To continue the saga, I finished the Infantry Officer Basic Course (OBC) not with distinction but with a bump up in my academic efficiency report for completing a history project. Again, that and ten cents…., snackbar, coffee, etc. What I did learn in my history project was that all the cowboy movies about the Army in the west were untrue because the soldiers almost always had Winchester rifles blazing away at the Indians. Turns out that the Army never bought the Winchester for troop issue. Why, you ask? Because the only gunpowder available at the time was still black powder and the clouds of smoke generated by rapid fire quickly obscured the battlefield. The French invented smokeless powder about the time we were subduing the Indians, but the formula was a closely guarded state secret which they (the French, not the Indians) refused to share. Selfish bastards that they are. The movies do show them firing their Winchesters with smokeless powder, however. So, if you can’t trust Hollywood, who the hell can you trust? But, as usual, I digress.
I entered Jump School the week after OBC. I was in good physical condition so was not concerned about completing that course. Unfortunately, as some of you will recall, the asphalt path we ran on was sloped towards the jump towers to provide drainage. My right knee objected to that slanted path at the end of the first day of Ground Week. I did not think much of it and slathered it with Bengay and took two aspirin and drove on at bedtime which was the Army treatment standard for most ailments back in the day.
But it wasn’t enough. As I was favoring my right knee and was assigned as the permanent rope man (the fellow that has to pull the trolleys back to the tower on the steel cable after each jumper finishes his trolley slide to the berm after executing a hopefully satisfactory exit from the tower), my left knee started objecting to the favoritism shown to its partner, the right knee, and it too became red and swollen.
I became the permanent rope man by innocently answering a question from the cadre jumpmaster in the 34 foot tower. He asked where I had been because all of the other West Pointers had gone through jump school in August (Those would have been classmates going to branches other than infantry for the most part I believe.) I told him I’d been in OBC. He asked why the hell I had to go to OBC because didn’t West Point teach me all that stuff? I told him no, West Point doesn’t teach that stuff. He asked then what the hell does it teach you and I said I didn’t know other than how to be a general, I guess. He thought I was being flippant, but I was actually serious. I hadn’t been in the Army long enough to know what the value of my academy education was just yet. Anyhow, he assigned me to permanent rope man duties.
By Wednesday of Ground Week, both knees were the size of softballs and hurt like hell. I would get up at 0200 to soak in a hot tub to try to reduce the swelling and the pain each day. I would then take four aspirin and go back to jump school. I was limping on the runs but my peers would warn me when a cadre member was approaching while we were doing the morning run so I could straighten up. Several of the cadre knew I was injured and would check me out very closely during the run each day. I was limping while executing my rope man duties running back and forth with the trolley for each jumper but that was apparently acceptable. In the Airborne mentality, you just couldn’t limp during a run. I was passed on to the cadre in Tower Week as a rope man. After my conversation with the sergeant about the pros and cons of a West Point education, I only got to exit the tower for my training one other time for the rest of the course.
We got to Tower Week and I had spent the weekend nursing my knees and therefore not searching for the love of my life. By Monday the swelling had gone down a bit. I started Tower Week in hopes of melting into the crowd, but no, as soon as we had finished the run, I was called out to be the rope man again. I did rope man duties for the next two days but on the first rope man duty on Wednesday, I very deliberately tried to pull the airborne sergeant manning the tower out of the tower. I did that by not slowing down with the trolley as I approached the tower as was required while the jumpmaster sergeant was leaning out to grab it to hook up the next jumper. Instead I sprinted as fast as I could (and yes it hurt like hell) and slammed the trolley past the tower on the steel cable and pulled the sergeant almost completely out of the tower. The surprised look on his face was worth it all as he scrambled not to fall out and be dangling on his monkey strap (i.e., Jumpmaster Safety Strap, Webbing, Cotton, 3 inch, 1 Each, OD in Color by actual Army nomenclature) which attached him to the tower. If he had been dangling by his monkey strap, we both knew the other instructors would never let him live it down. He probably would have been nicknamed Sergeant Monkey Strap or just Monkey Strap for the rest of his airborne career. Either way, I wasn’t going to be rope man anymore. They could just eat my shorts; I wasn’t going to do it!
I needn’t have worried on that score. Almost Sergeant Monkey Strap says, “Lieutenant, did you just try to pull me out of the tower?” I said, “You’re goddamned right I did! I’m done with being the goddamned rope man!” Monkey Strap says, “Okay, LT, take it easy. Why don’t you go over to that bench there and sit down and take a break. Just take a break, sir and I’ll get another rope man. You just take it easy, sir.”
