2. Firefight

The seven ‘enemy’ soldiers walked into the intersection of the two rural roads we were guarding for the night and stood in line facing our troop sergeant. I and a few of my fellow troopers took their rifles away and piled them on a rain poncho on the ground. One of the prisoners, a master corporal, was explaining to our sergeant that they had become lost while trying to get back to their unit for the night and accidentally stumbled into our roadblock in the dark. They were, however, part of the enemy force for the exercise we were on. Protocol required us to search them and we began to go through their pockets, returning personal items, keeping maps and notebooks, confiscating cigarettes. We had been in the field for four days participating in a large, multi-unit, combat exercise and cigarettes were hard to come by. Living out of a jeep, your priorities were very different than when on base. Cigarettes, sleep and a hot meal were luxuries. Their cigarettes were the price of not knowing how to read a map.

The suddenness and surprise of the firefight had set the adrenaline flowing and all thoughts of getting into the back of my jeep for a nap had gone from my mind for the immediate time. A few of us chatted about the fight and we decided we had done well. The regular army warrant officer approached and said that he had called it in and there should not have been any enemy operating near us and a truck was coming to take the seven captured infantry soldiers back to their unit. I decided to take the opportunity to clean my weapon and, returning to my jeep, climbed into the back seat. Stripping weapons in the dark was a trained skill and as long as you kept the parts in an order as you laid them down, reassembling the machine gun was not a problem. I slipped the blank firing attachment off and laid it to my left and then proceeded to take the 9mm Sterling Machine Gun apart. As I cleaned the various pieces of the weapon, I began to feel much calmer and also tired again. After assembling the machine gun I looked at my watch. In two hours time, I had radio watch for two hours. Keeping awake in the middle of the night listening to static was another skill but a much tougher one. When you needed to be awake always seemed to be when you were the most sleepy. There were stiff penalties for sleeping on sentry or watch. I did my best to get comfortable in the cramped space and closed my eyes. Idly I began to wonder how my classmates from high school were spending their summer. Parties, trips to the beach, baseball games maybe. Shocked by the hand roughly shaking my shoulder, I sat bolt upright. My crew commander informed me I was on radio watch. Had I actually slept at all? With an effort I focused on my surroundings and slipped the headset on. I hated radio watch.