Who Fights Our Wars? CSM Donald C. Cubbison, 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division

In the fall of 1977, 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division got a new Command Sergeant's Major.  Donald C. Cubbison, veteran of the Vietnam War with 23 years of service became the top enlisted man of the 4,000-soldier mechanized brigade where I was a tank commander.

Like most career soldiers, he hated journalists, especially Army journalists.  But he gave me the chance to be an Army journalist, then a civilian journalist.  More on that soon.

When Cubbison came to our base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, we had a weekly brigade run, sometimes more than two thousand soldiers formed up by company and battalion and ran the perimeter of the former airfield, now a parking lot for tanks and other tracked vehicles.

At the time I was 24 years old.  When we heard about this new hard-ass CSM coming to the base, everyone was saying he was 52 years old, even older than our Korean-War veteran First Sergeant, Robert V. Baker.  So we expected this ancient sergeant's major would just watch his troops run the airstrip.  We were wrong. First run he grabbed the brigade flag and led the formation.  Anyone who dropped out of that formation caught Hell.  "You can't keep up with a guy who's THAT old!!"

Clearly, Cubbison was not one of those people who everyone says looks young for their age.  A week ago, I found a brief article about Cubbison and an obituary.  He was 42 years old, not 52 when he became sergeant's major of 4th Brigade.

After he made clear that the fitness program would be continuing with him at the front, Cubbison had an NCO meeting in the base theater just before Christmas.  He told the nearly one thousand sergeants in the brigade his priorities.  The Tennessee native talked about leadership, readiness and other topics on the NCO to-do list.

Then at the end he said he wanted a Combat Arms sergeant to volunteer to get his brigade into the newspapers. He wanted us in Stars and Stripes, in the Air-Force run base newspaper, "and every place else that writes about soldiers." Then he repeated the volunteer has to be infantry, armor or artillery. "I don't want a raggedy-ass Army journalist that doesn't know one end of his rifle from the other."

With that he dismissed us.  I saw that he wrote with a blue marker pen on yellow pads.  I went straight to the PX, bought the pen and paper he preferred, then ran to the airstrip.  There was a German and an American squad practicing together to be the honor guard at a friendship event on Christmas Eve.

I wrote the story and went to Cubbison's office in Brigade Headquarters an hour after the NCO meeting ended.  The other sergeants who auditioned for the job showed up later in the day or the next day.

I got the job.  By the first week in January, I was re-assigned to Brigade and on my way to becoming a journalist.  I got 4th Brigade in the base newspaper almost every week and in the Stars and Stripes enough that Cubbison told me, quite proudly, that Col. John Riscassi, the brigade commander, got a call from Division HQ asking, "Why the Hell is it always 4th Brigade I'm seeing in the newspaper."

In 1979, Cubbison went on to be the top sergeant of 3rd Infantry Division, then the sergeant's major of a rapid reaction force formed within US Army Europe. He passed away in 2015 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

When Cubbison moved up, I moved out. I left active duty in 1979 and went to college. While I studied, I had a part-time job as a newswriter at the Elizabethtown (Pa.) Chronicle.  Cubbison made my new career possible.

AIM-9 Explodes on the Test Stand

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AIM-9 Sidewinder missile fired from an F/A-18C

My job in the Air Force was Aging and Surveillance Testing of missiles--everything from the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile all the way up to the Minuteman ICBM.

In my Air Force service between 1972 and 75, I never got closer to Viet Nam than the western desert of Utah, but test firing missiles can be dangerous.  My first brush with missile-induced death only caused minor, temporary hair loss.  The second was a lot worse, but more on that later.

On a warm, spring Friday in 1973, we were scheduled to fire 20 AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles in a test stand.  The missile test area was in the northwest corner of Hill Air Force Base, three miles from main base and the airfield. It was also out of the flight path of the two runways, since we could occasionally send up clouds of smoke from test firings that changed from burn to explosion.  Today was one of those days. 

Weeks before the test, we received a shipment of AIM-9s randomly selected by lot number.  We then froze the missiles in a large freezer. We shook them on a vibration table that was a huge 300,000-Watt speaker driver.  We simulated various stratospheric heights in the altitude chamber, then finally took the stressed missiles, bolted them to a test stand, attached accelerometers, and fired them.

On a good day we could fire one every ten minutes, allowing for burn time and time for the spent missile and for spinning the big screws that locked the missile into the test stand. By the time of this test, I had been on the fire crew of several batches of AIM-9s. 

