Chicken Wars

D. E. Larsen, DVM

My brothers and I had spent the entire morning cleaning out the old chicken coop. It was one of the most unpleasant jobs on the farm. The dust from the manure and debris made breathing difficult. We would work a bit and then step outside to breathe for a few minutes.

We had just finished when Dad arrived from town with a crate on the back of the truck. He had about 30 chicks in the crate. These were a little older than the just hatched size but still small, maybe a week old. When the crate was opened in the coop they scattered, happy to have some open space.

We spent the next hour setting up the water tank and the feed rack. Dad put some medicine in the water. We had a mash in the feed rack, and we planned to feed some scratch on the floor every morning. This was going to be our summer job. I enjoyed filling the feeder with mash and throwing the scratch out for the chicks to scramble after. They would gather all the scratch before they would return to mash. They seemed to grow as you watched them.

It wasn’t long, and they had some feathers. They were all doing well, but there were a couple that the others picked on, pecking their tail stump raw. We had to doctor those wounds every morning and finally had to separate the chicks who were being picked on, sort of like kids at school, I guessed. There was always an odd one that didn’t get along.

The summer went by rapidly, and the day came to slaughter the chickens. If I thought the daily chores were a pain, this day was going to be fun but a lot of work. The first job for my older brother Gary and I was to chop off the heads of the chickens. We had to work relatively fast because there was an assembly line of sorts set up and the speed of the chopping dictated the pace of the assembly line.

We went into the coop and started capturing chickens and placing them in a crate. Then we took the crate to the woodshed. My job was to pull a chicken out of the box and hold its head and neck down on the chopping block. Gary swung the ax. Then I would release the headless chicken with a bit of toss into the air. It would fly around a moment, then run around the woodshed, blood spurting. It didn’t take long for Gary and me to be covered with blood, and the woodshed looked like the scene of a horrible crime. The only thing that bothered me was that the head would blink for a short time. I wondered what it was thinking.

We would gather the birds after they were quiet and well-bled out. Then take them out to the scalding tub, a large kettle of boiling water set over a fire in the middle of the yard. After a short dip in the tub, we could pluck the feathers.

Then Mom and Aunt Lila would take them into the house, singe the fine feathers and pull the large quills if any remained. After the singeing, they would gut the bird, saving the heart, liver, and gizzards. Then rinse them thoroughly, and wrap them for the freezer. While that was going on, Gary and I were starting on the next crate of chickens in the woodshed.

The battles started when the chickens were thawed and cut up for dinner. Mostly fried, one chicken fed the family, Dad, Mom, Linda, Larry, Gary, and myself.

Mom cut up the bird into the breast, two thighs, two drumsticks, two wings, neck, and the back was divided into two pieces. The breast was divided to provide three parts. The wishbone was cut out first, then split the breast into two pieces.

At the table, the meat was distributed. Dad and Larry got a large piece of breast, and Gary got the wishbone. Mom and Linda got a thigh and maybe another piece like a drumstick or wing. I was left with a drumstick and maybe a wing. Once in a while, I would get the neck and a piece of the back. This was fine until I was old enough to think that I also deserved a part of the breast. 

Mom attempted to defuse the problem.

“David, you can have my thigh. I like the wings and backs, and the backs really have a lot of meat, and the wings are white meat also,” she said.

“The thigh is dark meat, and I like white meat. I don’t see why I can’t have some breast meat,” I replied.

“The chicken can only be cut into so many pieces,” she pointed out.

It was decided that the wishbone would be up for grabs for whoever got to the table first. You can imagine how that went. Mom solved the problem finally by cutting the wings off with a chunk of breast meat attached.

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels.

Trip to Münster 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

I sat my stuff on Smouse’s desk and watched as Moyer had guys scurrying about gathering every possible piece of test equipment that I may need. They had a car delivered from the motor pool, and all this stuff was packed out and loaded into the car.

Since I didn’t have a European driver’s license yet, I would need a driver.

Moyer looked around and finally asked Smouse who they could spare.

