Posted on 07/10/2020 10:05:12 AM PDT by GrootheWanderer
Loving your stories & memories as they are from the same time I was a Field Artillery lieutenant in a LANCE missile battalion in V Corps. Did REFORGER 77, too, along with NBC School at Vilseck. Along with you and others on the thread, I don’t have much confidence in the likes of what read in this article.
Correction to my previous - I did REFORGER in 1978, not 77.
Its now up to us to get rid of the RINOs. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of GOP voters are uninformed and weak. It makes the removal process more difficult than it should be.
I was usually the only officer there, so I got a fair amount of face time with him. I never saw that as a negative, he was one helluva officer. He also backed me up when I was clashing with my BC and Bn Cdr.
Air Force alerts were great, basically a 4 day camping trip for my soldiers, while I was down in the hole for 96 hours straight. I always enjoyed hearing the zoomies gripe about their twelve hour shifts.
When I was kicked up to Battalion HQ at Spangdahlem, I didn't move from my apartment in Traben-Trarbach, a beautiful town on the Mosel River. I did my last 2 years there, mostly in the S-4. Not coincidentally, every hail & farewell my last two years was held at a venue within 10 minutes of my apartment. It was an eye-opening experience for those at Bitburg and Spangdahlem, nice areas, but no comparison to the Mosel. Afterwards, a dozen or so would head over to my place to continue the party...my landlord had no problems with our celebrations.
When I got back to the States, my battalion commander and I bumped into each other, we had apartments in the same complex. I went to work for him after the Advance Course at the Air Defense Board (as it was known then), the testing agency for new ADA weapons in the system. That's where I met my future bride, who came to work in my section.
I closed out my career with a year and a half as a headquarters battery commander. I was 30 and ready to move on.
About the only thing I would have changed was to wait for a command of a line unit, instead of HHB. I got along great with the Colonels of the directorates in my unit, to include the CG's staff, and all of our metrics were fantastic, such as 98% pass rate on the PT test, in a unit with 50% of the soldiers being over 40 years of age, all in staff positions.
Just never seemed to mesh with the battalion commander, who was mad at the world because he didn't get a line battalion. I wasn't one of his favorites, c'est la vie.
“I miss a lot about the Army, too, but I know it’s not the Army I was used to.”
That’s the truth. I enlisted after Vietnam, and only had to serve three years for Operation Desert Storm, so I picked a relatively peaceful time to serve.
But, you never know. I just want our kids and Grandkids OUT of the Sand Box. 28 years in the ME is more than long enough. :(
All the treasure we’ve lost in the Middle East is insufficient reason to stay there. I grieve for the lives lost, and families shattered, but the lesson has been learned: enough is enough.
Yes, I'm that old. This was before soldiers were equipped with modern night vision equipment.
I had the flashlights with red filters, so you can’t possibly be THAT old. ;)
The academy's purpose is to produce those worthy of leading warriors, not wusses who'd lick the boots of those who seek to defeat us. Kick them out and take the commissions of the known radicals who've graduated (like Mr. Communism Will Win). They can always find work with the Democrats, their AtiFa militants or some other Soros activity.
And they used their tanks as infantry support, thus in ‘penny packets’ of 5 or 6 per infantry battalion. The creation of 2 armored divisions happened during the “phoney war” and they were not really combat ready on May 10th. Individually, the French tanks has superior armor and fire power over the German tanks.
A great read on this is William Shirer’s “The Collapse of the Third Republic.”
As to your point, yes, the French actually had better tanks than the Germans in 1940, but didn’t know how to use them. The only French officer who did was DeGaulle, at that time (I believe) a colonel. He understood the punch through power of the German armored divisions, but the French high command did not.
And, given that the French and English built all of their defenses around an attack through the lowlands, they were completely surprised when the Germans went through the Ardennes forest and showed up well south of the massed Allied defenses. The surprise was so complete that a few weeks later, Churchill inquired as to where the reserves were, and was told “there are none.” Meanwhile, the Allied army was bottled up at Dunkirk, and the German panzer divisions raced across France, cutting it in two.
People accepted going out with a whimper when they refused to breed; too many haven’t passed along the WASP culture to a next generation.
It isn’t a victory for our enemies; you can already see what happens to areas in this country when the WASPs are gone. Nobody wants to live there; there is no tax base, no skilled labor pool - nothing.
It definitely is. The RINOs are a cancer.
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