The nostalgia is odd.
With the birthday of US Cav so recently behind us...
I looked up some of the places I served.
Fort Knox is no longer the Armor Training Center.
Panzer Kaserne no longer has any tanks on it.
1-81 Armor still exists, but it's at Fort Benning. BENNING! The cursed home of the tanker's mortal foe: infantry! (That's not true, we loved the grunts and they loved us back; but we were rivals.)
3-34 Armor has been disbanded.
The people I did the exciting 6-month TDY with are still around, but I was more an accessory than a member.
The E Troop of the 108th is now a HHC for an Infantry Regiment.
ReplyDeleteAnd as a guy who trained at Knox and then spent an inordinate amount of time at Benning the whole thing gives me a head ache some times.
But I look forward to the new museum
The Infantry company I was in at Ft. Carson was attached to a Tanker battalion as a combined arms experiment. We were used in a role that was between scouts and Rangers. We would stay a terrain feature behind the scouts. The scouts located the enemy and we walked in and flushed them out. When they moved, our tanks would blow the piss out of them. They treated us very well, plus Tankers had some dang good chow. The experiment worked out quite well. Our brigade was the first to ever go undefeated against the OpFor at Ft. Irwin in 1996.
ReplyDeleteIn a bar fight between Infantry and Tankers, we may fight amongst ourselves, but let the MP's show up and we had a common enemy.
1ID(F) took tank platoons and assigned them to infantry companies to get the DAT/Crunchy ratio to desired levels.
DeleteWe were well thought of because of the Lycoming space heater / MRE warmer on the back.
Heh! We were Mechanized Infantry, so we had our own heaters. Not that we got to use them much, since we seemed to do a lot more walking than riding.
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