Uncle Sam
Ain’t Released Me Yet
Memoirs of a REMF
Copyright©
2016 by Robert B. Martin, IV
All
Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written
permission from the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in
a book review or scholarly journal. I have attempted to recreate events,
locales, and conversations from my memories of them.
------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter
11
This is My Rifle, This is My Gun!
“A fear
of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.” ............Sigmund
Freud
The third week of training left us very
little personal time. I was unable to write home until the weekend, when I told
Carol Ann, “This past week has been so busy I’ve only been able to take two
showers and I smell rank.”
We finally began going to the rifle
range on Tuesday February 25, 1969. Then for the next two weeks we marched and
double-timed four miles out and four miles back every day except Sundays.
Officially, there was no training on
Sunday but we still had work to do. We had our personal area to take care of,
such as polishing shoes, boots, and brass and cleaning our equipment and weapons.
On Sunday mornings it was not unusual for our DI to come into the barracks,
grab anyone sitting around doing nothing, and have them “GI” (a very intensive
cleaning of all nooks, cracks, and crannies) the barracks. One of the things I
discovered very early in BCT was that all trainees had the right to attend
church services on Sunday. The DI had to allow you to go to church if you wished.
Not being stupid I jumped at the excuse to get away from my personal hell once
a week, even if for only an hour.
Every Sunday would find me attending
service at the 3rd Brigade Protestant Chapel, one of thirteen
chapels on post. The church was rather new, very nice, very quiet, and very
peaceful. Most of all, there were no DI’s there. It was the only place and the
only hour each week that I didn’t worry about the DI, training, or punishment.
They couldn’t touch me in there. Going to the chapel was sanctuary for an hour.
I would have lived in that church all week if possible. I haven’t attended church
that many consecutive Sundays since BCT.
I soon learned the meaning of “forced
march.” Most of the other training companies would heckle us as they passed in
trucks and busses on their way to and from the ranges. As to the reason our
company seemed to have it a little tougher than some of the other companies, I
would guess that it had to do with our company commander, Captain Spacek, being
new in his job and trying to prove something. Whatever the reason, it was going
to end up backfiring on him.
Our personal weapon was the M-14 rifle
with which we became very familiar. Later, during the last two weeks of basic, about
sixty-five of us (those going into a combat arms advanced training after BCT) trained
with the M-16 rifle, the standard rifle of the American soldier in Vietnam.
Much emphasis was put on the ability to
quickly dismantle and reassemble our weapon in the event of a malfunction
during combat. We were drilled repeatedly and timed with a stopwatch. Every
single second mattered. Once we were performing adequately, we were blindfolded
and taught to do it by touch and feel. A little frightening at first, but with
practice it was possible to do this very quickly. Before the end of BCT, I
could disassemble and reassemble the M-14 very fast while blindfolded.
Most of the third week of training was
spent becoming intimately familiar with the M-14 rifle and the various firing
positions on the firing ranges. We shot a lot of ammo at fixed targets during
this period of time. It would have been a lot of fun had it not been so
miserably cold.
We took our weapon, not our gun, with
us almost everywhere we went. To call it a gun resulted in an embarrassing
punishment. The unlucky trainee would be required to run in a circle holding
his WEAPON over his head with one hand while grasping his crotch with the other
and shouting loudly, “This is my weapon,
this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun.”
At the end of a day’s target practice
we had to police the range for all of the spent shells, or “brass,” and take
them, along with any remaining live ammo, back to the ammo locker. When leaving
the range, the trainee stepped up to the range officer at “port arms” (rifle held
on a diagonal out in front of the body while at attention) and sounded off
loudly, “No brass, No ammo, SIR!” Getting caught with live ammo after leaving
the range could cause big problems. One trainee in my company was caught with
live ammo after leaving the range. His locker was searched and several hundred
rounds of live ammunition were found. He said he was saving up until he had
enough ammo to “kill all the sergeants.” He was taken away and we never heard
any more about the incident. Have you seen the movie “Full Metal Jacket”? Sounds
very familiar, doesn’t it?
On a Friday we “zeroed-in” our weapons in
preparation for our upcoming rifle qualifications. This required making
adjustments to the rifle’s front and rear sights for elevation (up and down)
and windage (left and right) until you could place a three round shot group, no
larger than a quarter, in the center of the target from a distance of
twenty-five meters (not very far, but not as easy as it sounds). I was able to
zero-in my weapon after twenty-four rounds, or eight shot groups. It was hard
to do because of my constant shivering. Still, some guys did it in only two or
three shot groups. They must have been descendants of Davey Crockett.
The next week we were back on the
firing ranges every day. We were now shooting at man-sized pop-up targets
instead of fixed targets. The targets would pop up for a few of seconds and
then drop back down, which meant you had to locate, aim at, and shoot the
target as quickly as possible before it dropped back down.
We were being taught not only to kill the
enemy, but also to hate the enemy without thinking of him as human. The
Vietnamese, we were told, were an inferior race. They were always referred to as
dinks, slopes, slants, gooks, or
other racially demeaning terms. We learned slogans such as “Kill a commie for mommy”, “The only good
dink is a dead dink”, and “Kill them
all and let God sort ‘em out”.
On Thursday of that week I had my best
day of shooting so far. Shooting from a kneeling position I scored hits on
twenty-one out of the twenty-four pop-up targets at distances ranging from
twenty-five to three hundred meters, a distance of over three football fields.
And no, we did not have telescopic sights. I was very proud of that
accomplishment. I’m not sure how I managed, but it did get me a rare pat on the
back from the instructor. If I could shoot like that during rifle
qualifications the next day I would easily earn the Expert badge, one of three
levels of qualification. At the top was Expert, then Sharpshooter, and Marksman
at the bottom.
