Hooah! Picture From Hawaii

Taking my pet rock for a drag

This is the last of the pictures I recently scanned in. I've got more, just not scanned.

This is a picture from the Kahukus Training Range from summer of 96. We were moving back from an area we should have never gone to. A couple days earlier, we got orders to move out to a hilltop on the east side of the box. We had reconned that area a week earlier and determined that it was not a good place to go. The roads there were marginal and a good rain could have stranded us up there for days. We asked for the higher HQ to reconsider. It took all of a 5 seconds for them to get back to us. So, we went. We got a good rain later that night.

The next morning, the battalion Command Sergeant Major came out to visit us. He told us that he had a terrible time getting up there in his truck and wanted to know why we came there in the first place. He told us that the roads were washed out pretty bad and it would be tough going to get our trucks back. You see, our TRQ-32 is a really heavy truck and is heavily weighted and top heavy on one side (the drivers side). He wasn't sure we'd be able to get out of the area at all. Especially since the forcast called for more rain that night.

We explained whom the orders came from and he was pretty pissed off that we had been overruled when we objected. He told us to pack up and take as much time as necessary to negotiate the roads back to a safer area. He also told us that we would probably have to rebuild some areas of the road because the rain had created 'ditches' in the road in multiple places and it was barely manageable in a normal HMMWV (HUMVEE), let alone our TRQ.

This picture was taken on the road back. We had encountered a very large ditch in the road. We were filling it in with dirt in the exact spots the tires would go. I saw this rock on the roadside and figured we could put it in the ditch and then put dirt all over and around it. The ditch was so deep, this rock only filled it about halfway. I got the idea to wrap a length of engineer tape around it and have a team mate take my picture. Even after rebuilding the ditches, my squad leader would only let me drive. He'd stand in front of the truck and VERY slowly guide me forward in our 'chase' vehicle (a HMMWV modified to be a match to the TRQ, just no equipment). After I made it through, we'd check the ditch and rebuild as necessary. Then I'd drive the TRQ forward. Very slow going, especially with a ditch every couple hundred meters.

We decided that road work went much quicker without our battle rattle, so we left it all in the truck. What the command doesn't see... never happened....

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