Old Sarge Introduction

[Old Sarge]

My pleasure, seriously, my pleasure. Most of those thoughts are pleasant and I enjoy remembering them which I don't do often. My biggest gripe? I have the same mind, but my body can't pay the freight anymore and I wind up recovering from body damage. Somehow I need to get my mind sync'ed with the age of my body.

Yes, we went out on FTXs often. I have no idea what it cost for us to train because everything went out, including the CEV vehicles (think a M60 tank with a shortened huge bore gun [I don't remember the diameter] used for breaching, a dozer blade on the front and a huge searchlight. Every piece of damage to the roadway would be assessed and paid for by Uncle Sugar.

I bet when we jumped Uncle Sam paid for the damage to the sugar beets or wheat we landed on too.

Yeah, I believe that back during your time in Europe there were many more training exercises that included areas outside of the traditional training centers, thus damage to roads, fields and trees.

When I was there during 90-93 most of the training was done at the Grafenwohr, Baumholder, Hoehfels and Wildflecken training areas. My engineer unit deactivated while I was departing, along with the "Wild Chicken" training area. This was my second engineer unit deactivation in a 12 month period and there was a time that I though I was a bad luck charm and my next unit would fall under the axe. Well, next was a finance unit supporting the 101st Airborne and they're not going anywhere anytime soon! 

When I finished my career with a final tour to Germany 08-10, I didn't get many opportunities to train. Within a couple of months of arriving I was off on a 12 month deployment to Iraq and upon returning I was doing all the admin crap to retire. I do remember that Herman the German was pretty extreme on protecting their trees with a big price tag for even damaging a limb!   I kind of feel cheated though with this last tour, as I knew I was going to deploy as soon as I was received assignment instructions so I opted for a two year all-others tour which allowed me to leave my wife stateside. Though she did come visit me for 10 days while we were on block leave prior to heading out and we did drive all over Germany doing tourist things and even scooted down to Venice...it wasn't the same for her to get the opportunity to live in Europe!