- Midjack
- Dec 24, 2007
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https://www.amazon.com/Humper-Monkey-John-McCarthy/dp/0557708834
Can't find anything else by him... But those are the creepypasta ones. The ones i really want are the insane funny cold war stories from the previous idiots thread.
Especially the "they put me in charge of a burn pit full of pallets treated with PCP to prevent termites, I burned them, and challenged a general to personal combat after breathing the fumes for a day" one.
I have a couple I emailed someone years ago and since I never delete an email:
quote:
So let's talk about idiots on a wider scope. This will be a LONG post, but I'm kind of compelled to put it in here, with the idiots, because it was idiocy at the highest levels down to the newest private.
Reading this thread brought back a lot of memories and talking to Mental Health at the VA the last two weeks has put a part of me right back there. I've been out for 15 years (Got medically boarded out the fourth time I went in front of them) but some of the idiots I remember clearly and the complete and utter idiocy and ridiculousness of my life between 1987 and 1991 inclusive.
But I'll be honest, there would be people who could call me the idiot. Definitely after the Cold War was over everyone who didn't get it thought I was a drunken idiot.
I was 17 when I hit Group in the winter of 1986. Went to reception on my birthday, went through Basic and then the long-rear end AIT, then hit Group. They took me and handed me the biggest hot site in Group, one of the biggest nuclear and chemical weapons site in Europe. They handed it to an 18 year old idiot with an alcohol problem.
Let's take a look at the idiocy right out of the gate so we can see what led to that.
Let's talk about Cold War Idiocy.
They took a unit that was deactivated in 1968 after the ammunition dump explosion had wiped out half the unit or more. They reactivated its mission, and started a round of unit drafts after operation conception in 1985 and writing up the unit in 1986.
Officers and senior NCO's who've ever gotten a personnel draft order know: you never send your best people if you can help it. You dump the fuckups, the idiots, the cruits, the shammers, and the people you figure it's better to play PERSCOM lottery than it is to keep these idiots. You get the odd guys who figure this is their chance to earn medals and be in on the ground floor of maybe something cool, but these guys are few and far between and have their own set of problems.
Then the unit's composition was designed by committee, starting with the METL and the over arching mission. Then it's combined with the Cold War Bullshit 'keep everything secret' crap, meaning that so many decisions were made by faceless groups that we don't know their credentials for putting together a unit. Then the guys at PERSCOM figured up minimum force strength, someone else added to that after PERSCOM labeled us a Group, then it went through the whole thing and we ended up with a force level that seemed normal to me because I didn't know any better, but made us massive compared to other units. Then we were tagged into MAD and that expanded our mission and twisted everything around before they even decided the unit's activation time, where it was going to be, or even unit TO&E.
Then they decided to put us in charge of a series of sites made up of old bunkers that had been listed as 'cleared/decommissioned' in 1968/1969 so that supposedly meant we had a shitload of empty bunkers. Now, ammunition had gone through a massive upgrade in the early to mid-80's, in part due to new equipment and vehicles, but a lot of it was hardware driven as computer equipment got smaller and able to do more. The Stinger is a MASSIVE upgrade to the Red-Eye. Then you had improvements in propellant and explosive, giving greater range and net explosive weight for smaller packages. Add in the new Depleted Uranium and the finalized Discarding Sabot designs to go with smoothbore, and you had everything above small arms being expanded on.
Which meant that tons of ammunition was obsolete.
So, the unit was designed by idiocy, as it was supposed to be self-sufficient. Completely self-sufficient in case the supporting units were wiped out in the initial thrusts or the unit got cut off from the rear elements. Which some goddamn genius decided meant that we could operate solo at all times, which meant that we could be buried so deep we didn't see the light of day since we were self-sufficient anyway. It went from 'self-sufficient in case of support destruction' to 'self-sufficient at all times' because of idiotic reasons. The unit had to be able to perform its job even if all of Europe was nothing more than a radioactive poisonous hellscape full of the dead, the dying, and mutants. So the designers of the unit decided that we had to be a little bit of everything at once. Remember, this was at a time when geniuses came up with the Sergeant York.
Total doctrine was outrageous when you looked at it. Now, if you've done research on Vietnam you know that there were a LOT of conscripted forces. Now, I'm not dogging on the Vietnam guys, far from it, it was lovely situation, in a lot of ways they were set up to fail, there were leadership failures, doctrine failures, vague mission goals, poo poo like that. But nobody who was there wanted to be there, they just wanted to survive to get the gently caress out of country, and who the hell blames them? But, the upper leadership looked at the Cold War Army in the same way. We didn't have the conscription 'gently caress learning this poo poo, how do I survive my tour' poo poo going on, we were highly motivated and ready to take on the Soviet Union if we had to. Of course, there was the "Join 4 GI Bill" guys, but hey, you work with what you have. But they were still doing soldier survivability and combat effectiveness based off the worst case scenarios from Vietnam. They expected us to be wiped out by platoons of USSR troops taking on companies, told us we were poo poo compared to the USSR, and that our combat vehicles couldn't survive 2 on 1 and we'd need 3 on one or better to come out on top. Parts of command wrote us off as losers without a single shot being fired.
