Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  Gunnery qualification at Graf requires that we proceed through a set of tank tables, from simple to complex, under various conditions of daylight and darkness while wearing gas masks and encountering NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) agents. Easier exercises lead, finally, to Table VII, which may be run but once, for final qualification. A crew that fails to qualify–to score under 800 on the 1000-point course–will face a debriefing that can have crew members reassigned to APCs or to Bradleys as infantry, or transferred from combat units altogether, retrained as cooks’ helpers or maintenance workers, even drummed from the service and returned to the street, to commence speaking (so I hear) of the chickenshit deal the army was as they seek work in other areas of life. For officers who fail it’s a time to reconsider civil service, sales, real estate, law school. The line in the air: Warriors come to play, and if they can’t get it up, it’s time to say adios, motherfuckers, and get the hell out of the way.

  The initial event–the day after setting up camp, using field latrines, eating from mess kits upwind from the smoky field kitchen–is a screening test. Under the lieutenant’s direction, Killebrew and other drivers in 2nd Platoon guide the beasts onto a target range where main guns are bore-sighted, computers are checked and clarified, and single rounds are fired (blue shells fed into the breech by yours truly) in recalibration of the system.

  “Up!” I call, to indicate that the cannon is loaded and that I’m clear of its violent recoil.

  “On the way!” Noordwink calls from the gunner’s seat on confirming the crosshairs and squeezing the trigger.

  Of an instant the belching gun rams its two-foot recoil beside me as the beast rocks like a rhino at collar and exudes an ammonia-laced cordite odor of burnt powder. The exhaust fan whirs, expelling fumes from the turret, and despite my impulse to do so I do not slam in another round and call “Up!”

  (See, Bro, how I’m working in some sense impressions like you said I should? You were right, as usual. They do add some spice, don’t they?)

  With the vehicle’s engine running, we shift to helmet intercom for conversation. There comes up, all about, a grinding sound as The Claw’s treads roll over earth. Also a smell of hydraulic fluid flowing from its working parts–you could be in a gas station under a car on a lift–joins the grinding movement. It’s an awareness of The Claw being alive. Added awareness is that I’m alive, too, in a way I’ve never been before. There are The Claw’s appendages, its movements, the working of human brains and computers, its lurching back on the belching of rounds. Rolling on, I sense not only that I belong but that the beast with its compartments is invincible, capable of crushing whatever it wishes to crush.

  In the days following we zero in The Claw’s machine guns on the same range and proceed to Tank Tables V and VI. Exercises include moving at high speed, and day and night machine gun training against pop-up and slide-out targets as we charge through ragged terrain. Stationary gun fire follows, using the .30 mm cannon mounted inside the main gun, four sets by day and four by night, three of each fired by the lieutenant and Noordwink as a pair, and a lone set of each fired by the lieutenant and me as alternate gunner. Targets pop up from hidden pockets and drop when hit by rounds.

  “Roughly a draw,” the lieutenant says. “Sergeant Noordwink’s accuracy is good, as always–though I’ll have to give Murphy the edge in speed this time out. Nor is Murphy’s accuracy bad. In fact, it’s amazing for a novice.”

  “He’s saying you whooped his ass!” Sherman confides as we sit out in the air eating from mess kits. “Whooped his ass good! Lieutenant doesn’t wanna hurt his feelings, but truth is nobody fires like that first time out on these ranges! Noordy’s fast enough, but he ain’t fast like you’re fast. You get it together, mon, you be a top gun for sure. I’ve seen some gunners, never seen nothing like that.”

  “Europe remains our mission, that’s all there is to it,” Sergeant Noordwink remarks on an occasion of the platoon’s enlisted men waiting after daybreak PT for the lieutenant to return and lead us into loading up and rolling out. News of Iraqi forces refusing to leave Kuwait keeps coming over AFN Radio.

  “Think about it for a minute. A front-line unit like 2nd Cav leaving its sector unprotected? The Wall may be down and the Rooskies may be different, but they’re still the Rooskies. You’re gonna load your most lethal armor onto boats and leave Europe’s belly unguarded? I don’t think so. The rumors are a ruse…to get Iraq’s attention.”