Smouse looked at the shop schedule carefully. “Looks like the best option will be Geibb.”

So Geibb was my driver. If anybody in the Army ever looked like Zero in Beatle Baily, it was Geibb. How he ever got into the shop was beyond me. Geibb was tall and thin, walked slightly stooped over, and his glasses were like the bottom of coke bottles. When he talked, he squinted his eyes and wrinkled his nose.

Smouse spoke to me in a hushed tone. “Geibb never does anything right. Good luck, you’re going to need it.”

We loaded into the car. Moyer was giving Geibb some last-minute instructions about driving in the snow. There was still snow on the ground, but the roads were clear. The trip started off well. Actually, I enjoyed the ride. Geibb seemed to know where he was going. However, he constantly leaned over the steering wheel and squinted as if he needed a better view. He kept up a constant chatter. He was excited about the extra money he would be getting for TDY (temporary duty) pay. The heater was going full blast, and it was still a little chilly in the car. But the countryside was fascinating.

By noon it had started to snow a little. Geibb held his face closer to the windshield to see better. We were pretty close to Paderborn, probably just a few more miles to go, and I thought that would be a good place to find lunch.

As we met an oncoming car, there was a sudden flash with a cracking sound as the windshield shattered into a million fragments. I had seen car windows do this before in freezing weather, and I believe it was a spontaneous event. Geibb was sure the other car had thrown something at us.

Geibb was able to stop. We broke a small six-inch hole in front of Geibb so he could see.

“All you have to do is get us to Paderborn, and we can call back to the shop and get another car,” I assured him.

It was slow going, but we pulled into Paderborn sometime later. I was looking for a good place to stop when we came to a German Army MP station.

“Pull in here,” I instructed Geibb. He was reluctant, but I often dealt with the Korean Army in Korea and found them more than willing to help. I figured these guys would be just as helpful.

They were very willing to help. We called the shop from the main office. Moyer had a little trouble getting the story straight but finally arranged to have a van from the Detachment come and pick us and the equipment up. They would send the motor pool to pick up the car.

The Germans were very helpful and anxious to be good hosts. They assured me that the car was very secure in their parking lot. As it turned out, the commander of the MP station had gotten married that day, and they were having a big party upstairs in the Cantina. They said we were welcome to wait in the main office, but we were also most welcome to come upstairs and join them in their celebration. I declined the invitation, saying we needed to watch the car. They pointed out that it would be several hours before anyone arrived from Rothwesten or Münster.

Finally, after repeated invitations, we agreed to join the party. The duty sergeant assured us he would watch the car, and since it was after five, I thought it would be okay. We head up to the third floor and enter the small Cantina. The place is packed, and the atmosphere is electric. 

A couple of beers are pushed into our hands. We are pushed to a table in the middle of the room. Everyone wants to talk with us and practice their English. I speak not one word of German, and Geibb, who has been in the country for over a year, doesn’t speak much more than me.

One beer follows another. I return downstairs to double-check our situation. 

The duty Sergeant gives me a thumbs up. The car is okay, and no word from anybody else. Back upstairs, the party continues. There is not much to eat, and some sausage and cheese and a hard roll are all I can come up with.

After what must have been a couple of hours, the van arrives from the Detachment. The driver, the maintenance man, happens to be MacDonald, a classmate from Fort Devens.

Another reunion, one more reason to celebrate. Mac has no trouble settling into the party. The guys from the motor pool don’t arrive until after eight in the evening. We transfer our stuff from the car to the van. The motor pool guy tells MacDonald that we should stay the night here, but we head to the Detachment anyway.

The ride to Münster was exciting, but we made it while most of the crew was still awake. Maybe twelve or fifteen guys, the Detachment was housed in a large German farmhouse. It didn’t take long for us to get into the spare room and hit the sack.

I was in shape for partying, and nothing was unusual about last night by my standards. I was up for the trip to breakfast at a small Gasthaus in town and then on to work. Geibb wasn’t up to the schedule, and we let him sleep. His job was done anyway.

