by Deja Poo on Sep 20 2009 6:18 am
Back in the late summer or early fall of 1981, when I was in the Army, we had been out on maneuvers for about two or three days, which mostly amounted to walking here or walking there. Besides all of the usual day stuff like lectures on field craft and working the courses, we were doing a lot of night stuff as well. One day we'd spent out on the range learning how to use our weapons at night and the next evening we had done night infiltration, which amounted to crawling across an open field while they shot (or claimed to shoot as it didn't sound like an M-60 to me) machine guns overhead.
On our last day of being out in the field, we had been doing a lot of work, mostly on the ranges but I think we had also done a couple of different offense/defense courses. We had gone back to the lager and set up our tents. At the meal that had been trucked in when we were told that this evening we would be doing the night patrol and night ambush course.
My squad pulled night patrol first. It was actually pretty simple. There was no real objective so it amounted to marching down a path through the woods for an unspecified distance. When you entered the kill zone, the night ambush folks would start shooting. Once the shooting started, we were supposed to return fire and then assault through the ambushers' positions. Then we would sit down with our respective observers and get critiqued on our performance. Everything went as planned on our patrol. We had a short 5-minute debriefing and then headed back to the bivouac.
At this point, everybody was pretty tired but we knew that we had to go back out again, so trying to sleep was pointless. When we finally go out our orders about an hour later, We grabbed up our gear, got our observer, the Platoon Sargeant, and set out. Fortunately, we didn't have to walk far, maybe 20 to 30 minutes before we were in our designated location. We found the high ground overlooking the path that the patrol was supposed to come down, set out our positions (which amounted to clearing away some leaves and putting up some aiming stakes) and settled down.
Because it was so late, we were on a 50-50 watch, which means one person slept while the other stood watch. Or, in our case, laid watch because we were laying in ambush. So, my "battle buddy" got into his position a couple of yards from me and I settled into mine. I laid there in the woods, under the clear, warm Kentucky sky, thinking about nothing in particular ...and promptly fell asleep.
It was a deep sleep too. And I had no idea how long I had been asleep either. I was startled awake by the sound of small arms fire. I didn't know where it was coming from and I didn't care either as I was still in a daze from having just been jolted out of sleep and now had a head full of adrenaline going. I grabbed my rifle and started shooting down range. Of course, I forgot the golden rule: know what your shooting at before you start shooting. Fortunately, I was still oriented in the right direction although I didn't know it at the time. Even more fortunately, our rifles were loaded with blanks.
When the squad leader finally hollered out for us to cease fire -- which was moot at that point because I had already emptied my only remaining magazine -- I kind of half expected to get my ass chewed out severely and maybe even have to pull some crappy details for the next couple of weeks. I had made several huge mistakes and I knew it.
Surprisingly, we didn't have an after-action. The observers went off out of earshot and talked amongst themselves while we sat around and waited. I didn't want to talk with Derek because I had seriously fucked up and he didn't seem interested in talking either, so we sat there quietly waiting for something to happen. The Platoon Sergeant, instead of calling us down to the path which would be the usual place for us to debrief, told us that we were going back to the bivouac and to grab our gear. We formed up and set out. I expected that we would do our debriefing there.
However, at the bivouac, we were told to go get some rest and that we would be setting out for our barracks after breakfast. At this point, I figured that everybody was too tired to do anything, that there would be no debriefing and that I had just gotten very lucky.
Back in the barracks, life was back to normal in a couple of days. We did our usuall drills, pulled our usual details and talked about the usual crap including our recent manuevers. Curiously, though, nobody in the squad seemed really interested in talking about the night patrol/night ambush course. That was fine by me. I was horribly ashamed. I had made one serious blunder after another, any of which could have gotten me or the guys in the squad killed or injured. The less said about it the better.
A couple of weeks later, however, I was talking with the squad leader. He told me about that night's events. The guys on night patrol had come down the path and marched right past us. They had gone on for about a half mile when they realized that they had gone too far, turned around and marched past us in the other direction. When they were about half way back to the bivouac, they turned around again and headed down the path. When nothing happened, their observer turned the squad up towards our position and started the assault with their rifles blazing. I guess that's when I woke up. As it turns out, everybody in the squad including our observer, had fallen asleep. Fortunately, the other observer was from Company and not from Battalion. We never heard about it from the Company CO. I guess that Captain decided that the desire to chew out our collective asses was outweighed by not having to answer a bunch of uncomfortable questions to Battalion or Regiment.
Excuse me, but would you mind holding that thought for a minute? I would hate to miss a moment of this conversation but I feel a vicious shit coming on and I must really bear down on this turd.