  Gunnery practice follows day after day. For each set we race through a noisy, dusty, hard-slamming firing routine as if our target loads are the real thing and are generating the hundred-ton recoil we’ll experience if we take the big beasts into combat and fire live ammo. We sweat and shout as a team, targets are picked up by the commander and/or gunner on separate thermal-imaging screens (sensitive enough to identify lone individuals), the gunner calls “Identify!” to confirm, and “On the way!” as he fires. Recoil occurs as I slam new rounds into the breech as quickly as possible and call “Up!” to say the cannon is ready to be fired again and that I’m not in danger of being crushed…until the lieutenant calls “Hold it!” and a pause commences.

  Sweat, noise, focus. Speed and accuracy. It’s never a time to let your mind meander. “Taking it downtown is not an occasion for wool gathering in a tank,” the lieutenant likes to say.

  Tank Table VII is a practice firing that can be repeated in anticipation of the crucial Tank Table VIII. The latter is a one-time-only combat firing on a different range and is scored like a final exam. Each table includes moving out, day and night firing while slamming over rough terrain at thirty, thirty-five miles per hour. An M1A1 can move at forty while firing accurately with computer assistance at targets over four thousand meters away. The mix of lethal weapons can be used simultaneously, including HEAT and Sabot rounds from the main gun, .30 mm cannon fire from within the main gun, and .50 caliber and 7.62 coax machine gun fire.

  (“In World War One,” Lieutenant Kline notes, “a lone M1A1, pending availability of fuel and ammo, could have ripped through an entire German army. Entire French, British, and American armies, too! Nothing could have stopped us, not ever.”)

  For one set I need, as loader, to dismount through the loader’s hatch and leave the gunner to load as the TC fires by override. When I climb out and jump free of the moving vehicle the first time, it’s into a dry late August afternoon. I watch The Claw rumble off, raising dust and firing–its main gun belching rounds is louder without than within–looking as alive to me as a seventy-ton bucking bronco working with a ton of electronic brains.

  I fire Table VII for practice as alternate gunner, leaving Sergeant Noordwink to reclaim the gunner’s seat for the Table VIII requalification firing. “Alternate gunner’s familiarization!” the lieutenant calls over the radio net as we begin the course. It may be familiarization, but our time and accuracy are in fact Geo Troop showstoppers as The Claw rumbles on. With my butt just above the seat I have the cannon belching fire, the turret pivoting to belch again, swinging right to belch again, returning to center to belch again…one target after another dropping as in a dream.

  TC: “Tank left front! Fire!”

  Gunner: “Identify! On the way!”

  Loader: “Up!”

  TC: “PC, left front! Say-bo!”

  Gunner: “Identify! On the way!”

  Loader: “Up!”

  TC: “Tank! Direct front! Say-bo!”

  Gunner: “Identify! On the way!”

  Loader: “Up!”

  TC: “Bull’s eye! Bull’s eye! Kicking ass! Friendly! Right front! Bypass! PC! Left front!”

  Gunner: “Identify tank left front! On the way! Say-bo city!”

  TC: “Bull’s eye! Bull’s eye! Say-bo city for sure. Gunner, I like your style!”

  Sabot (pronounced say-bo) rounds are sharply pointed high-penetration rounds fired from within the main cannon (as opposed to high-explosive-anti-tank HEAT rounds) and have Sherman alone saying “sa-boe.” It’s i
n the vein of him saying “mon” rather than “man” while the reason for his wordplay is anyone’s guess.

  “Incredible shooting from The Claw!” the lieutenant calls as we turn to circle back on the return road. “Incredible! I hoped we’d have a ringer here and troops, as you may have noticed, your glorious leader has been right again! Impressive reflexes, Murphy. Great style…which, as you may know, turns all things to gold.”

  “Hear, hear,” Sherman says from the loader’s position. “Better than I did my first time out. Remember, sir? Was slow, bypassed targets, took out two friendlies.”

  “Three,” the lieutenant says, making everyone in The Claw snicker and gurgle.

  “Don’t know why you kept me, sir,” Sherman replies. “Thought for sure it was off to breaking eggs and flipping jacks.”