Which was really loving insulting in a way.
So we had idiocy from doctrine and high level planning on down.
When we got our sites it was found out that they were NOT cleared. So the US Army had ammunition sitting there for two goddamn decades completely abandoned and ignored. The bunkers were all compromised, the sites were compromised. We had trees that grew on the top of the bunkers, the roots infiltrated into the roofs, and shattered the concrete roofing, which let water into the stack of the ammo, which rotted the bunkers, wore away the paint, and started rusting the ammunition. Twenty years of rot and rust.
Which brought in more idiocy.
Instead of letting us destroy the sites and build new ones, they wanted as much of the sites recovered as possible. Word on high said it was a funding issue as well as the German government wasn't about to give the US military more land after we'd hosed up the sites. So that meant we were doing a lot of 'blow in place' work or wrapping and packing poo poo for shipment. Old chemical rounds were a particular problem. The US Army wanted to build incinerators at the sites, but we couldn't guarantee German government that the smoke wouldn't be toxic so they refused, so that meant we had to do serious measures. Which involved wrapping them in plastic like Saran Wrap and then sprayable plastic (which coated your hands, get in your lungs, clogged the masks, poo poo like that, and caused total problems across the board) and multiple inspections by NATO and the Germany government/military. All of this slowed everything down, inspection requirements changed weekly, and increased accident rates as the timelines didn't change but the job requirements did.
Then we rebuilt the bunkers, right there. Then we had to scrape up the contaminated dirt, load it into dump trucks, then take dumptrucks full of dirt back in and fill in the land. The fuel tanks had to be excavated and examined for leaks after being drained. We're not talking little tanks, we're talking about 50K to 200K underground tanks that had to be pumped out after decades of being ignored. The fuel needed redone to save it, but had to be replaced. Contamination levels were checked every week for a year, and because they went with minimal replacement meaning that we had some bunkers with 'acceptable contamination levels' that ranged from having to go inside fully suited to just low grade contamination of anyone who went inside. But it didn't matter to anyone above us that we had to work in that environment, because ultimately we were disposable. They let us know that, and flat out ordered us to work in this environment. On one hand we're being piss tested and bloodwork every 30-60 days to make sure our levels aren't rising too high, we're constantly checking our radiation over lifetime and burst exposure constantly, but even if we edged near or even the danger zones we got told to go back to work.
Then some genius looked at our mission and decided to consolidate the rearming/refitting process by having huge warehouses rebuilt at the site, and instead of sharing the site with another unit that would have to be reactivated, they gave us the mission of handing out equipment to any of the units who arrived without their equipment. They had the equipment moved in. Everything we'd need to rearm the poor bastards who mobilized naked. That meant that we got saddled with every little bit of TO&E that a unit might need, stacked by who would be there first and receive their ammunition first. Which gave us more to handle. More to deal with, without our force levels really being increased.
You can see the idiocy piling up on us.
Because it got even worse.
We needed secure commo equipment. DARPA had hot poo poo new crypto-gear, sat gear had gotten smaller, easier to use, and better, so they handed off all this high speed commo gear. DoA didn't want to task another unit to commo for us, despite the fact that another unit had done commo for us before we got wiped out in 68/69, and to keep up with the Cold War Bullshit, they decided we'd do our commo in-house. Which meant we got commo guys who went to training at Fort Lewis with 1st SF, and then the DARPA dwonks came out and trained our guys on the poo poo. Then the equipment would be swapped out because it failed at some point in the trails, meaning we'd have new commo gear, new training, and our commo guys started to look like zombies as they got run more and more ragged while the senior NCO's and the officers just piled on more training and more equipment on everyone.
Then some goddamn genius figured "If they handle commo, well, it would be simpler/cheaper/more effective to have them handle other things in house." That got Support Platoon added in the spring of 88. This covered cooks, more medics, more commo guys, lawyers to advise us on the legality of weapon's usage and unit function, and loving doctors as well as MP's with high security area training. They rolled "Kill Shop" out of HQ platoon into Support Platoon and then beefed up the HQ Platoon. Kill Shop was another goddamn doctrine genius. Officially it was called "Operational Planning and Execution Section" which meant planning on how the NBC weaponry would be used, and it got staffed with sadists and weirdos. But that just another micro-unit rolled into ours.
