RANGES

During that first inspection, as I arrived in front of the first member of the Weapons Squad, I found the platoon sergeant whispering in my ear.

"Ask him when he last fired his weapon," Sgt Haas directed.

I was a little surprised, since I didn’t expect my platoon sergeant to actually tell me what to do (I did expect him to let me know a little more discretely), but, being brand new, I figured he had a good reason, so I did.

In those days every rifle platoon had three rifle squads and one weapons squad. The weapons squad had two machine guns and two bazookas, properly called rocket launchers. I was standing in front of a rocket launcher gunner. I asked the question which Sgt Haas had suggested and was nearly floored at the answer.

"I have never fired this weapon, sir."

I was sure I had either misunderstood or been misunderstood.

"I don’t mean this specific weapon, I mean when did you last fire a rocket launcher," I explained.

"Never, sir," was the answer.

I looked at Haas and he showed no emotion. At the next gunner he prompted me to ask again. "Never," was the answer. Well, I thought, perhaps there’s some logical explanation for that. Then the same thing happened with each of the machine gunners. Out of eight gunners and assistant gunners in my platoon, none had ever fired his assigned weapon.

I had entered West Point in 1954 when the Korean War was still officially going on. Approaching draft age all through high school, I had followed the progress of that war carefully. As a cadet I read everything I could about the prosecution of the war. I knew that many times in Korea, American positions were overrun and all the defenders killed because no one left alive knew how to fire the machineguns. I had, therefore, paid close attention in every class dealing with machineguns and was confident that I knew how to set the head space, fire, and keep firing the tricky A-6 machinegun. Now, in my first platoon, it looked as if I was the only one who could.

As soon as the inspection was over I asked Sgt Haas to meet me in my office. I told him that I had gotten the message and was appalled, but I didn’t know what to do. Sgt Haas suggested that I talk to the company commander.

Unfortunately, the company commanders reaction was not what I or Sgt Haas expected. Instead of taking charge of the solution to the problem, he told me that if it bothered me I should talk to the Battle Group S-3, the Operations and Training Officer. I immediately walked up to headquarters and went in to see the S-3.

Major Sigholtz was surprised and amused to have a brand new 2d Lieutentant stop in to criticize the training. Looking back on it now, I am amused at it, too. Such things are simply not done. Of course, the reason is that no other company commander would have allowed it, much less suggested it.

Sigholtz was a real character. He had been a sports hero in New York City in his youth, where sports heros were granted a very special status. He had the easy going self confidence of someone who has been very successful at something, especially sports. He was accompanied at all times by his dog, a huge boxer, who was, when I arrived, lying under the desk panting and drooling. It was a little unnerving, but the last few days had been that way from dawn to dusk, so I hardly noticed.

Major Sigholtz said words to the effect of, "So you, a second lieutenant who has been in the unit for about a week and a half, think you know more than I do about how to conduct training, have I got it about right?"

"No, sir," I stammered, "I’m simply pointing out a problem and hoping you will know what to do about it." Sigholtz was clearly not pleased.

A few weeks later, range firing for all the rocket launcher gunners in the battle group, forty in all, appeared on the training schedule. I was listed as the instructor. At this time the senior lieutenants, meaning the rest of the lieutenants, became rather curious about who I was and why I was training all the rocket launcher gunners. As soon as they discovered that I had little idea of how to run such a range or to conduct such training, they each predicted my certain failure.

As it turned out, they were right. The range firing was less than successful. One reason was the close attention I received from the Deputy Battle Group Comander who showed up unannounced and proceeded to walk around behind the firing line where he would have been incinerated had I allowed the launchers to fire. I had to repeadedly cease fire to save his life. I was afraid to instruct him of the danger from the range tower, so I would climb down, jog over to him, explain the problem, and ask him not to move around while I was conducting firing. As soon as we were ready to fire again I would see him walking behind a launcher.

After several appeals from me to not walk behind the firing line, the colonel decided that I was the problem. He ordered me to mark the backblast areas behind each firing position with engineer tape, which I didn’t have. So he closed me down until I could accomplish that. The gunners fired few rounds that day. I did get them back on the range a week later and they all fired at least 8 rounds apiece. At the end of the day, they had all qualified on their weapons and we were probably the only unit in the United States Army at that moment that had all its gunners qualified.

The range firing was repeated several weeks later for the machineguns, and once again I was the instructor. It took several days to properly train the gunners and assistant gunners on the machineguns, which were especially tricky to operate.

I thought I should have gotten the eternal gratitude of everyone in the unit for that. I had repeadedly asked other, more experienced officers for help and had been refused everytime. It turned out that the opportunity to get in trouble was so high in running a range that no one would ever do it voluntarily. I was the only one dumb enough to run ranges, especially for crew-served weapons.

My reward for conducting essential training that no one else would conduct was to be named rifle team coach. I would now run a rifle range everyday. To make matters worse, there was no talent among the soldiers assigned to my rifle team. I took them to the range everyday to fire for a few hours until it simply became second nature to them. We placed third in the division championships. Every other team had old marksmanship pros, senior NCOs who had made a career out of competitive shooting. I thought that under the circumstances we had done pretty well.

Now I was rewarded by being made the LeClerc Trials coach. At that time there was an automatic weapon in every fire team known as the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR. A French general had established a competition in Europe to improve the knowledge and skill of BAR gunners. That competition had now spread to the US. I took all the BAR gunners from the Battle Group and trained them, held a competition, selected the best gunners, and won the Division competition.

When I returned triumphantly to the company, the company commander grumbled something about my being off playing with my teams. I probably should have learned the lesson: no one was interested in training. The senior officers had no means of evaluating training effectiveness, but other measures abounded. Grass growing in front of the company barracks, number of offenses committed by the soldiers of the company, enthusiasm of the commander for supporting post beautifcation projects, all were more noticeable to the seniors than doing the only thing that mattered. Of course, I devoted the rest of my career to being the guy who always put training first. I adopted a motto which I had read in Clausewitz,

"It is of utmost importance that the soldier, high or low, not be exposed on the battlefield to events, which, seen for the first time, place him in terror or perplexity."

That is a tall order, but it is what I strove for the rest of my time in the Army.

Several years later on Okinawa, it came to the attention of the Battle Group staff that my platoon always won the mortar competition. When they reviewed the training for the past several years they noted that my mortar section was often scheduled to fire on the Marine ranges on the northern end of the island. They decided that I should share some of that experience with the rest of the mortars in the Battle Group, so they put mortar firing on the training schedule with me as the instructor. I immediately told them to check on the availability of mortar ammunition. They did and discovered that my section had already fired all the mortar ammunition for the entire Battle Group for the year (in fact, I had been told that we had fired all the mortar ammunition for the US Army in the Pacific.) There was none available until the next year. Did someone call me in and compliment me on my dedication and farsightedness?

Yeah, right.