Anyway, I did the duffel bag drag down to the 400th and embarked on a new adventure. Actually, all I did was report to work at a different place -- I was living off-post at the time in a little house I shared with Lou Holm. We paid $125 a month plus utilities for an old two-bedroom house at #12 Keithville. We had moved in during pre-phase training back in June 1979, and one of us was always out in the woods anyways, so it was like living alone. Lou was in the class ahead of me through phase training. We were both engineers, so he was able to tell me what I would be running into ahead of time. Very useful.

Funny story about that house. It had oil heat, and we were spending all of our money on necessities like liquor and John Wayne equipment to get us through SF training. We went through the winter without buying a whole hell of a lot of heating oil. Just didn't need it. The house was stone and stayed above freezing all through the winter. We were off training a lot, living out in the woods in a poncho hootch, so just being indoors was pretty cushy. The house never fell below 35 degrees all winter, but never got above 50 either. Anyway, in late March after I had reported in with the 400th, we had a freak snow storm in the Fayetteville area. About nine inches of snow and the temperature dropped like a stone. The temperature in the house, for the first time, dipped below freezing. We had to put stuff in the refrigerator to keep it from freezing. What a hoot. We just bundled up a little bit more, poured some more Jim Beam-and-Mr.-Pibb, cranked up the TV and settled in to await the thaw.

I think that finally got to Lou. He was getting settled into the Demo School committee in the training group, had a routine, and was thinking that the good life beckoned. He had met Jackie, his future wife, and I guess he was thinking that it had to get better than this. He ended up married and sort of settled down within the year. He got out of the Army when his hitch was up and moved to Tennessee and got set up in the pawn shop business by his father-in-law. I eventually lost touch with him, but I did run into him years later in the Reserves. After I got out, I signed up with an SF company in Columbus, Georgia, and he signed up with one in his area. We ran into each other at annual training camp up in Vermont or New York or some damn place, but eventually we both drifted out of the Reserves and I comletely lost track of him.

Anyway, back to the 400th.

There were some characters in the 400th. A lot of those guys had been with the 400th or in SF for years and years -- mostly the 05Hs. There were three of us 98Cs, but we seemed to come and go with an alarming regularity.

I've split this up into pieces, mostly based on the surviving set of pictures that I have. I lost an entire scrapbook of photos when I left Fort Bragg, which was a crying shame, but I did keep some pretty good ones, mostly of the insanity. I had a good time and really enjoyed the people. It also spoiled me for the rest of the Army. How could you go back to being an office pogue after running around with these guys?

Augsburg TDY - 1980

Gary Weese and I were the two 98Cs. He was an SFC with about a dozen years in and was one of the funniest guys I ever knew. He had gone to college for a short time in the early 1960s and had studied fraternity partying. He didn't get a degree, but he certainly had it down to a science. We were all esconced in an open bay at the top of one of the barracks, which was fine by us, and someone (Weese or Dave Carden) decided that we needed to have a toga party. Because they operated those goofy shifts at FS Augsburg, they had an after hours bar in one of the barracks, so we bought a boatload of liquor, beer and wine and invited all the women to the party. It turned out pretty good, by the way, after it got cranked up.

This is Steve Clark sitting on one of the bunks in our open bay. I suspect that he is hung over, as these are the pictures that I took just prior to the toga party.

This is some of the liquor that went into the Purple Jesus that made the toga party such a success.

This is Gary Weese getting the ball rolling. He mixed up a sample batch of PJ in a helmet up in the bay to get us motivated. It worked like a charm. Gary and Dave Carden were really the driving force behind this party -- this next picture is Gary and Dave setting up bar in their togas.

And of course, this is me in my toga. Damn, I looked good. Gary told me that the key to successful toga-ing was to forego underwear. Then, when you had the babes sitting with you, let your knees spread apart to give them a look at the goods. If they got up and left, good. If they glanced down and stayed, better. Have I said before what a fountain of wisdom Gary Weese was? Let me say it again.

