Oh Deer! Another Hunting Season Story: Skinning a Deer in Missile Test Bay

Sometimes the best tool for a job is a tool that is not yours.  So you borrow it.  That’s why the first time I skinned a deer was in a U.S. Air Force missile test bay on Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah. 

Four miles north of the main area of the base was the missile test facility on Hill.  We had equipment to shake, bake, heat, freeze, and simulate high altitude.  We stressed missile engines (not warheads) then test fired the engine bolted to racks.  The smaller missiles, like the Sidewinder, we fired right on post.  When we fired one of the three engines of the three-stage Minuteman missile, we fired on a range on the west side of the Great Sale Lake. 

To shake, we called it vibration test, the missile engines we used a 300,000-watt electro magnet—essentially a really big speaker driver.  Bolt an engine to this vibration machine and it could be shaken back and forth, up and down, left to right fast or slow, soft or hard, smoothly or with jerks.  Then we fired the missile on a test pad to see if the vibration broke it.

To hook the missiles to the electromagnet we used a crane on a beam running the length of the test bay. 

One Monday morning we were waiting to see the week’s tests when Sgt. Robert Reineccius whispered for two of us to give him a hand.  We went outside and followed the sergeant across the sand to the vibration test building.  Before sun up, Reineccius had backed his pickup truck into the bay, hooked the deer he bagged that weekend to the crane and pulled the carcass all the way up.  Our job was to skin the huge, stinking carcass before work started so he could drop the deer carcass back and the truck and cover it with a tarp. 

The deer was impressive: a 12-point buck he bagged in the mountains, which was why he needed a crane.

He really wanted that skin in one piece.  So we climbed up on the test bed and started pulling from the inside of the thighs where Reineccius had already slit the skin.  We pulled and twisted and pulled some more. After twenty tiring minutes, the skin was on the test bay floor and the sergeant was lowering the deer back into his Chevy pickup. 

Reineccius covered the animal with a tarp.  He would drive to the butcher at lunchtime, but he had the skin now. Back in the 70s military, enlisted men did whatever sergeants told them, even skinning a deer first thing Monday morning.

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Gutting a Deer in the Driveway in 1980

Today, my kids are home from school because in Pennsylvania, school is closed on the first day of deer season.  I grew up in Boston and spent most of my seven years on active duty in the western United States or in West Germany.  In those places, deer hunting was something you did away from towns and cities, often quite far away because the deer were up in the mountains. Or you just could not hunt close to populated areas.

In Pennsylvania, the city and borough lines are sometimes where the hunting begins.

After I left active duty in November 1979, I lived in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.  My apartment was two blocks from the eastern edge of the E-town marked by the PA Route 743 South. 

One day, I got home from work at noon.  As I went up the outside stairs, my neighbor across the alley, Jimmy, drove into his driveway with hooves sticking out of the trunk of his Ford Falcon.  I stopped and looked.

He jumped from the car and yelled, “Gimme a hand, Guss.  I have to gut this thing.”  He pulled a big blue plastic sheet from his garage.  The sheet had brass eyelets so I assumed it was some kind of shelter.

Jimmy spreads out the sheet, then pulled the deer from the trunk.  Jimmy dropped the six-point buck with a headshot, so the body was intact.  Jimmy slit open the deer’s abdomen and we started pulling out entrails.  We shoved the organs and entrails into a plastic bag then put the deer and the bag back in the trunk of the Falcon.  Jimmy sprayed the blood off the plastic sheet with a hose then hung it over his fence to dry. 

While we cleaned up, Jimmy said he saw the deer in a field south of route 743 about 100 yards from the road. He pulled off the road onto the edge of the road.  The deer was in West Donegal Township, so he could shoot.  He leaned on the roof of the Falcon and dropped the deer with one round.  Then he dragged the deer across the field and drove straight home.

The whole job took about ten minutes, then Jimmy was off to the butcher.  I started back up the stairs.  Jimmy had hosed off my hands and wrists, but I need to take a shower and get the blood off my shirt in cold water.  Then I needed to do my homework for the next day’s class.

Being a good neighbor in Pennsylvania was different than in Boston.

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Sergeant Bambi Killer: Nicknames Happen as Fast as Machine Gun Fire

From 1982 to 1984 I was a Staff Sergeant and tank section leader in Alpha Company, 6th Battalion, 68th Armor.  For the last few months I was in that unit, I was "Sergeant Bambi Killer."

In the 80s, Army Reserve tank units fired twice a year.  We had a full tank gunnery at Annual Training and a three-day weekend tank gunnery at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., in the fall.

We fired both day and night on these ranges.  In 1983, I was the NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) of the range for night fire.  At dusk on that October evening, I was in the tower above the range.  Below the tower, our 17 tanks were lined up fender to fender waiting to test fire their machine guns before night fire.  The crews got to check their guns in the fading light before firing at night with searchlights, both white light and infrared.

Each of the 17 tanks had 50 rounds for the M-85, .50-caliber machine gun and 50 rounds for the M240 coaxial "coax" machine gun next to the main gun.

As the light faded I gave the command from the tower to lock and load one 50-round belt of ammo for each gun.  The targets were between 500 and 1200 meters away, clusters of olive-drab panels on stakes driven into the muddy ground.

I checked the range, picked up the loudspeaker microphone and said, "Ready on the right. Ready on the left. The range is ready. You may fire when ready."  As I said the last words, a white-tailed doe jumped out of the woods and hopped into the middle of the 500-meter targets.

It seemed that all of the 340 tracers in 1,700 rounds of ammo converged on the spot where the white-tailed deer hopped into the middle of the targets.

I called "Cease Fire" less than a minute later, but there was no need. Each of the machine guns on an M60A1 tank can fire 50 rounds in 5 seconds. Everyone had expended ammo.  The deer disappeared and I was Sergeant Bambi Killer for the rest of my time in 68th Armor.  In the Army, nicknames can happen as fast as machine gun fire.

Movie Review: "Prisoner of the Mountains" "Кавказский пленник"

Last night I watched the 1996 movie "Prisoner of the Mountains" loosely based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy called "Prisoner of the Caucuses." We read an abridged version of the story in Russian for the Russian class I am taking and watched the movie for the class.  

The movie is set during the bloody Chechen War of the mid 1990s shortly after the Soviet Union had collapsed. This is not an action movie in the American mold: no special effects, no big explosions.  But the relationship between the main characters is as good as I have seen in a war movie.  The captured career sergeant and draftee private are the center of the film.  Sasha, the sergeant, maintains his authority throughout their capture.  Even when they are chained together and facing death, Sasha lies to the young recruit Vanya in a way that made me laugh out loud.    

The movie also gets right the experience of an Army made up of draftee soldiers led by career soldiers.  The tension between those who love the Army and those who hate the Army never goes away, but both soldiers can be equally brave facing death.  Near the end of the movie, Sasha and Vanya escape.  Sasha kills a shepherd to get his gun.  Shortly after they are recaptured because of a mistake by Vanya.  Sasha admits killing the shepherd and walks to his death, allowing Vanya to live. Later Vanya has a chance to escape again, but refuses when it would risk the life of a Chechen girl.

The relationship between Sasha and Vanya makes this movie well worth watching.