  “Better breaking shells here than in the mess hall where we’d have to eat your mistakes,” the lieutenant says, drawing “Ooohs” of disapproval throughout The Claw. “In any case, good eye, Murphy,” the lieutenant adds.

  “Nice work,” comes from Noordwink, letting me know that I’m being accepted.

  The Claw’s scores in stationary firing, high-speed firing, firing with the TC riding as observer are passable for each set of targets while it’s on my turn in the gunner’s seat (if I may say so) that we achieve ‘distinguished.’ Above the gunner’s seat, I should say, because I never let my butt settle in. Sherman rides as loader when I fire, and we mesh as a team. He can slam rounds into the breech with lightning speed and, giving all focus to the screen–forehead riding the head rest–I’m able to fix crosshairs in a fluid movement of handles, telling myself no! to friendlies, calling “Tank! Left front! On the way!” when it’s time to squeeze off a round.

  As the recoil lifts the front of the on-charging beast half a dozen inches, I ride my body on into the next target, call “PC! Direct front! On the way!” and send another round belching from The Claw’s main gun. Three shots. In firing speed, they belch in at six to eight seconds each. But when the lieutenant says, “Good work, got us a dynamic duo here…a pair of point guards for the state champions!” there occurs the first racial moment in my time in Germany in The Claw.

  “Aren’t hoop references racist, sir?” Sherman says.

  “Sherman, get a life,” the lieutenant replies. “Three rounds and three hits in twenty seconds is incredible work! Nothing racist about it. Let me tell you, I do not like the R-word! You use it, you better know what you’re talking about in my tank! You know in your heart I was issuing a compliment. You’re just ragging me, right?”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I say so!”

  “Yes sir,” Sherman says, while I ask myself what just happened. A racial incident in The Claw? Sherman confronting the lieutenant for calling us ‘point guards’? Have African Americans been brainwashed unto simplemindedness? My response to Sherman, left unsaid: Grow up, for chrissakes! Stop whining about ancient history! Stop reading racism into everything that is said!

  Our score doesn’t make the top ten but places no less than fifth in the squadron’s sixty pairings and brings congratulations from the captain. “Geo, White One, you got yourself some shooters who are only going to get better,” the captain comes on radio net to say for all to hear. “First time we’ve ever made the top ten! Was the real thing, woulda kicked Rooski butt all the way to Siberia.”

  Rooski butt? Have to say that this sounds off to me, too. Iraqi butt is the target now, there’s no doubt about it. Are these vets not reading Stars & Stripes and tuning in? Everything on AFN and in Stars & Stripes has Iraqis in Kuwait as our focus, not Rooskis in former East Germany or anywhere else. Have they trained to fight Rooskis for so long they can’t see any other enemy?

  Hygiene and housekeeping chores take up much of our time in the field, when we’re not practicing gunnery and movement in the mud-bellies. Eating, washing, shaving, polishing, oiling. PT. For privates and PFCs, added work details and guard duty. Shit details.

  Most talk, I notice, keeps going not to the running of Table VIII or XII (four tanks in each platoon firing in twenty-four-hour day-and-night teamwork scenarios that obliterate the enemy while using combat engineer and artillery support plus coordination with Apache and Cobra airships overhead…extended exercises designed to avoid fratricide) but to the simulated warfare maneuvers that lay ahead at Hohenfels, a hundred klicks away, and the outrageous and unfair nastiness everyone–but for the lieutenant–says we will have to endure.

  “We always lose bad…a downer for a man’s self-esteem…which is why they make us do it,” Sherman says as we sit near The Claw, systems off, waiting to be checked out for the next day’s running of Table VIII.

  “Meet the challenge, think how your self-esteem soars,” the lieutenant says from where he’s sitting on a tank fender.

  “Not what I learned in Philadelphia, sir,” Sherman says. “Feeling positive helps in life, sir.”

  “Sorry if they got it backwards in Philadelphia, Sherman. Army’s not in the business of making people feel good for being incompetent.”

  “Coming on a little strong here, aren’t we, sir? This have to do with the racial issue the other day?”

