My Last Tanker Nickname: Oddball

Donald Sutherland as Oddball, a tank commander in the movie "Kelly's Heroes"

I got my last tanker nickname more than a decade after I earned the nickname Sgt. Bambi Killer.  I got that nickname on a business trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2000.  The company I worked for just bought a company in Brazil and I was part of a team that went to Brazil to introduce ourselves to the people who ran the business.

Sao Paulo has traffic that makes Los Angeles look like Omaha, so the local managers sent a limo for the four of us. This meant we could be more comfortable on the three-hour 20-mile trip from the airport to downtown. 

At the time I had a beard and still had a lot of brown hair.  Among the local staff people who were waiting to meet us was my now long-time friend Ivan Porccino. Ivan speaks five languages and was assigned as our interpreter.  When we got in the car, Ivan introduced us to the driver and said we would be in Sao Paulo for a few days. The driver said, “I love America. I learn English watching American movies.”

So we talked about movies. The driver mentioned he loved “Kelly’sHeroes.” Bob Lee (Robert E. Lee, no kidding, but he went by Bob) our CEO said, “Neil was a tank commander back the 80s.” The driver turned, looked at me again and said, “Oddball! You are Oddball!” And so I was. For the rest of the trip and the rest of the time I worked for that company, I was Oddball, especially to Bob Lee.

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Field Guide to Flying Death: ICBMs (InterContinentalBallistic Missiles)

LGM-30 Minuteman III ICBM.

The name of every type of missile describes how far it flies. So an ICBM, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missile can travel at least 3,400 miles carrying one or more warheads.  The standard American land-based ICBM, the Minuteman III, can fly 8,100 miles before releasing between one and a dozen individual warheads on target. 

Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota is the center of a missile launch area spread across the northern tier of America with 450 missiles carrying thousands of nuclear warheads. Minot also is home base for B-52 bombers, the main aircraft of the U.S. nuclear bombing force since the Eisenhower administration. 

Our arsenal of ICBMs and other nukes is so overwhelming, that if Putin used nuclear weapons and America responded in kind, the response would not likely come from the America’s land-based missile and bomber fleet.  Lurking in the oceans somewhere are Polaris submarines armed with Trident ICBMs are already on station, within range, waiting for the order to counter attack if Russia uses a nuclear weapon. 

My first job in the Cold War U. S. Air Force was live-fire testing of missiles.  I was assigned to the Aging and Surveillance branch of Air Force Systems Command on Hill Air Force Base, Utah.  

Every Thursday (except Thanksgiving and Christmas week) we unit fired one stage of a three-stage Minuteman missile.  The missiles were randomly selected.  They were pulled from their silo and shipped to Utah.  On the test range we froze them, baked them, put them in an altitude chamber, shook them and finally bolted them to a test pad and lit them up.  The test range was on the west side of the Great Salt Lake. On a clear day, you could see the cloud from firing in Ogden and Salt Lake City on the east side of the lake. 

We made sure the missiles were ready to fly to target. 

Armies win or lose wars for any number of reasons, but in modern war, the difference between winning and losing is often the reliability of the weapon.  Testing those missiles meant American missiles were ready. 

In 1973, at the same time I was on a team test firing every missile from Sidewinder wing rockets to ICBMs, Israel was hit with a surprise attack by three Arab armies who outnumbered Israel 100 to 1.  Israel repelled the invaders and won that war for many reasons.  But one reason was weapon readiness.

Taking tanks as an example, when Jordan rolled its Soviet-made tanks toward Israel across the Golan Heights, one in four of those tanks broke down before getting to the battle.  For every hundred Syrian tanks, only 75 made it to the fight.  Israeli tanks were ready to fight.  It really fucks up your war plans if a quarter of the tanks don’t even shop up, and it affects moral. The other crews are wondering if their tank will break down.  There are few targets easier to hit than a tank sitting still in a battlefield.

The missiles in U.S. submarines and silos are tested to make sure they are ready if needed.  As many failed North Korean tests have shown.  The short life of a launched ICBM is full of stress and strain. 

When Trident, Minuteman or other ICBMs launch, they begin the half-hour-long trip to a target on another continent or just very far away.  The three-stage Minuteman is in boost phase for five minutes, flying out of its silo on the North Dakota prairie to target. By then end of boost phase, the three-stages have burned their solid fuel and fallen away.  The warhead has accelerated from 0 to more than 15,000 miles per hour and has broken through earth’s atmosphere, flying in space.

In the launch phase, the rocket is subject to an average of 5gs of acceleration with two big jerks when one stage burns and falls away and the next stage lights up. The skin temperatures on the missile zoom up from 70 degrees to hundreds of degrees as speed approaches 15,000 mph. As the final stage burns and separates the warhead bursts out of the atmosphere into space, buffeting the warhead at the same time it rapidly cools as it leaves the atmosphere. 

The warhead is now in ballistic phase, coasting at 15,000+ mph to re-entry and target.  If the U.S. launched a Trident Missile from somewhere in the some ocean it would now be flying thousands of miles in 10 or 20 minutes toward its target. 

