APC, Armored Personnel Beater

Chapter 6

Copyright Michael Duke 1995

It clanked, it stank, its inhabitants were rank, it leaked, it creaked, it rattled and banged and drove you insane. You loved it, you hated it, and it was your home for the duration. It was a thirteen ton, camouflage painted, underpowered monster, capable of beating you to death at 25 miles and hour or slower. It was a vile master, requiring constant caressing and tending, and rewarded you with busted knuckles, bruises and hours of sweating. It was the M113A2 Armored Personnel Carrier, the main battlewagon of the Scout Platoon and Mechanized Infantry in the early 80’s Army.

Developed by a team of idiots in the late 50’s and early 60’s, it saw service in Vietnam, and had God loved us, it would have been abandoned there. But to prove God had a sense of humor, the Army kept it, revamped it, and gave it us to play with. Let me repeat this, GAVE IT US TO PLAY WITH. Not gave it to us, gave us to it.

Daily we tended it, filling its maw with diesel, oil, and water, grooming its treads, adjusting, tuning, and tweaking it, in vain hope that it would support us when we most desperately needed it. In return it would break down at the crucial moment and leave us cursing.

One favorite trick was to wait until you were half way up a mountain trail, with the mud knee deep for 100 yards in any direction, then it would throw a track and stop dead. You would spend the next 4 to 24 hours straining and pulling, trying to get it back on. This was usually during the middle of an exercise, rain or snow falling heavily, cold as a well diggers ass, with the battalion commander screaming for you to get back into action. Finally, covered in mud from eyebrow to toenails, body battered and sore, you would get the track on and resume your mission only to have it throw the other track 10 minutes later.

If there was snow on the ground, it had a whole new set of tricks, all designed to maximize your discomfort.

Going downhill it would become a bobsled, refusing to respond to any and all attempts to slow it down. Many a time you would go sledding down a hill, engine at max RPM, in Reverse, bouncing and banging off the banks and trees along the road until it came into contact with some large immovable object, at which point your fragile body would collide with the hardest, sharpest part available. Sometimes, it would do this going up the hill and you would have the dubious pleasure of watching where you’d been and unable to see your pending doom.

When it was cold, you’d have to start it every hours on the hour or it would refuse to start at all. All winter long, those unfortunates among us who lived in the barracks would climb out of bed and trudge to the motor pool to crank it up and run it to operating temperature.

Summer it became an oven, baking everything and everyone inside, and your heater, which never worked at all during the winter, would sometimes start all on its own. It would add insult to injury at every chance it could. It leaked oil from every part of the drive train, which created a deep rank sludge in the hull, and would eventually flow over the floorboards and cover everything inside, especially your sleeping gear and clean clothes.

The bolts on the drive train had to be constantly tightened for fear of slinging a drive shaft, and what knuckles you didn’t bust doing this, you blistered on the glowing hot engine parts nearby. The track tension had to be pumped up constantly with a grease gun that never worked properly, and leaked grease all over you. Try mixing dirt and grease with oil and antifreeze together and removing it in two minutes from your hands with a rag.

The hatches were spring loaded and had to be latched open and secured with a safety pin, or they would spring closed and smash and destroy anything in their path. Usually this would be you, or your companions, or the most expensive thing you were responsible for, say for instance your M-16. Even safety pinned, they were still apt to come crashing down, fingers beware.

Its main armament was the Browning 50 caliber machine gun, mounted in a pintle of the track commanders hatch, it would swing 360 degrees, and elevate and transverse as well. When traveling it was locked down and used as a map holder, but became a hazard in rough terrain. If you were expecting contact with the opposing force, it was kept free and you controlled its movement by hand, supposedly, for it had a mind of its own.

One cold February morning we were alerted and grabbed our gear, roared out of the motor pool and into the local forest pending our movement orders. It had been snowing all night, and was still falling heavily at the time. It started like this…

I’d been blissfully asleep at my quarters, warm, comfortable and relaxed when the ringing of the phone shattered the night’s quiet. Immediately the atmosphere in the house went from calm to chaos, me scrambling for the phone, my infant son screaming at being awoken instead of getting to wake everyone himself, and my wife scrambling to get to him before he woke up his toddler brother.

“Hell… er… Sergeant… Who the Fuc… Lariat Advan… SHIT, Ok, on my way”.

