They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee.  You should see some of the things that can be designed when the committee is made up of Army lieutenants!

This memory was jogged during a little back-and-forth with Pontogubb this morning.  He mentioned having a trailer hitch cover that looks like a claymore.  In the process of imagining what that would look like, another frightful memory crowded in and I thought I should share it with you.

When we got to the desert in '91, we pretty much knew that DESERT SHIELD was soon gonna become a hot war;  we were hustling from the port to the supply points in the desert as fast as we could.  My company was a fuel-hauling outfit and operated convoys back and forth (the port was about 300 miles from the tank farm that was set up in the desert).  Since all the troops were busy doing their jobs, it left most of the senior leadership to the chore of preparing the unit for a mobile war that was very soon to come.  My Truckmaster and I were the only combat vets in the unit;  both of us were old enough to have been in Vietnam.  In the operations tent every evening, "Truck" and I would discuss how best to prepare and when and how to do it.  The unit's officers, four lieutenants and our CO, a captain, were having similar meetings and sometimes we all noodled things out together.

The subject of a "gun truck" came up.  In Vietnam, gun trucks became heroes and legends, like "Nancy" and "Eve of Destruction".  We took a standard cargo truck, 2- 1/2-ton or 5-ton, hardened them with steel plates and /or sandbags, mounted a few machine guns on them, and plunked them down in the midst of a convoy to provide heavy firepower in the event of an attack of some sort.  The problem with making gun trucks is weight.  Steel plates and sandbags, two or three machine guns with boxes of ammunition and six to eight soldiers stress a 2-1/2-ton truck's weight limit.  But in the environment we would be operating in, I figured an overweight, seriously slowed-down cargo truck would be preferable to not having the extra fire support.  

We met with the maintenance NCO and came up with a design that was workable.  He welded a few pipes to the center-front of  the bed of the truck and welded the tri-pod for a fifty caliber machine gun to the pipes.  It made a hard, sturdy mount for the M-2, Heavy-barreled .50 Caliber Machine Gun (affectionately known to soldiers for generations as the "MawDeuce").  The MawDeuce provides long-range, effective fire.  We decided to mount an M-60 machine gun to each rear corner of the cargo bed.  With a combination of some PSP and sandbags for cover, we had ourselves a pretty awesome gun truck.  It wasn't very fast, but we weren't going to be going very fast (we thought) across open desert behind the M-1A1s of the 3rd Armor Division.  After a couple of test runs and a few tweaks, we looked at our finished product and thought we had a pretty good product.

In theory, we should have had some form of security on a convoy, provided by other units...MPs or infantry or armor units...we really weren't expected to defend ourselves.  But we felt it couldn't hurt to have the guns and not need them than to be in an ugly situation without them and wishing we did have them.

It was at this point that the committee I mentioned stepped in.  The lieutenants, unbeknownst to me and Truck, decided the gun truck needed an improvement or two.   They proudly presented their "improvements" to us.  They wanted to mount two claymore mines to each side of the gun truck.  Their thinking being that if we were under a heavy attack from ground troops, the mines would go a long way towards breaking the enemy up.  

For the uninitiated, let me explain what a claymore mine really is.  Picture an Olive Drab object about the size and shape of the back rest on a stenographer's chair.  Inside a plastic casing is a layer of C-4 plasic explosive and a layer of about 700 ball bearings about an eighth of an inch in diameter.  When it explodes, it sprays the ball bearings out in a fan about 60 degrees side-to-side and up to six feet tall.  It is a "shaped" charge and the bearings all go outwards...the casing is marked "Front Toward Enemy"....good to know.  Claymores are very effective in covering blind areas of your perimeter or avenues of approach.  It is like lighting off forty 12-gauge shotguns loaded with #4 buckshot all at once.  Except that shotguns really are "shaped" charges with a barrel to direct the energy.  A Claymore's shaping provides for a pretty sure fan of fire, but no barrel means that there will be "backblast" as well.  Some of the energyfrom the blast will leak off to the sides and rear.  Up to about twenty yards to the rear...a two-and-a-half ton truck is only eight feet wide;  even with the steel side of the truck and maybe a layer of sandbags, lighting off a Claymore on the side of a truck will cause considerable damage to the truck and whoever is inside it.

This is what it looks like when it pops.     And this is to give you some scale.

We pointed all that out to the LTs and they looked at each other and back at us and back at each other...then went back to the shop to come up with a new plan.

There was another Claymore/Lieutenant story that a fellow First Sergeant shared with me.  After the CeaseFire order was issued, the units on the battlefield were instructed to permanently disable any enemy combat vehicles that were still around.  Since my First Sergeant friend was in a tank company, they just fired a round from the tanks' main guns into any enemy vehicles they found.  One of his lieutenants found an Iraqi T-72 sitting totally intact and abandoned.  He was in a Hummer and didn't have a tank to shoot into the T-72 so he decided to put a Claymore in the turret to finish it off.  The Claymore bandolier comes with about 100 ft of wire attached to the blasting cap.  The LT dropped the claymore down the commander's hatch,  backed off as far as the wire allowed, attached the firing device, yelled "Fire in the Hole" in three directions, and then depressed the firing lever three times rapidly, just like he was taught.  The Claymorewent off in the turret and all forty-some rounds of 125mm main gun ammunition went off together.  100 feet was about half as much wire as the boy needed to be a safe distance from the blast.  Fortunately for him, none of the blast debris landed on him, although he lost his eyebrows, half his hair, and got a serious sun-burned look.  The turret, which left the tank almost intact, landed less than twenty feet from him...probably 15-plus tons of commie steel.

I have heard lieutenants described in many ways:  dangerous, ghosts, over-educated privates with signature authority, etc.  But I have had the opportunity to work with lots of ,young LTs and they all had one thing in common no matter how "good" or "bad" they were:   they all bear considerable watching