This is Dan Schmedlij getting loose in the pre-party warm up. Schmedlij was a funny guy. At Fort Bragg, if you re-enlisted then they would send you off to school anywhere you wanted for up to one semester. Schmedlij went to farrier school -- shoeing horses.

The guy on the right of this pile is Barry Garland. We were pretty good buddies during my Bragg time, but he was always getting into trouble. I got away with murder -- always have. Barry got away with nothing, but a lot of that was as a result of not knowing when to cut and run. Anyway, I don't remember who else is in this pile, except that I think that the guy behind Barry is our company commander.

And here is fearless leader again. The guy in front was named Luis and he was a SP4 05H. He was about the only one who had to go to work every day while we were at FSA. He was a really nice guy and steady as a rock. The guy behind him, hiding his face from the camera, would be our company commander. I don't recall his name off the top of my head, but he was an aviation guy and was scouting out his next job. Now, it might not seem to be such a good idea to take your CO with you on a boondoggle, but it turned out good for us. He partied with us, and took the heat when things got out of hand.

Sometime in the middle of all the fracas, some little SP4 was telling Gary and I that we couldn't get into the area she worked in because it was so secret, blah, blah, blah. Gary and I didn't go to work much anyway, so this sounded like a challenge. When we had first showed up to the TDY coordinator at FSA, he looked at us and said "Hey, two language-qualified 98C's -- great! What language -- Russian? German?" Set him straight pretty quick -- Arabic. Yeah, Arabic. He seemed a bit crestfallen as he explained that there was not a whole lot of call for Arabic linguists. Never fear, we assured him -- we'll find a spot. So anyway, right after the party we showed up on this little SP4's doorstep, talking to her boss and asking for the grand tour. She was kind of pretty and kind of miffed, so it was a phyrrhic victory at best, but that was what we were good at. We stayed an hour or two, then caught the early bus back to the kaserne to get an early start on the next party.

Now I don't want to imply that we did not work while we were TDY at FSA. Well, I guess I do want to imply that, after all. Most of the troops were E-6 or E-7 and already knew how to copy code, so they didn't need the training. We all tended to go in late and leave early, and any excuse for skipping altogether was acceptable.

One of those road trips was the parachute jump. There is an SF battalion at Bad Tolz, which was just down the road from Augsburg, and we contacted them about making a parachute jump. They had an admin jump scheduled and said we were welcome. An admin jump is a helicopter jump without any of the military hassles. You have to jump every 90 days to qualify for jump pay, so these things were scheduled all the time so that nobody lost pay. Anyway, we signed out an Army bus from the post motor pool and were able to borrow a driver (you need a bus license to drive an Army bus -- rules, rules, rules).

Some of us brought dates along on the drive, and all of us brought liquor. Of course, there was no drinking prior to the jump -- some things just aren't done, and that would be one of them. There were delays and the day stretched out into afternoon and the weather was iffy and so on, but finally, in the early afternoon, everybody got manifested, we made out pay jump, and it was "Katy-bar-the-door." We got back on the bus and broke out the liquor. It was a couple of hours by road back to Augsburg, and we were blasted in record time. We were mixing drinks and spilling stuff and stopping by the side of the road to pee and generally acting the fool. We got back to the kaserne and dropped the bus off after hours in the motor pool and continued with the party.

The first sergeant got a call the next morning. Seems like someone wanted us to clean up the bus. And explain why the engine had blown up (we had egged our borrowed driver on to see just how much power that bus actually had, and something broke on the inside of the engine). And to get their ass royally chewed. Just another nail in the coffin.

