Alex Taubinger – Forward Observer – Part One
ALEX TAUBINGER
Forward Observer
Part One
Lt. Taubinger
Early Career
Right out of high school my best friend and I took our girlfriends to a drive-in where the only movie showing was about Army jump school, and from that we both decided we wanted to be paratroopers. The next day we went down to the recruiting station and walked in and said we wanted to be paratroopers. We had walked into the Air Force recruiting office, and the recruiter just stared at us. Then this guy down at the other end of the hall waved and yelled at us, “Down here.”
Before we could move the Air Force recruiter said, “Hold it, we need typewriter repairmen.”
Our reaction was, “What?”
We went to see the Army recruiter and he said if we made it through jump school (paratrooper training) he’d buy us a steak. I got in but my buddy did not pass any of his written exams. He was dyslexic we found out. It was good they rejected him because he became a rock musician and got to be pretty famous out on the west coast where he made a lot of money.
I did basic training at Fort Ord, California, from there to Ft. Sill in Oklahoma for cannon-cocker school, and from there to jump school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. My first assignment was at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina with the 82nd Airborne Division.
The next year I came up on orders for Korea and went to Camp St. Barbara. (An artillery camp built at the end of the Korean War just south if the demilitarized zone, and named after the patron saint of artillery.) My most vivid memory of Korea is that our dress uniform was a heavy khaki wool that we wore in the winter, which made us stand out whenever we went to headquarters. They called us the boonie rats. The only other thing I remember is there was snow on the ground when I got there, and snow on the ground a year later when I left.
I went back to Ft. Bragg where I made E-6.
Military levels are denoted by rank, such as sergeant or captain, and a corresponding pay grade. Pay grades for enlisted personnel begin with an E, while pay grades for officers begin with an O. For example, E-6 denotes a staff sergeant, while O-3 is the pay grade of a captain.
From Bragg I went to drill sergeant school at Ft. Jackson, S. Carolina in one of the first classes the Army had. I was a drill sergeant for almost two years at Ft. Gordon, Georgia and during that time I pushed about 450 kids through basic training. It was the only job I had in the Army where I felt satisfied. You could see what you’d accomplished. You get all kinds of people, some are real losers and some are pretty sharp. Then after eight weeks of basic training they went from a kid to an adult. They were self-confident.
Three Drill Sergeant Stories
One of my training platoons included part of “McNamara’s 10,000.” (Initiated in 1966 by Robert McNamara to recruit soldiers below mental or medical standards in order to meet escalating manpower requirements. Over 320,000 came through the program.) They went into the prisons and got the petty criminals and drafted them into the Army. A lot of them could not read or write.
The company first sergeant (E-8 top dog) liked to fool the new troops as they came in. He had all the drill sergeants hide. In come the buses and all the kids get off. The first sergeant told these people, “We were not expecting you today. You are lucky all the drill sergeants are in town. If they knew we’ve got a new batch of recruits they would be might pissed off because we just graduated some a couple days ago and they expected a couple weeks of rest.” Right about then we started jumping out of the barracks screaming and hollering.
I got on a guy in the back row who stood there and wet his pants. I kept on him, “Get your feet together. Get you hands to your side, you’re at attention,” yelling the whole time. He ended up in my platoon as the trainee platoon leader. (Trainees were named to leadership roles that mimicked the formal chain of command.) I came into the barracks the next morning and every single bunk was as tight as could be. As I inspected he walked around with me bouncing quarters off each one of those beds.
I said, “Where’d you learn this?”
“Prison. My buddy and I here have been in and out of the system as long as we can remember.”
This guy who pee’d in his pants graduated number one in the class. He was the best marksman, the best everything. There was only one problem. We got a call a couple of days after he graduated from basic training that he and his friend were arrested on their way home to Philadelphia. They were robbing liquor stores and gas stations on the way home.
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Then there was Sclafani. I can’t remember names very well, but I’ll never forget that one. He was a male secretary to a banker in New York. This guy was so weak he could not do a single pushup. We’d walk more than a block and he’d fall apart. He was not strong enough to pick up his M-1 rifle. I grabbed his arm one day and all I felt was bone. Of course we just kept pushing him and pushing him. That was our job. But he was hopeless.
One day I’m sitting on the commode, and you remember in the old barracks they were all out in the open. Sclafani runs in and kneels down in front of me and puts his head between my knees. A sergeant is right behind him and I ask what’s going on. He says, “I yelled at him and he broke down and ran off.”
Sclafani with his head down kept saying, “I can’t take it anymore.”
So we got the paperwork together and recommended that he be discharged. A psychiatrist decided that he had to be under 24 hour watch because he had suicidal tendencies. Guess who had to be his 24-hour-a-day companion? I was told by the company commander that Sclafani would move into my room with me in the barracks and that I had to watch him at all times. I did not vary my routine, and just had him follow me everywhere. That lasted for about a week. He was one of those people just not suited for the military, not the Army anyway.
