The Lance Corporal Factor By Ddick Marines... you gotta loveem! Between the end of Vietnam, and before the beginning of Desert Shield/Desert Storm, the Corps discovered maneuver warfare. We were still licking our equipment wounds, working on what today would be known as a reset, and trying to make chicken salad out of chicken sheit... at the time, it fell my lot to be the Head Wrench (Maintenance Management Officer) at the Stumps. A Colonel, from HQMC, known (behind his back...) as Rolling Roland came out from HQMC with a grandiose plan to have a Mobile Mechanized Exercise... which would involve an infantry BN (1/4... first grunts to call the desert home), beau coup tracked vehicles (SP artillery, a tank Bn,, etc., gobs of trucks, jeeps, etc...) for a five-day, live-fire exercise circumnavigating the base at 29 Palms. In total, counting jeeps with trailers, it was going to be 1,008 pieces of equipment across the line of departure... had to be the biggest deal since Inchon, maybe Lebanon, for sure. After the unit commanders had all asked Rolling what he had been smoking (we, collectively, were on our azz, and knew it, equipment wise) he countered with Well, you want me to go back to HQMC and tell the Commandant you cant do it?... it was decided that it would happen. One of the aspects of my daily duties was, that as a staff officer, from the highest headquarters on the base, I had staff cognizance over something like 32 different unit shops... the usual routine was to check in with the unit S-4, advise that I was in the area (kinda like... Im from the gubbmint... and Im here to help, and then go to the various unit shops, and check on things... Being from higher, I wasnt wildly popular, although I was in position to actually help... even had a little yellow Cushman three-wheeler from Base Motors, with a red/yellow sign on the front bumper, that read ForTrps MMO... and I scooted around the base, doing what I could, to help... Then, one fine morning, we had a staff meeting... a hows it going brief, on the preparations for the upcoming exercise... and as the turn to speak went around the table, it seemed that all was going well, that we would be ready and able to really kick some hypothetical (they werent actually shooting back...) azz. I had noted, in the perambulations about the base, that rope yarn Sunday (old nautical term for Wednesday afternoon sanctioned goofing off), as well as early libbo on Friday was still being observed... and when it came my turn to speak, in the rotation around the table of unit commanders and staff officers, my (not well considered...) comment was... Read the rest of this submission at: grunt/corps/newsletter/10022/#lance Submit your Marine Corps related stories, events, and images at: grunt/corps/stories/post/
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 14:11:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015