Back when I was doing all this the first time, we just didn’t know. Alison wasn’t diagnosed until she was over 18. The autistic grandchild and the dead baby didn’t happen until well into the end of the grandchildren boom. Every time it happened, it was a horrible event, but nobody drew any conclusions, certainly nobody from inside the Lefleur family.
Personally, I figured it was from all the inbreeding those shitkickers and hillbillies were doing up north of Plattsburgh. Remember Deliverance? At least two sets of Marilyn’s first cousins married each other! Welcome to the Lefleur family! Genetically, at least, my mother was right; I could have done better!
Chapter 56: International Relations
We dropped on Honduras at 0700 on Monday 7 September, 1981. At the time, it seemed as if a combat drop would be preferable to hanging around either the battalion or Marilyn.
I had made a mistake when I went into ROTC lo those many years ago. No, the Army wasn’t going into combat for quite a while. That didn’t mean I might not get deployed somewhere. The Sandinistas had taken over in Nicaragua, and were making themselves into a real pain in the rear for everybody in the region, and especially for Uncle Sam. It was decided that a show of strength would be a good idea. Operation Southern Shield ’81 was put into place, a joint training mission with the Honduran Army, and the 82nd Airborne was tasked to participate. Specifically, a battalion task force would be sent down to Honduras to show the flag and participate in training missions and war games.
This isn’t all that unusual an event. The 82nd is pretty much ready to go at any time, and paratroopers are a pretty flexible bunch. It’s almost part of the code that things will get mixed up and moved around, and you learn to live with it. In this case, a battalion of paratroopers would be sent, 1st of the 505th, along with their battery from the 319th Airborne Artillery, and would form a battalion task force. In addition, we would have a platoon of combat engineers (Charlie Company, 307th Engineers), a platoon of Stingers (Charlie Battery, 3rd of the 4th Air Defense Artillery), and even some MPs from the 82nd MP Company. The local outfit in Panama, the 193rd Infantry Brigade, was supplying a mobile field hospital, a squadron of Cobra attack choppers, and a squadron of Hueys. The brigade commander even deployed with us, since this was a big deal operation.
Guess which battery from the 319th was spending three months in Latin America! Guess whose wife wasn’t happy! Marilyn was seven-plus months pregnant and ten-plus months bitchy. I was not going to Honduras! I was going to be at the hospital with her while she delivered my child! She was getting a divorce! She hated me, the battery, the battalion, the regiment, the brigade, the division, the army, and me all over again! (I guess she hated me twice as much.)
I wasn’t too worried about the divorce. She would never be able to get a lawyer in time and be able to serve me divorce papers on the base (Federal property) and I was pretty sure there was a World War II era ‘Dear John’ law that said she couldn’t divorce me until I got home, by which time I hoped she’d be over the mad.
Personally, I was there for all three of my children’s births on the first go-around, and the miracle of childbirth ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. I think my Dad had the better idea — smoke a pack of cigarettes in the waiting room while reading Field and Stream. We were informed of the deployment on Monday, August 31, and I spent most of the intervening week at the battery getting ready. It was quieter!
Life for me in the battalion had taken a decidedly worse turn that summer. Lieutenant Colonel Buller was now Colonel Buller and had been transferred to NATO in Brussels. His replacement, Lieutenant Colonel Morris, did not turn out to be a fan of mine. Far from it. I suspected that if my chute didn’t open over Honduras, he would not be sorry.
No, the problem was a personal one, and not one easily fixed. Lieutenant Colonel Morris brought with him a nickname, ‘Mighty Mouse’, and for good reason; he was only 5’7" tall. His three battery commanders were Captain Mikowski, 5’8", Captain Borisowsky, 5’10", and me, 5’11". He had issues with all of us, and in direct proportion to our height! Mighty Mouse was going to make us better, and fix our problems, whatever they might be, and it seemed that the taller we were, the more problems we had. Mikowski could slump a little and get away with it, and he escaped the easiest, but Borisowsky and I were up shit creek! I had three months to go before I transferred to Sill, and I was happy to be in a foreign country! Borisowsky was facing the brunt of it on his lonesome and would probably be a corporal by the next time I saw him. I was just pleased that Buller had given me a real ‘walks on water’ OER before he left.
Even worse, the division decided that it would be an insult to our Honduran allies for the artillery battery in the exercise to be commanded by a mere first lieutenant. No, only a captain would do, so my promotion was moved forward, over Lieutenant Colonel Morris’ vociferous objections. It was a damn good thing that immediately after this deployment was over, I would be moving to Fort Sill.
So Sunday we loaded the Hercs and Monday morning we dropped on La Paz Drop Zone in Honduras. If it wasn’t for the fact that my battalion commander was holding an axe for me, and Marilyn was sharpening it, it would have probably been somewhat enjoyable. We based out of a military airfield near Tegucigalpa. The CIA and some Special Forces types were nearby, doing things they probably shouldn’t be doing in nearby Nicaragua, but we had nothing to do with them. We did spend a lot of time training with and teaching the Honduran Army and working with their parachute battalion, but that wasn’t all. The field hospital was set up and treated civilians as well, earning some good will. The Hueys would be left behind, since the Army was transitioning to Blackhawks. The engineers were deployed to various places around the area to help build roads and bridges.
This whole shebang was under the command of a brigadier general named Hawkins from Fort Benning who saw Southern Shield ’81 as his ticket to the E-ring at the Pentagon. He was constantly climbing up the asses of the majors and colonels involved and making them do it harder and faster and tougher, etc. etc. etc. As a captain, though, I was so far down the food chain that I wasn’t worthy of notice. That suited me just fine.
There wasn’t a whole lot to do otherwise. My Spanish is limited to ‘Mas cerveza, por favor!’ and ‘Donde esta el baño?’ Max, now a first lieutenant and my exec, did a lot better, since his Spanish was quite fluent. Besides, it wasn’t like I was going out chasing skirts like some of my troops. Boys will be boys, so I laid in a generous supply of rubbers to keep them safe. Besides, it was the late summer in the tropics and you could melt even at night! You could find some local beer, but it generally tasted like weasel piss, so when possible I would stock up on Heineken, which was usually available and much more expensive. I even made a few jumps with the Hondos (from the C-130s) and picked up a set of Honduran jump wings. A lot of troopers on foreign training assignments do this. I heard of one master sergeant with seven different sets of jump wings from around the world!