Flintlock, then TDY to Augsburg - 1981

I was one of the only repeat offenders to go back to Augsburg the next year. Most of the old guys opted out of the trip, but I was at the stage where I would go anywhere and do anything as long as it was not in the SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility) at Bragg. Myself and a Russian Linguist named Lance McCoy were attached to a team from 2nd battalion for Flintlock, and after we finished up with Flintlock, we would just catch a train over to Augsburg and sign in on TDY. Flintlock was an exercise every year where SF teams, mostly from Fort Devens, invaded Europe. It was just luck (or maybe somebody actually knew what they were doing) that Flintlock was scheduled for the month prior to our TDY, since it meant that we wouldn't have to pay for transportation to Germany. (Interesting tidbit -- if the Air Force flew you over to Europe, the Army got a bill for the ride. However, if you jumped out of said airplane on arrival, then the Air Force footed the bill and the trip was free).

I'm going to gloss over the Augsburg trip for now because, for the most part, it put me in a bad light, and its my damn web page. I'd rather talk about Flintlock, which was a big damn hoot all by its lonesome.

Lance and I were attached to a seasoned team. These guys had been together for a while, and looked at us with disdain. Can't blame them. The first thing they did was nickname us -- I was Flounder, Lance was Buckwheat. Buckwheat and Flounder -- we were off to a hell of a start. We had to train with these guys for about a month prior to deployment, and it wasn't pretty.

Ostensibly, our mission was to run radio intercept out in the woods. However, there was a catch. The primary mission of this team was to liase with Turkish special forces. Sometime in the 1970s the U.S. and Turkey had gotten into a pissing contest about Cyprus, and as a result there were some hard feelings. Turkey, being one of our NATO allies, was not someone we wanted to be angry with. Anyway, this mission was conceived as a "welcome back to the NATO fold" type of public relations deal. We would train together for two or three weeks and everyone would be happy again. The Turks were sending 50-100 guys and we were sending us.

Here's the fly in the ointment -- we weren't supposed to be doing SIGINT in front of foreign nationals. So if Buckwheat and Flounder are seen wandering off in the woods together all the time, someone would smell a rat. I brought this up with the Fort Devens SOD liason guys, and they suggested we try to work around it. We did. We packed up the radios and just did SF stuff, which suited me just fine. I was already figuring out that I liked to go camping in the woods carrying a gun more than I liked to go camping in the woods carrying a radio, so doing "Army Stuff" suited me to a tee.

I was an Arabic linguist and Buckwheat was Russian. Most of the guys on this team spoke a middle eastern language, but none of it was Turkish. We had Russian speakers, Urdu speakers, Farsi speakers, Arabic speakers, a couple of other off brand languages, but no Turkish. And no German, either, by the way.

We staged out of England for these forays at an air base -- Mildenhall? Something like that. After we went into isolation to begin planning the big event, the Lieutenant in command of this team (who was a typical ell-tee, but the Team Sergeant really ran things) was playing with an AK-47 and fired off a blank round right into the Team Sergeant's back. Gave him some powder burns and really pissed him off. Did the ell-tee get a special nickname? NO-OOO-OOO-OOOOO.... Just the ASA guys.

We jumped into Germany on a black-ass night. We had flown a couple hours nap-of-the-earth (NOE) in one of the Air Force's Blackbirds and were ready to get out of the plane. It was between midnight and 4 a.m. when we finally got the green light to go. During our briefing on the drop zone, they had pointed out the high tension power lines down one side of the DZ, a river on the other, some hard surface roads, and some other stuff I quit listening to. The jumpmaster pushed out our door bundle which had all the equipment that was too heavy to manpack and then the rest of us are following it out. So we get out the door and I hear my parachute open, but I can't check the canopy because I can't see diddly. I've got a rucksack strapped to my front with about a hundred pounds of miscellaneous gear either in the ruck or strapped to me and I'm looking around to see if I can see any other jumpers, because I don't want to have a midair collision, and WHAM!!!!!

And I do mean WHAM!!!!!

At first I thought I had collided with another jumper in the air, or else that I had collided with the bundle, but then I gradually realized that I was laying on my back and not moving through the air. I had hit the ground much sooner than expected, probably due partly to the excitement and partly to being at a lower-than-advertised jump altitude (800 feet on tactical jumps, but since 7 of the 12 of us hit the ground carrying rucksacks, I'm not so sure we were that high).

