BlackFive

The first thing I wrote ever posted on the internets was a bit about fights I had seen, that Matty O' threw up in a fest of military tales. In it one brawler is an Irish conscript member of a Scots unit the Queens Own Highlanders, battle #2. We hosted them in a winter warfare exercise and young Tony Moore gave an excellent account of himself.

It hadn't occurred to me that The Cabarfeidh Pages, also a nominee for best Milblog was written by a member of the same unit, probably due to the gibberish of a name.

Well I pinged Dave T and mentioned the exercise and he replied:

"Aah Exercise Trumpet Dance at Fort Lewis! We went there as the Queen's Own Highlanders in Jan/Feb 94 and as The Highlanders (the amalgamated regiment) in Jan 98. The ranges were fun - Yakima at minus 300 degrees or whatever.....our male appendages still remember the pain of trying to pee into wind during a snowstorm!

dave t"

That was the very one, and we took some of them to Montana for Skiing, Snowmobiling and Shivering. That is where their Irish conscript Tony Moore had his encounter with a gargantuan Montanan. If anyone else played give a holler, I will try to remember a story or two to tell. I jumpmastered one of the birds as we jumped in and I do remember seeing a herd of pronghorn antelope barrel-assing across the DZ while hanging out the door. That led to a new hand and arm signal as I tried to convey what I had seen to my team sergeant, the first jumper. I forked my fingers and poked them on the top of my helmet, but all I got was the "dog looking at a doorknob, or hog looking at a wristwatch" face from him as that tracked with nothing he could relate to airborne ops.

It was the 50th anniversary of the 1st Special Service Force which trained at the same base we used in Montana. Some of the guys from that unit showed up and unsurprisingly over cocktails we got treated to tales of the first US Special Forces operations in WWII. Amazing people, and all us tough guys got humble real quick.