There are days in the Army that start bad, get worse, and then somehow keep finding new ways to go sideways until you’re standing waist-deep in freezing water wondering how the hell you got here. This is the story of one of those days. It involves a dead M1059, a Major with a grudge, Ozzy Osbourne, a First Sergeant with a mattock handle, and the most beautiful act of defiance I ever witnessed in ten years of active duty.
But to understand the day everything went wrong, you have to understand the days when everything went right.
12th Chemical Company, Fort Riley, Kansas. January 1985.
I showed up to 12th Chemical Company a PFC straight out of AIT, green as grass, and walked directly into a drug bust. My first formation—first one, I hadn’t even found the latrine yet—and First Sergeant Glen Burris had the whole company locked up at parade rest because somebody left a joint in a stairwell. TOP was pacing. Nobody was breathing. Welcome to the Army, kid.
Three days later, the soldiers who owned that joint were gone, and there were empty seats on the bus and plane to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. They needed a replacement. I raised my hand.
I’d been in the unit seventy-two hours.
That decision—volunteering for the Mojave Desert before I’d unpacked my duffel bag—set the trajectory for everything that came after. Leadership noticed. They always do. The guys who volunteer get more leash, more freedom, more opportunity. The guys who hide get managed. I didn’t come to the Army to be managed.
I went to NTC eleven times in four years. I volunteered for every one.
I was assigned to the best platoon leadership I would ever serve under: SFC Klingman and LT Foreman. I can say this without hesitation—I would have followed any order from either of them, anywhere, without question. Not because of their rank. Because they earned it. Every single day.
Klingman and Foreman ran our platoon like a professional military academy. Every morning, we stood in ranks for a full inspection—uniform, boots, haircut, dog tags, ID card, and then board-level questioning. NBC knowledge, soldier skills, general military subjects. And here was the genius: whoever performed best got the day off. Every day, somebody earned a reward. That changed the whole culture. We didn’t maintain standards to avoid punishment. We maintained standards because excellence had a payoff.
Our training schedule wasn’t the usual garrison grind of motor pool and weapons cleaning on repeat. We had classes. Equipment training. Map reading, land navigation. EDM and CDM calculations—Effective Downwind Message, Chemical Downwind Message—plotting contamination predictions on acetate overlays by hand. What-if exercises. Basic combat drills. We were running a mini-NCOES every single day.
And the CO and TOP left us alone. They’d look at our platoon and see a machine that ran itself. Sergeant Majors would pop through—battalion, brigade, once even the Division Command Sergeant Major walked in while we were loading magazines for a range. He asked a few questions, got solid answers, saw we were squared away, and moved on. That’s the CSM equivalent of a Michelin star.
CM-42
We were doing something nobody in the Army had done before. We strapped M3A3/M3A4 smoke generators onto M113 armored personnel carriers and pioneered mechanized smoke doctrine. The tactical problem was real: the 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized)—Big Red One—was a full-up heavy division, extra tank battalions and all, built to fight Soviet armor on the European plain. Tanks and Bradleys could move fast. Smoke assets couldn’t keep up. So we made them keep up.
We proved the concept, and the Army responded by fielding the M1059 Smoke Generator Carrier—a purpose-built M113 variant with an integrated smoke system. We were the first unit to receive them.
I was a Specialist when Klingman and Foreman made me track commander of one of those M1059s. A Specialist. Over E-5s and E-6s from other platoons who wanted the job. NCOs came asking for it, and Klingman and Foreman told them to pound sand. Their SPC had earned it.
CM-42. That was the bumper number on my track. Klingman’s vehicle on the property book. My vehicle in every way that mattered.
Over the Mountain
I should tell you about the time I accidentally broadcast Ozzy Osbourne across two command nets during a live battle at NTC.
I’d hotwired a cassette player into the communications panel of CM-42. Rigged it so we could listen to music through our CVC helmets, and it would drop automatically when radio traffic came through—incoming or outgoing. It was a beautiful piece of soldier engineering. Worked perfectly.
Right up until it didn’t.
We were rolling right behind the armor, M1 Abrams tanks maneuvering across the Irwin training area, MILES lights flashing everywhere, a full-scale battle raging. And I’m in my TC hatch, rolling to Ozzy. Randy Rhoads shredding his way through “Over the Mountain.”
