The 5-ton Truck was just over the top of the ridge.  Large logs had been placed in front of its drive tires, and the winch cable had been played out and attached to the frame of the 2 1/2-ton truck at the bottom of the hill, about fifty feet away.  All of the rigging had been inspected and the shackles and pins all double-checked.  Unfortunately, not all unnecessary personnel had been moved out of harms way.  The cable lay slack on the ground.  The sergeant in charge of the recovery operation gave the signal for the winch operator to take the slack out of the line.   One of the soldiers who had been standing around chose that moment to move to the other side so he could see better, neccessitating he step over the cable.  The driver in the truck being pulled up the hill saw the signal and figured he should release his brakes.  The smaller truck rolled back just a little, the driver of the 5-ton let the clutch out and the winch cable snapped up tauter than the high "E" on a guitar. 

The young soldier was caught with one foot on either side of the cable when it snapped taut.  He looked down in wonder at the winch cable coming out of his belly button.  Then the wonder stopped and the screams began.  He didn't last long;  he bled out in a matter of a couple minutes.  His screams weakened and stopped. 

This story was told to us in our Recovery class at the Army truck driver school at Fort Ord, California in the early fall of 1964.  Some of us giggled, some felt queasy, but I did neither.  I learned from my dad about the power and energy of a tight line and the damage it can cause.  Stepping over a cable was one of a long list of no-no's my dad, the Chief,  taught me as a lad.  His lesson about cables was taught to him on a ship in the North Atlantic in the late 1940's.

The Chief wasn't a Chief then.  He had just returned to active duty in the Navy.  Mustered out in '46 after two years in the Pacific on a destroyer,  and a short spell as a civilian, he was on his first trip back to sea.  His ship had been tasked to tow an unmanned ship from somewhere to somewhere else.  In between the two somewheres, they ran into a storm...a North Atlantic Gale...and before long the towed ship was wallowing and pulling the towing ship out of line, threatening to get them all in serious trouble.  Because of the action of the ocean and the constant strain on the tow-cable, it wasn't possible to just unshackle the line.  The machine shop was called upon to send out a sailor with a torch to cut the cable. 

After some foot-shuffling, and hemming and hawing around, our future Chief stepped up and said he would do it.  They strapped him into a safety harness and attached a life-line to it.  They fired up the torch,  played out a lot of extra hose, and tied his line off on one of the hand rails just outside the hatch.  The Chief sidled out into the wind and waves.  After a few short steps, he gave up walking and got down on his hands and knees and crawled aft towards the  cable.  He was tossed around and nearly got washed over the side a couple of times.  It took him forever to get to the spot where the cable was secured to the ship, and then there wasn't any "where" to brace himself to make the cut.  He had to crawl further down the cable to find a place where he could wedge himself into a position that allowed him to apply the torch to the cable.  Then further down from the attached point, the cable was moving around a lot more and cutting it seemed to be nearly impossible.  After another eternity of trying to cut a cable that would only pass by now and again, the Chief came up with the genius idea of hanging onto the cable...and just riding it out as he cut. 

A First-Class had come out on the deck to oversee the operation but had stayed close to the hatch.  When he saw the  curly-haired blonde sailor wrapped around the line and cutting just over his head on the cable, he had two thoughts right away.  First, that was the gutsiest little sailor he had ever seen and second, if that sailor was on the cable when it parted, no one would ever see that gutsy little sailor again.  So the First-Class began a crawling journey to where the sailor was working, yelling in vain (all anyone could hear inside or outside  the ship was the howling wind and slashing water).  Then the First-Class got a genius idea of his own.  He started pulling on the Chief's life line.  This irritated the Chief no end as he was finally making progress on cutting the cable.  He tugged back on the life line and for the next few minutes they had a tug-o-war with the Chief's line.  When the First Class got a really good tug, it pulled the Chief off the cable.  The Chief was livid; he  decided to take a minute to tell that First Class what he thought of his interference.  Yelling at the top of his lungs did no good; he couldn't be heard, and the First Class's yelling was undecipherable, too.  Seeing the futility of their conversation, the First Class grabbed the Chief by the head and pulled his ear right up to his mouth and yelled what was about to happen to the Chief if he was riding that cable when it parted. 

The Chief froze.  Suddenly, removed from the intensity of the problem-solving-process and seeing the situation from the First Class's point of view, the Chief nearly blew his lunch.  While this spirited conversation was taking place, the partly-cut cable had been fraying and coming apart on its own.  Now, above the wind and water, they could hear the high-pitched screech of the cable and the occasional loud "whang" sound as another strand of the cable came apart.  The First Class yelled into the Chief's ear that he had to find a way to finish the cut and stay out of the way at the same time...then the First Class boogied as quickly as he could back toward the hatch. 

The Chief tried to find a place where he could work on the same spot on the cable,  but had a very difficult time holding the torch steady enough.  It didn't matter much.  As they had already noticed, the damage he had done while riding the cable and the violent motion of the two ships had weakened the cable enough to start it unraveling.  It wasn't very long before the cable popped with an astounding sound and began whipping around with unbelievable velocity.  The short end beat against the ship and its structures on the deck, shearing stanchions, and putting three-inch-deep dents in the deck and superstructure.  The spookiest memory the Chief kept of the incident was the sound of the long end of the cable as it whipped back toward the towed ship, singing like a banshee.  The towing ship lurched forward when the load was relieved and was soon quite a distance from the towed ship but The Chief could still hear the cable lashing the decks of the towed ship, and then whipping forward again with a continued screech and howl.

Almost twenty years after the event, when I was in high school, the Chief  got a chilly look when he described the appearance of the towed ship - and the towing ship - when the storm passed and they returned to reconnect the two and continue the mission.  The towed shipped looked as bad as any battle-damaged combatant he saw in WWII.  He talked about the bent and savaged deck plates, the shattered storm glass, the railings and stanchions that were broken off and twisted, the bent masts, missing parts, and general destruction.  His own ship, the towing ship, had taken quite a beating from the short end of the cable as well. 

Over twenty-six years of active duty and  anadditional 15 years playing with trucks in the construction industry, I saw many recovery operations, some of which went really bad;  but one thing that never, ever, ever happened was....I never stepped over a slack cable.