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WAR GAMES – EVERYBODY’S DANISH
By fred | October 2, 2010
WAR GAMES – from EVERYBODY’S DANISH
WAR GAMES, IT’S JUST LIKE PLAYING COWBOYS AND INDIANS
With our basic training over, we got some new platoon officers, and our training moved into what most of us considered ‘fun.’ We were into what is known as Advanced Infantry Training. All the boring stuff, the learning to take care of equipment, our rifle, the compass and map learning, the grueling marches, now was the time to put all this stuff to the test.
For most exercises I was given a squad of twelve men. We first went through some stuff like crawling under barbed wire while they are shooting tracers from a machine gun over your head. I does tend to teach you to keep your ass on the ground. As you crawled on the ground, the tracers would be moving all over the top of you. You got the feeling that you would just like to crawl into a hole and forget the whole thing.
On another exercise we dug fox holes for ourselves. Our West Point Lieutenant kept telling us to dig deeper, and deeper. A tank was demonstrating how it could destroy infantry if it got through the lines. It would almost stop over the fox holes we had dug and spin its wheels. Those heavy medal tank tracks would just dig up ground. When it was over, the fox holes were gone.
The Lieutenant pointed out that if we were in that hole we would have been crushed, certainly eliminated from any capacity to fight. He said that it would be difficult to escape if a tank really did the track spin on top of a fox hole any troops were in, however if it was moving fast, we would still be alive if we had dug the damn things deep enough. If you learn with your eyes, this was one heck of lesson we would not forget.
We had to walk through an empty barracks building with our gas masks on. For some unknown reason we had to take the gas masks off about half way through the building. Stupid, I guess they were trying to make us feel some of the effects of the gas for some education purpose. I remember holding my breath, but my eyes were smarting and running for a long time after.
One exercise we really loved was, each of us individually with live ammunition walking slowly through a wooded area. All of a sudden a man sized target would pop up, it could be in front, or to the right or left. You had just a few seconds to shoot it, hit it and knock it down. If you didn’t do it in a few seconds, it was assumed that the ‘enemy’ had killed you. Just about every one of us in the company was killed at least once in this exercise until we learned to react and shoot fast.
One night in a compass problem I had my squad spread out, ready to attack a machine gun nest, all of a sudden I heard a lot firing to our left. A Major jumps out from behind a tree and I let him have it. We were shooting only blanks. He was a ‘referee’ trying to tell us we were all dead. Damn he was mad, said something about I could blind him firing that close. Now I was a little pissed off, and nervous, we had all been killed for about the fifth time. I just said, “That’s what we are trained to do——” He was really mad, and I said after a long wait, finally realizing that I was talking to an officer, “Sir.”
I have never ‘died’ so many times in my life. Another time I had had my scouts out checking yet another machine gun nest we were supposed to take out. When the scouts came back to report, the entire squad was huddled under a huge pine tree, looking at the map. It was a heavily forested area. Looking up you could not even see the sky. Somehow through all those limbs a sack bomb filled with flour dropped from a ‘bombing’ piper cub aircraft and ‘killed’ the entire squad,—– again! Another judge or referee pops up and says, “You are all dead.” It got to be a joke with us, like how many minutes do you get to live in real combat. Not long it looked like to us.
One morning very early we were given a target, another machine gun nest. We were about a mile from the target, the map showed a swamp of about a half mile in length, behind the nest, and the machine gun was situated in the ruins of a old broken down brick building. There was a huge field in front of it, and some forest areas about a hundred yards on each side. The squads were sent off at one hour intervals to attack.
I looked at the map and knew there was no way anyone would survive attacking that damn nest. The only way was if we hiked around the swamp, or slue, or whatever it was, and try and get through it, and attack from the back. My guys did not like wading in a swamp, but they didn’t like dying all the time either. One guy asked about snakes and stuff like that. I told them that I never heard of snakes in a Washington state swamp it was too darn cold for swamp snakes. I talked it over with the rest of the squad. They didn’t much like the idea of going through a swamp, snakes or no snakes but they figured – why not? They were tired of dying all the time too.
They gave us the go ahead at about ten hundred hours (10 A. M.) in the morning. I had made all the compass calculations and we started our circle. No roads, it was a hell of a thick forest mess of pine and alder trees. Over grown, with fallen, rotting logs to climb over, difficult to get through, and very time consuming. It was almost fourteen hundred (2 P.M.) before we got to the back of the swamp. It was a real bitch. Water sometimes up to my waist, and I was one of the tallest of the squad. Some of the guys were wading up to their chests, holding their rifles over their heads in spots. We would hit some shallow spots, but not many. A couple of times the taller guys ‘piggy backed’ some of the shorter ones in the squad. Some of the guys were really getting chilled so we moved as fast as we could.