Then the distribution panel fired and our track went hot mic on two nets simultaneously—Battalion and Division CNC.
Somewhere in a TOC, radio operators monitoring tactical traffic during a division-level battle suddenly got a face full of Randy Rhoads through their headsets. The radio crackled with a voice I will never forget:
“Who is playing Ozzy on this net?”
The cold chill that went down my spine could have frozen that desert. I got smoked for it. But the Battalion Commander was an Ozzy fan. And the laughs, the retelling, the legend of it—those things bond soldiers more than any formation or ceremony ever could.
Nobody remembers the AAR from that rotation. Everybody remembers the night Ozzy went out on the Division net.
Twenty-Four Days
An NTC rotation ran twenty-four days in the box, and the Mojave doesn’t come with plumbing.
So you took an Australian shower.
Here’s how it worked. One canvas bucket, about a gallon, with a showerhead in the bottom. You filled it from the water can and hung it off the M2 .50 cal on the TC cupola. You dragged a wood pallet under it, because standing barefoot in desert dirt defeats the purpose. Then you stripped down, naked as the day you were born.
The water came down cold. A gallon doesn’t last, so you learned the drill: wet down, shut it off, soap up, and spend whatever was left rinsing. Thirty seconds of water if you were greedy. A minute if you were smart.
And somewhere in that minute, the OPFOR would roll past. A column of VISMODs dragging a dust cloud a mile long, crews standing in their hatches, every one of them getting a good long look at a naked smoker on a pallet in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Some of them waved. One or two saluted.
If you never saw a VISMOD, picture an M551 Sheridan in a Halloween costume. The OPFOR took those little aluminum light tanks and bolted on sheet metal and fiberglass until, from a thousand meters through a sight, they passed for T-72s, BMPs, and BMDs. Up close they looked like exactly what they were. But they were fast and low, and the men driving them knew that desert better than anybody who rotated through it. For twenty-four days they were the Soviet Army, and most days they won.
I didn’t care. Nobody did. With that cold water running down your back, the whole war could go by. You had exactly one concern in the world, and it was hanging off the fifty.
Then you got dressed and ate.
Our MREs were first generation. The original twelve menus, nothing like the fine dining soldiers carry today. No heater, no options worth the name. What we had was the dreaded dehydrated pork patty and the dehydrated beef patty, gray discs of something that had once stood near an animal. You could eat them dry like a cracker or soak them until they went to wet cardboard. Both were worse than they sound. The troops had a name for the whole menu: Meals Rejected by Everyone.
Twelve menus. Twenty-four days. Three a day.
That’s seventy-two of them in a row. You traded for the good ones, hoarded the cheese spread, and learned which brown pouch you could stand. By the second week every menu tasted the same. By the third you’d quit reading the labels.
Nobody complained about the food at NTC. Complaining assumes there’s an alternative. There was the MRE, and there was hungry.
Chem Light Football
When the battle went quiet for the night and there was nothing to do but wait for the next one, somebody always came up with a football. Nobody packed one. You built it.
You took a roll of toilet paper and wrapped it in duct tape until it was hard enough to throw a spiral and heavy enough to hurt when it hit you. Then you taped chem lights around it. Now you had a ball you could see in the dark.
The field got the same treatment. Chem lights at the four corners, two more for each goal line, a few down the sidelines so nobody ran off into a wadi. Teams went by color. Green on one side, red on the other, a chem light taped to your sleeve or hanging off a bootlace so your quarterback knew who to throw to and the other side knew who to hit.
Picture it from the ridgeline. A rectangle of chem lights in the black Mojave, a green blur tumbling end over end, and two dozen more chem lights crashing into each other in the dark. It was supposed to be touch football. Nobody played it that way. Somebody always went back to his track with a fat lip, and somebody always took a ball in the face he never saw coming, chem lights and all.
No refs. No clock. The game ended when the chem lights went dim or a platoon sergeant walked out of the dark and reminded us that stand-to was at oh-four-hundred.
Then there was pogey bait.
Pogey bait was anything that wasn’t an MRE. Candy bars, sunflower seeds, beef jerky, a bag of Doritos crushed to powder in the bottom of a rucksack. Whatever you carried into the box was all you had for twenty-four days, and it was worth more than money. A Snickers bought you somebody’s radio watch. A bag of M&M’s bought you the good MRE. A guy who got a care package from home was the richest man in the battalion for exactly as long as it took to run out.
