Was talking with the son this morning and the subject got around to tents. He was interested in the shelter halves that were issue items when I was a soldier. Hell, “shelter halves” have probably been issued since the Civil War. They’re still on the books today. And they’re the least common denominator it army field shelter. This is what they look like:
Of course, that picture, almost bucolic in peaceful simplicity, is like the picture on the carton of a TV dinner in that it has only the most tenuous connections with reality.
First, I can’t remember very many sites where we pitched one of these things that was quite this pretty. In the real world, the platoon sergeant comes over and says “Ya’ll pitch shelter halves over there”, pointing in the general direction of an annex to the Atchafalaya Swamp. Second, there’s no insect protection. Third, there’s no floor. Fourth you can’t stand up in it. Fifth, if it’s cool outside, two guys breathing in it overnight leaves a drippy film of moisture all over the inside so when you’re trying to get out of your sleeping bag and get dressed, you’re guaranteed to drag one or more portions of you anatomy against the canvas, giving you a quick douche of cold water. Sixth, there’s room inside for you, your buddy who owns the other half of the shelter and a little bit of gear.
However, being a tanker and all that, we had “options”. First, each tank had a sixteen by twenty foot tarpaulin. It took about a minute and a half to rig that thing out tied to a fender on one end, propped up on the other end by a couple of sections of “rammer staff”, the inch and a quarter by five foot joints fo the cleaning rod you use on a tank’s main gun. Here’s how that looked:
This ain’t my tank, but I spend many a night in a hasty rig like this. If you click on the picture and enlarge it you can see sleeping bags under the tarp.
However, us tankers had more permanent and comfortable accommodations if we had time to set them up, something we often did if we were at a fixed location such as a range or a training area where we’d be coming back to “home” at the end of the day. That was the M1950 “hex tent”, complete with liner. Each tank had one of these as issue equipment, and they looked like this:
This was what passed for “luxury living” for tankers. It had a liner inside, and provisions for a stove. We had a stove on each tank, too, a multifuel tent stove like this:
This little jewel would burn wood in a pinch, but was at its best burning liquid fuel (and a tank carries 300-odd gallons of that), especially gasoline. On a ten-degree day that little stove, fueled by gasoline filched from the company commander’s jeep (because he told us to burn the much more available and nastier-burning diesel) would turn the inside of the tent warm enough to sit comfortably in a T-shirt. Loops of cord set in the tent liner provided place to hang gear to dry, and a couple of candles provided more than enough light if nobody’d managed to steal a military version of a Coleman lantern. The top of the stove was hot enough, too, to boil water or do some cooking. Life was good. Still sleeping on the ground, and unless we took the tarp off the tank for a floor, there was no floor, but it was pretty good living.
Then there were the big tents, the GP’s, small ( a 17.5 foot hexagon, ten feet high under the peak), medium (16×32 feet) or occasionally a large (18×52). The small usually became the office for the company commander and first sergeant in the field, and the mediums were just like they said, “general purpose”. You could sleep an entire tank platoon (twenty men) in one with room to spare. “Larges” were not issued at the company level, so the only time we saw them was some special occasion at a range or training environment.
Here’s a GP Medium:
Now, in the winter, none of these was too bad if we had the available stoves for heating, which we usually did. summer, though, was another story. The flat olive drab canvas has the innate ability to suck a lot of heat out of the sunlight and they were often too hot to bear. You could raise the sides and tie them up, but then you were in full daylight and in easy view of any officer who came traipsing by with bright ideas that would work wonderfully if only he had an NCO to throw at them. And mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes. Army issue or civilian mosquito repellents helped some, but you have to be pretty tired to ignore the buzzing of the little boogers, even though the repellent deters them from actually biting. Many is the day, though, when I was plenty tired enough to ignore the buzzing.
And people wonder about why I’m not a big fan of “roughing it” any more…