  “Sherman, it doesn’t have to do with race, so give it a rest. Has to do with self-esteem and the army’s strategy of knocking you down a peg to see if you’re man enough to get up wiser than you were before! Believe me, you overcome obstacles on your own, self-esteem will intoxicate your psyche and lead to new achievement, even leadership. You’ll be a man, my son. Self-esteem’s one thing I have a handle on. Lots of civilians think the army is dumb, which is a dumb idea in itself. You want to grow up, sign up. Stand up and be a man. You’ll love it because you’ll learn to love yourself.”

  “Yes sir,” Sherman says mockingly, which the Lieutenant–having seized the opportunity to round out his earlier lecture–lets pass.

  August 1990

  Iraqi troops stormed into the desert sheikdom of Kuwait today, seizing control of its capital city and its rich oilfields, driving its ruler into exile, plunging the strategic Persian Gulf region into crisis and sending tremors of anxiety around the world. Witnesses in Kuwait said that hundreds of people were killed or wounded as Iraqi ground forces, led by columns of tanks, surged into the desert emirate at the head of the gulf.

  –The New York Times, August 3, 1990

  Armed and audacious, Saddam Hussein took Kuwait and no one knew how to stop him. With hindsight it looked so obvious, so wickedly brilliant. There sat Kuwait, fat and ripe, bulging with enormous reserves of oil and cash, boasting an excellent port on the Persian Gulf…utterly incapable of defending itself against Iraq’s proficient war machine.

  –TIME Magazine, August 13, 1990

  Iraq’s “proficient war machine” forcing our mud-bellies into a stalemate? I don’t know about that. True, the threat is scary when it gets put like that. At the same time, it has most of us focusing on getting things right. I know firsthand that our crews are competitive and motivated. I can’t see anybody outgunning our superior weapons and equipment. I guess the Russian tanks rolling into Kuwait are good…but are they that good? Do the critics at home have any idea how advanced our equipment is or how disciplined and competitive we are as crews? Do they think we’re relics of Vietnam? If that’s what they think, they’re caught in a time-think we’re relics of Vietnam? If that’s what they think, they’re caught in a time-warp and are going to be in for a surprise.

  Hohenfels is going to be hell to pay and more, we keep hearing. Having practiced gunnery at Graf, we’ll be up against an opposing force (OPFOR) of highly trained U.S. soldiers who relish their roles as the teachers of brutal lessons. OPFOR knows the terrain, holds every advantage of surprise, imagination, intelligence, dirty tricks, armaments more advanced than our own. They face one U.S. combat unit after another (which units visit twice a year) while they’re dug in and motivated to kick our asses into yesterday. They cheat, commit sabotage, unleash every NBC agent k
nown to man. They taunt and inflict humiliation on every level, personal and professional. I learn that even if my sensor is not beeping, letting me know that I’m alive (if disabled by wounds) that their unfair behavior will persist and arouse heated anger. At the same time, the losing of one’s cool in retaliation against an OPFOR soldier will have a tanker or dismount scout arrested by MPs and returned to base under charges of contempt, to be fined and reduced in grade, to eat more crap than would have had to have been swallowed in the first place. You see…war is hell.

  “We rated less for winning than for how intelligently we play the game,” the lieutenant tells us time and again.

  “Means we always lose,” Noordwink adds.

  “Whoa, now,” the lieutenant says. “Three percent of the time OPFOR is made to eat it by somebody. Okay, two percent. Maybe less than two.”

  “We lose ninety-nine percent of the time?” Noordwink inquires. “Truth is, I’ve never seen anyone beat OPFOR at Hohenfels. Ever!”

  “Wherein lies the lesson,” the lieutenant notes. “Gives you a charge for when the ammo is real, the bayonets are razor sharp, and it’s life or death.”

  “What it is,” Sergeant Noordwink corrects, fixing on me as the newcomer. “We’ll be taking on entrenched superior forces in their backyard. Their weapons are calibrated better than ours, as is their training…they live to kick our ass and get promoted for doing so.”

  Lieutenant Kline: “You’re getting it. That’s the idea. Developing an edge.”

  Sergeant Noordwink: “It’s true, sir.”

  Lieutenant Kline: “In Kuwait–which is where we may be going–we’ll be facing Russian T-72s, which, in theory, are competitive with our M1A1s.”