In the wake of the UN troopers, a German infantry major hiked up the hill. The major spent fifteen minutes walking around, closely examining the hilltop. When he had completed his inspection, he returned to sit on a boulder just up the hill from Fong’s body. An out-of-breath corporal came trotting up to the officer and rapidly reported, “Herr Major, die heckenschuetzen….” The major flashed his palm and sternly corrected him. “We speak English, always English. Now start over.”
The corporal frowned and then began again, haltingly, “Sir. The resistance men are gone. We could find no other bodies, sir. The rest of them must have escaped und taken their wounded with them, sir.” The major shook his head in contradiction. He knew better. He asked the corporal, “What others? There were no other fighting positions, no other blood stains, no other empty cartridge cases, aside from those from our own Kalashnikovs. These Americans don’t have any rifles that fire our 5.45-millimeter cartridge. That’s the only sort of fired cases that I’ve seen scattered around. Hundreds of them. And as for bodies… all we’ve found was this one Oriental. There was perhaps one other man, who got away with the larger caliber rifle. That was the one that was fired at us from the far side of the next ridge.”
The corporal looked dumbfounded. He implored, “But sir, between here und the valley below, we have suffered some forty-six—how do you say—casualties, killed and wounded. Everyone says there must have been at least a unit of company size in these hills. There must have been.” The major shook his head again from side to side. He somberly gazed at the eviscerated body for a few moments. He said with reverence, “He was quite a warrior, this one.”
The corporal bent down to search Fong’s body, which was still partially stiff with rigor mortis. It took considerable effort to pry the rifle from his cold, dead hands.
CHAPTER 27
Abrams
“The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
All the members had been briefed on the Abrams tank. Months before, Jeff Trasel gave the Northwest Militia and some of the other local militias a series of briefings on armored vehicles, using his Jane’s books and Army field manuals such as FM 17-15 Tank Platoon, for reference. Seeing some of the tanks up close was another matter. To Todd, they looked ominous and frightening.
Jeff began his M1 briefing, “The M1A1 Abrams tank was the principal tank of the United States Army and Marine Corps before the Crunch. The M1A1 weighs sixty-seven-and-a-half tons. It is just over thirty-two feet long, twelve feet wide, and nine-feet-six-inches high. It can travel at forty-two miles an hour with the governor on, and even faster if the governor is disabled, as some tankers are known to do. I don’t know how things are now, but doing that before the Crunch was grounds for an Article 15 disciplinary action. The M1 tank can climb a vertical obstacle forty-nine inches high.
“When the first Abrams tanks were fielded in 1983, as the ‘M1,’ they were equipped with a 105-mm main gun. Variants produced since 1986 (the M1A1) were fitted with a M256 120-mm main gun. The bigger gun was an outgrowth of the escalating armor add-on cold war between the NATO countries and the former Soviet Union. As each side added more and more armor to their tanks, they saw the need for progressively bigger main guns to punch through all that armor. The normal ammo load is forty rounds for the main gun, and over twelve thousand rounds of ammunition for the machineguns, mainly 7.62-mm NATO for the coax.”
“The armor on the Abrams is impressive. ‘Chobham’ layered armor panels are installed on the glacis and turret. In addition to the main belt of armor, there are also armored bulkheads between turret and engine, and special ‘blow out’ panels over the main gun ammunition compartment. M1s built after 1988 also have depleted uranium armor beneath the Chobham panels. Those are M1A2s. I suppose they weigh even more than the M1A1 model, but I couldn’t find a spec on that.
“The M1 series tanks are powered by Avco-Lycoming AGT-1500 turbine engines. This fifteen-hundred-horsepower turbine gives the tank its distinctive quiet whining noise that can be heard above the sound of the treads when the wind is right. One interesting point is that it uses the same amount of fuel when idling or running fifty miles an hour cross-country. With a turbine, it always burns roughly the same amount of fuel. Needless to say, depots are often easier targets, if available. So when you have the chance, the best way to stop a platoon of M1 tanks is to take away their refueling infrastructure.
“There are several high technology goodies on an M1A2. They include GPS navigation systems, which could be working, assuming that the GPS satellites have been in stable orbits for the past four years. They also have a digital inter-vehicular information system, commonly referred to by its acronym, IVIS. With maintenance likely degraded, the IVIS systems probably won’t be working, but their FM radios probably will. The laser range finders may or may not be working at this point. Also, of greater concern are the gunners’ thermal imaging sight and a commander’s Independent Thermal Viewer. Both of these can literally see heat. They are optimized for detecting the heat of vehicle engines, but they can see human body heat. I strongly suspect, however, that the thermal sights won’t be working, due to the limited useful life and fragility of their sensor heads.
“In addition to the main gun, the Abrams carries a coaxially mounted 7.62-mm machinegun, a Browning M2 .50-caliber machinegun for the commander, and another 7.62-mm machinegun—the M240—for the loader. In all, the tank normally carries a crew of four.
“Tankers seldom operate alone. A single tank is very vulnerable to getting enveloped by infantry, particularly in limiting terrain. The tank platoon is the smallest maneuver element within a tank company. Organized to fight as a unified element, the platoon consists of four main battle tanks organized into two sections, with two tanks in each section. Tanks are normally accompanied by infantry for local security. On the march, they talk back and forth on SINCGARS VHF radios. The SINCGARS are frequency-hopping radios, but under the current circumstances, I’ll bet that they are operating on fixed frequencies, and possibly without encryption.
“When they are in laager, they use field telephones, especially if they’ve stopped for more than a few hours. Count on it. The tanks have telephone boxes on the back for communicating with infantrymen. The infantry have digital field phones—sort of like ours—for when they are dismounted, and telephones boxes like the tankers’ on their APCs like the M113s, M2s, and M3s. For some reason, when the Army designed the M1 tank, unlike the older M60 tank, they forgot to run cabling from the main commo panel inside, called an AM-1780, to the phone box, so their crews have to run WD-1 wire through the loader’s hatch or one of the vision blocks and attach it to a field phone on the back of the tank.
“The M1 tank has vulnerabilities just like any other tank. When they are getting pinged with a lot of small-arms fire, they button up and pull in the thermal viewers so they don’t get their optics shot up. That limits their visibility. That’s when they have greater difficulty acquiring targets, maneuvering on rough terrain, or spotting approaching infantry. One other thing to consider is that although they carry a huge supply of ammo, they don’t have an unlimited supply of vision ports. They carry spares, but if you keep shooting out the ports, or obscuring them by spray painting them, for example, eventually they’ll be blind.