet. I had arrived in this wooded area about 0200 that morning with all of F Troop...about sixty vehicles of all sorts and probably more than a hundred soldiers. We had driven all day to get to this patch. It was after dark when we turned off the two-lane blacktop onto a narrow, rutted, logging trail that wound its way up the side of the valley. Once all the vehicles in the convoy turned onto the dirt road, we shut off our normal running lights and went to "black-out drive" lights... very dim and tiny lights that can only be seen for a short distance. We drove like that for more than two hours and finally got placed into parking spots scattered among the trees.
When the cavalry stops for the night, there is no flurry to set up tents and dig latrines, and all the other stuff associated with military campsites. It is more of a "Stop and Drop" arrangement. Of course, some essential services are required. For instance, the fuel truck driver gets to set up a gas station for all the vehicles to "top off" before they "drop". Anyone who is not on guard or involved with the fueling is usually asleep within a few minutes of stopping. On a normal night, after all the vehicles and five-gallon cans for stoves and mess halls and generators, etc. were filled up, the fuel truck driver would meet up with the fuel trucks that had been taking care of the other troops and they would all convoy to the "rear" (wherever that turned out to be) to refill the big tanks on the trucks. We usually got done with that and returned to the units we were assigned to service about the time they were getting up to start moving again. That didn't need to happen on this night because we were officially quitting the field exercise at 0600 the next morning...the vehicles of F Troop would get their next night's fuel at our home base in Bad Kissingen. Sooooo...I was curious why there were no sounds of the Army in the field around me.
I sat up and looked around. I knew right away why it was so quiet. I was totally alone in those woods. No Tanks, no personnel carriers, no jeeps, no fresh coffee in the no mess tent. The whole Army had disappeared...and left me all alone. That wasn't so bad; I wasn't afraid of the woods and it was a beautiful, late-Winter/early-Spring morning. The only problem that I could see with it was the fact that I had absolutely no idea where I was. This is more of a problem than it would be in Texas or California. In those places they don't have a fortified, land-mined, barb-wired, covered-with-machine-guns, manned-by-angry-East-German-and-Russian-soldiers border. And we had been operating pretty close to that border all week. It's good to know these things if you are going to drive around lost trying to find your home station.
I calmly went about doing what bears do in the woods in the morning, you know...brushing teeth, combing hair, washing face, etc. Then I started up my trusty tanker and began looking for the logging road that brought me there. It was pretty easy to see which way the tanks and tracks had gone and I could tell from the mud they had drug up on the asphalt road which way they had headed off in...but after that I was lost. I stopped in the first village I came to and got some confusing directions, then at the next village did the same. About four or five villages later I finally heard a name I was familiar with. Once I got there, I knew the way home. It was a nice drive around Northern Bavaria, on tiny two-lane (not wide enough to be one-lane) roads, over ridge lines and through valleys. And I got a great welcome when I drove through the main gate of Daly Barracks, my home station. They were really glad to see me...well...they were really glad to see all the accountable items I carried with me: my M-14, my Protective Mask, all my other gear, and of course, my truck. You would think they would be happier to see me with all that stuff than they were; I sure got some serious attention from some pretty high-up folks. I guess it was a pretty serious thing to lose a Private and all his equipment. I became the rope in the tug-of-war between my boss who was supposed to come and get me (F Troop insisted) and F Troop who was supposed to bring me in with them (my boss insisted). So in appreciation of all I did, both sides dumped on me for not reading their minds and doing whichever I was supposed to. I got chewed out so many times I started to believe it was my fault (they both insisted).
It just illustrated the truthfulness of the old military adage my Dad, the Chief used to tell me when I was growing up. "There's always that 2% that never gets the word". To me it just meant there were 98% who could have told me they were leaving.