(Another post from 2004, when I had like fifty readers)

Another “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” post…

I was a tanker in Korea from September of 1969 to October of 1970. Actually, I was a tank commander. That’s a lofty-sounding title which means you get to do as much work as everybody else on the crew, but they get to hang around the tank while you go to the meeting to get your butt chewed…

Our tanks were the Patton M48A2C. 90mm main gun. .50 caliber M2 Browning machinegun mounted in a “cupola” and a real abortion of an idea, more about that later. And a .30 caliber (.30-06) M37 Browning machine gun mounted as a “co-ax”, alongside the main gun. And the driver and loader wach had an M3A1 .45 submachinegun, commonly referred to as a “grease gun” because that’s what it looked like, and each crew member carried a .45 pistol, an M1911A1 Colt. Armed to the teeth, we were.

Engine was 750 horsepower fuel-injected twelve cylinder gasoline fueled, and air cooled. The air was sucked in through grills on top of the rear deck of the tank, behind the turret, pulled through the cylinders and oil coolers for the engine and transmission, and then blown out the big grill doors on the rear of the tank. In the wintertime,standing behind an M48 tank was an excellent way to warm up. That is, until you got enough carbon monoxide to pass out. More than one novice tanker stood behind an idling tank, went to sleep, and woke up cold, whereever his buddy dragged his carcass. You couldn’t do that behind a diesel-fueled tank. Diesel exhaust burns your eyes too bad…

I could be snarky and say that the workings of that tank were “seared” into my mind, but I won’t. Tanking is what I enlisted for, and Korea was as good a place to do it as anywhere else. Well, almost.

You see, tanks are made for the plains and deserts: vast sweeping vistas of rolling hills where you can maneuver like vast fleets, engaging other tanks in gunnery battles. Where I was in Korea was disgustingly bereft of vast sweeping vistas. The place was full of hills. In between a couple rows of hills was three things: A little river, a two-lane road, and every mile or so, a little village looking from a distance like something from a quaint Oriental postcard.

Two-laned road. That’s two lanes for the Korean equivalent of a 1968 Toyota Corolla, i.e., not real wide. Certainly not wide enough for BOTH a Toyota and a whopping big American tank. So a lot of our travel was done up the stream-bed of the little river. They were shallow, and had no speed limits other than common sense.

But the streambeds where popular places where mamasan came down to do her laundry. A 54-ton tank in two feet of water at ten miles an hour (a prudent speed) makes one heck of a wave. Laundry (and American prestige) suffers. We swamped few mamasans. They were, as a group, relatively fast and wary. Other features of the riverbed were these little piles of gravel. The rains would was gravel down from the hills into the river, and papsan would shovel it carefully into piles for sale. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of control over where the wave went, and more than one pile of gravel suffered on our moves.

Other hazards of riverbed travel were Korean kids with slingshots. I guess they were trying to get revenge for our effects on mamasan’s laundry, but they thought it was the GREATEST of pleasures to plink at tanks with rocks fired from a slingshot. After the first time a rock caromed off my CVC (combat vehicle crewman) helmet, I promptly wrote home for a Wrist Rocket slingshot. Evened up the score a bit. They duck fast when you shoot back.

Often we had no riverbed, so we ventured onto the public roads. These were interesting times, because our size took a lot of road shoulders were non-existent in a lot of places. This caused problems, like the time our platoon was marching through a little village and into the open valley.

Village. Place where people eat, sleep, and relieve themselves. Valley. Place where crops are grown. Fact. Koreans use human waste to fertilize crops. This is collected from EVERY place you can take a dump in the village. Papasan has a big barrel on a two-wheeled cart pulled along by an ox. This is euphemistically termed a “honey wagon”. He goes around to all the crappers and dumps the contents into the honey wagon, then takes the cart OUT of the village and spreads it on the crops.

Well, today, we caught papasan and his honeywagon just leaving the village. He tried moving over to the right side of the road as far as he could. The lead tank passed. Then the second, me, trailing the light section. Then the lieutenant’s tank, then the fourth. We almost made it. The tracks on the side away from papasan’s honey wagon were just barely keeping us all out of the adjacent dish. Just ONE more tank.

Well, you guessed it by now. The last tank in the column was passing the honey wagon. The driver and the tank commander were hugging the side of the road to avoid the honey wagon when the edge of the road started to give way. The driver jerked the tank back onto solid ground, then jerked back to miss the wagon, and the honey wagon got caught in the sprocket at the rear of the tank.

Papasan’s whole valuable load of shit flipped up in the air and came down. On the back deck of the last tank. Upside down. Two hundred and fifty gallons of last night’s feces was sucked into the air intake of an air-cooled engine. A huge amount blew out the rear grill doors of the tank with the air flow, but a lot didn’t. I am glad I wasn’t behind him. The spray of heated dung spray went back more than twenty yards. And if there’s one thing that smells worse than a load of day-old shit, it’s day-old shit heated to 250 degrees and sprayed out the ass of a big ol’ tank.

When the call came over the radio, the whole column stopped. Papasan was understandably disturbed at the damage to his cart. The ox, well, the ox just stood there like an ox. The tank commander was as disturbed as you’d imagine yourself to be if somebody just dumped a load of shit on your mobile palace. Clean-up was needed, and the crew was in a, well, a shitty mood…

I dunno how much this cost the US forces in Korea, but I think the next time I went through that village, the new honey wagon looked just like a US Army water trailer.