On the way to the site, I started going over the problem with McDonald.

“The problem is really a simple one,” I explained, “It is in the power supply for the antenna rotor. There are two large power transistors that burn out. The number is 2N174, I believe. All we have to do is come up with a couple of those, and we’re done. The problem is I doubt if they are in the supply channel. I tried to get Moyer to get them on order, and he would not do it.”

“We checked those transistors, and they are fine,” MacDonald says.

“The problem is an emitter to collector short,” I said. “We can’t detect that short the way we check transistors.”

We immediately tore open the rotor power supply and removed the transistors when we got to the site. The typical burned braided wire on the emitter side told me all I needed to know. We called the shop, and sure enough, there were no 2N174s in stock.

Moyer was surprised to hear from us so early. He had already heard about the party. “It will take several days to get those transistors to the site,” Moyer says.

“You get several pairs on order with an ASAP on the order. If this site is down, the others will be soon to follow,” I instructed Moyer. “We will probably be able to get started with some from the German economy, I would say Black Market in Korea.”

Mac knew of a little German TV repair shop that also served as a supply for a large group of Ham Radio operators. We made a quick trip to town and came up with a half dozen transistors with a bit of bartering. These didn’t have the braided wire attached to the poles, but they would serve their purpose until the Supply channel was full.

We had the site operational before noon. Mr. McCann was on the phone to thank me shortly after it returned to service. I told him that we had about 3 pairs of transistors that would work in a stop-gap manner.

“Each of the transistors that we have will last about three days, four days at the most,” I said. “That gives you nine to twelve days of function before we are out of transistors. So you had better get on Moyer’s ass to get the right ones into supply. I tried to get him to order them earlier, and he was going to go by the book, and there are none in-house now. This site will not run if you guys go by the book,” I say.

The Army had strict rules on supply inventory. You could only stock so much of any one item. The figure was based on the need for that item in the previous six months. If you had an inspection and were found to be overstocked, there was some hell to be raised. You could get around this in a couple of ways. One was to order an item more often than you actually used it. The other way was to hide the overage (in your pocket if necessary). Moyer knew this stuff as well as I. He just liked to follow the book. I wanted to keep the equipment running.

It took a couple of days before Geibb and I were retrieved. MacDonald was eager to learn everything I had to teach him, and we used our time well to cover the entire unit. The evenings were used to celebrate us as visitors, and these guys could party just as well as the Germans at the MP station.

When we returned to Rothwesten, our glory was short-lived. The story of the windshield and the party at the German MP station had been entirely blown out of proportion. The Maintenance Officer, a 2nd Lieutenant who knew nothing about maintenance, wanted to see us right away.

He really raked Geibb and me over the coals. How dare we drink on TDY? How dare we jeopardize the equipment in the car? He didn’t give a damn if I was the only one that could fix some of this equipment. Our asses were his, or we could go see the company commander for an Article 15. He restricted us to the base for 30 days. I was really pissed.

Christmas came and went. I was restricted to base, so dinner at the mess hall and an evening spent at the NCO club watching a bunch of lifers and their wives get drunk and call it a celebration.

The next day the Army issued a directive that said that any soldier volunteering for duty in Vietnam would go. Commanders were not allowed to prevent that transfer. 

I read this directive posted on the Orderly Room bulletin board on the evening of Tuesday, December 26. The next morning, the 27th, I marched into the First Sergeant’s office and filed a DD1049 (request for transfer) for Vietnam. He took it with a wry smile on his face.

When I told Smouse what I had done, he was so inspired he filed one also. He said I had things in such turmoil he didn’t know what would happen. Nothing had ever happened in the shop like this before.

In the afternoon of the 27th, I was working at the bench doing a routine tune-up on an R390 receiver. Colonel Paris, the Field Station Commander, walked into the shop. Colonel Paris was very tall, probably early 50’s, with slightly graying hair that was sparse on top. Judging from everyone’s reaction, this was just something that never happened. He spoke briefly with Sergeant Moyer and then walked over, pulled up a stool, and sat down at my bench, facing me in a very relaxed manner with one foot on the rung of the stool.

