There and back again: A private's story

By Josh Glover

Watching that tank drop three stories was pretty entertaining, but was only the first mishap we had with the infantry vehicles. We loaded the whole division's vehicles in three days. Of course, a few things would get a little ding here and there.

We had only been working for an hour or so that second day. We were loading all their Bradley Fighting Vehicles (they're like a Honda version of a tank) into the belly of the second boat. There were lined up twenty or thirty deep in a row of 12. Each row had one ground guide up front signaling vehicles forward and keeping them from banging into each other.

As it turns out, a major was the one signaling, and had little appreciation for our low visibility.

Oh, how lucky I was.

He called me forward and kept using the signal to continue moving forward. It felt like I was veering off to the right, so I stood up in my seat just in time to watch my Bradley break the rear armor skirt off a tank.

Talk about your stomach dropping.

I'm standing there, assessing my damage — which I thought was minimal (22 weeks of training as a Bradley mechanic taught me a few things). The safety officer came up and starting machine-gunning questions at me. So, like a good private, I told him it was the major ground-guiding me.

He became much more sociable, asked where the major was and literally slapped me on the wrist and told me not to hit any more tanks.

At lunch, we went back to the d-fac (dining facility for those that didn't know). The food was terrible, as expected. but it was Sunday and the army newspaper had the funny papers. Thomas and I grabbed a copy on the way back to the busses and watched the clouds darken up in what looked to be the start of a nice shower for us.

"Thomas, check out the storm rollin' in," I said, laughing at his annoyed expression.

"Awww, are you kiddin' me? This detail already sucks, dude!" Thomas grumbled. "We're only half done with this boat because night shift is so slow."

"I never said I was gonna do this in the rain," I said with a grin as I pulled out the funny papers from my pocket. "We've got reading to do."

"You shammin' clown," he whispered, catching on.

So, needless to say, we snuck down to the lower decks and laughed at the paper and at the other guys getting soaked outside. We may have been joking a bit loud, because it didn't take long for a female major to come down and see what was going on.

Yes, it was time to stop laughing for a minute … we were busted.

So, in my ever-humourous manner, I offered her part of my paper and a seat on the tank with us, the whole time expecting a fair amount of yelling and "Where's your seargent!"-type aggrivation. Guess it just wasn't our day to be in trouble. She just grumbled about rainy days, took me up on my offer and joined us for the remainder of our shift.

St. Ignatius resident Josh Glover served two tours in Iraq with the United States Army. Look forward to more columns about his experiences in future editions.