Of Ice And Men

Well, it's Friday, looking like the start of a long weekend for me. I got a 'snow day', that is, the post is closed due to weather. Kind of makes sense, it's a real icy mess out there. But like my squad leader pointed out, go up to Ft. Drumm. Drumm is in upstate New York, and apparently is colder than hell. Glad I got stationed in Oklahoma, although I hear it's not bad.
At any rate, yesterday was not a lot better, although I did have to report in to work. I don't mind my job usually, despite the lack of clear direction and/or chain of command. You take the good, you take the bad. However, yesterday I think I could have done without. It began like any other day- morning formation, then report to the office and see what orders the day brings. It was in the middle of this massive ice storm Oklahoma seems to have lost their mind about, although the main component in the morning was rain. No big deal, but darn! Left my wet-weather suit at home. Oh well, there's not going to be a lot of call for supply today, so I probably will sit around the office pushing paper all day. No big deal. The thing was, the day prior we had been out in the field training. When we do this, we need to bring supplies- in this case just food and water. So it was that I was in the truck hauling the water buffalo. No, not a live animal, the water buffalo is a big 4000 gallon tank on a trailer bed- it has pipes and spigots on it, and its purpose is so that we have a supply of drinking water where plumbing may not be available. It's important to keep enough water in your body- believe me, I know, having had heatstroke before. Not in January, but still, you get the idea.
So out we went, filled up the buffalo, and off we go. The day went well, lots of exciting training, and we all came back happy and tired. The buffalo stayed hitched to the truck it was on, and the truck stayed where it was parked. This was not its 'home', that is, the place on the lot where it is supposed to stay. So there it sat all night, with an empty water buffalo attached to it. Now, the water buffalo sits on a frame that looks like a big A, with the hitch end being at the top of the A. This means a single pivot point, which also means that combined with the fact that the trucks have a fairly wide turning radius, that backing it up is not as easy as it sounds. For larger trailers, this isn't a problem, as they too turn slow enough so that the truck can easily maneuver them into place. However, the buffalo is a comparatively small trailer, and as such jackknifes very easily. A jackknife is when the trailer swings around the truck, winding up at a 90 degree or greater angle to the truck- this can happen when the truck is moving forwards or backwards, but is more likely when backing up. To move a truck in the motor pool a ground guide is required- the trucks are pretty big bastards, and so someone on the ground is a safety precaution, just in case the driver misses something. A ground guide also assists in hooking up trailers and things of that nature. Guess who got to pull ground guide duty in the rain? It was pretty brutal, though I don't like to complain. The wind lashed across the lot, driving both rain and ice before it and right into me. Okay, I thought, no big deal, I've dealt with worse. So away we went, trying to back the trailer into a spot diagonally. This is, as a friend once said, like trying to nail Jello to the wall. The truck would turn, the trailer would turn more. The truck would turn back, the trailer would attempt the Watusi behind it. So it went for a good while, me gesturing back and forth and the driver responding, both of us trying to get the trailer to stay the hell put. As you can guess, after about an hour, it was getting a tad chilly outside. I was soaked to the skin and stinging from the ice and sleet that the wind sent my way. Finally the driver decided to simply detach the trailer, set down the wheel on the front and just roll the stupid thing into place. Like any trailer, it has what I think are called landing gear- wheels or stops on the hitch end so that the trailer can sit level when it's not hooked up. Now, a 4000-gallon drum may sound like a chore to move, but actually it's surprisingly light when empty. (The buffalo is drained after each use for sanitary reasons). So we set about detaching our little monster. The only difficulty with this was that in the hour we had been out there, a nice thick layer of ice had developed all over everything- including me, but that's another story. We managed to get the trailer detached, and with three of us holding the hitch end, found we couldn't get the front wheel down- instead of a simple crank, it drops down in a semicircle and locks into place- under ideal conditions. We managed to swing it down, but failed to lock it into place. So we were kind of stuck holding the increasingly heavy trailer hitch while flailing away trying to lock the stupid thing in place. It failed to lock due to-yep- a thick coat of ice all over the locking mechanism. So finally we just dropped the thing and let it sit there, creating a noise loud enough to almost attract the attention of the mechanics, whose job it is to fix stuff like this. Finally, after consultation with several other soldiers who were smart enough to stay inside and not spend an hour in the cold, we got the landing gear down and rolled the trailer into place, set the brakes, and went back inside to recover from frostbite. The total time it took to get the trailer parked once the landing gear was down-less than two minutes. The total time it took to figure out we should have just done this in the first place- about two hours. There's strong, and then there's Army strong.
I love my job, though- if I wasn't doing it, who would be?