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?
