From the
Soldier side: (I’ll write some more GSW stories later, but with Easter, I had
to write an Easter story.)
Somebody
asked me the other day what I did on my Iraq Deployment. Well, for those who haven’t read some of my
old post, I was in the 525 MKR BG. That’s
a Mess Kit Repair Brigade. For about the
first four months I took a team to several places in Iraq and we fixed damaged
Mess Kits. Our first mission was to
Fallujah (right at the end of the 2nd battle), then Mosoul, Telafar
and other places.
After one of
our jobs in April 2005, we were back at our base in Baghdad in time for
Easter. Since we were on one of the big
REMF camps, we had a great mess hall with really good chow! Easter they had a big brunch. My team and I were off duty that day, so I
slept in late (until about 0700hrs) then cleaned my weapons and gear....normal stuff.
Later, we
walked over to the mess hall (about ¾ of a mile away) and we saw our company
First Sergeant walking along. She was Regular Army and not a very bright person…but,
she tried to do a good job. As we were
walking, I said: “Hey Top, we should go invite some of the local Iraqi kids in
to have some ham and stuff.”
She looked
at me and smiled and said: “Ci Dude, that’s a nice idea.”
We walked
along a little further and one of my guys said: “Top, I think he was joking.”
Top just
looked at me…with a very confused look.
I found out later somebody explained to her that the locals didn’t any
pork.
At the time
I thought it was funny as hell, but I guess you had to have been there to
really appreciate the full effect.
6 comments:
Good one, and yeah, sounds like she was a few short of a full deck...
How did she get to be top? She that good at mess kit repair?
Old NFO, yep, she was a few bricks short of a full load...but she tried.
CP, That Top didn't actually do what we did. The unit she was in wanted a bunch of my types so they'd have a mission. Funny thing, in those days they actually had units showing up in Iraq without the types of troops they needed to do the mission!
So, when we arrived in Kuwait with our Guard unit, some of us got taken. Which overall turned out to be a good thing for us.
1. Sounds like a lot of the senior NCO's back in the bad old days.
2. One of the things that really hurt the Army back then was that they commissioned so many of their good NCO's.
3. In the early '70's when VN ramped down, most of them got RIF'ed and put their stripes back on(-but got to retire at O-2 or O-3).
4. The Army I worked with (as USMC) in the eighties was much better than the one I served in.
5. The big difference between our military and all the foreign ones I worked with was that we had a professional corps of NCO's. They maintain standards and assure the work gets done.
6. Most other armies have junior officers do the job our NCO's do.
7. Stuff gets done, but not as well. Discipline tends to be problematic.
8. Case in point: the battle of the 73rd Easting -the last meeting engagement of any note involving US forces.
9. An Army cavalry troop destroyed an Iraqi Army brigade. (140 troops versus 3000; about 30 vehicles vs 500)
10. As as someone noted (Schwartzkopf?), if the units had swapped equipment, the results would have been the same.
11. These days, I'm surprised when I run into or hear about duff SNCO's.
V/R JWest
Mr West, some of my duties before I retired was taking the new 2nd LT's out and showing them how to let the NCOs run things. The last weapons range I ran, I had SIX brand new 2nd LTs!!!
A few tried to run the range! Then the Major explained to them that they were there to learn, not screw things up since I was in charge. I was very nice and 5 of them learned alot. One still thought he should have been in charge since he was an Officer.
Mess kit jobs are a hell of a lot of fun. My only regret is that we don't get to spend as much time camping and shooting guns. I mean going on FTXs and conducting weapons training.
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