Yeah, the unit was self-sufficient, but it was some kind of horrible Frankenstein's Monster of a unit. A loving monster that the US taxpayer spent BILLIONS of dollars funding and maintaining. Then to top it off all of ostracized us from the rest of the Army in Europe because we can't talk about the typical bond of what MOS we are, what we do, what post we're on, poo poo like that. Anyone who asked what unit we were in, we had to loving lie, and it never loving failed that there was some guy from the unit we were claiming to be part of. That just meant that we just stuck together and formed extremely tightly knit cliques within the unit. Remember, it's OK to drink a 5th every night and only hang out with your little clique, but going to Mental Health meant you were unstable.
Idiocy straight down the line.
And it got even thicker at unit level.
We had to carry out our mission no matter what happened. To say that the early phases of a push-back or a counter-attack or a full blown first assault hinged a lot on us would be an understatement. But we weren't standard, we were total war. We carried conventional ammunition to double up on the standard ammo loadouts that 60th Ord Bn carried with 144th and 15th Ord, in case one of us got wiped out the others could pick up the slack. Redundancy redundancy redundancy.
This meant that squads that worked the sites were 10-15 members until Support Platoon was added, which cut it down to 8-15 per squad and added another squad to each site. Which meant more cross training. Each platoon had 6-8 squads, I was in Second Magazine Platoon at first, which had 8 squads, then our mission got expanded in 1988 and my crew was put in Third Magazine Platoon which had 6 squads. We expanded to handle six more sites that had been built but the two squads of support had been moved to Support Platoon.
EOD loved and hated us. We had a company up until 1988 who only existed to come out to the sites and work with us. These guys hung out, smoked cigarettes, pumped iron, and jerked off waiting for the inevitable "OH gently caress! HELP HELP HELP!" from one of the sites. The EOD team assigned to Atlas told me that they'd done more work at Atlas than some of them had done in 10 loving years. Our EOD team ended up living with us for almost a month, supervising or performing EOD tasks every loving day. Then the orders came down that they were to cross-train us and we were to cross train them in NBC destruction. Which meant more cross training. Then they created Support Platoon and some of the guys from the EOD unit got put in our unit while the main unit got retasked to other units and areas. The EOD unit guys all had the shakes, all hit the bottle or stronger, started displaying high stress symptoms, but nobody gave a gently caress.
Use until destruction, baby.
Then there was the mental health idiocy. Which is best summed up as "THOU SHALT NOT ATTEND MENTAL HEALTH!" written on stone tablets with lightning and read by James Earl Jones over a loudspeaker. If you went to Mental Health and you needed more than one visit you were automatically taken off of active site duty, and Mental Health could yank your clearance, or even recommend that you be dropped to another unit or even all the way down to your 'primary MOS' in another unit after being read out of the unit.
Saw someone get turned into red mist when unstable or badly manufactured ammunition detonated? You drank till you could sleep. Your friend get his arm loving ripped off? You drank to till you couldn't see it any more. You end up trapped in a bunker for 6 hours where 20 year old ammunition dropped off the stacks and armed? Drank till you couldn't feel it any more. Are you having nightmares? Drink until you black out and pass out. Can't stop shaking because some old ammo went off in your face and knocked you cold? Drink, baby. Feeling isolated and alone because you're back at the unit separated from your crew? Drink to make the loneliness go away!
Command recommended Mental Health, but it was a trap. Support Platoon had 3 Mental Health techs in it, but nobody from any of the Magazine Platoons would go unless they were hoping to get dropped. Those Mental Health goons lurked around the unit, watching us, just looking for an excuse to have us medically held and comb through out brains to see if they could pull us off the line and drop us. We ALL hated those guys, which made them hate us, which just made poo poo worse across the board.
But, back to the idiocy surrounding the unit itself.
We had no equipment when we were reactivated, so of course, the DoD assigned us to have all new equipment so that we were outfitted properly. However our equipment was, to put it bluntly, stolen. It was stolen when the train stopped at a post who figured they needed new vehicles or equipment. (First Cavalry Division, First Infantry Division, Third Infantry Division, 82nd Airborne all stole our poo poo. We had a guy from Big Red Dumb lament over the fact that 3 months prior he helped loot our poo poo and now he was stuck with the poo poo they pawned off on us) Our poo poo got stolen at Bremerhaven. Out poo poo even got stolen from the Wildflecken railhead. When we reported that our vehicles had been replaced with depot-yard junk we were told to suck it up and drive on. We got boxes with manufacturing sealing that had nothing but scrap metal, or even more insulting, rocks in it. We'd report it, but we all knew that none of the defense contractors were getting so much as fined for replacing vital equipment and ammunition with loving scrap metal and rocks.