Now the cadre never called you sir. They either addressed you by your last name or by your student number plastered on the front and back of your helmet in big letters. I caught the significance on being called sir again. A juniorcadre NCO with clearly not enough to do, came over to where I was sitting and started screwing with me to stand up, beat my boots, do push ups etc. when the tower sergeant (Monkey Strap in case I’m not being clear enough) told the dip shit NCO to get the hell away from me and to mind his own explicative, explicative, explicative business. The NCO slunk away as directed. Clearly Monkey Strap also thought he was a dip shit, so I was not alone. From then on, I was left alone and finished Tower Week.
We went into Jump Week and I was still limping. The NCO’s who knew I was hurt only came by once during the runs down to Lawson Army Airfield and the jump aircraft waiting there. My buddies warned me and one time an NCO even announced himself as approaching so I could quit limping.
We made five jumps out of C-123 aircraft which were two engine versions of a C-130. My jump log given to me upon graduation said we had jumped out of 4 C-130’s and one C-141 and never mentioned a C-123 but they were preprinted and had your name on it, so it was official. The C-123 has to have its doors removed in order to jump out of it. They cannot be opened in flight. The result was a deafening roar from the engines which were right outside the doors. Another result of the proximity of the engines to the door was the plane being noted for having a “dirty tail”. What that meant was the airflow past the door from the engines was so horrific that it took your parachute deployment bag and spun that rascal in circles while your chute was deploying which meant your parachute risers with twisted from your neck all the way to the canopy so you spent a considerable effort bicycling your legs while pulling on the your risers to untwist. You can’t pull on the risers to control the direction of the chute if the risers are twisted. This was critical when it was time to land and you needed to pull the appropriate risers to tilt your chute into the wind to reduce your rate and speed of drift. If you screwed that little maneuver up, you increased your rate of drift and usually got to execute a feet, ass and head parachute landing fall (PLF) landing rather than the approved ”balls of your feet, calves, thighs, buttocks and small of the back” PLF.
As I was doing this untwist dance on all five of my jumps, I landed on top of someone else’s parachute on every jump. The drill upon doing so is to run across the chute which is like trying to run in marshmallow and jump off the side. I dutifully did so five times but could never find out whose chute I landed on. Nobody would fess up for stealing the air from my parachute. Oh, I forgot to tell you that part. As you’re trying to run off the other fellow’s chute, your chute losses its air and starts coming down around your ears as it deflates. You have to “dash” off (although you can’t) before you get entangled in your chute and it doesn’t reopen once you finally jump off. All this sucks big time and takes most of the fun out of jumping.
On my fifth and final jump I landed for the fifth and final time in all my 69 total jumps on someone’s chute again. I was getting very proficient at this drill by this time so ran off the chute. I landed well away from the rest of my stick and was rolling up my chute to limp/run to the turn in point when a jeep came flying over the hill towards me. The NCO in the jeep in a frantic voice asked me where the guy was who had just landed out by me. I told him there was no one else nearby that I had seen coming down. He got a funny look on his face and told me to give him ten pushups. I told him I had made my final jump for jump school and was out of the pushup business. I probably added an explicative or two as I said it. He still had the funny look on his face and said, “Sir, I need you to do the ten pushups so I can see you are all right.” I told him of course I was all right and it was bullshit and I wasn’t going to do it. He said, “Sir, your chute never reinflated after you jumped off that other chute and you streamered in from what we saw. So please do the pushups.” Well, this was news to me. The jump landing hadn’t felt any different to me, so I just shrugged and did the ten pushups. The NCO got out of his jeep, collected my parachute kit bag for me and put it in the jeep. Then he told me to hop in because I deserved a ride back to the turn in point. According to him, I had streamered in the last two hundred feet of the jump. Again, it felt the same to me! I was an item of great interest to the airborne cadre at the turn in point, all of them asking me how I felt, etc. Several of them who had known about my knees being injured congratulated me for gutting it out. My chute not reinflating explained why I landed so far away from everybody else. They drifted on the wind for several hundred more yards away from me. I came straight down.
