Hunter-Liggett is a military reservation about 60-70 miles south of Fort Ord, CA. Anyone who spent any time in the 7th Infantry Division in the seventies, eighties, or nineties is very familiar with the place; it is the primary training area for the division and its support units. I have spent a lot of time there over the years; I was very familiar with the terrain and foliage, the ranges and impact areas, and the routes in and out of it.
It was coming out of Hunter-Liggett one morning with a bulldozer on a lowboy trailer that I got a real thrill-ride down a long, steep hill without any brakes on the trailer...they blew the first time I used them (the trailer belonged to the engineers who owned the dozer...Yeah, I should never have trusted them when they said the trailer was in great shape)...it was a wild trip to the bottom of the hill.
It was at Hunter-Liggett where I thought I had killed an errant soldier in my squad...it all started when I had had to tramp all through the woods to find the jerk. I made him sleep on the ground outside the truck I was in. We had a hard freeze that night and when we got up in the morning I saw his sleeping bag lying motionless and thought he'd frozen to death. He hadn't.
Hunter-Liggett is where my buddy Paul and his squad initiated a firefight with a huge brahma bull. The bull chased his whole squad off the hill they were on...then slowly strutted away with his cows.
We were at Hunter-Liggett when the night sky lit up like the noonday son. Across the Command Post area, LT Abad had awakened in the dark; his Coleman lantern had run out of gas. He decided to re-fill it without getting out of his sleeping bag. The lantern was still hot and the fill hole is not very large and lying on your back half in, half out of your sleeping bag is not the preferred method for refilling a lantern. In fact, there are numerous safety bulletins warning against refilling hot lanterns, about filling any lantern insided a tent, and being up and mobile close to a fire extinguisher and other handy tips that Abad, the Arab, the Sheik of the burning tent ignored. Yep, the gas spilled, flashed, and set the whole dang thing on fire; tent, cots, clothing, field gear, weapons, radios, and all the unauthorized cans of chili, pork and beans, tamales, soup (which continued to cook off and explode like little grenades for an hour or more), and whatever else was in the tent.
I have written numerous articles about H-L over the last few years, on JU or Blogster, or both, because just one heck of a lot of things happened there.
So, there I was, watching a great movie, "We Were Soldiers" when I got a creepy feeling. LTC Moore told A Company to send machine guns to cover the creek bed and as they ran into the creek bed to set up the guns I thought, "I've put guns on that creek bed!" At other times I felt that I had sat beside that clearing...climbed that hill...looked up that mountain. And it turned out that I had...the "We Were Soldiers" action scenes were shot primarily at Hunter-Liggett. How 'bout dat!?
It is a little thing, I guess, but it was kinda cool to think that those actors were humping ground where real soldiers had trained for years, preparing to hump them thar far off hills.
Apart from the training memories: the cold nights, the hot days, the long walks up steep hills, C-rations, rough trails, and sleepless nights that stretched into sleepless days and nights and days and nights; Hunter-Liggett is a beautiful patch of the coastal hills and mountains (part of the golden rolling hills I wrote about the other day). There are huge old black oak trees there, some of the tallest I have ever seen; natural creeks (dry and wet), and grassy meadows ringed with scrub oak and eucalyptus trees. I really liked it there.
And now I can say that me and ol' Mel and ol' Sam and ol' Barry have humped the same hills...well, I didn't have the option of calling in a stunt double...and I didn't have a catering crew to provide the meals...and I didn't get to head to the motel at night...oh well...we were in the same place anyway.