Stories

The Anti Aircraft Law

When I was a young private, my Battalion deployed to Eglin Air Force Base to aggress against the 5th Mechanized Infantry.

Though I was the commander's driver, I was assigned to the 3rd Platoon for the exercise, since we did not drop in the Jeeps.  After the jump, we set up an Anti-Armor Defense and began digging in and building obstacles.

As part of the exercise, we carried expended LAWs.  The LAW, a 66mm, extendable, one-shot, light anti-tank weapon, was good against light armor vehicles.  Of course, we didn't carry the real thing in training.  The expended Law was a hollow fiberglass tube, capped on both ends, extremely light, but a great training aid.

An "enemy" Kiowa scout helicopter began flying over our positions.  They would stop and hover not more than 200 meters from us.  You could see the pilots drawing our defensive preparations.  A pilot would never do this in the real world; this was cheating.

Though we fired hundreds of blank rounds at them with our M16 and M60 machine guns, they wouldn't move.

Specialist Tollner, my team leader, told me to fire my LAW at him.  I pulled the pin, extended my law, checked my backblast area, and took aim.  When I squeezed the trigger, the law went off.  A line of white smoke headed rapidly toward the chopper and exploded just before it reached them.  SPC Tollner had shoved a star cluster, a signaling device, in the back and struck it as soon as I squeezed.  It could have killed those guys.  

They banked hard, flying away.  They returned a few minutes later and landed.  I've never seen two men so angry.  The platoon surrounded them.   Our platoon sergeant told them to leave before we kicked their asses. If they returned he told them, they could expect more of the same.  Before he let them go, he took their notebook and cut off their 5th Mech patches as souvenirs. 

This was the 82nd Airborne I joined in 1976.