I was just glad to get a few days off after jump school before starting Ranger school the following week. We had been lucky on the weather and got in all five of our jumps by Wednesday afternoon. I could not contain or reduce the swelling and pain in my knees, so I went on sick call Thursday morning. As my luck would have it, I got a doc who was an embittered total asshole. We started off my “treatment” by him asking me if I had gone to West Point. I said I had. He then looked at my knees and said I had severe tendonitis in both knees. I asked him if I could get something to fix them and get a delay for Ranger school. I knew I couldn’t make the runs and road marches in Ranger school with my knees still the size of softballs. In response, he informed me that he had been drafted into the Army right out of med school and he was really pissed about it and would not help a West Point graduate since we had all chosen a “life of violence” and deserved whatever bad happened to us. That took me rather aback and I asked again to be deferred from Ranger school to recover first. His response was “You can’t make it though Ranger school with your knees this way but good luck next week in Ranger school anyway. I won’t help you.” He was a smug little shit and I didn’t know enough about the medical system to ask to see another doctor. I hope he got out of the Army, went into a very lucrative medical practice and got run over by a large bus while he was counting his loot after the first week.
I reported to Ranger school and gutted it out the first four days of City Week. On the fifth day, I could not walk at all. I was pretty much carried to sick call and was diagnosed with acute tendonitis in both knees and medically dropped from the course. I reported back to the school and the camp commandant, Colonel David Grange, Sr. asked me if I wanted to continue in the next class slated to start after the Christmas break. He said the Ranger Instructors (RI’s) all knew I was injured when I started and had reported that they would support me entering the next class. Colonel Grange said their remarks were very laudatory which was nice to hear. My first duty assignment unit, the 82d Airborne Division would have to approve my attendance, however but Colonel Grange said he would call them if I agreed. I readily agreed.
Colonel Grange’s call to the Division G1 was not successful. The G1 said the 82d was short infantry lieutenants and that I was required to report before the end of the year in late December. By this time it was the first week in December. Colonel Grange argued with the G1 but he would not relent. He said it was matter of utmost importance for me to report before the monthly readiness report was done for December. Imagine! A single lieutenant would make a difference to a division that was always kept at about 110% strength and would have a bearing on the whole division’s readiness report. It was all BS, but I was unwise to all that stuff at the time so believed what the G1 said. Colonel Grange apologized to me for his lack of success and said he would always have a slot for me at the school as long as he was commandant. I thought the world of Colonel Grange at the time and was able to serve with him again several times down the road when he was Lieutenant General Grange and one of the BCTP wisemen/gray beards. What a great soldier!
So, they had to find something to do with me for two weeks at Ranger school pending my Christmas leave and reporting in to the 82d. I was instructed to see the Senior TAC NCO for the school. I unfortunately cannot remember his name, but he was harder than woodpecker lips. If you were unlucky enough to draw his attention to you as a ranger student, it was going to be painful. He had and deserved a reputation for being a hard, hard man. So that’s who I went to see. I introduced myself and told him Colonel Grange said I was to help him out for the next two weeks. He eyed me askance and called me “ranger” which is what all the students were called in the school regardless of rank by the cadre. I politely informed him that he must address me either as lieutenant or sir and that I was no longer a ranger student and hence would not be addressed as “ranger” by him or anybody else. That put him into almost a state of shock. He slowly recovered and without saying anything, showed me to an empty office and mumbled something. I assumed that was where I would be working. I sat down at an empty desk and waited.
I waited all the remainder of that day without another word from the senior TAC NCO. The next morning the senior TAC NCO came into my office and deposited a very large cardboard box on my desk. He said “Lieutenant, these are the records for the last six or seven years of Ranger school. They have never been verified and I need you to go through all the records, add up the points for each patrol for each ranger student and make sure what we had was right.” I told him I’d certainly do that. I asked him what I was to do if I found an error. He said if the ranger should have graduated, I was to fill out a form to amend his official records and notify the individual or his unit by telephone if I could not reach the individual. I asked what to do if a ranger had actually failed and had been awarded his ranger tab by mistake and he looked at me for a minute and just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, he lucked out then, didn’t he?” There being no such thing as a calculator back then, it was going to be a long process of addition to go through several thousand student records. I pulled out the first of the class folders, a pencil and paper and started adding scores up.
A little later in the day I noticed that the old World War II office building we were in was getting bitterly cold. Benning was having a cold snap and the outside temperature was not getting much above 30 degrees during the day. I went down the hall and asked the senior TAC NCO if I could turn the heat up and he said we didn’t have any heat to turn up. He said we had an old coal furnace under the building, but it didn’t work. I took him at his word and went back to my math. Of note, back then there was a graduation category for Ranger school to graduate but without a ranger tab being awarded. Why they would ever have a such a category was beyond me, but it was in there. That is where I found the most math errors and quite a number of students should have been awarded their tab and were not. I started calling units and one unit responded with, “Why that SOB has been wearing a ranger tab since he got here!” I told him that was good because he had earned it.