Normal procedure is to jettison the rucksack while you are about 100 feet in the air so that you don't ride it in. It drops to the end of a 15 foot line that is attached to your harness and you can judge your landing by when you see it or feel it hit the ground. Riding the rucksack in, though, is usually a bad idea, because it has a tendency to break bones. Try holding a bag of cement in your lap and jumping off the roof of your house and you'll see what I mean.

I started feeling around for broken bones, but couldn't find any. I finally managed to push the rucksack off of my chest and legs and started heading for the rally point. I didn't get 25 feet before I found a three foot ditch that ran across the length of the DZ. If I had found that puppy during my decent, it would have been big trouble, but as it was, all I did was fall down and pull a bunch of muscles.

So we were off to a start -- not necessarily a good start, but nobody got seriously hurt, although the stage had been set. Interestingly, other teams did not fare so well. There were a total of four teams dropped by our Blackbird on that sortie, with our drop being the last. An SF team of eight men that had jumped just prior to us on another DZ had ended up with four men in the hospital, and one guy had almost died. So we were whining and crying and bitching and moaning, but we were all in one piece.

We linked up with the Turks and had a fun couple of weeks. There was training every day and night, and I participated in some of it and avoided other parts of it. Since the whole idea of this training was to make the Turks like us, the controllers for the excercise had called off the dogs in our AO so we did not have to worry about getting overrun in the night. That was nice. We still had to worry about hitting the targets, but that was not a big deal. So anyway, we had a lot of time on our hands and essentially little or no aggressor opposition in the surrounding area. So the ell-tee suggested we go on a Volks March.

In Germany, there are Volks Marches every weekend all over the place. People go out and hike through the countryside, ending up at a beer tent. That's where about 10 of us ended up -- five Americans and five Turks. I met a German man there who must have been 60 or 70 (its funny how old that is when you are in your twenties) who had been in the German Army during WWII. Most German veterans will tell you they fought the Russians, but this guy was pretty proud that he had shot at Americans and British. He didn't speak any English and none of us spoke German, but one of the serving wenches would translate. In between translations, old Adolph would just speak louder -- just like an American, assuming that if you speak loud enough, your words will magically translate. Anyway, he had been a tanker and had duked it out in France. He bought a lot of drinks and essentially said "No hard feelings -- was just doing my job." Anyway, after an afternoon of free Schnapps and big steins of German beer, I was befuddled. We got back to our base camp, and it starts to get surreal.

I was sitting with a couple of Turkish guys around a fire when this German girl rides up on a horse. This is out in the country, so she just rode over to see what the 100 or so guys camping out in the woods and wearing green suits were up to. I invited her to sit down and chat, as she spoke some English and I was still liquored up. Now, we had a cover story for who the Turks were, because they are not always so popular in Germany. I don't know all the why's and wherefore's, but we were supposed to gloss over the fact that there was a band of Turkish Army commandos sitting in the woods. Our "cover story" for the Turks was that they were members of the New Mexican National Guard, which would explain the swarthy complexions and the different uniforms. Sounded good to me! I was in the middle of that cover story, when I noticed the Turks looking at me strangely. One might say, hostilely.

Hildegaard had to go, so she jumped on her horse and took off. One of the Turkish captains who had his big commando knife out looked at me then and screamed loudly that "We are Turks to the DEATH!" and was waving the knife at my face. I wasn't sure if he meant their death or my death, so I asked them to hold that thought while I went to get Bob, the Team Sergeant. I explained my little faux pas quickly, and he told me to go find my hootch, get in it, and stay out of sight. He managed to explain things to the Turks, and I assume there were no hard feelings (other than Bob's exasperation that Flounder had screwed up again), but I'll never forget that look in that captain's eyes.