So we had to rob any unit who didn't post a heavy enough guard to keep us out. We stole from everyone, because we HAD to be at 100% by the end of the NATO inspection. We once stripped vehicles left outside of units for Duty Driver. We learned an important lesson. You can steal from the Air Force. You can steal from the Army. The Navy doesn't have poo poo you need, so don't bother. But DO NOT STEAL FROM THE MARINES! Those guys will come to your barracks, take their poo poo back at gunpoint, and kick the rear end off of anyone who objects. Oh, and they applied "interservice tax" and took more than you stole.
Everything that wasn't high security, like the commo gear or computers or NBC gear, was total junk. I'm not kidding when I say my 5-ton was a Korean War vet. My weapon had a chrome bolt and no forward assist. Or the heavy weapons that were actually loving dirty. We had a bunch of M-60's come in that still had reddish mud smeared on them. One of them was loaded and had about 30 rounds on the belt.
This whole time DoD, DoA, and ChemCorps were acting like we were getting the gear we were supposed to despite our complaining and despite reports to the contrary from inspectors at the site.
DoA once shipped us 22 M1A1 tanks for 'site security' of all things. What the gently caress were we supposed to do with 22 loving Main Battle tanks and no loving tankers? That was less then 2 per site, which meant they'd get knocked the gently caress out in less than 10 minutes by two or three dudes from the Soviet Union before any tankers could even get there. They were also supposed to be there so that if the supported unit lost a tank or two we could turn those tanks over to them, as if they'd last that long. So we got permission to trade them to 1/68th Armor in return for other poo poo we needed. In 1988 we got handed off 4 Apache helicopters for 'convoy security' by some loving genius at DoD, and we traded those to 11th ACR. We got a handful of Blackhawks and a couple of Chinooks for "rapid deployment capability" but we had neither pilots or crews, so those helicopters sat at 11th ACR and they had extra crews added to their TO&E for us. We had to provide funds for training the crews, maintaining and use of the helicopters, as well as keep those pilots and crews on our TO&E in slots that really had no reason to exist.
Our METL and TO&E changed monthly, based on data of what the other side was doing. It could change based on if units on the NATO side changed METL or operations. Which meant that back at Group people were getting a two or three day METL briefing while I was getting a paragraph or two on the weekly 'scream sheet' which I promptly ignored.
So you can see the idiocy from the top down.
Then we had the Cold War Bullshit idiocy everywhere. This is where it got ugly.
Cost Analysis Warfare was how it was put to some of us who asked questions. Apparently somewhere in the Pentagon is exactly how much a soldier is worth. From training to equipment. Our equipment was more valuable then we were, so that was factored into the analysis. Whether we could take on the Soviet Union or not was entirely decided on weird algorithms and poo poo, all based on 'cost effectiveness' and poo poo like that. Rumor around the unit was that our lives were worth exactly $4.50. Rumors were around that the M1A1 was so tough that the crew could die of radiation poisoning or blast wave overpressure and they could just throw another crew into it to keep getting their money's worth. This led to a lot of pseudo-depression in our unit as we knew that we were written off.
Our life expectancy got leaked: -92 hours. Almost four days before any hostilities we'd be all killed. Should we survive that, our life expectancy was at 19 minutes. The time it would take to load, prep, and strike package us while we were still mobilizing. We'd vanish in a ball of nuclear fire as one of the opening tactical strikes of the war. This caused more drinking, because, well, gently caress it.
And the officers and senior NCO's let that leak into how they treated us enlisted. We were expendable as far as the DoD and DoA and ChemCorps were concerned so they treated us as expendable, which means our leadership was absolutely crappy. They didn't give a poo poo about us, and all that mattered was the Holy Mission. We were told, trained, and reminded on a constant basis that we were not important, the mission was important, and if we had to die to accomplish that mission, then that was it. I once brought up that by disposing of us to managing to accomplish a basic mission prevented us from accomplishing further missions, and that was when we found out that were two units Stateside that were to pick up our mission. They knew it was only 50/50 that those units would make it across the Atlantic without the Soviet Air Force knocking them out, so they doubled up.
But did those units get read in for our METL and primary mission? No. They would be briefed on the mission enroute. They did no training, had no loving clue that somewhere in the Pentagon they were tasked to take over for people who were killed in the opening phases and what their mission would be.
We were expendable in both peace-time and war-time. Because the senior NCO's and the officers figured if we were all that disposable for war-time then by God we could accomplish the missions no matter what the cost in peace-time so that we got used to hardship and danger.
But, thankfully, V Corps ChemCorps Operations decided to tell the unit that half of the Magazine Platoons had to be deployed to their sites at any given time to prevent a surgical strike on the barracks from eliminating the majority of our war fighting capability. That was supposed to mean we were rotated out. Instead they just kept the same people at their site depending on how mission critical the site was. I literally went FOUR months without seeing my barracks at all. Mine wasn't the only crew this happened to. Which made the cliques even stronger. You only hung out with your crew, and later with your Support Squad, which was usually just rolled into the crew anyway, and you stayed at the sites because that's where you felt safe. This meant that those on the poo poo list usually were kept at their sites, away from the people who would be inspected back at the unit.