And everybody who smoked—cigarettes, not fog oil—was begging.
By the second week the guys who came in with a carton were down to loose ones, and the guys who came in with a pack were bumming off everybody else. You’d see a grown man with sergeant’s stripes standing at somebody else’s track with his hand out like a kid at a candy counter.
“Got one?”
“Last one.”
“You said that yesterday.”
Every smoke got split and passed down the line until the cherry was burning somebody’s fingers. Somebody always had one more. Nobody ever admitted it until you asked twice.
That was NTC between the battles. Cold showers, rotten food, a toilet-paper football, and a man’s whole net worth in a cargo pocket full of candy bars. We were broke, filthy, and a long way from Kansas.
I volunteered for every one of them.
The Grudge
Major Andre was not my biggest fan.
The first time I crossed paths with him, he was umpiring an exercise at Fort Riley. I drove CM-42 across a hardball road at a tank crossing. For the purposes of the exercise, hardball roads were rivers and tank crossings were bridges—and the bridges were “blown.” You could only cross using combat engineer bridges.
But here’s the thing: my M1059 was simulating Field Artillery smoke. I wasn’t participating in the tactical problem. I wasn’t a maneuver element. I was support, operating outside the scenario.
Andre didn’t care. He went ballistic. He wasn’t hearing my explanation. So my Battalion Commander got on the radio and told him, in so many words, to mind his own business.
That was the day I made an enemy of Major Andre.
Three Feet and Rising
Late February or early March—I can’t remember which. It was gray. A Kansas winter mix of snow, freezing rain, and mostly rain. The training area was a muddy mess.
A battalion of armor and infantry plus the smokers—six M1059s from 12th Chemical—were in the field. 1/4 Cavalry was playing OPFOR in their M60A3s, and God bless those beautiful machines, but they were kicking the hell out of 3/34 Armor in their M1s. We were in full retreat.
I was last in the column. Forty-plus tracked vehicles—M1s, M2s, M3s, M113s—strung out ahead of me. We came to a stream I knew well. Usually a foot to eighteen inches of water, easy crossing, I’d been up and down both sides in all manner of vehicles, even an M151 a few times.
Not today. Forty vehicles had already churned through ahead of me, tearing the banks apart. The water was up at least three feet over normal. The far bank—a manageable fifteen degrees under normal conditions—was a chewed-up mudslide.
We went in. PFC Martinez, my driver, followed the ruts the vehicles ahead had made. We hit the far bank and started climbing. Made it twenty-five feet up the incline.
Then Martinez started rocking the laterals, trying to dig down through the mud to something solid.
Pop. Bang.
The engine revved, pegging close to max RPM.
The quill shaft had snapped clean off the final drive. That’s not a thrown track you can remount with a pry bar and some strong backs. That’s a vehicle that is completely, mechanically dead. The engine was screaming because the drivetrain was disconnected—the drive sprocket was spinning against nothing, zero load, all that torque going nowhere.
Then the quill shaft cut the fuel shutoff cable.
Martinez grabbed the cable handle and pulled—the right instinct, kill the engine—and the entire cable pulled free from the firewall. Now we had a runaway diesel. Max RPM, no load, no kill switch.
I dropped down, heading for the fuel supply valve to close it manually. By the time I got there: steam, smoke, and silence.
The Detroit Diesel had run itself to death. Seized, then cracked the block in places. That engine was scrap metal.
And then gravity took over. With no brakes worth anything on a dead drivetrain, CM-42 rolled backwards down that slope and settled into the middle of the stream. Water up to the hull. Rising.
I felt like Johnny Cash. Three feet and rising.
Behind Enemy Lines
I worked the radio, trying to reach anyone from our side. But it was too late. Here came the OPFOR—1/4 Cav’s lead elements in pursuit. Their M60A3s rolled past us without a second glance. We were a dead vehicle in a stream. Not worth their time.
And let me say this: the M60A3 is a gorgeous machine. Don’t let anyone tell you different. That long 105mm tube, that silhouette, the curves of the turret. The M1 is a weapon system. The M60 looks like a tank. The way a tank is supposed to look.
