Marilyn adjusted to life in the cycle about as well as I expected her to. She didn’t like it, but Marilyn had never given me grief about my working hours before, and I didn’t expect her to now. The support cycle was the easiest, and we were still finishing up that. Training cycle was next, and while she didn’t see as much of me, I was always home at night, and usually had my weekends free. The six weeks of ready cycle were very unhappy for her. The days were very long, and often there were overnight readiness exercises and drills.
There were, however, a few things I could do to ease her through this. First, we bought a used car, a little red Toyota Tercel with a stick shift and a couple of hamsters under the hood that she loved. That let her get out and around. I also drove her up to Fayetteville State. If she wanted to be a teacher, she needed a master’s degree. Fayetteville State is pretty much a black college, but whites could go there, too, and it was part of the University of North Carolina system. There were a number of colleges in the area, but most were either community colleges or religious colleges or undergrad colleges only. If she didn’t want to go to a black college, she would need to drive up to Raleigh or Durham, at least an hour away.
Marilyn was nervous about this, simply because Utica and Plattsburgh are pretty much totally Caucasian. Oh, there’re some blacks around, but Marilyn had lived a very sheltered life. I don’t think she had ever actually talked to a black person until she got to college, and Harlan and Anna Lee were a real shock to her family at the wedding. Still, we picked up a copy of the catalog and some admissions paperwork.
Going back to college would keep her busy. Likewise, when I was on the ready cycle, and stuck on base, I offered to fly her back to Utica for a few weeks, or maybe back to Plattsburgh to visit her aunt. She could drive if she wanted, also. That actually made her eyes light up, although she felt like she was abandoning me. I just wrapped my arms around her and promised it would be all right. I then implied that the rest of the guys and I would head out to the strip clubs, but she tried to punch me at that point, so I just wrapped my arms tighter and gave her some kisses.
The dreaded Orange Army had snuck into Fort Polk in September and captured it, and we were needed to parachute in and send them all back to Orangeland. In point of fact, Army base security was pretty lax, and several times a year the Orange Army was able to capture a base somewhere in the country, requiring the training brigade to go and liberate them. Once a year, every brigade in the division would participate in a major league training exercise somewhere. It’s very expensive and very time consuming and very difficult, but it’s also very effective. There’s a saying in the military, going back to at least the days of Caesar and before then, that the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war. That level of training is what takes us from being just the 82nd Airborne to the ‘elite’ 82nd Airborne.
During this rotation, the entire brigade made a combat drop, including the 319th. As I mentioned before, airdropping artillery is truly a major headache, and to be avoided at all costs if you can get away with it. We couldn’t. Battery B dropped rather than landed. Here’s a quick quiz for all you fans of the Airborne artillery:
What happens when you airdrop a 105mm howitzer from a C-130 Hercules?
a — The gun lands upside down.
b — The gun lands in a tree.
c — The gun lands in the swamp.
d — The gun lands in the river.
or everybody’s favorite:
e — All of the above! The gun lands upside down in a tree in the swamp and then falls into the river!
This assumes that everything is going perfectly. If something goes wrong, you get:
f — The chutes rip to shreds and the gun plummets to earth at terminal velocity and crashes into the General’s brand new Cadillac!
I’ve never actually seen Option F, but I’ve heard about it! The result is known as Satan’s Lawn Darts!
Amazingly enough, on our drop we actually had Option G, which was everything worked properly. When Captain Harris marveled at this, I just reminded him that God was saving up something more creative for us, like all four engines on the Herky Bird would fall off during takeoff, or the Air Force would forget to put a full load of fuel into it, or something even more enjoyable. Still we survived and got good marks doing so.
In January I discovered just how good that deployment was. Lieutenant Brimley was promoted up and out of his exec’s slot and sent off to the 321st as a captain in a battery commander’s slot. I was being promoted to First Lieutenant and taking over the exec’s slot. This was a real surprise to me, since normally it takes at least 2 to 2½ years before you can be promoted to first lieutenant, and I had only been in for a 1½ years. On the other hand, there is something called a 5 % list, where a small percentage of officers are promoted earlier than usual; maybe I was on a list somewhere. I was sure I would end up paying for it somehow. I wondered about any future promotions for myself. I was under an obligation of four years as part of my ROTC contract, which left me with a around 2½ years to go. That’s normally the minimum length of time required at a first lieutenant’s rank before even being considered for promotion to captain. My understanding was that they often waved that promotion under your nose as an inducement to stick around beyond your obligation. If I didn’t stay in, I had another two years of inactive reserve obligation, but that was nothing. Short of total war, I would be out.
In any case, I was the new exec. Captain Harris told our other second johns what was going on, and we divvied up their responsibilities. (Goldstein was long gone by then, with an OER that had him watching an ammo dump in Greenland.) We had a nice little ceremony that Marilyn came to, where I got my silver bars, and I settled into Lieutenant Brimley’s old office. Almost immediately I began to ‘enjoy’ one of the responsibilities of the exec’s position. The captain is the commanding officer, the ‘Old Man’, the nice guy; the exec is the ‘Hammer’ and the designated prick. As a general rule, Captain Harris let the exec handle the Article 15s, the non-judicial punishments, when the troops got stupid. He just signed off on whatever his XO decided (technically only the CO can administer Article 15s.) Now that was me.
Most of the time, the troops were good kids, but the fact was that a lot of them were teenagers away from home for the first time. By the time they made non-com, they usually had matured they weren’t a problem, but it wasn’t unusual to have the MPs haul some kid in who got drunk and mouthy, or who took a piss on the mayor’s lawn, or something equally stupid. If they were lucky, one of the non-coms would grab them before they got into trouble, but occasionally I would hammer them with restrictions, loss of pay, extra duty, or even take a stripe from their sleeve, and reduce them in rank. I didn’t have to do it often, but it was necessary, and if I was a hard case, I didn’t care. This was still better than giving them a court martial, which would end their career, even if they beat it.
Marilyn decided to enroll in January at Fayetteville State, and that seemed to go well. We had another support cycle in March, by which time I had built up some more leave, so she skipped school for a week and we took the Hawaiian vacation that Big Bob and Harriet had given us. We went to Oahu, which was very nice. I made sure to pack a good uniform, and we drove out to the Punchbowl and to Pearl Harbor to see the Arizona, where I paid my respects. The rest of the time we just goofed off and screwed around.