Checking first the remote box to ensure that the radio was set on the Team net, Bannon keyed the radio and paused for a moment to let the radio’s small cooling fan come up to speed. “ALL BRAVO 3 ROMEO ELEMENTS, THIS IS ROMEO 25. IT’S GOING TO BE AWHILE BEFORE THOSE OTHER PEOPLE GET HERE. SHUT DOWN AND SETTLE DOWN. CHECK YOUR SYSTEMS AND LOCK AND LOAD. ACKNOWLEDGE, OVER.”
One by one, the platoons checked in and acknowledged. Uleski, in Alpha 55, simply stood up in its cupola, turned toward 66, and waved, indicating that he understood. The ITVs did not respond but shut down. With nothing more to do there, Bannon turned around in the cupola and faced to the rear. Locking the push-to-talk switch on his CVC back so he could talk to the driver on the intercom while hanging on with both hands, Bannon began to back the tank onto the logging trail. As he leaned over to the right side of the cupola, watching the right rear fender as 66 moved back, Kelp popped out of the loader’s hatch and leaned over to the left, watching the left rear fender. Once on the trail, the tank made a pivot turn to the right and started forward and toward 3rd Platoon.
The drive down to 3rd Platoon was a short one, only about 700 meters. But it felt good to be in the tank and moving. Standing in the TC’s hatch of a tank, rolling down a road or cross-country was always an exhilarating experience for Bannon. He never tired of the thrill. Despite all the pain, misery, and headaches a tank could inflict upon its crew, it was fun being a tanker. It was the little joys in life that kept a soldier like Bannon going, and right now he was in desperate need of a little joy.
As they moved along the trail, he kept an eye to the left, catching an occasional glimpse of the 3rd Platoon tanks. Their nets were still up but were propped up clear of the exhaust as well as the tank’s primary sight. When 66 passed the last of 3rd Platoon’s tanks, Bannon ordered Ortelli to turn left into the forest and move down a small trail cut by a combat engineer vehicle that had dug the Team’s positions. As they had not planned to fight from here, 66 was taking one of the alternate firing positions from Alpha 33, now to their immediate left at about seventy-five meters. 33 would now have only its primary position to fire from and one alternate firing position to its left. 66 would not have an alternate. If 66 were detected and fired upon while in this position, the best Bannon could do would be to blow smoke grenades, back out of sight, and hope that whoever was shooting at them gave up before 66 crept forward and reoccupied the same firing position.
Unlike the other tanks in the team, rather than stay back and hide in the forest, Bannon decided to ease 66 into its firing position. From there he would be able to observe the village, the valley, and the hills across the valley. The walled farm was just off to the team’s extreme right was the only key piece of terrain he could not see. Satisfied with his position, he ordered Ortelli to shut the engine down and to get out with Kelp to cut some foliage and drape it across the tank as camouflage. In his place, Folk came up to the TC’s position to man the M2 and monitor the radio while the rest of the crew were on the ground.
Using an ax, Ortelli began to cut some branches as Kelp and Bannon draped the camouflage net over the rear of the turret and back deck without putting up the supports or stake it down. All Bannon wanted to do was to break up some of the tank’s outline. Finished with the net, the two of them began to place the branches dragged over by Ortelli on the side and front of the tank not covered by the net. They were careful to ensure that the gunners’ primary sight was not blocked and that the turret could be traversed some without knocking off the foliage or snagging the net.
When they’d done as much as they could, Bannon stepped back a few meters to view their handiwork. To his eye, Alpha 66 looked like a tank covered with branches. Someone looking hard would be able to see it, no doubt about that. But, with a little luck and some harassment from the air defense artillery, any Russian pilot zooming about overhead would be moving too fast to take a hard look. Satisfied that they had done the best they could, the crew remounted and waited.
With nothing else to do for the moment, Bannon took off his CVC, laid it down on top of the turret and stood upright as he took to watching to the east. With the radio turned up so he could hear any traffic being passed, he began to listen to the noise of the battle to his front.
The rumble of impacting artillery had been joined by new sounds, chief among them was the faint crack of high velocity tank cannons firing. The cavalry, no doubt, was now fully engaged, returning artillery and tank fire. That meant the enemy was out in the open and coming on. With no way of finding out what was going on out there if he kept his radio on the team net and aux receiver on the battalion command net, Bannon was half tempted to switch his auxiliary radio receiver over to the cavalry’s frequency. But doing so would have meant leaving either the battalion or the team net. Were he still up on the headquarters position, that would not have been a problem since Uleski would have been close enough to monitor the net he wasn’t. After mulling the problem over without coming up with a solution, Bannon resigned himself to the fact that until the battalion started to pass information down, if they ever got around to doing so, he would just have to be like a mushroom and stay in the dark. Besides, at the moment, he felt it was more important to be near 3rd Platoon and listening to the team’s command net just in case Garger had forgotten that morning’s lesson on radio listening silence.
Now the waiting began. It wasn’t even 0830 yet. The last hour had gone fast but had been emotionally draining. Everything had changed that morning. Wars, once started, take on a life of their own. What occurs and how they end are seldom controllable by either side. World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam all took twists and turns no one foresaw. Bannon had no reason to doubt that despite all the planning and training that had gone into preparing for World War III, it wasn’t going to be any different. Those thoughts were disquieting. His mind needed to be diverted to something less ominous and more comprehensible.
After pulling on his CVC, muffling most of the noise of the unseen covering force battle, he locked the push-to-talk switch back into the intercom position. “Gunner, have you run a computer check yet this morning?”
“No, sir, we haven’t.”
“Well, let’s make sure we don’t get any surprises whenever Ivan gets it in his head to pay us a visit. I intend to go home a veteran and collect some of those benefits Congress is always boasting they provide. How about you, Kelp?”
Kelp stood on the turret floor and looked up out of the opened loader’s hatch at Bannon with a grin. “I’m with you. My uncle was in Nam. He’s always tellin’ me how rough it was. By the time we get done kickin’ Russian ass, I’ll be able to tell ’em what a real war was like.”
Bannon left the CVC keyed to the intercom position so that the rest of the crew could hear their conversation. “Well, if Ortelli can keep this beast running, and Sergeant Folk can hit the targets I find him, you and I should do pretty well, Kelp.” Both Ortelli and Folk chimed in, vowing that they were going to be the ones waiting for Bannon and Kelp. After a couple more minutes of banter, when Bannon judged that they were in a more settled state of mind, he started them on the crew checklist. With great deliberateness, he went down the checklist, item by item, watching as the crewman responsible for each item performed it. In the process, he began to feel more comfortable as he saw the initial shock slowly fade. By the time they were done, he was able to relax, both physically and mentally, for the first time that day.