Beautiful or not, their passage meant we were now behind enemy lines. And trailing behind the combat elements came the maintenance detachment from 201st Maintenance Battalion.
The XO of 201st Maintenance was Major Andre.
They had an M88 Recovery Vehicle—the one asset that could pull us out. But no tow bar. So they tow-cabled us. Steel cables, no rigid connection, our dead M1059 free to swing and drift behind the M88 like a sled on a leash.
And Andre made my crew hook up the cables. Not his maintenance soldiers who do recovery for a living. My crew. Me, Martinez, and my equipment operator, Specialist Tartt. Standing in freezing water up to our waists, fingers going numb, connecting steel cables in a Kansas winter while Andre’s M88 crew watched from dry ground.
Then they processed us as POWs.
Under the exercise rules, this was technically legitimate. Full MILES protocols, casualty card processing, POW capture authorized. They towed us to their field maintenance grid location—a spot I knew very well, because it was right near Beck’s Lake. That was our platoon’s fishing spot when the training area went cold and nobody was out training.
Andre was taking me to my own backyard and didn’t even know it.
My casualty card read KIA. That was standard—TCs got KIA cards so they’d stay with their vehicles. Tartt had no casualty at all. Not a scratch. And Tartt was a PT stud—300 APFT, maxed out. A specimen.
This becomes important.
Andre pulled Martinez and Tartt for detail work. KP, whatever his unit needed. He separated my crew, scattered them into his labor pool, and left me alone with a dead M1059 at Beck’s Lake. “Killed” on my casualty card, no crew, no communication with my chain of command.
And nobody had notified 12th Chemical that we’d been taken. Nobody. Three soldiers and a vehicle just vanished from the column during a retreat in winter conditions, and Andre never sent word through exercise channels.
We were ghosts.
And the SOI—the Signal Operating Instructions, every frequency, call sign, and crypto we had—was rolling over in eight hours. After that, even if I could reach a radio, nothing would work. I’d be transmitting into dead air.
Pound Sand
I was still a Specialist at this point. SPC Bussell. No stripes, but years of experience behind me.
Andre sent a specialist mechanic to cannibalize parts from CM-42.
That M1059 didn’t belong to Andre. It didn’t belong to 201st Maintenance. It belonged to 12th Chemical Company, signed for on our property book. And I was the track commander. Whatever happened to that vehicle, I answered for it.
I sent that specialist packing with the most colorful language the United States Army has ever produced.
Then Andre sent an E-6. A Staff Sergeant who outranked me. Different battalion, different unit, no authority over me or my equipment. I told him to pound sand and asked whether my unit had been contacted about our capture.
They hadn’t.
Then Andre sent a butter bar—a Second Lieutenant who’d probably spent less time in the Army than I’d spent in the box at NTC. Same answer. No.
Then Andre came himself. With the specialist, the E-6, the lieutenant, and a few others. A Major and his entourage, rolling up to intimidate one Specialist standing in front of a dead track.
But in that group were Tartt and Martinez.
My crew didn’t hesitate. They broke from Andre’s group, climbed through the driver’s hatch, and we buttoned up. Every hatch sealed. Three soldiers locked inside an armored vehicle that wasn’t going anywhere but wasn’t opening up either.
Andre and his people stood outside looking at a sealed aluminum hull. They couldn’t get in. They couldn’t get to the parts. They couldn’t separate my crew again.
Eventually, they left.
But I knew they’d be back.
PT Run
Tartt always brought PT gear to the field. Always. And when we weren’t running and gunning, when we were parked somewhere without mission orders, I’d let him take a run. Everybody knew that about Tartt. Established behavior.
We were just off the hardball road that ran straight to the crossroads where the two major hardball roads in the training area met. Three miles from Range Control.
I sent Tartt on a PT run.
Three miles on a paved road for a 300 APFT soldier is a warmup. He walked into Range Control barely winded, picked up a landline phone—no frequencies, no call signs, no crypto, no SOI—and called 12th Chemical Company.
He told them our grid coordinates. He told them everything.
The Reckoning
The next morning, they came.
First Sergeant Adams—Burris’s replacement as TOP, and the First Sergeant who broke his back on the flight to REFORGER ’86. SFC Klingman. LT Foreman. Captain Delasandro, our CO—a West Point graduate. SFC Warner, our company section NCO. And a couple of mechanics from our company.