Every so often in the distance we would hear a machine gun firing, as another squad would attack the nest. It seemed that no one else had the same idea that we had. Finally at about eighteen hundred hours (6 P. M.) we could see the bank behind the ruins of the old brick building. In Washington in the late fall it gets dark early, fortunately we had a fairly clear night, and there was a moon out.
The edge of the swamp, the bank, was about three feet high. It was awful quiet, so we slowly waded to the bank, and lay under it. A line of us all hugging bank of the swamp, I whispered to the guys to fix bayonets (we kept the scabbard on in games). I figured it would be a good idea to ‘soften them up first,’ so again I whispered to get their dummy grenades and pitch them into the ruins, right before we ‘came over the top.’ I whispered, “Pitch,” and we all threw our grenades into the nest, and came screaming over the lip of the swamp.
Our Field First Sgt was sitting on a old log smoking a cigarette in the front of the ruins, he started to rise up, and had a startled expression on his face. My squad of twelve was literally swarming all around him. Then his face got red and he said, “Where in the fuck have you stupid bastards been? The company has been in for hours, the captain was thinking of calling out the regiment to look for you. Get in that truck, — do it now!”
The Sergeant got in the front to drive, WOW was he pissed, I have never seen him that mad before. All of us dripping wet piled into the back of the truck. It was awful quiet. One of the guys, looked at me and said, “I guess we really screwed up,” and then he grinned and said, “At least we didn’t get killed this time.”
Another guy said, “I wouldn’t bet on it!”
It was after nineteen hundred hours (7 P. M.) by the time we got to the company. We trooped in behind the Field First – and the Captain and Top Sgt met us in the hall. Now for the Captain to still be in the company area at this time was highly unusual to say the least. He was usually at the officers club or home with his wife by this time. “Nielsen its your squad, lets hear it, it better be damn good.”
I said, “Sir, I’m sorry, it just took us a lot longer to execute our plan of attack.”
“Eight hours, for Christ’s sake, what the hell could take you eight hours?”
“Captain, there was no road, and the swamp was—-.”
He broke in, “The swamp, what about the swamp?”
I said, “It took us a lot longer to get behind the swamp, and a lot longer than I figured to go through it to get to the target area.”
The Captain has a habit of shaking his head, like a boxer just taking a punch. He said, “I don’t believe it. Do you have your map?”
“Yes Sir,” and I pulled my small problem map out of my breast pocket, it had a lot of my pencil stuff related to compass readings on it.
The Captain said to the Top Sergeant, “Get out the big base map and bring it here.”
With the squad still wet, the usually sparkling front hall was taking a beating, mud from our boots, and damp spots all around the squad, it was a worry. We figured we were in big trouble. The Field First and Top Sergeants both standing there, I knelt on the floor and showed the Captain from my little map what we had done.
He said, “I still don’t believe it, you went right through the middle of the swamp?” He got down on his hands and knees with my small map and traced our route on that large Fort Map.
I said, “Sir, no one told me that there was a time limit on the attack schedule.”
“Is that right Sergeant Jungbooth?” the Captain said to our Field First.
“No there was no time set, we just released the squads every hour and figured they would attack in a equal time frame.”
“Sergeant, if the machine gun was still there, would they have neutralized it?” he asked.
“Captain, they scared the hell out of me. I was just sitting there at the old building having a smoke and all of a sudden a bunch of grenades came flying and bouncing all over the area – then these assholes came screaming out of the swamp, with fixed bayonets, ya, they sure as hell neutralized that nest.”
The Captain with a huge grin on his face, turned to the Top Sergeant and said, “Roll up the big map and give it to me, give me yours son, I gotta go to the Officers Club and tell the guys, no body is going to believe this, not in a million years. Right through the damn swamp, if I didn’t see what a mess these guys were, I still wouldn’t believe it.”
“Nielsen, you have an hour to get your boys cleaned up. Top, get the Mess Sergeant to open the Mess, I want this squad to have a hot meal.”
A bunch of guys were watching from the third floor heads over the railing, the Captain looked up and said, “All of you dead men up there (referring to all others that got killed in a frontal attack on the machine gun nest) – get down here and clean up this hall for some real soldiers.”
After giving these instructions, he looked at us and said, “You did one hell of a job, I am damn proud of you.” With that, he grabbed the rolled up map and headed out for the Officers Club. The Captain was on his way to show his fellow officers, and grab some more bragging rights for Charlie Company.
As for the squad and I, we all heaved a sigh of relief, we were off the hook, it was close, but it was over. The old Mess Sergeant was bitching like hell, but the Top said to shut up, our squad had done something nobody else had ever done, and the Captain said hot food, and hot food we were going to get, no matter if the Mess stayed open until midnight.
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