Less than 100 miles from target, the terminal or re-entry phase begins.  At this point the warhead drops back into the atmosphere heats to thousands of degrees from re-entry friction then delivers one or a dozen warheads to target.  The already baked and frozen warhead heads to thousands of degrees and shakes with hundreds of gs of vibration as it drops back into the upper atmosphere.

American missiles are thoroughly tested for this horrendous ride. Even so, solid fuel missiles are big cans of gunpowder designed to burn rather than explode.  I have seen, and almost been killed by, missiles that blow up when they were supposed to burn. But when they reach their target, ICBMs are apocalyptically deadly.

One Trident ICBM with eight warheads could turn Moscow into rubble. Each Polaris submarine can carry 24 Trident missiles.  Each of the multiple warheads are hundreds of times more powerful than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.  And one submarine fully loaded with Trident missiles can deliver 192 warheads on target.

If these terrible missiles are ever launched, the destruction will be beyond anything in history. 

Real Senior Moment and a Book About the Iraq War

I just had a real senior moment about a book about PTSD. The book, Thank You For Your Service by David Finkel will be released soon as a movie.  Here's the trailer: 

On Thursday of this week, I was talking the professor in a writing class I am taking. He asked if I read much about the Iraq War then mentioned the book Thank You For Your Service.  I wrote down the title. 

But 20 minutes later, I realized the book sounded very familiar.  Three years ago, I read the book.  Worse still, I reviewed the book for Books and Culture. The review is here. So I wrote back to the professor with proof positive I am 64 years old! 

It is a good book about the worst parts of service in Iraq. 

Best Day in the Army and The Best Job I Ever Had

Two weeks ago I started writing about the best day of my life as a soldier out of the 6,575 days (18 years) I served in uniform. That day (I have to find the exact date) was Table VIII tank gunnery at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the Spring of 1976.  It was my first tank gunnery, and my first gunnery as a tank commander.  Why was I tank commander first time out?

I was in the U.S. Air Force from 1972-74 and got out a few months after being temporarily blinded in a missile explosion.  After a year as a civilian, I re-enlisted in the Army and went to Fort Knox for Tank training in July and August 1975.  I re-enlisted as an E4 and made E5 in January of 76.  I got my own crew and was determined to qualify--not bolo as the old hands predicted the ex Wing Nut would.  I had a great platoon sergeant and my crew fired Distinguished on Table VIII. 

I will be re-reading gunnery procedures and interviewing at least four tankers who fired Table VIII at Carson that year.  If all goes well, it could be a book.

I admire the "Day in the Life of..." form. Especially the books A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  So I am writing Home on the Range: A Day in the Life of a Cold War Tank Commander with the idea of telling a much larger story of the effect that day would have on my life, but never leaving that one day.

I was talking to a friend about how even after writing several hundred words, I have more questions the more I write.  One related question that came up was about travel. Part of loving the military and why I kept re-enlisting was travel.  I flew space-available flights across America and Europe as a young soldier, everything from a C-130 to a C-5A.

Now that the military part of my life is over, any travel I do will be as a civilian.  This summer I went on a six-week trip that began in Belgrade, Serbia; circled north and east to Ukraine; back west as far as the very western edge of the Normandy beaches; and then to Israel and back through Paris to Stockholm.

That trip included seven Holocaust memorials and changed my view of life profoundly.  So my friend asked if their were other trips that changed me as much.  The answer I just blurted out was: The trips with a gun.  The only two trips that had as great an effect on me as the trip this summer were deploying to Cold War West Germany with Brigade 76 and deploying to Camp Adder, Iraq, in 2009-10 with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Tank gunnery 1976 was, in part, training for sending the entire 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division to Germany in October.  And that day made me so much more confident I could lead a tank crew if the Cold War heated up.

In the past 40 years, I have been to 44 countries on five continents.  The bicycle-train-plane-automobile-boat trip this summer is the only trip that has come close to traveling in uniform with a gun in its profound effect on how I look at the world.

If you read this blog, you likely made one or more trips with a gun.  What it means to travel with and without a gun has been stuck in my head since that conversation.

Being a tank commander was without a doubt the Best Job I Ever Had.

Different Water for Sinks and Toilets--Camp Beuhring, Kuwait, and Amtrak

On the train to Philadelphia recently, the toilets had water, but the sinks did not in the last two cars. I walked three cars away from my seat to wash my hands. On the way back, I let the conductor know about the lack of water.  He said there are different water systems for the sinks and the toilets.  Then smiled and said the water is blue in the toilets.  

I told the conductor about a morning at Camp Beuhring, Kuwait, in April 2009. We were there for training before we went to Camp Adder, Iraq.  During our two-week stay, we slept in 77-man tents.  Outside the tent were several sinks and mirrors just standing in the open on the sand. I wish I had a picture.  

