I was working in Fort Knox’s First Training Brigade S-3 shop in 1973. In the army, the S-3 of an combat unit is the operations section. In the training brigade, we were responsible for the operations of training. I and another staff sergeant were responsible for scheduling the training for four training battalions: Two armor, one reconaissance (scout) and one combat engineer vehicle.
Since I came to the position after a year of honorable service as an instructor (one award as Instructor of the Cycle, and the instructor for a couple of Outstand Trainee award winners), it fell upon me to perform a few onsite inspections of training sessions. I also had the opportunity to work with a couple of captains as they did revisions of the armor crewman training program.
But when that wasn’t happening, we did scheduling, trying to juggle the various training companies between the classrooms, ranges and training areas. Sometimes this was quite the headache.
With ten armor training companies, we usually had one in each of the eight weeks of training, one in “zero week”, that is, accepting the new trainees, and one in post week, shipping out trainees and doing maintenance and receiving the big inspection a training company got after each eight-week training cycle. A company turned out around a hundred trainees each cycle.
Once they threw us a curve and we had two companies start training at the same time. It really loaded up the system, but we managed.
Perhaps my proudest achievement happened the week before I left for Germany. I was the substitute player for the lunchtime pinochle game. Pinochle is a card game which has a pretty decent following in the Army, and we had a game every day at lunch. The regulars were my co-worker, the sergeant major who was the senior NCO in the S-3 shop, and two other senior NCO’s. One of these was gone, and I found myself filling in on the pair playing opposite the sergeant major and my co-worker. And as luck (and skill) would have it, we pulled pinochle on them, winning ALL the tricks in one hand, and by default, the game. The sergeant major, normally a jovial sort, was unapproachable for the rest of the day.
And another memorable achievement? This was about the time Super-Glue hit the market. I was fascinated, so I bought a tube. This tube glued down five coffee mugs to desktops and glued together the fingertips of both the draftsperson and the major’s driver, although not to each other. Office work gets to you, you know…
