The Field

Wirecutter talks about being in the field, in the Army.  That's what the Army is for; going out in the field and training to defeat our nation's enemies.  We don't go to the Super 8 to sleep, although I spent a portion of my career as a REMF. But, I started in the field, and I ended my career in the field.  A garrison posting was gravy, but the simple fact is that an Army learns its job in the field.

When I was a young'un, I was a Boy Scout.  We were a fairly hardcore troop of kids, spent a lot of time hiking, camping, getting familiar with the woods, creeks, and forests around central Louisiana.  By the time I went into the Army, I was comfortable in the woods.  I learned all kinds of neat stuff in the Boy Scouts, things that kept me in good stead in the Army, but the first thing I learned in the Army is that camping with the Boy Scots was fun while camping with the Army sucked.    It was work, and there were very few creature comforts.

Wirecutter talks about sleeping in a GP Medium tent, and if you go to the link, you'll see a picture of this thing.

US Army, GP Medium

It's a nice tent, but in Armor or Cav units, we never saw one.  It was too permanent, meaning that when you get ordered to move, packing up takes valuable time.  We learned to sleep wherever we could find space to get horizontal.  I spent a few nights sleeping on the back deck of the tank, still in my CVC helmet with a long spaghetti cord, so I could listen to the radio.  In the Cav, we'd often sleep in the back of an M113,, or in whatever vehicle we were assigned.  I even knew a Chaplain who slept on the roof of his HMMWV, but I never understood how that was even marginally comfortable.

When I got promoted to Major, I was in charge of the battalion TOC, an assemblage of staff M577 vehicles where we coordinated the activities of the battalion.  It came with a shelter, and looked something like this.

Random Photo, slurped from the internet

There was always room in the TOC to set up a cot, and I spent a lot of nights on a cot in the TOC.  It was a decided "step up" from sleeping on the back of a tank, or crashed in the back of a 5-ton.  I remember one night in the TOC, a cold, wintry night and sometime during the witching hour, a truck pulled up outside on a logistics run..  They were bringing mid-rats (midnight rations) t the companies, and dropped off a mermite container and a platter of ham sandwiches   The mermite was filled with fresh chicken soup.  Big chunks of chicken, noodles, carrots, it was a god-send and my TOC watch crew went through that soup like the ravenous horde that field soldiers are.

I don't know how the Army goes to the field today.  It's been twenty years since I was a field soldier.  I'm sure that they do it differently today with the focus on the desert, rather tan the woodlands that we trained in.  It was a different time, and a different Army.