Firestorm: Stripes

6 Comments

• Jagdpanzer says:

  March 9, 2018 at 10:28 am

  great, thanks for joining

• Stone says:

  March 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm

  Thanks for posting. Better luck moving forward.

• recce103c says:

  March 6, 2018 at 8:29 pm

  first blood Jonathan, pity it was yours! Liked your matter of fact aar and followup plans.

  … carry on sergeant …. 🙂

• bayankhan says:

  March 6, 2018 at 5:29 pm

  It happens, trust me. A long time ago and far away, I was a cadet and we were doing mech platoon in the attack battle drill. The Army was test-driving some new technology for after-action reports, portable cameras (not digital, tape drive…like I said, a long time ago). My platoon did its thing with 2 M48s and 4 tracks. Victory was ours, and we retired to a big tent and waited outside for the tape to be spliced so we could see our screw-ups in living color. Meanwhile our arch-rivals in First Platoon, whose Platoon Evaluator was a tank officer to our Engineer, and whose Platoon NCO DI was somewhat of rival-friend to ours, did its thing. Having had the tutelage and sage wisdom of an Armor Captain with experience in the Blackhorse from Vietnam they had spent the night before telling us how they were going to kick ass and take names in Mech Platoon in the Attack.

  Part of the exercise was a two-man Aggressor outpost kindly provided by the 82nd in the logical place for the M113s to dismount conducting a hasty ambush. The training point was for a couple of the cadet squad leaders in the commander’s hatch to cover Six with the Mah Deuce, and of course none of us did it, being too busy looking up the objective hill. So we dropped a fire team to the ambush. But First platoon really messed up. When they dismounted, they lost the same fire team, saw us on top of the hill to their rear, saw the big tent, and charged the wrong way, leaving the two M48s to assault the real objective alone (where an Aggressor Nation M48 handily destroyed them). And, of course, they took fire from the rear, and were ruled as 50 percent losses, with their cadet leadership running after them screaming Wrong HILL!!!.

  First Platoon, of course had the same experience you just had, thinking they had won (in cadet world, done it perfectly and incidentally captured their rivals) but really had lost. They had to do it over, of course, and by the time they repeated the exercise on the real objective, we had dug a simulated grave for their NCO Evaluator, marked with a cardboard headstone, outlined with carefully gathered white stones, topped with some field flowers, formed a seven-man firing party, and fired over the grave with our NCO Evaluator and several cadets crying like bereaved comrades over the loss. Just to make it better, and unknown to us, the technicians recorded the grave ceremony and spliced it into the AAR! Meanwhile Third Platoon came up and took the craziness in. First Platoon was not allowed to live it down, either…apparently the incident became a teaching point to the rest of the battalion as they cycled through the capstone exercises (mech platoon in the attack, CALFLEX on the range with two M48s shooting HEAT rounds and us banging away with recoiless, etc.) First Army ROTC Summer Camp1972, Summer of, Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, Commonwealth of.

• Jonathan at Battlefront says:

  March 6, 2018 at 4:07 pm

  Thanks @bayankhan – PC crashed as I uploaded this and it went squiffy. For a second there i basked in the glow of a win, and realised it was just my tanks burning.

• bayankhan says:

  March 6, 2018 at 3:59 pm

  Jonathan, in my book, you got it backwards. Lucy won because she had a unit on the table and you didn’t, since she killed your two Abrams with something. Or am I reading this wrong?