I grew up eating grilled cheese sandwiches...the kind everyone ate: butter two pieces of bread, put one butter-side down in a hot skillet; then put on a slice of Velveeta or American cheese and cover it with the other slice of bread, butter- side up. Flip it when it is browned and eat it when the other side is browned. That was the way I liked them. When I got a little older and was making them for myself, I added a thin slice or two of ham to the mix. Yummm. This afternoon I had a grilled ...
In a previous article on JU , I talked about a couple of senior NCOs that influenced me when I was a young Private (influenced? Terrified might be a better word). They seemed bigger than life and were both veterans of ugly combat; they bore the scars to prove it. They were students of war, masters of its application. They epitomized the "rough men" who stood ready. The Army was full of them then. WWII vets, Korea Vets, a very few who had been to Vietnam e...
Our last days in Log Base Echo were surreal. The whole area smelled of JP-8. That was because we had tankers full of it and no place to put it. Since water was in short supply, some genius decided to use the JP for dust control. We drilled holes in a couple of fill hoses, hooked them up to the down-load pumps and sprayed all the roads for miles around. Solved the dust problem and the excess fuel problem. So we all had headaches and who knows how many green-skinned, web-footed babies have been ...
The "war" was over. Well, in a cease fire. We had about an hour to celebrate and then went right back to full time convoys, moving fuel from Nellingen to LRP 8 inside Kuwait. Nellingen was a bit of a concern, located in the middle of Southern Iraq; there wasn't much out there...nothing at all of a defensive nature between us and Bahgdad. (I found out later that it was patrolled by an Armored Cav Regiment. Much later...about three weeks ago). The fever-pitch of chasing after the 3rd Armored ...
We were lined up for the real deal. We had moved into Log Base Echo a week before knowing that it was just to get us closer to the point of departure. We had continued to run fuel convoys from the port to Echo until the day before. We did a final check on all trucks and equipment in our parking area at the Log Base, then we moved into position. We found out that when the ground manuever started, my company would augment the Third Armor Division's support chain. Each of my platoons would be spl...
Our Company, the 515th Trans, came from Germany as part of our parent unit, the 4th Trans Battalion. Upon arriving in the desert, however, we were informed that we had been detached from the 4th TC and attached to the 6th TC, a Trans Battalion that was coming from the States. Not only were we detached from the 4th, the Sergeant Major had made sure that we were detached from any of the special purchase material we had shipped with us: conexes full of plywood, tools, and other equipment we had pu...
From the moment we found out we were bound for Saudi Arabia, my office was flooded with young soldiers, and some not so young, who had to tell me why they couldn't go to a war. Some had joined to get the college benefit, some had new-found religious convictions, and some were very distraught at the thought of living in a tent in the desert. Many were just afraid of the unknown and could be settled down with some calm, reasoned advice. A few came up with a new excuse the minute an older one got ...
A guidon is a small pennant-like flag of a specific unit, usually at company level. Numbered units, like the 515th Trans Company, have their unit designation on the flag; lettered units that are part of a battalion or brigade will have those designations as well as which company they are. Traditionally, a guidon was carried into battle on a tall staff and stayed with the commander, which allowed all the soldiers to see where their leader was so they could rally to him if needed. The unit gu...
After a couple of months of 24/7 convoy operations, moving fuel from the port to a bladder farm at Log Base Echo, we were told to move from our home at TAA Henry up to Echo. We knew that this was the signal that the ground war was going to get underway. We struck our camp at Henry and made the move in one lift. At our new site, we set up our tents and equipment, but we knew we weren't going to be there very long. We put in hasty perimeter positions, didn't spend a lot of time improving our tent...
There was literally a line of soldiers waiting to see me before PT started. The night before, we had all found out on CNN that we were going to Saudi Arabia as part of DESERT SHIELD. We had all been watching the situation down there develop; some units from Germany had already been tagged to go there. We hadn't even gotten the official notification yet, but the word was surging through the grapevine and everyone was buzzing. These soldiers in the hallway in front of my office all had some comp...
One of the things about PVT Bee was how his excuses and alibis always sounded so reasonable and believable. His boyishness: blue-eyed, blond, beachy-looking, tall, and fair. He looked so wholesome and clean it was easy to imagine he was just the hapless victim of wrong-place-wrong-time. His measured articulation made you want to believe him. When he was stressed, he became almost manic in his eagerness to please. You should have seen him the day I showed him the letter. It started with a ...
Anyone who has been in any kind of leadership role knows the old adage, "3% of your people use up 97% of your time" to be true. I have mentioned before that my first weekend in the 515th Trans, three of my soldiers were arrested on the Dutch/German border attempting to smuggle in a package of heroin. They were gonna get rich! They got a lot of jail, instead. But as an example of the adage mentioned above, these three yahoos burned up one heck of a lot of my time and attention when I should h...
The Army in the 1970s was going through some changes that it really wasn't prepared for. When Vietnam fizzled out, there was some effort to downsize the Army, but there was also a kind of guilty aura around some of its policies. The attitude about drugs was especially confused. In 1976 I attended a course to become a drug and alcohol "counselor". The course was set up to create advisors at the unit level that were familiar with the current policies and procedures for soldiers who used illegal ...
In Germany we used to have "community clean-up" days, a day when everyone took off at noon and went to their housing areas and did a spring or fall cleaning: mowing, raking, picking up trash, cleaning out gutters, etc, etc, etc. These days were usually arranged on a Friday so they could be finished up with building or stairwell barbeques and such. It was an expensive way to get things cleaned up, on one post clean-up day the Chief of Staff of EUCOM came out of the Headquarters Building and loo...
The snow started late in the afternoon. We started getting calls from our customers to set up a time to begin snow-removal for their parking lots/company streets. We didn't have any of the sanders installed yet so we couldn't send any trucks out right away. The sanders were large bins with conveyor-belt bottoms that fed sand out the back of the bin. There was a sliding door that allowed you to adjust the amount of sand that was dropped down the enclosed chute onto a horizontal spinner. The spin...