When the duty day was over, the senior TAC NCO bid me goodnight and left. Out of curiosity I wandered around the back of the building and looked under it where the coal furnace would be located. I noted that there was a coal bin behind the building, and it contained coal which was pretty strange if the furnace didn’t work but I did notice that the coal was covered in dirt, dust and pine needles and had obviously been there awhile. I opened the door to the furnace and saw that the inside was stuffed with coal, twigs, leaves and all manner of debris and clearly hadn’t been opened in a long while. Some attempts had been made to light the debris based upon the partially burned fragments in the furnace. I made a note of that and headed back to the BOQ.
Early the next morning about an hour before the senior TAC NCO would come in, I revisited the furnace. I pulled out all the old crap that was in it and put in the newspaper I had brought with me. I made a loose pile of the paper and used the twigs I had taken out along with more from the pines behind the building and some pinecones, loosely topped it all with a few chunks of coal and lit the paper. I made sure the flue to the furnace stack was open before I lit the paper. I had looked into the furnace beforehand to make sure the stack was clear. I could see light from the sun coming down the stack when I looked. The paper, twigs and pinecones lit the coal satisfactorily and I fed more coal in slowly around the outside of the ignited coals making sure they touched and finished with a few more coal chunks sprinkled on top. I went up to my office and got back to work, leaving every 20 minutes or so to check the furnace and feed in more coal. I had learned all about Army coal furnaces from my dad when I was a kid and we vacationed up in Rhode Island at an old World War II Army post converted to MWR use. After an hour or two, the office building had warmed up considerably which brought the senior TAC NCO to my office.
“Hey, lieutenant, do you feel heat?” I told him I did. He wondered where the hell it was coming from. I told him it was coming from the coal furnace. He wanted to know if the post engineers had come and finally fixed it because he sure as hell didn’t call them. I told him it wasn’t broken and just needed to be cleaned out and relit. He asked how I knew that shit? I told him I had done it; cleaned it out and relit it. He again asked how I knew that shit! I told him about my dad teaching me. He asked about my dad. I told him my dad was an infantry officer and was still in Vietnam finishing up his fourth combat tour. So, we chatted for a while. As he was getting ready to leave, he asked if I would fire the furnace up again the next morning because it sure was nice. I told him I’d be happy to do so and asked if he wanted to learn about the furnace and he said he definitely did for later after I moved on to Bragg. We did that together the next morning and he was pretty excited about it. You can teach old dog new tricks it seems. (Sure hope so since I’m an old dog now!)
For the uninitiated and in case you ever have to light a coal furnace in an old World War II building (good luck on finding one anymore, particularly with a coal furnace still intact!), the secret to the next day’s fire is to properly bank the coals in the furnace the night before and cut down the air flow so they pretty much smolder through the night but don’t go out. Putting fresh coal on top in the morning and leaving the furnace door open to get plenty of air will get you back in business in short order.
I finished my two and half weeks at the ranger school and was at the point where I was allowed to call the senior TAC NCO “Top” and lounge in his office when I took a smoke break. He was one hell of a soldier; the type you don’t run into very often. The end of the story is I finished up all the records and corrected the horrible ranger math which made several dozen fellows out in the Army very happy when they learned they had actually passed and earned the tab.
The old senior TAC NCO also had a farewell gift for me which I was unaware of. After my classmates who had been in that ranger class came to the 82d several months after I got there, one of them showed me his ranger school graduation orders. He pointed to my name prominently on the orders as a graduate with tab of ranger school and asked if I had come back to the class and he just hadn’t run in to me? I laughed and said, no, I had not come back, and I was not a graduate of ranger school. He said those orders could go into my records because they were official. He was somehow worried I would take advantage of those erroneous orders, but he needn’t have worried. We hadn’t known each other at the academy so he didn’t know me. I laughed when he showed me the orders because I knew exactly who put my name on that list. As I said, he was a hell of a soldier! He knew I wouldn’t take advantage of the orders but was sending me a message he thought I was okay in his book, tab or no tab. Or, probably more accurately, their record keeping at ranger school had all gone to hell again!
Next update in the saga (fairytale?); arriving at the 82d Airborne Division. Finally! I was officially sooomebody when that happened!
Good read! I’m looking forward to the next one!
Another great story, Bill!
Awesome read Sir. Look forward to the next read. Sledgehammer!!!!