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Old 02-23-2018, 04:30 AM
dragoon500ly dragoon500ly is offline
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Location: East Tennessee, USA
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Originally Posted by CDAT View Post
Just a side note, talking with my brother and some of his buddies who spent there entire career in the 81st (joined early 1990's) it went from round out to enhanced readiness with a war mission in Korea. What they were told was the brigade (at the time two armor battalions, two-three infantry battalions, engineer battalion, FA battalion, MASH, support battalion, and more almost 8000 strong) was expected to be in combat within 30 day of the north crossing the DMZ. One of the guys was a tech (full time working for the guard but as a civilian) who said part of his job was to go to the two ships that were pre-loaded with equipment and pull maintenance on them every month. According to them, the plan was when the war broke out the ships would sail and the troops would fall in on their training equipment, when the ships were just about to arrive they would fly the troops over and hook up with the equipment. Now this is all hearsay but I have heared it from LTC and CWO-4's as well as senior NCO's. Would it have worked? I do not know I can see some issues, but that is my understanding what the plan became for the 81st when the got rid of the 9th ID.
Running joke when I was active duty was that the 81st was always in search of a mission. They were slotted for NATO, then Korea, then RDF back to NATO, reinforcement to 9th MID, then Korea. My own take is that they would have wound up in the Middle East.
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