(I'll admit it, I was a lovely garrison troop because I didn't have much experience with garrison, but I was high speed in the field, but in garrison I didn't give a gently caress. I'd forget to go to formation, would show up with my uniform all ate up, poo poo like that because I was still at the site in some weird ways)
As a site NCOIC (as a loving Corporal for a long time) I had to look at the weekly scream sheets to see if we had to shift ammunition in the bunkers. See, the bunkers were stacked in such a way that the first units to get there (based on mileage and alert performance) were at the front of the bunkers while low-priority, last to arrive, might not arrive units were in the back or on the back rows. Plus I had to make sure that sling load ammunition was up near either of the helipads so they were ready to run out at a second's notice. Now, a 13 man squad sounds impressive until you find out that we were responsible for whole loving battalions of units getting either their initial total war loadouts or their rearming for a counter-offensive or to seriously paste the European countryside. The sites should have been run by platoons, maybe even entire companies, but that wasn't how we rolled back then. Some genius was trying to do the minimum force levels poo poo that later plagued OIF. Personally, I blame Cheney, since he was Sec-Def at the time.
Even then they'd switch units arrival order, switch unit missions, and that meant weeks of work for us, followed by returning to the old way, which meant more weeks putting it back how it was supposed to be, which led to me putting it off for at least 30 days, to see if it went back to normal, and if it didn't we busted our rear end for a few days to rotate the ammunition. And right afterward we'd have to switch it back. Then there would be units that would be swapped out with other units, rapid deployment units we had to support, all that poo poo, which required ammunition rotation and reassignment and maybe even more ammunition brought in front Stateside, and sometimes new bunker construction. Which half the time the bunker would be half-finished that the unit would be pulled from Rapid Deployment and the bunker would be finished and site empty until we figured out what ammunition should be put into it.
We also found out, despite command trying to keep it from us, that everyone in Europe was only supposed to do their best to hold back the Red Steamroller for 72 hours, time enough to get units from Stateside to reinforce us and evacuate the non-combatants. Total unit mortality for my unit by that 72 hour mark was a whopping 90%. That meant that the survivors would be rolled into whatever unit survived to reach us. To top it off, when the ammo was offloaded the Group would be broken into "Warfare Elements" depending on who survived. My crew would break into a mix of infantry and "NBC Advisors" which meant I'd be planning strike packages for the last unit that left the site. This meant that I had to be cross-trained, all my crew had to be cross-trained to advise the units we ended up attached to. Which meant we'd be attached to a unit that did not give a gently caress about us which meant that more than likely we'd be handed a rifle, our real job ignored, while barely intelligent morons threw around the NBC weaponry like retarded gibbons throwing rocks and all the understanding of a monkey doing math.
Our unit's mission looked amazing on paper. We looked high speed up at DoD and DoA and ChemCorps, but the reality was this horrible charlie foxtrot of apathy, alcoholism, depression, and just plain numbness. Were we highly trained? gently caress yeah. Were we crosstrained in all kinds of poo poo? Oh hell yeah. Were we motivated? Kind of. Our mantra was 'survive this poo poo' and we tried to figure poo poo out that would enable us to fight and win, because that was the only way we could figure out to survive. The units we supported treated us like poo poo half the time when we went with them for training, so we treated them like poo poo, which led to a bad cycle of attitudes and 'gently caress you, that's why' operations.
Then we were read in on the total war planning once we were at 90%. How we'd try to interlock with the rest of MAD, which meant we were read in on the horribly fascinating tactics of MAD. Our unit had its part to play in completely wiping out as many people as possible and poisoning the ground for decades and centuries. Looking back at it, this had a strange effect on us. See, we grew up under the shadow of nuclear war. Nuclear was not if it was when and it was an impossibility that NATO and the Warsaw Pact wouldn't eventually come to blows. Proxy wars, clandestine operations, dirty deals in the shadows, the CIA and the KGB and the DIA and the GRU all hitting each other in the dark with fallout casualties that nobody gave a gently caress about. So we knew it was going to happen, and you had a choice, you could either drink the horror away or you could throw yourself gleefully into the planning, or both. So we'd drunkenly talk about how we'd maximize casualties. Both civilian and military. Which looped back around to the First Commandment. Thou Shalt Not Go To Mental Health. So we had to self-medicate and develop coping mechanism. Usually drinking and fighting and other high risk entertainment.