“I guess I owe you a real thank you. Mr. McCann tells me you have done more for the mission of this station in a couple of days than anyone else has done in the last couple of years. So thank you,” he says.

“Thank you, Sir,” I replied. “I just happened to be lucky enough to arrive at the right time.”

“Thanks anyway, and keep up the good work,” he said as he left my bench. He walked around the shop, stopped again, talked with Moyer, and left.

A couple of hours later, near the end of the day, when Moyer comes over to talk with me.

“Colonel Paris wants to know what it will take to get you to withdraw that 1049,” he says.

“I don’t like it here, not one bit. I will withdraw it if you send me to a detachment,” I said.

“Well, we have you scheduled for a detachment as soon as a spot becomes available.”

“Not good enough,” I said, knowing I had him over a barrel. “You send me to a detachment this week, or the request stands.”

“Okay,” he said, “go pack your bags. I’ll send you to Wobeck tomorrow. And by the way, the old man was going to recommend that your transfer request be denied.”

“I am sure that he read the same directive that I read,” I said as I started to clear my bench.

The outcome of those few days at Rothwesten took a few more weeks to completely unfold.

I went to Wobeck, and we arrived late at night on December 28. I checked into the Banhauf Hotel in Schöningen, West Germany. Schöningen was a small village located right on the border of East Germany. The site, Wobeck, was located a couple of miles up the hill in The Elm, an ancient Elm forest full of local lore of witches and goblins.

TDY pay for the site started on my arrival, an extra $16.00 a day. Smouse let his transfer request stand, and he went to Vietnam.

MacDonald was pulled from his Detachment for poor behavior displayed on my visit. Geibb was in the dog house deeper than ever.

Mm biggest allies, the DF and RFP operators, were back to poor maintenance. My presence was short-lived, but they had a new starting point and an understanding of what they should be expecting from the maintenance shop. Moyer knew he would have to keep someone on top of things a little more.

It took a while, but Moyer was replaced by Sergeant Z. The shop was run more efficiently, and I had someone I could work with from this distant shop.

I was in bed shortly after my check-in. Morning came early, and the bathroom was at the end of the hall. The clerk said if you wanted hot water for a shower, I needed to be the first one there.

It was a Brisk shower in the morning as most of the hot water was gone. By the time I got downstairs for breakfast, most of the maintenance crew were there to meet me. 

This was the start of a whole new chapter in the Army.

Photo by KarinKarin on Pixabay.

Rothwesten Operations

 D. E. Larsen, DVM

Tuesday morning was a little busy. I had borrowed Sergeant Z’s jeep again to get my new uniform taken care of as far as new patches and the like sewn on and laundered. By this evening, I should start to look like a soldier again. When I brought the jeep back at noon, I stopped at the orderly room with an armload of new laundry.

“Any word on my clearance papers?” I asked. I was getting anxious to get to work.

“Nothing yet. Sergeant Z has been trying to build a fire in personnel for you. I think he sort of likes you,” the clerk said.

With nothing to do, the afternoon was a real drag. The swing shift guys were just starting to stir. I would be bored to death if those papers don’t come through pretty soon.

Just about this time, my roommate comes through the door. He is a little excited and starts throwing things into a bag like he is going away for a few days.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“They have serious problems at one of the DF sites. The new TRD-23 is down, and the maintenance guy there can’t get it fixed. Anyway, they are sending me up there to take care of things,” he says.

“I can tell you how to fix the thing. We had the same problems in Korea a few months ago, and I spent a couple of weeks with the factory team,” I say.

“No need; I am perfectly competent. I will have it up with in the first hour that I am there.”

Smouse was right. This guy was a real jackass. If I give him any information, it will be just enough to hang himself. He heads out the door with his bag.

“I expect to be back by tomorrow night,” he says as he heads down the hall.

Wednesday morning, when I checked, Sergeant Z had my papers and badge. He hands me the envelope and I am all smiles.