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One time I almost got shot in the face. We were out on the rifle range with the trainees in holes up to their chests behind sandbag walls. I notice one kid waving his rifle around. I went over and stood over him and yelled, “Soldier!” With that he snapped to attention, jammed the butt of the rifle down next to his feet, and as he did the gun discharged inches in front of my face. The bullet barely missed my helmet. That one shook me up.
Return to Ft. Campbell
I first went to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky to help set up a new basic training center there. I brought all of the Ft. Gordon lesson plans with me, rewrote them and put my name on them. I was there for just one training cycle, about two months.
I went up for promotion to E-7, but I did not have enough time in service. I’d been in only about six years, plus I did not have enough time in grade as an E-6. The battalion commander on the promotion board recommended I go to OCS (Officer Candidate School). My comment to him was, “I don’t think my leadership capabilities are there yet. I need to spend more time as a sergeant.” That did not go over too good with him. I think I also make a comment about a lot of officers lacking leadership ability.
Later my first sergeant convinced me that I should go. He said, “Look, it’s going to take you three or four years to make E-7 even if you’re number one on the list. You’d be a captain by then.” So I got out a copy of the pay scales and looked up the pay for an E-7 versus an O-3 with ten years in the Army. There was about a $300 dollar a month difference, big money in those days. That copy of the pay scale was my motivator while at OCS. I kept it in my helmet liner.
The precise difference was $667.20 per month for an O-3 versus $381.30 for an E-7, or 75% more.
I wanted infantry OCS at Ft. Benning, Georgia because you had to be infantry to go into Military Intelligence, which was my ultimate goal. Instead they sent me into artillery at Ft. Sill, because of my math test scores.
I kind of breezed through OCS. Based on my military experience they made me the trainee battalion XO (executive officer) which gave me separate quarters from the rest of the trainees. And a lot of the topics they taught I already knew, such as military justice and map reading, and all of which I taught for two years as a drill sergeant in basic training. The only exception was fire direction control and calling in artillery fire.
Out of OCS I went to the 6th Infantry Division back at Ft. Campbell. The only highlight in that assignment was that I had to brief top ranking personnel when Martin Luther King was assassinated. They were afraid of riots in Nashville, about 60 miles away. The majority of Ft. Campbell is located in Tennessee and we were the only military unit active in the state. We got the job of putting together a plan to “keep the peace” in Nashville, and because I had spent a little time in the Nashville area I got added to the team.
There was a big tactical review scheduled for two generals, the division commander and the post commander, along with their entire staffs. A major that was in charge of giving the presentation got laryngitis during the night. At about 5 in the morning he told me I had to give the presentation. We had a big map there and talked about such things as putting the headquarters at the Parthenon in the middle of the city. I did not know much about Nashville – I’d only been in the area a few months – but I was considered an expert because I knew more than anybody else.
When the 6th was de-activated they made me a company training officer in the same basic training battalion that I helped set up back when I was a drill sergeant. The company commander was brand new and the outfit was having problems. My colonel said to go down there and make sure things were being done right.
On my first or second day I was walking around – it was close to 100 degrees – and I saw the drill sergeants sitting under a tree sipping cold drinks while the troops were marching themselves on the tarmac – or trying to march themselves.
I go up to one of the sergeants and say, “What’s happening out here?”
He says, “Well sir, today is the trainees-train-themselves day.”
“Really?
He says, “Yes sir!”
I say, “Tell me, what lesson is this?” And he gives me the name and number of the lesson. I can’t today remember which lesson it was, but they were all ones I wrote and none of them involved trainees off by themselves with the drill sergeants lounging in the shade.
I get back to the office with the first sergeant and I am steamed. The first sergeant remembered me. He says, “Well you know what, you still got some of your old fatigue shirts?”
“Yeah.”
“You take the stripes off?”
I say, “Yeah, but they got these shadows where the stripes used to be.”
“Good! And you still got your Smokey the Bear hat?”
“Yeah.”
He says, “Wear that old fatigue shirt with the sergeant stripes shadow, and pin your drill sergeant badge back on along with your lieutenant bars. Hang your Smokey behind your desk or even wear it. We’re gonna have a meeting with those guys first thing in the morning before we wake up the troops.”
They all came into my office, the whole contingency, and their eyes snapped wide when they saw me. Usually officers sent to the basic training centers were either green out of OCS or ROTC graduates we called 90-day-wonders. But these guys knew right away I was a sergeant at one time … and a drill sergeant.
Straight off I said, “ I do not appreciate being lied to.”
One sergeant said, “What do you mean, being lied to?”
I said, “Here’s a copy of the lesson you were training yesterday. Look whose name is on the first page. Where does the plan say the trainees train themselves?”
Then I said, “You guys can either leave or we’re going to bring disciplinary action against you.
We got rid of four of them that very day.
Toward the end of that year after only a couple training cycles, I got orders for Vietnam. I’m married, I’ve got one kid and one on the way. Because I was an officer they would not defer me for the birth.