Now we get into Stateside problems. See, they'd send units to Europe for training, mainly because their mission was to try to make it to Europe and take over for us. The thing was is that they weren't trained on the poo poo we had. They weren't fully read in to the METL, which meant that they rarely trained in what they'd have to do, which in turn meant that when they arrived in Europe (on our budget) for training they had no idea what they were stepping into. Then to top it off half the time we weren't allowed to fully train them because they didn't have proper clearance, which meant either they stayed in the less classified section of the site and ate MRE's for 30-60 days jerking off, or they went to Graf or Wildflecken and did the same thing. For my site, my brother's site, and Krietz's site it was the entirety of 60th Ord Company out of Fort Lewis that was supposed to take over for us providing that the USSR didn't make heavy West Coast incursions. We trained elements from 60th Ord twice, each time they were completely amazed at the poo poo we were handling and the poo poo they were expected to do. The first time the 60th Ord officers got read in they freaked the gently caress out finding out that they were nothing more than the second wave of casualties.
Because someone in DoD got together with someone else from FEMA and CoG and they went apeshit on us. When I start talking about underground facilities people look at me like I'm crazy. When our unit was deactivated they had guys from CID and MI go through our poo poo, confiscating diaries, pictures, poo poo like that. The tunnels were imploded and any surface damage was filled in with clean dirt. But we had the tunnels, which go ahead and go back Stateside after the Cold War was over because the USSR collapsed and explain to someone in your new unit, which has no idea what to do with you because they're trying to put you in a slot for an NBC NCO when you're entirely built for speed and for offensive work, that you used to work in a high security area with underground tunnels designed to handle the predicted Soviet Union knockout blow to let you survive that initial hit and then leave the tunnels and load up the units in a radioactive and/or chemical hellscape. Try to explain that you drink to put it out of your head, that you couldn't give a gently caress less about their 'peace-time mission' and think that the 'wartime mission' of the unit is a goddamn joke and could be handled by 8 privates and a brain damaged monkey.
Then you had the fact that what we did was STILL classified when you went to your new unit if it wasn't one of the units that handled poo poo like that. Can you imagine going from an environment like that and being put, say, in 2nd Armor Division at Fort Hood as the NBC Operations NCO, which everyone expects to be some dude who just hands out masks by most of command when in reality you're involved in planning for 2nd Armor to be involved in NBC Warfare. You tell the Division or Brigade, or whatever you're trying to work with that this field exercise was an NBC rating and all they do is toss some CS, bullshit around, and maybe do a single nuclear drill that involves diving to the ground, helmet toward the flash, and covering the back of their neck with their hands and then run to their tanks like that was all that was involved? Or someone honks their car horn three times or honks the horn on the vehicle in the motorpool three times to check it and you're grabbing for your mask, eyes closed, counting the seconds? You're completely wired for someplace like Johnston Atoll and they've sent you to some ridiculous loving unit that doesn't seem to get that war is serious business? How's that for weird, you think of war as serious business, and while their officers and NCO's think the same thing, you're looking at their little plans to take out an enemy armor division and talking all kinds of poo poo and you're standing there thinking "Pfft, just use three 125kt face-bursts and roll over the melted remains, dumbasses." because you look at warfare completely differently. Your new unit talks about casualties in the hundreds at the most and you're thinking in the tens of thousands and burning cities. You try to talk to the chain of command about the mission you are responsible for and nobody wants to talk about it because as soon as you start rolling high kill count and a focus on civilian and infrastructure damage you're the goddamn freak and you get ostracized pretty loving quick because people think you're the weirdo.
Because now you're the idiot. You're the weirdo in the unit who drinks too much, hangs out in his office, gets weird phone calls in the middle of the night and vanish for a few days or a week or two and can't tell your chain of command who is getting pissed because they don't know what you really do. You're the rear end in a top hat who comes by and demands to check people's masks or wants a full test on vehicle NBC systems, and everyone in new unit, from the CO down, thinks you're a loving drunken weirdo because you never acclimated to a normal unit. Which meant Group used you for a few years, and you were completely wrecked for any other unit.
But it was OK, because it was all about the numbers, boys and girls. The Cold War was all about numbers, and that's what mattered. Group was specifically designed to fight at the end of the world, it was all about the numbers, and that's all that mattered. For the end of the world we needed only 10% survival rate to complete our mission, and higher percentage was just gravy and increased effectiveness and killing more people at the end of the world.
You were just a number, and the idiocy reminded you of that all the loving time despite the fact that you were basically one of the Horsemen of the loving Apocalypse.
Because nobody gave a gently caress about you and you stopped caring about the rest of the world except for how to kill all of them.
So we had complete idiocy from the top down. The people who thought up Group and it's mission were goddamn idiots. The people who implemented it were idiots. The people who expanded on the unit's mission were idiots. The people who controlled the unit were idiots. The people in the unit were idiots.
I was an idiot.
There was nothing but idiots all the way through.
