“But Private Jones just loves to run!”
That cracked all of them up, especially since I was calling Spec 4 Jones Private Jones! Thereafter, however, my nickname around the battery, and ultimately the regiment, was ‘Doc’ or ‘the Doc’, although none of the men said it to my face. I could live with that.
Chapter 49: Bachelor Life
The 82nd is unique in its structure, which is organized around its equally unique readiness system. Alone among all the divisions in the Army, the 82nd is tasked with being able to send troops anywhere on the planet within 24 hours. The average division can take weeks to get ready to move. We do it in hours.
The heart of the division consists of three brigade combat teams; each brigade basically consists of three battalions of parachute infantry plus an Airborne field artillery battalion. Each battalion has three parachute infantry companies plus a battery assigned from the artillery battalion. There are also a variety of other outfits attached, such as engineers, medics, transport, and even a few chaplains who jump in with us. Technically most of these assets, including the artillery, belonged to the division and not the brigade, but that was the way it worked.
The division operates on an 18 week cycle, with each of the three brigades somewhere on a six week element of the cycle. When I arrived, 3rd Brigade was in the six weeks of ready cycle, which was unusual. Normally people transfer in and out during the support cycle. Support is the goof off time, when things are relaxed. People take leaves, officers and men transfer in and out, it’s low pressure. It’s like being in the regular army, with regular hours and duties.
After support, you go into a six week training cycle. This becomes a lot tougher. You are shooting the guns, maybe doing a jump or two, getting stuff ready to go, and working a lot longer hours. Forget about taking leave, but you’ll probably still be able to sleep at home, and you might have to work some weekends.
After training you go to the six week ready cycle. You are ready to go to war. Forget about leave. Kiss the wife or girlfriend good-bye. Within the brigade, it gets even tougher. During the ready cycle of six weeks, each infantry battalion and its artillery battery are on two week cycles of readiness. You can go home, but you can’t leave the area, and a lot of the guys stay on the base anyway. During that period, you can’t be more than two hours away from going to war. In theory, when the shit hits the fan, they just want to issue you the ammo and load you on the airplane. You have two hours to get assembled and ready to go. All the equipment, ammo, rations, and whatever are pre-packaged and pre-positioned out at the ramps at all times. The other two battalions aren’t much better, with four and six hour readiness periods. There are usually readiness drills and exercises to check to see if we are ready to go.
If the President decides that Lower Slobbovia needs to be taught a lesson, the ready battalion will load their planes and be airborne in two hours. No excuses. The rest of the brigade will be airborne in either four or six hours, and most likely the support elements will be gone inside a day. The training brigade gets moved up to the ready brigade; the support brigade supports this and gets ready to move out itself. Leaves are cancelled and all hell breaks loose. Lower Slobbovia is about to be visited by a shitload of teenagers with guns who just had their weekend plans trashed. Lower Slobbovia will wish they hadn’t been visited!
You can make the cycle your friend, but don’t ever try to buck the cycle. The cycle will always win.
On the other hand, it was very easy to make plans for anything short of war. We had calendars with six week blocks drawn on them, and you could make plans. For instance, my first week in the battery I discussed my impending nuptials with the captain, and was able to tell Marilyn when we could get married. I figured I would need two weeks leave, starting in the middle of the week. The wedding would be on a Saturday, so if I got off duty on a Wednesday before that, I could travel to Utica, do whatever I needed to do on Thursday or Friday, get married, have a week of honeymoon, and then be able to get Marilyn down to Fayetteville by Tuesday after getting back. Since I needed to do this during a support cycle that limited us to a wedding between July 2 and July 30 of this year. If we missed that window, we would have to wait 18 weeks for the cycle to repeat, putting us into November.
I wasn’t all that hopeful. This all relied on Marilyn being organized enough to be able to get this taken care of in six months. Marilyn couldn’t organize a church cake sale, let alone a wedding. The last time we did this, she postponed the wedding from June to September. Furthermore, she had to get used to the idea that the Army wasn’t just going to let me take a weekend off to help. When Maggie got married, Marilyn tried to help and managed to lose, within 24 hours, all the lists and spreadsheets she had asked me to print out. Maggie ended up having me run the wedding. I didn’t think it was all that difficult. Pick a date, find a church, find a reception hall, pick a budget. After that, it’s just a matter of money. There are lots of banquet halls around Utica, lots of places to buy a dress, lots of limo companies. Just make a list and get it done!
Marilyn wasn’t too pleased by my attitude, nor by the fact that I wouldn’t be able to come up and help. How was I supposed to participate in pre-wedding counseling? I flat out told her I was a thousand miles away, and the last guy on the planet I was going to listen to about getting married was a guy who wasn’t allowed to get married. If her priest required it, she could find another priest. She wanted to know if I was having any of her brothers be in my wedding party; I said I wasn’t even having my own brother in it, so I didn’t see any need to balance things out. She didn’t push that one. I did promise to take some leave during the cycle before the wedding and visit, and we could see the priest then for some of the details.
I did manage to get her to set a date of July 9. The night after I got the schedule from the Captain, I had her call her priest and reserve the date. That date, and most of the others in the window were already taken, but not July 2. That was the date we selected.
After running that last Friday morning of January, Captain Harris got a phone call and summoned me into his office. “Buckman, I told battalion about your paper yesterday afternoon, and they booted it to division. You’re to report to the G-2 at division at 1400.”
I stared at the captain for a second. “Sir, it’s just a report on mathematical techniques!”
“Well, I don’t think that you’re in trouble, but you need to go over there and find out. I won’t let them shoot you without a few last words and a cigarette. My word on it!”
“Yes, sir.” Oh, shit, now what! It was just a paper on math! The paper had already been accepted into the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, which I had joined, and which the professor was a long time member of. Furthermore, they were having their Eastern Seaboard Regional Meeting in February, and the professor was scheduled to deliver the lecture during a session on discrete mathematics.
At 1400 I found myself standing at attention in a colonel’s office, while he and some captain quizzed me about the paper. How the hell do you explain discrete mathematics, information loss and entropy, and computer networking to people who never learned what a derivative or an integral was? (Okay, that’s a bit extreme. They all had to take Calculus I, but by now they had all forgotten it.)
“Excuse me, sir, permission to ask a question?”
“Granted.”
“What’s going on, sir? Am I in some sort of trouble? This was my thesis, from before I took the oath,” I asked.