Another funny Turk story happened on our last night in the field. The Turks had expected to have some quality time in town during their trip, but the U.S. Army was just as determined to keep them out in the woods. It was becoming unpleasant, and we were beginning to hear a lot of grumbling about the poor treatment. So the word came out that at 4 that afternoon, trucks would show up at our base camp to take us all over to Bad Tolz for showers, shaves, rest and relaxation. Good deal -- war's over, time to go.

About noon, the Turks have broken down everything and are packed up, bag and baggage in anticipation of the truck ride. And then its four o'clock. And then its eight o'clock. And then it's midnight. And the Turks are cooking now. I had not stayed up to watch the fireworks, but here's what happened: about midnight, the Turkish major in charge had stood up and declared "I don't care if the trucks come right this second. We are not going anywhere. Everybody break out sleeping bags and sack out. If the trucks show up, the drivers will sit by the fire all night until we are ready for them to drive us. I have spoken. That is the way it is going to be." Now, his English wasn't that good, but it had improved markedly and was now a damn sight better than he had been letting on up until that point. In any event, his orders were unmistakeable and there was not going to be any argument, period (or maybe they'd bring up that "Turks to the death" thing again). One of the Turkish captains leaned over to Bob, the team sergeant, and told him how they would have handled this in the Turkish Army. "Sergeant Bob, if the truck driver does not come on time, we take one of the truck drivers and shoot him. All the other truck drivers hear about it and take great pains to be on time in the future." Bob said he wasn't sure how serious they were, but he made a point of staying up to greet the truck drivers when they did finally show up. He didn't want any mistakes or incidents at this stage of the game. The truck drivers did finally show up in the middle of the night, but everyone stayed sacked out until morning. From there, we skidded into Bad Tolz and Buckwheat and I pealed off for our TDY journey to Augsburg.

We did not get into as much trouble the second time around in Augsburg. We didn't have our first sergeant and commander to run interference, for one thing, and we had been informed that we were on probation anyway. Screw them, then.

I took up with my bad habits again, but it wasn't as much fun without Gary Weese to lead the way. We had some adventures, but it was pretty tame compared to the first time around.

I did have a high high palling around with Buckwheat (Lance McCoy). Lance knew everybody from his DLI days, and was a pretty smooth operator. Conventional wisdom suggested that guys hang around Lance and pick up some strays, and I saw it in action. Buckwheat was an interesting character study -- he apparently had been serious about a female soldier that was at Augsburg, but she wasn't as serious as him any more. She was pretty as a picture -- I remember that, so I don't blame him for a somewhat foul attitude. Anyway, I ran into Lance over at one of the clubs at some damn kaserne and we decided to go to another watering hole (I think he might have been looking for his friend, but I don't know for sure). Anyway, we come out of the club and go over to where taxis come by looking for fares. Somebody was already waiting and in a friendly voice mentioned that the next cab was theirs, to which Buckwheat replied "I'll fight you for it." I had been smiling up to that point, but I figured out something was wrong. We didn't have to fight for the cab, but that was Buckwheat.

Lot's of hostility on that trip. Frank Chun, who was my team sergeant and the senior guy there, went into the bank to cash a check and one of the tellers said something to him that didn't sit right. Frank didn't take lip, so he got into something of a verbal joust. Well, the teller was some sergeant major's wife, and the next thing you know, Frank is in the guy's office. Frank didn't back down, though. He told the sergeant major it wasn't any of his business, and that Frank ought to be sitting in the bank manager's office getting his ass kissed instead of the sergeant major's office getting his ass chewed.

This is a picture of Frank taken at Fort Meade in 1981. A bunch of us were TDY for various projects and we built a snowman. That's Barry Garland behind Frank.

Frank was real good to me and the other guys. During 1981, I had moved into the same apartment complex that he lived in, and he and his wife were always cooking dinner for me and the other single guys. In fact, his wife set me up with a local girl that she met at the local college. I then went on a string of TDYs to beat the band, so Sherri and I never consumated the deal, but its the thought that counts.