That wasn’t a rescue party. That was a reckoning.
Klingman and Foreman pulled CM-46, their M113, into position to hook up and tow CM-42 home. TOP Adams sat on top of CM-46, right behind the driver’s hatch, like he was planting a flag. And in his hand was a mattock handle.
If you’ve never served, let me explain what a First Sergeant holding a mattock handle means. It means he did not come to negotiate.
Klingman was in the TC spot. Foreman was in his M113 with his driver, SPC Moran, ready to tow. Captain Delasandro stood to my right. Martinez and Tartt beside me. The whole picture was 12th Chemical Company reclaiming what was theirs.
Then Andre showed up with his crew. They took position in front of CM-46.
Andre issued his order: these are POWs and the vehicle stays until the exercise wraps.
TOP looked at CPT Delasandro. Delasandro shook his head. No.
TOP told Andre that we were being taken back to our motor pool, and we would be POWs there until the exercise wrapped.
Andre said nobody was moving without his say-so.
So TOP tapped Moran on the CVC and told him to move out. Moran gave it a touch of gas and put the front edge of the M113 against Major Andre’s body. Then stopped.
And I will remember what TOP said next for the rest of my life:
“If he doesn’t move, run him over. And if you can’t, I will.”
That is the most First Sergeant thing ever said in the history of the United States Army.
Captain Delasandro—West Point ring, company commander, an officer who had stayed silent through the entire confrontation, who let his TOP handle business with a mattock handle and didn’t say a word—finally spoke.
“Move, Major. Or get ran over.”
Andre moved.
Steak Dinner
They towed us to 201st’s motor pool—the compromise. We stayed there for the remaining seven days of the exercise as POWs, technically. But the game had changed. Our chain of command knew exactly where we were. Andre couldn’t touch our vehicle, couldn’t separate our crew, couldn’t sneeze near CM-42 without 12th Chemical knowing about it.
That night, Klingman and Foreman brought us a steak dinner.
Not MREs. Not chow line. Steaks. For their guys who’d been through hell. Sitting in an enemy motor pool, technically prisoners of war, eating better than anyone in 201st Maintenance. That’s what real leadership looks like. It doesn’t end at the confrontation. It follows through.
Andre wrote me up. A field grade Article 15—the big one. Failure to perform PMCS and disobeying a direct order. He was trying to pin the vehicle loss on my maintenance negligence and punish me for refusing to let his people cannibalize my track.
It went up to Brigade.
And here’s the thing about reputation. That Brigade Commander? He and I were lifting partners. He didn’t know me through a personnel file. He knew me from the gym. He knew my character, my standards, my work ethic. The soldier described in Andre’s charges—negligent, insubordinate—wasn’t the man he stood next to at the squat rack.
So he dug deeper.
And everything came out. The unreported POWs. The failure to notify our chain of command. Three soldiers unaccounted for overnight in winter conditions. Unauthorized cannibalization of another unit’s equipment. Using captured soldiers as a labor force. All of it.
Andre’s Article 15 didn’t just get thrown out. It boomeranged.
I don’t know the specifics of how it went down. I just know that one day Major Andre was the XO of 201st Maintenance Battalion, and the next day he was gone. No farewell formation. No announcement. Just silence. The Army doesn’t make a production out of relieving an officer. A set of orders gets cut, a desk gets cleared out, and a career quietly disappears.
Meanwhile, SPC Bussell was still at 12th Chemical, still TC on an M1059, still lifting with the Brigade Commander, still serving under the best leaders the United States Army ever produced.
I look back at that day—the stream, the cracked engine, the freezing water, Major Andre, all of it—and I wouldn’t trade it. Not for anything. Not for any amount.
Because those are the days that define you. Not the easy ones. The days where everything goes sideways and you find out who you are, who your people are, and what you’re willing to stand for.
Martinez climbed in that driver’s hatch without being told. Tartt ran three miles to save his crew. TOP Adams rode in with a mattock handle. Captain Delasandro told a superior officer to move or get run over. Klingman and Foreman brought steaks.
That’s the Army I served in. That’s the Army that made me.
And somewhere, on some forgotten radio net at the National Training Center, Randy Rhoads is still shredding.
— END —
Every story here is true the way a war story is true: it happened, and it got better every time it was told.