“I have called the operations gate, and they are expecting you. So is Sergeant Moyer. He is maintenance NCOIC, a good man,” Sergeant Z says. “I’ll have the clerk run you out there as soon as you’re ready. It’s not too far to walk, but I know you’re ready to get to work.”

Sergeant Z had coached the MP at the operations gate well. He took my papers and glanced at the badge. “You drop that here when you leave, and we keep it on the board,” he said.

Smouse was sitting at a large desk in the middle of the maintenance shop. He had worked himself into the desk job. He jumped up and showed me around the shop and took me on a tour of the operations building. Other than Smouse, there was nobody who I knew. When we got back to the shop, he introduced me to Sergeant Moyer.

Sergeant Moyer was about average height and in good shape. His short dark hair was starting to get sparse on top. He seemed a little preoccupied and not very talkative.

I told Sergeant Moyer that I had a lot of factory-trained experience on the TRD-23 and could help them with any problems they might have. He assured me that they had their best man on the job, and it should be fixed in no time.

“If you don’t have any power transistors in supply, you should be getting some on order, 2N174. I suggest you order as many as they will allow you to order,” I said.

“Here, we handle orders by the book. We are not authorized to order supplies that we have not documented that we have a need for them,” Moyer says. “You will find that we follow the book around here.”

That was all he had to say. Time would show him that he needed to bend those rules once in a while.

Smouse showed me my workbench and handed me a toolbox. He shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head toward Moyer, “He is alright most of the time. But times like this are why I work at that desk. The DF network is down, and it will be his ass if it is not up and running in a short time.”

I sat on my stool and thought, here I am at work with nothing to do. Just about that time, a tall, thin Sp4 entered the shop and came over to my desk. He looked young to me, and I wasn’t twenty-three yet.

“Hi, I’m Jim Simpson from the DF center. We heard that you came from Korea, and I know that they are very functional in DF and Radio Fingerprinting. We wondered if we could get you to look at our RFP unit. It has been down for about two years now.”

“I’m Dave Larsen,” I said as I extended my hand. “What the hell are you talking about. How could that unit be down for two years?”

“Nobody here seems to know how to work on it,” he replied as he shrugged his shoulders.

“Let’s get a look. I took care of the unit at the 177th. It is complex, but everything comes together if you go about it systematically.”

After looking things over, I looked at him and shook my head. “It might take me two or three hours, but we should be up and running by mid-afternoon.” Jim just looked at me blankly. I wasn’t sure if that meant he had heard that line before.

Since this had sat for 2 years, the first step was to go through and check all the tubes. Hopefully, supply would have replacements. After Moyer’s comments earlier, I was a little concerned about that part of the project. 

After all the tubes were checked and the bad ones replaced, I started through the alignment. In Korea, I usually had the next in line working with me. Being new in the shop and working on something they had neglected for two years, I had no new guy to be an understudy. That required a lot of extra steps when I started alignment on the CRT deflections. I finally talked with Jim, and he came and helped out a little, so I didn’t have to run from the back to the front all the time.

Working through the lunch hour brought some attention from Mr. McCann. He was the CWO who was the DF Operations officer. He had been sitting and watching the process for the last hour. It was about 2:30 when I had Jim pull up a signal and turn on the camera. I was worried that the high-speed camera might also be a problem if it had sat for two years without being used.

The signal came up, the camera ran, and everything looked good. Now we just had to wait until Jim developed the film. I sat back and relaxed for a minute. Mr. McCann looked at his watch.

“When did you start on this?” He asked.

“I don’t know. It must have been 11:30 or so this morning. I had to test all the tubes and get replacements from supply, which took a while. Usually, this alignment only takes an hour or an hour and a half.” I said.

Jim was excited when he returned with the film. He stood stripping through 10 feet of the paper film before handing it to Mr. Cann.

“How come you can come in here on the first morning and fix this unit when that shop has not been able to get it to run for the last 2 years?” Mr. Cann asked.

“Beats me, pretty standard stuff in my view. In Korea, we limited the people who could work on the until to one man, like myself, and a new kid who would work into my place. Too many hands in the soup make bad soup.”