The Cold War, ladies and gentlemen of GiP.
quote:
Nuclear proof. Jesus Christ, that was the mantra and the goal. "Make it nuclear proof." Norway had a shitload of those, all full of "Warfighter" equipment, which basically means take naked people and fully outfit them to fight the war. Britain had a couple. France had one or two. All the NATO countries did. The idea that some of those are still sitting out there, ignored and forgotten, makes me wonder if someday some Urbex guys are going to stumble onto the jackpot.
As far as incompetent, make no mistake, while we were drunks, we were highly trained and motivated to do our jobs. Most of the other troops were highly motivated to. It's just, like any organization that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, it had its share of retards and fuckups, and when you work with dangerous and/or volatile material, fuckups are usually pretty spectacular. We didn't know how incompetent the USSR was because all we saw was how hot poo poo they were, so we were being held to this impossible standard against an enemy who apparently could walk through walls and turn invisible.
At crew levels, which was the guys running the sites, and sections like Kill Shop, Support, and Motorpool, things were just fine.
It was at Group level things started going to poo poo.
Sure, I had a nervous breakdown and challenged a Brigadier General to a fight for the 'total mastery of the universe' from on top of a stack of MRLS rounds, but I knew my poo poo. My assistant squad leader could step into my shoes if I got downed, I could pick up the slack for about half of my crew, and the whole bunch of us had guts and ingenuity.
One question that gets asked to me by people is if I would have authorized and armed certain weapons and taken part in pasting Europe. For some reason the movies like War Games made everyone think that if the balloon went up people would refuse to use NBC weapons.
Sorry to disappoint them, but I sure as poo poo would have.
And this is where some real idiocy comes into play.
They gave an 18 year old that kind of authority. Kill Shop would have given me my initial orders before they got wiped out, I'd have modified it according to how things changed on the ground, and then I would have advised the unit I was attached to as well as handed out kill packets to units going through, on how to maximize casualties and break the USSR's will to carry out the fight. The stupidity is that they gave that to an 18 year old. This wasn't "oh, you'll kill 250 people in this village with a napalm drop just to be a dick and demoralize their government and keep anyone from using the Autobahn intersection right there", this was "turn this city of 125,000 into a blasted wasteland to deny the enemy the use of anything there, even loving Twinkies, for 1,000 years because gently caress YOU!"
Like I said, I don't mean for it to sound like everyone in the Army in Europe was nothing but idiots, but it was a whole different world over there. My viewpoint was from an enlisted man, because officers were retards and even when I was an NCO I wasn't a long-time NCO so I was just jumped up enlisted. My landlord for when I lived on the economy had been a tanker under Rommel, and my and my friends would get drunk with him and listen to him ramble on for hours at a time. He'd bitch about the same thing that pissed us off. Out of touch officers, retarded NCO's, bad food, and stupid missions. I guess soldiers are the same all over.
But the upper ranks. Jesus Christ. Talk about a pack of cock sucking morons. They wanted to play their little games and look good and earn medals which directly translated to a headache and work for us. Senior NCO's were either cowards, psychotic sociopaths, retards, or high speed.
To be honest, all of Group could have vanished up its own rear end with Kill Shop being moved to 108th MI, and I wouldn't have noticed the loving difference. It sure as poo poo would have improved my performance at the very least. So some piece of poo poo Warrant Officer wants to show off for his rear end in a top hat buddies about how high speed his troops are or just wants a medal, or just wants to validate his existance, he'd task us with moving around ammunition on a piece of paper, without any knowledge of just how much two million M-16 rounds really is, and a week later we'd have to put it back how it was when someone noticed that it hosed up load order, and we'd get our rear end chewed for it even if we showed the paperwork. At one point we didn't have a regular CO because people were resigning their commissions rather than be in charge of us in our hosed up place. Which to me just meant they were whiney babies, after all, I'd been there since there was less than 20 of us in the entire unit and I was fine. If you didn't pay attention to the drinking. Or the paranoia. Or the hyper-vigilance. Or the insomnia. Or the drinking. Or the explosive violence. Or the drinking.
The driving us to the breaking point during peace-time was about the most wasteful thing I've ever seen. They'd grind at us until we broke from the pressure, and everyone broke sooner or later under the pressure. poo poo rolls downhill, the officers would get pressure for poo poo, they'd push the Senior NCO's, who'd push us. I was one of those squad leaders who didn't like to dump it all on their squad, but still we'd have to do the work and bust our loving asses till we were almost blind.
We'd noticed the NCOs and officers who talked the most about 4 hours of sleep for mission effective were the ones who never left their loving offices, were fat as gently caress, and hadn't seen live ammo since the last time they'd cheated out of their weapon qualification. There were motherfuckers at Group who felt like they could tell us mag-rats the 'right way to do things' when they'd never even seen the sites, and those guys were complete loving idiots.
One of my favorite things is that I read somewhere that only about 3K chemical weapons were pulled from Europe in 1991. Hell, I had 3K chemical rounds in one loving bunker. Hell, I had 3K nuclear munitions in like 2 bunkers total.
