Below are the few pictures I still have from my days with 24th ATSE (ASA Tactical Support Element) at Fort Stewart. In a fit of madness, I reupped for that duty because some of my buddies were there. I was gone within a year to language school to study up on Arabic, so it was a very short visit.
While I was there, Captain Daniel Carson was the head of the ATSE (eight of us), ably assisted by 1LT (then Captain) George Summers and 2LT Harris (former enlisted swine). Gwen Connor (Hummer) was the NCOIC when I got there, but he wangled an assignment to Fort Campbell and was gone soon thereafter. The guy who took over was a 98J, Bill (??? -- it will eventually come to me. He was SF, by the way, although I didn't really appreciate it at the time). Don Adamson, Lee something-or-other (we were room mates for a while, but this was over 20 years ago and I wasn't there that long, so give me a break), and me. Low man on the ole' totem pole. There was also an SSD detachment with Captain Friedel, another SFC and a SP4 Fred something-or-other.
(I ran across Captain Friedel's name in a book in college years later. Some scandal about the Army spending money on some kind of secret something, and he was mentioned in the middle of the book. He didn't do anything, as I recall, but he was using some of the scandalous equipment. Whatever -- I just wanted to drop a name of somebody mentioned in a book.)
When I got to Fort Stewart, they were just building up the 24th Division and had only one active brigade, but the other was coming on line. Hinesville, Georgia, was not geared up to accept all the new soldiers, so it was pretty ugly for a while. Fort Stewart, which is west of Savannah, Georgia, had been a training camp during WWII and Korea and then had gone bust after the wars had ended, so there was a bit of reluctance on the part of the locals to believe that we were coming and were going to stay. That means there were no apartments, not enough bars, no fast food, no lots of things. When the Burger King finally opened, there was a line of cars in that drive through 18 hours a day. There just wasn't any place else to go.
I lived off post in a trailer park:
Ain't that lovely? Summer in south Georgia in a trailer in the middle of an open field. I would get home in the evenings from a hard day of doing nothing in our air-conditioned SCIF in G-2 and find my trailer was about 120 degrees. I would strip down to a pair of shorts and start drinking vodka and Kool-Aid until I was drunk enough to go to sleep. It was pretty ugly. I was rooming with Fred, a SP4 in our SSD detachment, but I moved out after a while because our junior 98J, Lee whats-his-name, was able to rent one of the few apartments in town and needed a roommate. That would be me. This is a picture of me and Lee at Tybee Beach near Savannah right before I left for DLI:
I got promoted to SP5 while I was there at the ATSE. This is a picture of the ceremony, such that it was:
The caption on the back, dated 2 June 1976, reads "SP5 Michael Barth is promoted to his present rank by LTC Herbert Prewitt, G2/DSEC, and CPT Daniel C. Carson."
I have very few lasting memories of Fort Stewart, but a couple of them have stuck with me over the years. I got sent out to the boonies in a jeep with one of those hand-held radio jammers to provide some electronic warfare support during an exercise. I was riding around in this jeep driven by some colonel's driver, a straight infantry guy who was just providing a taxi service. It was the middle of the night, and I was not at all tactically proficient, to put it kindly. Shoot, I had spent a couple years in Korea laughing at the Army guys who actually carried rifles and went camping and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, in the middle of the night, we are stopped for some reason and I'm crouching in the backseat of this jeep trying to keep from getting dirty or stepping on a snake or whatever (I mean, I was really pitiful -- kind of embarrassing now, but the only time I had ever played Army was in basic). The driver climbs out, pulls out a poncho liner, uses his helmet for a pillow, and lays down and goes to sleep.
I looked over at that guy and something clicked. I started getting the notion that I could do that, if I had some practice. I could be a real soldier, the kind that I'd always seen in the movies. Fort Bragg, the seeds are planted!
Another memorable occaision was when Lee and I went out to provide EW support to an artillery brigade from the South Carolina National Guard. "EW support" is a euphemism for jamming the crap out of their radios and otherwise harrassing them, all the while wearing umpire badges and white engineer tape so nobody can touch you.
We were supposed to be out there for an hour or so, but we were having so much fun we lost track of the time. They would be trying to send in a fire mission and we'd jam the same word or set of words each time in the transmission. You could hear the tempers starting to boil over the radio, which just made us do it all the harder. We called in a live fire mission, but got worried that maybe these weekend warriors would actually fire the damn thing (with coordinates that put rounds into Fort Stewart-proper) so we started coming up on their radio saying "Hey, never mind, its just us, the ASA guys, don't fire that mission..." and so forth. Now, all of a sudden, they got commo-wise and started using appropriate procedures and all that crap and saying things like "ignore those guys breaking into the net." They were probably messing with us back, but we were ASA guys and we didn't know if the artillery guys would actually look before they shot the rounds we had called for (they wouldn't have fired the mission, but we didn't know). So we tore back to the headquarters tent and got intercepted on our way in by the colonel commanding the outfit. He gave us a "nice job" and a pat on the back and then told us we had better skedaddle, because those good old boys from South Carolina had had enough of our bullshit and were ready to start breaking heads. We skedaddled.
Captain Summers introduced me to cigars. I was out with him on some darn thing and we were holed up in a jeep with a radio jammer, and he pulled out these really long, thin cigars and lit up. I smoked cigarettes, so I didn't think anything of it for a while. However, the cigar smoke kept the mosquitoes away -- and there were a lot of mosquitoes, let me assure you! South Georgia swampland has plenty of two things -- rattlesnakes and mosquitoes, and I saw both while I was soldiering in the backwoods of Fort Stewart. Anyway, Captain Summers taught me a neat trick -- smoking cigars keeps the bugs off of you.
He also bought some beers (Budweiser 16 ouncers, if I recall right) and invited me over to partake in his tent during that exercise. He was in a GP Medium with some other officers, and I was as uncomfortable as a whore in church because I just didn't know how to fraternize with officers. What the hell do you say to them? He told me an amusing story about his youth (he was an Army- or Air Force-brat) when his family lived in Paris. Seems the maid took a shine to him (he was a young teenager) and he scampered out a window and down a drainpipe to get away. I guess the point of the story was that he had changed a lot (I guess he was in his middle twenties at the time), but I was kind of dumbstruck. I just didn't know how to talk about things like that. I was a geek, to be sure, but many of us are at twenty.
I know I was something of a disappointment to Captain Summers. I was a screwup, plain and simple. Its not that I didn't try, but it was mostly that I was 20 years old and fresh from a field station and didn't know squat about anything. I ran into Captain Summers up at Fort Devens in 1981. I had orders for NCOES, but had just made the decision to get out of the Army because I just couldn't see leaving special forces to go back to working in an office (note the change between 1976 and 1981!). I was walking around looking for my friend Dick Cooper to bid farewell, when I bumped into George Summers. I could see the surprise in his eyes when he looked at me and at that green beret on my head, but he hid it well. Lots of changes between 1976 and 1981, that's for damn sure.
Captain Carson, the OIC of the ATSE, was different. If I disappointed him, he hid it well, even years later when I ran into him up at Fort Meade. He was married to another Captain Carson (he was Daniel, she was Concetta) and they were just the nicest people. Hey, if either of you ever see this, I really did turn out okay... it just took a while.