“It’s like I told you before, I’ve got a battery of M109s here with the 25th.”
I smiled. “The Electric Strawberry needs self-propelled 155s?” The shoulder flash of the 25th Infantry was red with a lightning bolt through it; it looked exactly like a bright red strawberry with a lightning bolt. “Which brigade?”
He shook his head. “None of them. We’re divisional level. The brigades are still using motorized 105s, like you had.”
“As long as you don’t have to hump around those shells. I used to have a second lieutenant who managed to drop one on his foot while training at Sill. He showed up two weeks late in a cast.” We laughed through a description of Lucky Lou.
“Man, I can’t believe you are out. I always figured you as a lifer,” Harlan said after going back for another round of beers. Marilyn and Anna Lee had gone off to the kitchen to make ham and cheese sandwiches, with Roscoe following them, and now we were on our third beer of the afternoon.
“It’s the knee, man, no way around it.”
“Just how bad is it?”
I shrugged. “Most of the time I just have a bit of a limp. What happened was I ripped up a bunch of ligaments and messed up most of the cartilage in the joint. I can walk okay as long as I keep a brace or bandage on it, but forget about any distance, and no running either.”
“How’d it happen?”
“This is what happens when you leave a perfectly good airplane in mid-flight, before they have a chance to land and stop. I had a really bad landing. Simple as that,” I replied.
“When was this, when you were down in South America?” The Buckminsters had visited us in Fayetteville the summer right before I had visited Honduras. “The last time I saw you you were still a first lieutenant exec of a company of 105s, about to be promoted and sent to Fort Sill. The next thing I hear, you’re a captain somewhere south in taco land. What gives?”
I shrugged. “Sh…” I glanced over at Roscoe, who was in earshot, and amended myself. “… stuff happens.” Anna Lee and Marilyn gave me superior looking nods of approval. “We got tasked to provide a battalion task force to go down to Honduras to train their army. That’s in Central America, by the way, not South America.”
“Whatever. Nobody cares. Keep going.”
“So, we had a battalion of paratroopers, and my battery got tasked to be the support battery, plus the usual whistles and bells for support. Then the State Department weighed in on things. I had been running the battery as an exec without a captain just fine, but that wasn’t good enough. We needed a captain, so division rushed my promotion through and gave me the battery officially. By the way, that really pissed off my CO. I was glad to be away!”
“Hmmph!” grumped my wife. “I wasn’t so thrilled!”
“It’s not like they asked me about any of it, honey.”
“So your bad jump was in Honduras?”
I drained my beer and reached for another. “Uh, yeah.”
It must have sounded odd to Harlan. He looked at me funny and asked, “So, what happened?”
“It’s like I said, I had a bad landing.”
Marilyn grabbed her handbag and reached inside. “You might as well tell him the rest. He’s going to learn sooner or later.”
That sobered me up some, and I sat upright and was saying, “Marilyn, stop it…”
She didn’t. She pulled out a mini-photo album and flipped through it, and opened it to a small picture of me getting the Bronze Star at my discharge parade. I simply groaned when Harlan picked it up and looked at it. “What is that?”
“Carling got the Bronze Star,” answered Marilyn.
I muttered something under my breath, and Harlan handed the photo album to his wife. “The Bronze Star? They don’t give the Bronze Star out for bad jumps. Just what the hell did you do?”
“It was nothing really!”
“Carl, it wasn’t nothing, and you know it!” protested Marilyn.
“It’s classified,” I answered back.
“Who are they going to tell!?” she replied.
I just shook my head in exasperation. Marilyn simply didn’t believe the concept of security applied to her. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut if you stapled her lips together! “Marilyn!”
“Come on, buddy, give!” said Harlan. Anna Lee looked on curiously, too.
I rubbed my face. “Okay, this is what happened. We were down there training the Honduran Army. Really routine stuff, good neighbors and all that crap. So, anyway, we’re nearing the end of the deployment, when the general running this whole shebang, a frigging one jump chump, comes up with this great plan to cement US-Honduran relations. He’s going to have the Honduran Air Force drop the American paratroopers and we’re going to drop the Hondurans.”
Harlan was following this closely. He also understood my reference to the straight leg, since he now had his paratrooper wings as well. “Okay, I’m following you. I’m guessing this didn’t work out too well?”
I snorted and shook my head. “Not hardly. Here’s where it gets crazy. One of the paratroop companies was missing their FIST officer, and I got tasked to provide one from my battery. No biggie. My mistake was that I said it was going to be my last jump in Honduras and my last jump with the division. As soon as I got back home I was going to Sill. So rather than pick one of my second lieutenants, I went myself. I mean, the whole thing was supposed to be a daytime milk run, almost a Hollywood jump, only with light weapons.”
Harlan nodded slowly. “And?”
“And the Honduran Air Force was using C-47s, not 130s or 141s. It was an absolute disaster!”
It took Harlan a few moments to figure it out. A look of horrified comprehension suffused his face when he did. “C-47s? You don’t mean…”
“Bingo! We were jumping from World War II era Goony Birds!”
“Holy shit!”
“Harlan!” scolded his wife.
Roscoe didn’t seem to notice, though, and Harlan just waved her off. “So, what happened?”
I sighed. “It was a world class soup sandwich. One of the birds blew a piston, and it took us until the middle of the night to rebuild the plane. Instead of being the pathfinders, we ended up tail end Charlie, dropping at the end of the exercise. Mostly that went well, but the plane I was on, the pilot got lost, and after a bit, he just turned on the green light and dumped us out. It took us most of a week to get back to civilization.”
“You weren’t over the drop zone?”
“Harlan, I’m just glad he didn’t drop us in the ocean! He didn’t have a clue where he was.”
“Okay, so that really sucks. You blew your knee out landing where you weren’t supposed to.” I just nodded at that. “So they still don’t hand out Bronze Stars for getting lost.”
I laughed at that. “No they don’t. Okay, here’s the story. The captain of the company, who I was jumping with, he broke his neck on landing. A private got killed on landing, and another one ripped up his leg worse than I did. The platoon leader I was jumping with was a numbnuts second john who couldn’t find his ass with a flashlight and a map. I had to take over the stick of troopers and get them back home. That’s what I got it for.”
“No, there’s more than that.”
I looked at him and then shrugged. “Okay, but remember, this is totally classified. The entire operation took place in Honduras. We landed in Honduras. We were lost in Honduras. If you were to ever hear any rumors about any other events taking place, it would be your responsibility as an officer to report those rumors to G-2.”
Harlan’s eyes widened. “What kind of rumors?”