The other thing we learned at Fort Sill was what was quaintly called 'Customs of the Service.' In other words, all the things somebody decided that 22 year old Second Lieutenants needed to know. This was important stuff, like:
Don't get drunk in the officer's club and piss in the potted palms.
Don't get drunk in the officer's club and puke on your commanding officer's shoes.
Don't get drunk in the officer's club and hit on your commanding officer's wife.
Don't get drunk in the officer's club and hit on your commanding officer's teenage daughter.
With some of my classmates, this stuff needed to be explicitly laid out and explained. I knew better, and Harlan was pretty much an upright citizen, but some of these guys had just been released from a zoo.
Harlan and I were good boys, and for the next six months we studied hard, partied little, and made numerous phone calls home to our sweethearts. Marilyn came out for a short visit before she had to go back to school in the fall, and so did Anna Lee. Mostly, though, we studied. The theory was that if you did well in school, when it came time to hand out assignments, the Army would be good to the people at the top of the standings. Most of the students had already received their eventual assignments, but not all, and if you fucked up in class the Army would be happy to reassign you. The guy at the bottom was probably about to guard an ammo dump in Antarctica. Harlan and I hadn't received our assignments prior to the start of school, and they weren't announced until graduation. I ended up Number One and Harlan ended up Number Two. Harlan got a nice dream assignment for himself, assignment to a mechanized 155 battery at Fort Hood in Texas with the First Cavalry, a top notch armored division. I figured as the winner, and with a doctorate in applied mathematics, I would be assigned to my dream assignment, a lab slot at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, back in my old stomping grounds.
The ways of the Army are mighty and mysterious. I was going to Fort Bragg, the 319th Airborne Field Artillery with the 82nd Airborne. Maybe that stint at jump school hadn't been my smartest move!
Somehow I didn't think Marilyn was going to approve.
Chapter 48: Fort Bragg Redux
There was one other guy in the class, Clarence Bodecker, going to Fort Bragg, assigned to the 321st Field Artillery, and thankfully, he didn't have a car. I dug him up and made a deal, I would rent the cargo van and carry both our gear, if he would drive my car. He didn't have all that much crap, but he had no way to get it there, and I needed to move and drive a car. This way Marilyn wouldn't have to fly out and do the cross country trip again. We were to report in on Monday, December 5th, so we had about a week after graduation to drive there.
It's a fairly simple drive, although it takes fucking forever. Oklahoma City to Little Rock to Memphis to Birmingham to Atlanta to Columbia toFayetteville. Interstates most of the way, although we had to take US-78 between Memphis and Birmingham (which really sucked - terrible road!) We could do it in two long days of driving; instead it took us five! We drove the first day to Little Rock, at which point Clarence decided we needed to stop, and he got drunk in the motel bar. We spent the day in Little Rock while Clarence got over his hangover, and then on Day Three drove to Atlanta. We had an encore performance of Clarence's drinking problems that evening and ended up spending Day Four in Atlanta while he recuperated. Day Five we made it to Fayetteville, and by then I had decided that if I ever was in an airplane with Clarence, I would unhook his static line!
That Saturday I found a storage locker and moved most of my stuff in there, while retaining what I wanted for the BOQ in the back of the Impala. I kept my mouth shut with Clarence while we moved our gear and got rid of the panel van, and then we made our way back to the motel. He had me drop him off at a used car lot on the way back. At that point I politely cut him loose, in the fervent but silent hope we would never run across each other again.
Since I wasn't really an impressionable young kid who couldn't figure out how to scratch his ass, I knew a lot more about airborne operations than the average second john. What I knew did not fill me with confidence. I wondered just how much of a hole I had dug for myself by earning my jump wings.
The 82nd Airborne Division is probably the most famous and exclusive division in the US Army. Most of the time it is called an 'elite' division. When there is an article in the paper or on the news, it's not referred to as 'the 82nd Airborne Division', it's referred to as 'the elite 82nd Airborne Division.' They should have trademarked the name and charged to use the phrase. You can't even apply to join unless you've graduated from jump school, and a lot of the time, the feeling is given out that if they want you, they'll let you know. I'm not quite sure what I was doing there, other than the fact that I had jump school under my belt. Maybe they needed another cannon cocker. Otherwise I was just another very young and very junior officer.
It was certainly very flattering to be honored with entry into this famed institution, but I knew too much about airborne operations to be totally comfortable with it. The fact of the matter is that paratroop operations are very questionable at best. The 82nd and the 101st brag about how they helped win D-Day by dropping into France ahead of everybody else, and tying up German operations, but the history of the Normandy invasion shows quite a different result. Yes, they tied up the Germans, but they suffered horrible losses and casualties, and the Germans they allegedly tied up were actually held back by the orders of Hitler. Throughout the war, airborne operations were plagued by high casualties and questionable results. D-Day, Sicily, Market-Garden, Crete, Finland - they all had the same mixed results.
Looked at from a cost-benefit analysis viewpoint, paratroop operations were remarkably inefficient! If the entire idea is to deliver infantry troops in an organized and effective manner capable of quickly commencing combat operations, the airborne fails in almost every regard. When guys jump out of a lot of airplanes, their groups get mixed up, they land all over creation, there's a lot of injuries, and the troops that land are predominately light infantry troops without a lot of armor or artillery support.
On the other hand, there are those who argue that some of those same operations were saved by airborne troops, and that some of the other operations failed because of other reasons. That's why other people then me wear stars and get paid the big bucks. No matter who's right, the paratroopers take a beating, no matter what!
Consider instead that rather than invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it cost to develop airborne capability during World War II, perhaps a better investment would have been heavy armor (a better tank than the Sherman would have been a Godsend!) or increased numbers of fighter-bombers. The same argument could also be made of long range heavy bombers like the Flying Fortress, which took horrendous losses and could barely hit a target the size of a city.
On the plus side, airborne capability is a must for special operations troops. Special Forces, the Rangers, and Delta Force all draw heavily on troopers who learned their trade in the 82nd. Likewise the techniques learned at Bragg and Benning's jump school influence the Navy SEALs and Marine Force Recon. As infantry, paratroopers are superb, the best in the world. Further, the 82nd was set up so that at least part of the division could be airborne inside of two hours and anywhere on the planet inside of 24. When the President decided that some jackass somewhere was acting too big for his britches, he had the ability to send them directly to his Presidential Palace at a moment's notice and stick a lot of very nasty and heavily armed people up said jackass' rectum.