About twenty yards away were Porta-Johns or Shit Ovens, which everyone called the plastic enclosures when the temperature approached 120 degrees.  One morning just after down I went out to the sinks, brushed my teeth, then walked toward the Porta-Johns.  One of the soldiers just stepped out of one and was walking toward me.  

He looked at my toothbrush, smirked, and sweeping a hand toward the Porta-Johns said, "Sergeant Gussman, there's some blue mouthwash in there."

"Thanks," was all I said.

Kuwait Porta-Johns

Home Sweet Home in Kuwait

A Cowboy Movie Set in St. Petersburg, Russia

Last week I watched the movie "Brother" of "Брат" in Russian.  The movie was filmed for just $10,000 in mid-1990s Russia, the worst economic times for Russia since the Mongol invasion in the mid-1200s. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia alone with a failed economy.  Along with putting tens of millions in poverty, Russia fell apart in many other ways.  Russia invaded Chechnya, but the Russian Army was all but abandoned by its failed government. Russian lost the war and veterans came home broke, broken and disillusioned. One of those veterans becomes a Cowboy, a friend and avenger for the poor. 

The movie is fun to watch for an old soldier that grew up on cowboy movies. It also has a lot to say about how terrible life in Russia was in the 1990s.  Part of the popularity of President Putin and his ability to hold onto power is that the economy got better under Putin--a lot better. 

The movie is available in eight parts on Youtube or for $4 from Amazon with subtitles.  Enjoy!

Six Days of War: Three Wars Lost in Six Days

Israeli Sherman Tanks in the Sinai, Attacking Egypt

Ignorance Can be the greatest ally or the greatest enemy of an army at war.  In the book Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren explains in considerable detail how Arab ignorance and mistrust was the real key to the vastly outnumbered Israelis defeating three Arab armies in just six days. 

Oren shows how the Israelis called up all of their reserves and prepared for weeks to attack Egypt before Egypt attacked them, or to defend if Egypt attacked first. And yet the Israeli attack on June 5, 1967, came as a complete surprise to the commander of the Egyptian Army.

The reasons are complicated, but Oren makes a strong case that Field Marshall Abdel Hakim Amer, supreme commander of Egyptian forces, filled the upper ranks of the Egyptian military with cronies, shoving aside talented leaders preparing for a coup against his childhood friend President Gamel Abdel Nasser.

The Israelis put Moshe Dayan in charge of the military just months before the war, another signal to anyone paying attention that the war plans were for an attack.  Also, just months before the war, the Egyptians blockaded the Israeli port in Elat and all shipping. Time pressure pushed the Israelis to act, and yet, the Egyptians blustered and waited and did not prepare for an attack, let alone prepare for their own.  

On June 5, nearly the entire Israeli Air Force attacked air bases all across Egypt.  By the afternoon, more than 80% of the Egyptian Air Force was burning wreckage, most of it on the ground.  Cratering charges made the airfields useless.  At the same time, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rolled into Sinai in a multi-pronged attack that succeeded so fast and so well that the most optimistic Israeli leaders could not believe it.  

With so much of the IDF fighting on the ground and in the air in Sinai driving toward Egypt, if the Jordanian and Syrian armies had attacked, Israel would have to stop the attack and defend itself, at minimum pulling all air support away from Egypt.  

Both the Syrians and the Jordanians had sworn mutual aid in case of attack.   

But nothing happened.  Iraq also was to attack in support of Egypt.  It's forces sat in Jordan and Syria.  

On June 7, fighting started near Jerusalem. The Israelis had no plans to recapture Jerusalem, but the Jordanians fired on the IDF from the Mount Scopus and other heights in Jerusalem. the IDF attacked to take out the guns and by the night of June 9-10, retook Jerusalem and had the Jordanian army, including the vaunted Arab Legion in full retrat all across the West Bank of the Jordan River.

During this period, the Syrians shelled Israeli settlements.  The settlers on the frontier howled for help.  On June 10, the IDF attacked in the North toward Syria.  If the Syrians had attacked, the Israelis would have been obliged to stop their offensives in Jordan and Egypt. But the Syrians shelled civilians and stayed still.  Their army, like the other two Arab armies was in headlong retreat on June 11.  

In war, the mistakes of the enemy are often as important as the plans of the winners.  In this case, arrogance and mistrust among the Egyptian leaders was followed by a betrayal by their allies.  The end was Israel more than doubling in territory and smashing three Arab armies.  

Oren explains battles in great detail, especially retaking Jerusalem and the air attack that won the war on the first day. He also gives the reader a lot of detail about propaganda.  Egypt used its media to deny their losses and tell the world they were winning the war. Part of the hesitation of the Jordanians and Syrians to come to the aid of Egypt was the glowing reports Egypt was sending of their great victories.  

The other overwhelming impression the book gave me is of how ignorant the Egyptians were of what the Israelis were doing despite the evidence in front of them. The rest of the world was also largely ignorant of how bad the situation was on the ground and how fast everything changed.  It reminded me of how the world blundered into war in 1914.  

This book tells a complicated story very well.