The Great Motivator
This is Steven Petrick Posting.
One of the greatest motivators in life is fear, those circumstances that can send that charge of adrenaline racing into your system and enable you to do things beyond your normal limits.
An example occurred one day while I was in the Army. I was attending the Infantry Mortar Platoon Officer's Course at Fort Benning. On this particular day we were doing "direct lay", i.e., firing the mortar over open sights at a target we could actually see down range. We had just scored a direct hit (we heard the metal on metal contact of the round impacting), but the round was a dud and did not detonate. So we attempted to re-shoot on the same firing data because we wanted to see a round actually detonate on, or inside of, the old APC hulk that was our target.
My position on the team was gunner, which meant I was on my knees, facing towards the target, looking through the sight and keeping the bubbles level (so that the gun would fire accurately). The assistant gunner dropped three rounds down the tube in rapid succession, the first two of which went "bang", but the third round went "tunk".
As I was thinking to myself "That did not sound right", the third round rose up out of the muzzle of the weapon, then "hovered" (I swear I saw it just kind of floating there for a few seconds, even though I know this is impossible), then turned nose down and fell to the earth about three feet in front of the tube (about three feet six inches from me).
This was an 81mm mortar round, which means that it has bursting radius for causing casualties of about 35 meters, and I am just over a meter from it.
At the time this happened there was an old Sergeant First Class standing about ten meters behind the gun, and as soon as he saw what had happened he started running to the rear. In very short order he reached the bleachers that were about 50 meters behind the gun line (as you might imagine, as people became aware of the situation there was an expanding ripple of people fleeing from the site, i.e., the gun crews of the adjacent guns also ran, and people on the guns adjacent to them and so on).
As to fear being a motivator. I started from a kneeling position facing the round, but when the Sergeant reached the bleachers, he found me there looking back at him, and he swore no one had passed him while he was running for the bleachers.
Fear is a great motivator. I have probably never run so fast in my life before, and probably since, that one day.
The round did prove to be a complete dud (EOD blew it up in place later that day), but it put an end to that day's training.
And we never got to see if either of the other two rounds we fired before that exciting few seconds detonated on or in the APC hulk. We were much more focused on trying to get a good 35 meters away from that last round to think about anything else.
One of the greatest motivators in life is fear, those circumstances that can send that charge of adrenaline racing into your system and enable you to do things beyond your normal limits.
An example occurred one day while I was in the Army. I was attending the Infantry Mortar Platoon Officer's Course at Fort Benning. On this particular day we were doing "direct lay", i.e., firing the mortar over open sights at a target we could actually see down range. We had just scored a direct hit (we heard the metal on metal contact of the round impacting), but the round was a dud and did not detonate. So we attempted to re-shoot on the same firing data because we wanted to see a round actually detonate on, or inside of, the old APC hulk that was our target.
My position on the team was gunner, which meant I was on my knees, facing towards the target, looking through the sight and keeping the bubbles level (so that the gun would fire accurately). The assistant gunner dropped three rounds down the tube in rapid succession, the first two of which went "bang", but the third round went "tunk".
As I was thinking to myself "That did not sound right", the third round rose up out of the muzzle of the weapon, then "hovered" (I swear I saw it just kind of floating there for a few seconds, even though I know this is impossible), then turned nose down and fell to the earth about three feet in front of the tube (about three feet six inches from me).
This was an 81mm mortar round, which means that it has bursting radius for causing casualties of about 35 meters, and I am just over a meter from it.
At the time this happened there was an old Sergeant First Class standing about ten meters behind the gun, and as soon as he saw what had happened he started running to the rear. In very short order he reached the bleachers that were about 50 meters behind the gun line (as you might imagine, as people became aware of the situation there was an expanding ripple of people fleeing from the site, i.e., the gun crews of the adjacent guns also ran, and people on the guns adjacent to them and so on).
As to fear being a motivator. I started from a kneeling position facing the round, but when the Sergeant reached the bleachers, he found me there looking back at him, and he swore no one had passed him while he was running for the bleachers.
Fear is a great motivator. I have probably never run so fast in my life before, and probably since, that one day.
The round did prove to be a complete dud (EOD blew it up in place later that day), but it put an end to that day's training.
And we never got to see if either of the other two rounds we fired before that exciting few seconds detonated on or in the APC hulk. We were much more focused on trying to get a good 35 meters away from that last round to think about anything else.
posted by Federation Commander at 9:34 AM
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