Shep's Army: Bummers, Blisters and Boondoggles by Shepherd Jean

Author:Shepherd, Jean [Shepherd, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Opus Books
Published: 2013-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

NIGHT MANEUVERS

I’m out on a night maneuver and our entire company is down in the swamps of the Everglades. In fact, there are about twenty-five companies on a vast night field maneuver that is to take place. Do you know what really happens on a night maneuver when soldiers get out there in the dark? Nothing. Everything goes to pieces. Individual guys have no idea what’s happening. There’s a peculiar chaotic quality that happens when this thing gets under way.

We’re all standing in the dark there one night, we’re all wearing our tropical gear, and our mosquito netting, and insect repellant rubbed all over our faces. Preparing for swamp warfare. Oh, boy! I don’t think there’s any place scarier than a swamp. You spend a night in a swamp, and man, you just don’t forget it! I’ll never forget it for the rest of my born days.

Me and Goldberg are assigned to a twisted pair of telephone lines we are supposed to string over to Company C’s command post. We all stand, waiting to be loaded on the trucks. Each one has been assigned his task. Each guy knows exactly what he has to do. I have a big reel of wire attached to my pack on my back. Goldberg has a field telephone set attached to him, and the two of us are a “wire-lane, company-observation-post team.” Me and Goldberg.

You’ve seen these movies of Van Johnson, he’s lying in a hole and he’s a captain, he’s the commanding officer, and he’s got his telephone that he keeps cranking. And he says, “Charlie Company here calling battalion headquarters. Charlie Company here.” Poom! Poom! The mortars are going overhead. That is what they call a command post field telephone, strung by wires back to the command post. His boss, the major, is about two hundred yards back in the darkness, hiding in his hole, which is a little larger. That’s the command post. And he’s got about three of these wires coming in. Each guy cranks when he wants to talk to him.

Goldberg and I are to lay one of these twisted pairs of wires, from our company to battalion headquarters, which is maybe two hundred yards away. And our company takes off into the dark. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp . And the mosquitoes start to move in and the heat is coming up from the swamp. You can smell the dead toads. You smell that brackish, salty kind of water that’s in swamps. You can smell the mud. The smell of mud is a very distinctive smell. And guys in New York, we’re so removed from nature—this must have been one of the smells that the dinosaurs smelled. Mud is mud. It must have been exactly the kind of smell that the earliest primitive man smelled as he crawled out of those ancient swamps. That smell of mud gets stronger and stronger and richer and riper and deeper and rounder as you go further and further into the swamps.

And we’re

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