You know the old cliché, if it ain’t raining, it ain’t training. Well, it had been raining steadily ever since we had been alerted for movement to the field. The Colonel prided himself in the discipline and esprit de corps of the entire area support group headquarters, and he believed that a jump TOC (Tactical Operations Center) for the group could be deployed anywhere and setup within 45 minutes of arrival at the designated jump TOC location. Even in the rain. I often wondered if that would be true if it were Purple Rain but I digress. Well, we were out there in the rain, swimming around and setting up the jump TOC in the back woods of Fort Lewis. The nice thing about the group headquarters was that none of the tents leaked. No sir. No holey tents in that group. I guess they didn’t like to pray or something. Another nice thing was that all of the tents had heat and light and all of the generators worked (as long as the gas tanks were full). The colonel had to have coffee as soon as his tent was set up (and his tent was always the first tent to go up, as in set up, not as in smoke). Go figure. So, we would percolate a 32-cup pot of coffee at 220 volts on the generator. You should try it sometime. A 110-volt pot cranked up to 220 volts will percolate like somebody lit a fire underneath its butt. Really fast, but the pot doesn’t seem to last nearly as long as if you use it the correct way. But hey, we weren’t paying for it. The Army was, and the supply guy would just have to order another one when the one we had went belly up (you know dying cockroach position). After we got the jump TOC completely set up in the field location, the colonel called a staff meeting. The first order of business, he coined all of us. If you don’t know what that means it is simply this: when an officer or senior non-commissioned officer arrives in a unit, the commander may (at his or her discretion) issue a unit coin to that officer or senior non-commissioned officer. The coins are known as challenge coins, and challenge coins may be small coins or medallions, bearing an organization’s insignia or emblem and they are to be carried by the organization’s members. Traditionally, they are given to prove membership when challenged and to enhance morale. Typically, when the colonel coined us, it meant that whoever did not produce a coin was buying everybody else a round when we returned to garrison. However, it was not to be that time because everybody in the staff meeting produced a coin. Tough luck, old man. You lose. The next thing he did was offer anyone and everyone who would partake, one of his imported cigars. He smoked Montecristo Nicaraguan Churchills. Picture that, if you can, a tent full of people smoking big-ass cigars and drinking coffee while the colonel was telling us war stories. Then, out of the blue, he said, “Boys, if I were a betting man, I’d bet all my money that we’re going to jump to Yakima. That’s right. You heard correctly. We’re going to deploy to Yakima. Warning order to follow.” “But you’re not a betting man, are you sir?” the group XO asked. “Well you never can tell. Prepare to move. Everyone dismissed.” As we walked away from the staff tent, pretty much everybody was saying the same thing, “That son of a bitch is crazy. It’s got to be snowing in the damn pass. The damn highway patrol will never let us through the pass. This is insane.” Insane or not, an hour later, we received a movement order to deploy the jump TOC to a forward location at Yakima designated jump TOC-forward. Yay. We tore down the jump TOC, packed everything up, and prepared to deploy. When a military police escort showed up to lead our convoy down the highway, I knew the colonel had been planning this little diversion all along. We were never going to camp in the rain. Oh hell no. That just wouldn’t be normal, not when we had the chance to camp in the snow. Especially when we didn’t have the pioneer gear packed for a winter excursion. You just gotta love it. We drove north up Interstate 5 without incident in our convoy, in the dark, in the rain. Then, we turned onto Interstate 90 east headed toward Snoqualmie Pass Enroute to Yakima, and it started to snow. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Sure enough, chains were required at the pass, and the highway patrol stopped our little convoy. We sat there in the snow for an hour and a half while the colonel waited for I Corps Headquarters at Fort Lewis to get us an authorization to drive across the pass. We decided to have a snowball fight to entertain ourselves while we waited. What else were we going to do? Make snowmen? Well, I guess we could have, but we didn’t have all of the accessories for the faces and arms and such. When we were finally cleared to proceed, we moved out toward Yakima but didn’t arrive there until 0230 hours. Once we arrived, we still had to setup the jump TOC-forward. We finally got to hit the rack at about 0400 hours, except for the few unlucky stiffs that had to stand guard duty. Guard duty in 20-degree weather without the proper clothing kind of blows. But what are you going to do? Quit and go home? Well, I guess that would have been an option, but it would have been one hell of a long walk home. Mostly downhill, though. As I lay in my cot shivering in the cold, trying to sleep, I thought that the whole jump TOC thing was one huge exercise in futility.
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