Of course, it does suck that when I talk about poo poo like 'nuclear proof areas' and nuclear land mines or shoulder fired nuclear weapons people look at me like I'm stupid.
But you want some idiocy. How about when I had my nervous breakdown?
We had a platoon leader say he wanted us to dig fighting positions every 100m around the site to 'defend it in case of Soviet aggression' and would not loving listen when I tried to explain to him that digging them at 100m wouldn't even cover the front of front row. So we just ignored him and went on with our lives. He tried to come out to the site once and his driver got so loving lost they ended up in Munster. I called him every day to tell him I was picking up the site and moving it to someplace secret and I'd never tell him where it was. BWAH-HA-HA! Seriously, gently caress that guy.
I got in a fight with a 5-ton. IT STARTED IT! I was walking in front of it, pissed off anyway, and for some reason it rolled forward slightly and knocked me down and into the mud. I started tearing it apart with my bare hands, right there in the motorpool, screaming at the top of my lungs at it. My crew drug me off it, threw me in the front of the Gypsy Wagon, and took me out to the site. I kicked that trucks rear end.
I choked out an Air Force officer because I thought he was a werewolf. He kept following me around asking stupid questions and the second night I suddenly jumped on his and started choking him screaming that he'd never convert us all. Then I put on his softcap, stole his weapon, climbed up on top of his car and fired off his pistol into the air shouting that at my whims and desires all Air Force personnel were hereby restricted from entering the site. Weird thing was, when I recovered, I found a V Corps memo restricting Air Force personnel from the site.
We had about a hundred trucks roll in with 'munitions upgrades' for the site and had to rack and stack that poo poo ASAP, so there I was running around with my poncho snapped around my neck like Superman charging all over the site like a nutcase. So I'm top of a truck full of MRLS rounds (new ones to replace the clicky ones) and my friend tells me that some poo poo needs inspected. I yell out "THIS IS A JOB FOR SUPERMAN!" and leap off the side. I catch the poncho on the main strut for the sideboard, it yanks me back, bounces me off the side, and drops me in the mud. So that night I shaved my head and claimed I was Lex Luthor.
I got caught break-dancing on top of stacks of MRLS rounds by a General (Still having my nervous break-down), who yelled at me to "GET THE gently caress DOWN, YOU MANIAC!" and challenged him to come up and make me. He took off his top, climbed up on the stack, and fought me in glorious hand to hand combat for the right to be "GOD-KING OF THE SITE!" while all of the privates I'd been given stared in shock and the long time members of the crew laughed and cheered. (He beat me and threw me bodily off the top of the 3-high stack and proclaimed himself the "Undisputed Overlord of All Officers Everywhere EVER" at the top of his lungs) I think he may have been crazy too.
I ran into the Wildflecken dining hall for 144th, 108th, and 168th throwing CS grenades and flashbangs screaming at the top of my lungs. I then stole an MP vehicle and drove out to the site, then blew up the MP jeep to keep the Soviets from getting a hold of it and getting a free vehicle. My crew welcomed me back and we went back to work like nothing had happened.
I went to formation completely naked except for my battle rattle and claimed I'd been mugged by Rangers who stole my clothes. When my unit tried to do something (like grab the crazy naked guy) I ran off laughing, went up to the motorpool, and stole the Gypsy Wagon. While I was loading it full of poo poo I was just grabbing at random my crew showed up, figuring it was business as usual, and we went to the site.
I would have gotten a company grade Article-15 but they found out I was cracking up because when our smart assed Platoon Leader said: "You'll all be deploying to your sites for the fall. Anyone think they can stop me from carrying out my sinister master plan?" and was doing his supervillain laugh I ran screaming to the front of the platoon and smashed him in the face with my helmet and yelled out that I was the new platoon leader and wore his helmet around till everyone chased me down and restrained me.
I got sent to 5th Floor Wurzburg and my intake got hosed up. Before I'd been seen by the doctor they took us out for a smoke break outside I jumped the orderly screaming "YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!", ran away, stole a car, and got arrested in the Class VI at Fulda just standing there guzzling down booze in the aisle. They took me back, this time doped me up with enough sedative to drop a loving horse, I slept for 3 days straight. My bloodwork showed I had high levels of chemicals (including PCP for no goddamn reason except we were burning pallets) so they kept me doped up and under lockdown for 2 weeks and my head cleared up and I was fine.
When I went up for my Field Grade Article 15 the Colonel read everything, looked at the psych report, and just gave me a suspended bust, 30 days restriction, and 30 days pay.
So they sent me back out to the site.
Because sending the maniac back out to handle nuclear weapons makes sense.
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Jun 16, 2020 14:32
worthy.
but those were definitely fun reads.