We bivouacked (Army-speak for “camped
out”) at the rifle range that night to practice night firing. One piece of gear
that we carried in our packs was a shelter-half (one-half of a small two-man
tent, also known as a “pup tent”). The two halves were buttoned together to
make a two-man shelter. Each half had either buttons or buttonholes so it was
necessary to find a partner whose half was a “mate” to your half.
It was bitterly cold, as usual, but
bivouacking at the range would save us eight miles of marching the next day,
supposedly allowing us to be well rested for Saturday morning’s rifle
qualifications. At least that is what our leaders told us. We ate our cold
evening chow and waited for dark. There was no moon that night and we sat
around in the freezing dark doing nothing for about an hour to make certain
that we had acquired our night vision.
It was very difficult, sometimes
impossible, to see a target at night, especially if you looked directly towards
it. You had to use your peripheral vision because the bundle of optic nerves at
the back of the eyeball creates a blind spot that blocks a portion of the image
formed on the back of your eyeball. Of course, the muzzle flashes from the first
few shots would destroy any night vision you had acquired. I think all we did
was point our rifles down range and shoot until told to cease-fire. I never
even saw a target. Fortunately, we were not graded on the night firing.
After we completed the night firing
exercise, around 2300 hours (11:00 PM), we were allowed to erect our tents for
sleeping. We were issued air mattresses because the ground was frozen solid and
an air mattress insulated the sleeping bag from the cold ground. The sleeping
bags were nothing more than a canvas bag lined with wool army blanket material.
It was not made for cold weather. We slept as best we could in our two-man pup
tents. I woke up about once an hour shivering violently from the cold. My air
mattress had a slow leak so that it took about an hour for all of the air to
leak out causing my sleeping bag to come in contact with the frozen ground. I
would blow the thing back up and be good for another hour. When I wasn’t doing
that I had guard duty. I had to walk around our camp from 0300 hours (3:00 AM)
until reveille at 0500 hours (5:00 AM). By that time my feet felt like blocks
of ice.
That morning we shot for qualification.
I did not shoot Expert as I had hoped. Instead, I earned the Sharpshooter badge.
I was very disappointed and wrote home, “I got nervous and couldn’t seem to get
comfortable in any of the positions we fired from. I got a little upset and
starting rushing shots, jerking the trigger, and breathing wrong. I was just a
bundle of nerves, like when I had to give a piano recital.” I was down on
myself when it was over. I should have done a lot better. The fact that I had
slept very little the night before didn’t help either. Perhaps if my BCT had
been in the warmer climate of South Carolina I would not have had the shivering
to contend with and might have qualified Expert. Then again, if I had shot as
well as I had the day before when I hit twenty-one out of twenty-four pop-up
targets I would have easily qualified as Expert. At least I did better than
Marksman.
As it turned out, our entire company
scored lower than most of the other companies. I told you earlier that our
“extra” training was going to backfire on the Company Commander. Surprise! I’m
sure the lack of sleep, the freezing cold, poor morale, no weekend passes, and
running to and from the ranges while the other companies rode had nothing to do
with our relatively poor performance on the ranges during rifle qualifications!
Our poor showing on the rifle range pissed off all of our DI’s and the Captain.
Their initial reaction was to make us run the entire four miles back to the
barracks. It seems that all of the “extra” training provided by our leaders had
not paid off as they had expected.
The M-14 was not the only firearm
training we received. In addition to the orientation those of us destined for
one of the combat arms received on the M-16, we also received quite a bit of
training with the M-60 machine gun. It was a lot heavier than the M-16 but a
lot of fun to shoot. Although our M-16’s could fire on automatic, we were
taught to fire no more than three-round bursts at a time. The M-16’s magazine
held twenty rounds, but we only loaded nineteen rounds per magazine. This was
supposed to keep the magazine spring from wearing out and causing the weapon to
jam. Nineteen rounds did not last very long with the selector set on automatic.
The .50 caliber machine gun was a
beast. To keep it from getting away from us the barrel was chained down so that
we could move it no more than a few inches left, right, up, or down. We were
only given the opportunity to fire a short burst.
The
M-79 grenade launcher was similar to a sawed-off shotgun but with a larger
diameter barrel. It broke open at the breech and the shell was dropped in. The
projectile was a grenade with a powder casing that propelled it from the
weapon. It was often called a “blooper” because it made a “blooping” noise when
fired. It was fired similar to a mortar in as far as you aimed it up and lobbed
the grenade in an arc so that it would, hopefully, drop on the target. These
were common infantry weapons and easy to shoot but would require a lot of practice
if you expected to consistently hit your target.
The M-72 LAW (Light Antitank Weapon)
replaced the old WWII vintage bazooka. The LAW was a one-shot disposable weapon
that fired an armor-piercing projectile from a short fiberglass tube. The
projectile was essentially an RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade), which had a hot
exhaust so you had to make sure no one was standing behind you when the rocket
ignited. Our targets were junked trucks down range but due to the weapon’s
expense (the only cost figure I could find was $2,244.72 each in 2005), each
trainee fired only one.
Any of these weapons were capable of
damaging a person’s hearing after repeated firing. Rubber earplugs were
included as part of our standard gear. To keep from losing them, each plug was tied
to one end of a string and the other end tied to the top buttonhole of our
field jackets. When not in use they were kept in the field jacket’s chest
pocket.
To be continued in Chapter 12, Killing with Bayonet and Boot….
1 comment :
geez.
Post a Comment