Traitors (Damned of the 2/19th - Book Five) - Finished

Tanks & Flashbangs

Grafenwöhr Training Area
Western Germany
Late Fall/ Early Winter - 1986

I leaned against the tank and lit a cigarette, my eardrums aching from the blasts of the 120mm cannons. The tank rocked backwards against my back, but I ignored it. We weren't supposed to be on the firing line, but that was commonly ignored because the C-DAT's made us carry the rounds ourselves, and if they were going to make us carry the rounds then we did it our way. It'd worked well for nearly a month, why change anything?

The 168th Armor commander was a cool dude toward the three of us, even if his men thought he was total cock wrapped in a complete asshole. He let us have our own GP Small tent, let us set our own hours, and pretty much left us alone unless his tanks needed ammo, or he needed us to go out and get him something that only we could get him and he didn't really want it to be tied to him. We had our own vehicles, CUC-V 15 - the Gypsy Wagon and 5-Ton 35 - Growler, but he gave us fuel coupons, and we went a "acquired" things like candy, porn mags, hooker, booze, real food, whatever he wanted.

We didn't ask questions why someone wanted something.

Nancy went by, carrying a box containing two 120mm APDSFSDU-T in her arms, glaring at me as she went by, but I just smiled at her, and blew smoke at her.

"I oughta set this down and kick your ass." She snarled, but kept walking.

The tanks all fired three rounds, then silence settled down on the range. Normally range control would be yelling to the training NCO's who would be yelling to the various people who needed to know the information. The C-DATs used their onboard radios to talk back and forth, which made the range have an odd silence even with the roar of the turbo diesels from all the tanks.

"Hey, Corporal Stillwater!" Came from above me. 1LT Victors, a tank commander in however the fucking C-DATs did their rank structure. I'd had it explained to me like a dozen times, but I'd probably know how it worked if I'd cared enough to pay attention. I'd worked with 1-68th before, but I still couldn't be assed to learn how they half-wit tank-apes did shit

"More ammo, coming up." I called out before he could tell me what he wanted, pushing off the tank and heading toward the area where we'd stacked the rounds.

"And put out that cigarette on the range!" He yelled.

"Then get out of your fucking tank and get your fucking ammo yourself!" I tossed over my shoulder. He yelled something back, but I didn't catch it and didn't much care. The BCO had made it pretty obvious that as long as we didn't piss him off, nobody else could touch us, which pissed off some of the more strak officers.

When I walked over the ammo stack, the reason why we did what we want was obvious. Boxes of 120mm APDSFSDU-T were stacked neatly on the pallets, over two dozen pallets were left, each pallet with 40 boxes, each box containing two foil wrapped 120mm armor piercing discarding sabot fin stabilized depleted uranium tracer rounds.

168th had been out of training funds, had just enough to get to the range and use training submunition shot, which no tanker liked to use. He'd told us, privately, that he had a lot of new men that had never handled the new live rounds, and I'd told him that maybe something could be done about that, as long as he'd understand my crew was a bit "eccentric".

So instead of five hundred practice rounds, I'd hauled over 500 war shots, 750 submunitions, and over 15,000 rounds of .50 cal API-T rounds that had been marked condition code H down to him instead of it being shipped back to the States for use, and gotten it for him without him blowing through the rest of the training budget with some creative fast talking to a few people.

Which meant, to the BCO, that I could dance naked on top of the tank with a whiskey bottle in one hand and a naked Nagle in the other, covered in paint and chem light, with a fire built on the back deck of the tank, and he'd bang the drum.