Advanced ARTEP Party – An Ode to Military Humor

When I served as the commander of the 305^th Supply and Services Company in the 227^th Maintenance Battalion At Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, I inherited a lot of problems from the previous regime.  One of the problems that I inherited was that the previous regime had failed its ARTEP (Army Training and Evaluation Program) miserably.  The way I was told was that the company had failed its ARTEP so badly that the former commander had literally cried during the debrief.  Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but they were given a chance to redo the ARTEP to fix the things they had failed.  However, they had failed the redo as well.  That is pretty pitiful.  When you know what you are being evaluated on, and you still fail, you deserve to be humiliated.  The Battalion S2/3 was a cocky sonofabitch Captain.  He was in line to take command of the 61^st Maintenance Company.  He was also in charge of evaluating my ARTEP.  He didn’t like me much neither.  That was fine by me because I didn’t like that sonofabitch much none either.  At the end of July, I held a meeting with all of my senior NCOs and officers.  I told them that if I had my druthers, I’d rather get the ARTEP out of the way sooner rather than later.  My plan was to put the ARTEP on the training schedule for late August or early September.  There was a good possibility that the monsoon season would be over by then, but weather would still be warm and amenable to camping in the boondocks.  I told my staff that I did not want to do an ARTEP evaluation in the winter when it was cold as shit.  I gave them some very good reasons why.  Soldiers would be cold and miserable.  When soldiers are cold and miserable, they do not perform well.  They just want to sit their asses in a tent around the heater to keep their cold asses warm.  Additionally, we would need to carry more pioneer gear to the field to perform the ARTEP in the winter.  We would need heaters for all of the tents.  The soldiers would need cold weather gear.  I cited the ARTEP failures from the previous regime and mentioned that they had performed their ARTEP in the winter.  I mentioned that there was more shit to inspect and go wrong in the winter.  In warm weather, we could travel lighter and have a smaller footprint for the evaluators to inspect.  Sure, everybody bitched and moaned for the usual reasons, none of which were valid.  The bottom line was that they just did not want to go to the field.  Neither did I.  By that point in my career, I had done enough goddamn camping in the woods, tramping through poison ivy and wait-a-minute vines, taking a shit in Port-a-potties that you had to pipe oxygen into just to breathe, and taking cold ass bitch baths out of a steel pot.  I drew the line at shaving with a blade and shaving cream.  No way in hell was I doing that.  They had invented this newfangled contraption called a battery-operated razor.  And let me tell you something.  That shit worked good enough for government work.  Once I convinced my staff that my way was the right way, we decided to schedule our ARTEP for the last week of August.  I formed an advance party team consisting of my executive officer, my Northern Detachment Commander, my Transportation Platoon Sergeant, my Administrative Platoon Sergeant, My Administrative Platoon Leader (who happened to be an infantry officer who asked for reclassification and transfer to my company), and my Northern Detachment Sergeant.  I tasked this advance party with initially scouting for and choosing our ARTEP location.  Their secondary mission was to select a few soldiers from each section in the company that would be assigned to the advance party.  The advance party would deploy to the field location in advance of the main body at the start of the ARTEP.  The advance party would be responsible for establishing initial perimeter defense and communications.  After my ARTEP advance party had selected our potential ARTEP site, they briefed me on it.  After hearing about it,  I just had to see it.  When my advance party took me out to the potential ARTEP location, I immediately fell in love with it.  It only had one avenue of approach.  It looked like it had a helluva lot more avenues of approach.  But it only had one.  One other avenue of approach that suckers would obviously take was chocked full of ravines.  The easiest way to defend that avenue of approach was with razor wire and booby-traps.  Oh yeah.  The suckers would like it, but when they tried to get across those ravines, they would get caught in that razor wire and get lit up by our booby-traps.  I just loved it when a plan came together.  The potential site backed up against a mountainside on another side.  That mountainside ran perpendicular to the ravines.  My plan was to tie into the razor wire from the ravines and run more razor wire up the hillside and along the hillside all the way down to the other end of our encampment.  Now, I knew that potential aggressors would still try to come down that mountainside to penetrate our encampment.  That was okay.  Cuz I also knew that soldiers were lazy, and they weren’t going to walk all the way across the encampment to the other side where the Port-a-potties were located to take a shit at night.  They were going to walk a little ways up that hill and take a shit.  Any stupid ass aggressors dumb enough to try to penetrate our encampment by coming down that hill, would crawl right through that shit.  In fact, I was banking on it.  When they started to notice that something started to smell like shit, they would lose their heart for the attack.  If that didn’t help, our booby-traps would.  The booby-traps would light up their world.  We would focus our crew served weapons on the main avenue of approach.  The ARTEP advance party had chosen well.  I thought the site was perfect.  I told my advance party that we needed to go back to the company and start to plan for the ARTEP in earnest.  At this point I did not foresee any exercises in futility.  

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