While on a river crossing exercise, my tank company was parked in a little German village, waiting on the engineers to finish their bridge. I was sitting on the front slope, BS with my TC when one of the recovery specialists decided to cook his C-ration by putting it in the exhaust of his M-88.
Now the tankers get away with this by our placing the cans on top of the cylinders and closing the grill doors again. Dip-shit shoved his can into the exhaust and then fired the engine up. The early M-88s used a gasoline engine and they normally blew about two feet of exhaust...when the M-88 started up, there was a choked moment and then the can was blown out the exhaust. It struck the right front headlight assembly on my tank, shattering it and spraying C-ration Ham and Lima Beans and tin can all over my TC and myself.
The worst part was not that he damaged our headlight assembly, nor was it that the two of us had to spend several minutes with the medic having tin can pulled out of our hides....it was getting sprayed with Ham and Lima Beans...YEECCCH!!!
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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