Mortar gunner on an M106

For a while before I went on active duty, I was in the National Guard, assigned to Headquarters Company of an armored battalion of M1 tanks. My military job at the time was being part of a crew operating an armored personnel carrier with a 4.2 inch mortar mounted in it. That's the biggest mortar the Army has. It fires a round larger than 105 Howitzer. There is no trigger mechanism on a mortar. Instead, a firing pin is mounted at the bottom of a long tube. The ammunition bearer fixes an explosive charge to the bottom of the mortar shell. He hands it to the assistant gunner who fits the rear end of the shell into the mortar tube. When the gunner, who is responsible for using a telescopic sight to aim the weapon, gives him the go ahead, the assistant gunner releases the round. It slides down the tube until it hits the firing pin. This detonates the charge and the shell is launched with a range of about 4000 meters.

There are four types of shells that can be fired from a 4.2 inch mortar: high explosive, white phosphorus, smoke and chemical weapons. I fired all of those except the chemical rounds which, although manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, were never used. If the gun crew didn't keep the tube clean, the debris could interfere with the round sliding down the tube, resulting in what is known as a hang fire. While I was in this unit, another crew of mortar gunners firing from the same range where we trained had a hang fire while firing white phosphorus rounds. The resulting explosion killed everyone in the gun crew and badly burned members firing from nearby positions. It's dangerous work. You're dealing with stuff designed to be as lethal as possible, and there isn't a lot of room for error.

My section leader, a sergeant, was named Larry “Big Dog” Evans. His full-time civilian job was killing turkeys in a poultry processing plant in town. To my knowledge, I never saw him completely sober, ever, not once. He was funny and profane and didn't have a mean bone in his body. I wanted to kill him. He made live fire exercises a nightmare. All of his mortar training had been on the job. Whereas I had actually been through indirect fire school at Ft. Benning. Big Dog had been a specialist 5 clerk-typist who was converted into a sergeant and squad leader when the unit's mission and the Army rank structure was changed. He had never been to an NCO class. Such was life in the National Guard in the decade after the end of the Vietnam War.

This particular drill weekend, we were live firing high explosive and white phosphorus rounds at Ft. Bragg. Our platoon leader was a nervous second-lieutenant who ran a convenience store for his father-in-law. He was scared of enlisted men and was seldom seen. Big Dog was drunker than Cooter Brown and couldn't get the sights lined up with aiming stakes, no matter how hard he tried. It's important when firing big weapons that you know where you are aiming because of the whole thing about them killing everyone in the location where they land. I was having to do my job and his, a situation I loudly protested, even though I was just a PFC.

My situation wasn't made any better by the situation at home. I was 19, married, with a son already and a daughter on the way. My civilian job had just ended unexpectedly. It was one I'd uprooted my entire family to move several counties away from where we knew people. I had no idea what I was going to do about that, and now I had the stress of trying not to die at the hands of a drunk professional turkey killer. Finally, someone called the company First Sergeant on the radio and told him that he might want to come prevent Big Dog's death at my hands.

When he arrived at the training area in his jeep, he called a cease fire and training stopped. He summoned me to the vehicle and asked me to tell him what was going on. I could hardly talk, but I sputtered out the story of the dangerous incompetence I felt was endangering everyone. The First Sergeant promised to take Big Dog off the range and talk to him about drinking during training. Since this was a wholly normal situation because being inebriated was his normal state, the First Sergeant wanted to know why this particular instance had gotten me so wound up. I told him about losing my job and not knowing what to do. He immediately told me that he was a building superintendent for a commercial construction firm. He said that if I would come to his job site on Monday, he would hire me. All I had to do was promise to calm down and quit threatening to kill his NCOs. I told him I thought I could handle that.

The following Monday, I showed up where the company was building medical offices and went to work. I kept that job until I finally enlisted in the regular Army. I'll always be grateful for that man's leadership and guidance. He was old school and I learned a lot from him.

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