The crew leader was Staff Sergeant John Pachuca.  He would retire the following year with 20 years of service. Hill was his only duty station in more than a decade. In the 60s, missile testing consolidated at Hill. Several other sergeants planned on retiring at Hill.  But this stable environment also meant that promotions were few and far between, so Big John Pachuca would retire a staff sergeant. Before he retired, my muscular Mexican-American crew chief would save my life.  

After each missile was fired, we counted to ten in a ditch several yards away from the concrete test stand. I waited in the trench till the noise stopped, and then vaulted the wall to switch the missile. Two of us ran to the stand and unscrewed the clamps while two more grabbed the next missile.  We used asbestos gloves to carry away the casing of the spent missile. 

The stand was covered with a shelter made from perforated steel planking or PSP. They were more the sheets were ten feet long, fifteen inches wide and weighed more 66 pounds. They were designed to be temporary runways during World War II, but were also great as temporary roadways or to make a cover that allowed smoke to blow through. PSP sheets are full of holes.

Since it was Friday, we all wanted to get done, so we sprinted to get the fired missile out of the stand and the next missile locked in.  When a missile fires, it roars for several seconds then the sound dies away. Each missile has a unique burn time and part of the test was recording that burn time.  Burn time was not my part of the test. The test went well in the morning, but after lunch a few glitches with electronic equipment slowed us down. We wanted to get done and have a weekend off, so we moved as fast as we could bolting the missiles to the stand, then removing the fired missile.  After three firings in the afternoon we had a rhythm again.  The fourth missile fired and burned, but the burn time was about two seconds too short.  I started to vault the wall then suddenly flipped backwards. I thought the top of my head was being torn off. 

I started yelling with pain and swinging wildly. I shut up when I saw the flash of the entire test pad blowing apart.  I looked up and saw a sheet of PSP fly over the ditch we were in. If I had been standing above the ditch, the ten-foot steel sheet would have cut me in half.  John Pachuca had grabbed my by the hair—which was three inches long and barely in Air Force regulations—and thrown me back in the ditch. He knew the burn was too short and heard the sputter before the missile exploded. 

Inside the missile, the propellant cracked during the freezing and shaking. The air gap caused the propellant to stop burning, but then heat in the casing caused the remaining propellant to heat and sizzle.

Then the AIM9 blew up on the pad.

I was lying on back in the ditch with the big sergeant in the white overalls on top of me.  My head hurt for days. Until sundown and much of the next day we cleaned up what we could of the mess. Engineering teams had to rebuild the test stand.  We continued the test the following week.  The test site had another pad because when missiles go high order they blow up everything around them.

The next time a missile test went wrong I wasn’t so lucky. 

Tanks from Inside, Tanks from Outside: The Huge Difference

The podcast Sectarian Review just did an episode on Philip Roth. It included a passage from American Pastoral using a military tank as a metaphor.  It made me realize how different it is to be outside a tank than inside.

It is very different to see a dragon than to be a dragon.  I was a U.S. Army tank commander trained at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1975. The following year I waited for World War III to start, looking across the east-west border in Fulda.  Tactically, most of what we knew about our own tanks and those of our enemies came from the devastation of Israeli armor at the outset of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the subsequent destruction of Arab armor after the initial shock and loss.

Tanks, like mythic dragons, are terrifying to those outside. But on the inside they are the target everyone wants to kill.  In 1973, lone Egyptian infantrymen with Soviet "Sagger" missiles more than a mile away could and did kill Israeli tanks.  In Cold War West Germany, we looked across the border in Fulda and saw a vast Army of tanks, men with missiles, helicopters, fighters and artillery arrayed to kill us.  No one I knew thought we were the terror of the battlefield.

It just reminded me the experience of literature, of all art, is different depending on the experience of the reader.  Armor crewmen, tank commanders especially, see the modern battlefield as a massive "kill the tank" game.  Some of the most fearsome weapons to our enemies in the current wars were designed as tank killers then used on other targets.  The A-10 Warthog, the most nearly perfect ground attack aircraft in history, was designed around it's tank killer gun.  The Apache helicopter has the same design concept--kill tanks with Hellfire missiles and it amazing chain gun.  As it turns out if you can kill a tank you can kill other targets.  There are youtube videos of Apache helicopters vs. Toyota pickups filled with terrorists caught in the open.  The outcome is always the same: Apache 1 Toyota 0.

Anyway, Roth was right to see the modern dragon as terrifying from the outside.  But we who are inside the dragon, who see out of our dragon eyes, know the terrors both of seeing a dragon and being a dragon.