The article says that a flamethrower is the best thing you've ever had in your hand. Well, I've used a flame-thrower, and I admit they are fun.
In Christmas week of 1969 (yes, this is a war story) my Company Executive Officer noticed that I had bamboo poisoning over so much of my body that I needed immediate medical attention. So he pulled me out of the bush and put me into the Company Area on "Medical Profile" for two weeks.
Talk about a great Christmas Present!
Since I was "light duty" and was required to walk about the Division Base Camp with my pants legs rolled up. wearing only shower shoes and NO BLOUSE (shirt) ON, I was of no use to anyone.
The thought was the the more sunshine I got on my running sores on legs, arms, face and neck, the faster I would heal and the faster I could get back to running my platoon ... I was the platoon sergeant, not the Platoon Leader ... (but we know who really runs a platoon. ). And I damn sure would never heal up while I was wading through bamboo thickets, bogs, creeks, and sleeping on the ground with leeches.
But officers .. ah, officers. They HATE to see an Enlisted man walking around in a Tropical War Zone looking COMFORTABLE!
The company leadership soon tired of watching me slouch around the company area, so they decided to find "light duty" which was appropriate to my rank and medical profile.
The thing they had me do was to evaluate weapons.
I tested a four-round semi-automatic rocket launcher, first. This was a weapon which fired missiles similar to the M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon (LAW). It was a piece of shit; too heavy for use in the jungle, and it required a separate person to carry the reloads .. both the launcher (loaded or unloaded) and the reload weighed on the order of 40 pounds, and had no redeeming qualities. I told them so. If the rocket couldn't do the job in one shot, what the HELL was the use of having four shots .. especially since you couldn't reload the one rocket used, but instead had to carry a 4-round rocket launcher and that was the ONLY reload option possible! (I admit to a little
Then they had me test ... I swear I am telling the truth .. a flame-thrower!
Again, too heavy, no redeeming qualities in an infantry unit where every man is already carrying a full load of ammunition and supplies; absolutely useless in a Jungle environment except (as was the case with the rocket launcher) if you wanted to neutralize an enemy bunker. In the jungle. Which was wet all the time.
Still, I got to fire one, and it was ......... heavy.
Not that it wouldn't have been fun, but who wants to carry forty pounds of fuel that blows up and burns your ass off if somebody puts a bullet in the tank. Yeah, I had seen all the WWII movies. But I got to burn up a couple gallons of fuel and discovered that the point of the thing is this magnesium match. And before you can get the fuel to burn, you have to pull this lever to strike the match. (Oversimplification alert!)
Once you strike the match, there's no way to put it out. You can only unscrew the mechanism and drop it. And then you have to put the new match in, which is a total pain in the ass because it has to go in JUST RIGHT!
(When you drop the match, remember that you have fuel dripping out of the nozzle, unless the flame thrower valve is in top-notch condition. Which puts you at the mercy of the guys in the Arsenal bunker, who maintain the equipment; I've partied with those guys back at Division, and none of them were sober 2 hours out of 24. So no, I didn't trust the technical expertise of people who were only sober when they were
On the third hand, flame throwers are nothing if not dramatic! There's this slight hesitation when you pull the lever, and then ... WHOOOOOSHHH!!!!!
As the referenced video shows, this great red-and-black Dragon dives out of the muzzle, grows to immense size immediately, and absolutely eats up everything in its path! (As long as it's within 30 or 40 feet of the nozzle, which is well within the range of an AK47, so it's Not All Good.)
<sigh>
Yes, those were The Good Old Days. When you could spend a couple of hours on an idle Thursday Afternoon testing 30 year-old equipment and had no more responsibility than to say: "Yep, it still works .. but who cares?"
Oh. There is suppose to be a point to these little snippets, isn't there?
Let's see, we're talking about (a) 4-round semi-automatic back-pack rocket launcher, and a flame thrower. Right?
Nope. No point to them. No point at all.
The best thing you've ever had in your hand was a woman's breast, and I defy anyone to argue the point.
5 comments:
It is a military fact, perhaps older than the Roman legions, that in regard to enlisted soldiers, idle hands will soon be doing the Devil's work, while busy hands are useful and happy hands. In simple English: keep the troops very busy and you will have less problems and troubles from them.
Does that suggest that I was WRONG in getting falling-down drunk every night?
Reminds me of the time in my RVN tour when I took over a mountain-top radio relay base. (On a mountain that was too steep to climb up, helicopter access only. One end of the top was off-limits due to an abandoned French minefield.)
I got a you-don't-want-to-know answer when I asked the senior NCO how much ammo we had on hand, so I went looking. Then I had everything pulled out of the base magazine and evaluated.
We had everything from .45ACP tracer to cases of 7.62mm ball left over from pre-M-16 days. Some of it was rusty. Lots of 60mm mortar shells for which we had no mortar. And Bangalore torpedoes.
Shortly I had colonels dropping by just to look at the latter.
Larry Arnold:
I had a similar experience when my company was assigned to NDP security in December of 1970.
We had claymore mines in the bunkers. Not just in the bunker line, but in the actual bunkers. We had blasting caps attached to det-cord (on both ends), obviously intended to chain-link claymores. And we had claymore detonators (the 'clackers') attached to wires which were corroded. Everything inside the bunkers where the guards slept.
I was the Platoon Sgt. and I can attest that none of my platoon was ever briefed on techniques to set up claymores, when the bunkers would be manned, when the defenses (claymores) were to be set out and retrieved, and absolutely nothing about safe handling of explosives.
I took every claymore and every bit of explosive ordnance outside and dug a hole in front of each bunker. Put a box (from explosive ordnance) for each bunker, put it in the hole, and told each bunker NCO that they should retrieve the ordnance and set up command-detonated claymores in front of their assigned bunker at dusk each night.
Then I went to the ordnance depot and drew claymores, det cord, and blasting caps to replace what I found. I had a mini instructional session for the platoon and discussed/advised how to set up chained claymores and how to string the clackers to the chains. And I showed them (again .. we had been in the habit of setting up claymores as first-line-of-defense at our ambush sites every night) how to safely test the circuits.
It was a learning experience for me; I had not realized that with new men being assigned to the platoon from time to time, they had not been taught these necessary skills. In fact, most of the OLD MEN had forgotten how to safely test the firing circuits. None of them had ever tested the circuits when they were on guard duty.
We had these sessions EVERY time we were rotated into NDP guard duty, and every time we found that the ordnance which was provided for bunker defense had been allowed to deteriorate between each rotation.
We blew up a lot of deteriorated/unreliable munitions between then and when I rotated home. Fortunately, the 1's Inf Div as a whole was rotated back home, and my duties changed. I felt a lot safer in the Division Base Camp because there were more untrained troops between the wire and my hooch.
PS: Larry .. we were caught on a week deployment which was a 'shotgun ambush" without communications. I climbed a hill and managed to contact a Ranger unit on Nui Bau Binh (SP) .... Black Virgin Mountain .. and they advised me to string commo wire to a make-shift antenna between our position at the foot of a hill, and the military crest. That was the only communications we had with our company for three days during the Thanksgiving Holiday of 1969. Officers don't pay attention to these petty details, and they are out of the area before dark .. which is when platoon sergeants finally get their assets in line and discover all the petty niggling details that officers don't really care about. (Such as insuring that they deploy their troops where they have a reliable line of communications.)
The army so sucked, officers were incompetent, and when they offered to give me another stripe and $10,000 re-enlistment bonus to sign on for another tour of duty, I laughed in their face.
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