“Don’t you worry. This is your baby from here on out!” Mr. McCann said.

I picked up my tools and closed the back of the unit. Jim was getting a crew together. They had a lot of work to do to catch up on stuff they had missed for the last couple of years.

When I got back to shop, Mr. McCann was at Moyer’s desk.

“Larsen has just fixed the RFP unit. He has done in two hours what your entire shop has failed to do in the last two years. I want Larsen to be the only maintenance man to touch that unit, period. Do you understand?” McCann said in a loud enough voice that the entire shop could hear.

Moyer was not too happy but busied himself at his desk. Maybe half an hour later, the phone rings. It’s my roommate from the Det. He tells Moyer that he has problems figuring out just what the problem is with the TRD-23, and he thought he might benefit from talking with me. Moyer calls me over to his desk and hands me the phone.

My roommate starts running down the list of his checks. He is way out in left field, but I listen as he goes on and on.

“Have you checked the two power transistors in the rotor power supply?” I ask, almost as if it is an afterthought.

“I have checked them 3 times, and they are fine,” he replies.

“They have an emitter to collector short, and they need to be replaced,” I said.

A long silence, “I have checked them 3 times, and they are fine,” he says again.

“I don’t have anything else to help you,” I say as I hand the phone to Moyer.

He tells Moyer he will be a few days longer than expected. When Moyer hangs up the phone, I tell him he had better get some transistors on order.

Smouse almost snickers. After the dust settles, he drops by my bench and says he thinks I am causing more havoc in the shop than it has seen in a long time. Moyer comes over and says he is assigning me to the swing shift starting tonight. I think he wanted me out of his hair. It was going to be a long day. Moyer sent me to dinner early so I would be set for the shift starting at 4:00.

The first night they sent me with a couple of guys to do maintenance on a transmitter at a nearby Air Force detachment. These guys were excited about the job. “This is an excellent way to spend the evening without having to do much,” Jim said. “This is a radar station located on another hilltop, not far from Rothwesten. 

“I didn’t know much about transmitters,” I said. But these two assured me it would be a good trip.

I can’t say that much was accomplished. These guys checked some gauges and made sure the thing was running. Then we sat around and shot the breeze with the Air Force guys, played some pool, and drank some beer. We started back to Rothwesten about 11:00, planning to get back just in time for shift change. It had started to snow while we were there, and it was snowing hard when we walked to the car.

We drove down the hill, the snow was not quite a white-out, but it was really coming down. The guy driving was straining to see, knowing that the main road was coming up anytime. Suddenly, there was the road, and we were speeding across it. We bounced across the shoulder and were in the middle of a snow-covered plowed field.

“Whatever you do, don’t stop, or we will never get going again,” I shouted from the back seat.

We drove in a wide circle and came back to where we could see the gate to the road. We drove through the open gate and right back onto the road. I would not have believed it would be possible. We laughed all the way back to Rothwesten. Actually, we were pretty lucky the field was there.

When I reported to the shop the next night, Mr. McCann and Sergeant Moyer were waiting to talk to me. The new TRD-23 at Munster was down and had been for several days now. It was desperately needed as the entire DF network was nonfunctional without it.

“How much do you know about this problem?” Mr. McCann asked, not giving Moyer a chance to say a word.

“I can fix it in a few hours if I can come up with the correct transistors. I have been suggesting that we get them on order for several days now. I spent several weeks with the factory team in Korea. I can train the on-site maintenance man to handle the problem.” I replied.

“I want him up there tomorrow!” McCann said to Moyer as he turned and left the room.

“You better go and get packed and get some rest,” Moyer said. “We will see at 8:00 in the morning. Bring your bags and be ready to go.

I arrived at the shop the next morning with my bag in hand. My roommate was there. He was pulled home overnight. He still couldn’t believe that he was unable to fix the problem. I didn’t have anything more to say to him.

Photo by Bruce Richards at http://brucerichards.com/army/kasselpics.htm