Quickly I called the person below me on the Alert Roster, and initiated a scene similar to the one just taken place.

“Another Alert?” my wife asked.

“Sorry Babe, gotta go, see you whenever.”

I kissed her and started out the door, dragging my gear behind, down the stairs to the contrary old Opel I drove to work. Throwing my gear in the back, I fought it to life and slid and spun off towards the Kaserne, passing other soldiers making their way in as well.

Thru the gate, past the gate guards and the bomb inspection, then to the company, I jumped out with my gear and shoved my way to the front of the arms room line.

“SCOUT, SCOUT, move NUMBNUTS, SCOUT PLATOON!!!”

I retrieved my weapon, made sure my driver and crew had drawn theirs and raced off to the motor pool.

My driver had the engine going, and the crew was busy arranging the vehicle for departure, I found the Platoon Sergeant and got the frequency for the radio, signal instructions, and movement order and we rolled out the gate towards our LDA, or Local Defense Area.

The fresh snow had covered everything with a deep white blanket, only the reflective plastic post along the road indicated where it lay, and once we entered the woodline, there was nothing to indicate the road except the break in the trees.

Being the lead element, I was breaking trail for the platoon, I tried to choose my path carefully through the trees, nice tall solid German oaks. It was a beautiful scene, the moonlight drifting down thru the trees, as the snow had stopped shortly before. However the beauty was lost on me, it was freaking cold, and I was in a hurry.

Keying back my microphone, I instructed my driver of two weeks, brand new from basic training and green as a gourd.

“Engleman, slow down and make damn sure you watch for stumps!”

“Yes Sergeant”.

“Driver go left.”

“Yes Sergeant”

We rolled through the woods towards our area.

Then.

Suddenly!

BAMMMMM!!!

The track stopped dead, one minute we were going at least 20 mph, the next I was intimate with the butt end of a Fifty caliber Machine Gun.

My lips, several teeth, and tongue suffered damage as we stopped still. Spitting blood and tooth fragments, I looked over to my driver, he turned a horrified face to me, blood ran from his nose and mouth, and a large gash on his forehead.

“Sergeant I’m sorry, I didn’t see it.”

Only it came out like he’d had a fifth of liquor to drink.

My crew behind me were straining for breath as they clutched bruised ribs, only our resident slacker was unfazed.

He looked at the damage to the rest of us, then grabbed the radio and called for the platoon sergeant.

“Charlie 25 this is Charlie 89 Delta over.”

“Go ahead 89 Delta”

He gave details of our plight, while the rest of us surveyed the damage to ourselves and each other. Our platoon sergeant swore and vowed vengeance on the driver, as he started to our position.

“Get 89 Actual on the horn” he called.

I took the mike and attempted to talk through swollen lips and missing teeth, but the first breath of air nearly split my head open as it hit a raw nerve.

An eternity later, we finally got to the medics and in my case a dental surgeon.

Later we discovered that the forest had been thinned, and our bad luck was to mistake the missing row of trees for a road, but we knew, without doubt, we knew.

Old Headquarters 26 had struck again.

We were her toys, and she played rough.

The following week in the motor pool, Engleman and myself, still sporting the bruises and stitches from the ordeal, inspected the old beast.

Total damage?

An eight of an inch dent in the hull and two square inches of paint, if you didn’t count the dried blood on the hatches.

I saw over the course of 10 years many such incidents, where puny humans pitted their strength against the wiles and cunning of a maniacal M113, only to be outwitted and outfoxed.

Never tell a Cav soldier that his track ain’t alive, because you will never win that argument, ever.

Graf 1986, muddiest field problem ever known to mankind, on the last day, 2 miles from the motor pool and wash rack, on a level, straight piece of road, ideal driving conditions, what does she do?

Breaks a track, spins around and throws the other track, all the while managing to completely block the road so no one else can get by. Tell me that isn’t an act of malice and evil.

National Training Center Ft. Irvin California 1989, during a major exercise, during the hottest moment of the battle, climbing up a draw on Tiefort Mountian, two enemy sitting dead ahead unaware of your approach, what happens?

Transmission goes, engine overrevs, which alerts the enemy, and you go sloping backwards down the mountain, banging and crashing until you stop on the hood of the controllers Hummer. Bummer!

Ask any soldier you see, the stories are the same, only the names and times change.

I tell you, them things is alive.