From the Citizen Soldier side: By 2300 hours on 17 Oct 89, I was unloading my pick-up truck at our national guard armory. I was only 5 minutes away, so I was one of the first to arrive. The First Sergeant saw me and said:"Oh great, we have at least one cop here now."
I thought:"why would they need cops for an earthquake?"
In a few minutes I was loading riot batons and other "crowd control and looter prevention devices" on the back of a 5 ton truck. I was guessing that if we had to "take care of looters" we'd be more than ready. I was thinking: "Sir, do you really need that TV set you're looting, or do I need to put a 5.56 mm round in your ass?"
We also loaded our combat engineer tools and equipment. Let me tell you something, if you have any kind of disaster, natural or man-made, the type of Army unit you really want to respond is a combat engineer unit.
An Engineer unit will have all kinds of construction equipment, skills for fixing all kinds of shit and the ability to blow things up and shoot people if needed.
Our platoon was the first to be all loaded and ready to go. Our platoon sergeant (another cop friend of mine) told us to get some sleep so we'd be ready to roll out at first light.
The other platoons were so disorganized, that they were moving stuff around all night and never got everything they needed.
We didn't get any sleep.
To be cont....
3 comments:
Knowing what you will be facing the next day, is it that easy to go to sleep?
I was there too. We were living in Palo Alto in a teeny apartment near Stanford. I was also readying for the SF Giants in the World Series when I saw the little apartment rise up and down, the earth literally rolled.
I've learned to sleep whenever I can and in any position. I could even sleep while walking guard duty in Germany.
Post a Comment