So just curious.
For a long time I ran a series of posts I called "The Army I Knew". It was a frankly personal recollection of my Army days, from the Regulars of the Eighties, to - I think - the Army Reserve of the late Eighties/early Nineties. IIRC I stopped when I'd gotten off active duty and had been assigned to a USAR hospital unit.
(Just looked it up - yep, the final post in the series is this one, about the technical side of that particular hospital, a "MUST" gimmick that was very Sixties but still around in the USAR like a lot of other antiquated hardware...)
Anyway.
Is there any interest in following this path? Specifically, I would have posts about:
1. A USAR heavy engineer unit outside North Philadelphia. I wrote about one of the adventures of the GIs-vs-turkey-hunters here back in 2015.
2. From there to the old 104th Division (Training) here in the Pacific Northwest, and spending a couple of years under the hat. It was an interesting look at the whole idea of "Reserve drill sergeants".
3. From THERE to the Oregon Army Guard - as a hat I was involuntarily reclassified as an 11C - mortarman - and would have been expected to go to war as a mortar section sergeant of FDC, and at that time I knew about mortar operations what a cow knows about church, so a lateral transfer to a Guard infantry unit. From there to...
4. A Guard artillery unit. For the simple reason that I was too old and to cunning to walk around with a goddamn mortar on my back, and when the ORARNG went fully to the light MTO&E I wanted to ride to battle. and then my final duty station,
5. The Oregon Guard west-side training post, Camp Rilea, where I retired.
I have no idea if there is any sort of readership for this stuff. I don't really have stories about me as much as about the time and places I lived through.
That Army - the Reserve and Guard of the Nineties and early Oughts - is as vanished as Ninevah and Tyre. The War on Terror destroyed them as throughly as it did Fallujah and Ramadi.
The reality of deploying very eighteen months to three years meant that the old-school-post-Vietnam guardsmen, the "two-days-a-month/two-weeks-a-year" guys like me, couldn't hang on to both a real civilian job and a USAR/ARNG slot. Despite the law, your civilian employer couldn't keep you if you were constantly vanishing to go play whack-a-muj every year and a half...so the reserve component units (so far as I can tell) largely became a mix of students and young guys without a career and more-or-less-professional-soldiers who picked up odd jobs between deployments.
But...it IS also truly ancient and minor history. There's nothing important or of social value there. It's just a reminiscence of a time that now seems long ago and far away. I time that, all in all, I enjoyed living through. But not one that I'm sure has any entertainment value to anyone who hadn't.
So.
Thoughts?
7 comments:
Chief,
I suggest that your experience of the Reserves back then IS of some importance. In the same manner that someone describing the militarization of standard city Police in the last couple decades is important. Police Officer 'Fred' is now in some ways Officer Fed', and the Reserve person in everyone's office is often now, well, gone in my experience. We only get people after they've left the Service.
The professionalization of police and military is a two-edged sword. Just look at any hometown newspaper's photos from 20+ (better, 40+) years ago and note that the cops then looked sort of like from Mayberry--accessible to the regular citizen. Now; closer to Robocop, with 40 lbs of crap they need to schlep around and a bullet proof vest so that they can remember that their life is constantly at risk (as opposed to those citizens not wearing the vest and without the training, some of whom they do 'pretense stops' on).
Walt.
I love your service stories.
I'd read 'em for sure!
I'd be interested. You're a good storyteller and armies seem to be a breeding pit for interesting tales.
Definitely love to hear more about the artillery at the very least. But really, anything on the day-to-day of military life would be gold to me right now.
Stjohnspock: I'd argue that the loss of the workaday Reserve and Guards is right up there with the legion-ization of the Regular Army; it's bad, bad for the Army and bad for the country.
The Guard, in particular, is going to be the first ones to encounter any sort of political protest when it gets too big for even the militarized-coppers to suppress. It's gonna be the local Guard infantry outfit there with their riot shields and clubs...and the reaction platoon with bayonets and combat load.
It's not going to be a good thing if those guys aren't the same people as the demonstrators only wearing a tree suit. Somewhere I've bookmarked a Lawyers, Guns & Money blog post about the famous "Tank Man" video from Tianenmen Square. The author's point is that the hope of revolt against a brutal dictatorship depends, not on "Second Amendment Freedoms" like the fucking nitwit wingnuts believe, but the unwillingness of the tank commander to run over Tank Man. Or the unwillingness of the local Guard platoon leader to fire on his brother, cousin, neighbor, classmate, or friend. The Revolution lives or dies depending on whether the Swiss Guard holds the Tuileries...or Bonaparte's artillerymen clear the street with "a whiff of grapeshot".
Making the U.S. Army an imperial legion - down to what should be the least-imperial units of all, the "hometown" Guard outfits - is not a good thing in any way.
Would love to read about Rilea.
Somehow missed this post earlier, but I always enjoyed this series of posts and also saw some common thread between this and your interpretation of the soldier's perspective in the important battles series. And perhaps they don't count in this thread, but the "Acting 1SG Lawes" posts are always a treat. So would always be interested!
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