Chapter 56: International Relations

We dropped on Honduras at 0700 on Monday 7 September 1981. At the time, it seemed as if a combat drop would be preferable to hanging around either the battalion or Marilyn.

I had made a mistake when I went into ROTC lo those many years ago. No, the Army wasn’t going into combat for quite a while. That didn’t mean I might not get deployed somewhere. The Sandinistas had taken over in Nicaragua, and were making themselves into a real pain in the rear for everybody in the region, and especially for Uncle Sam. It was decided that a show of strength would be a good idea. Operation Southern Shield ‘81 was put into place, a joint training mission with the Honduran Army, and the 82 ^nd Airborne was tasked to participate. Specifically, a battalion task force would be sent down to Honduras to show the flag and participate in training missions and war games.

This isn’t all that unusual an event. The 82^nd is ready to go at any time, and paratroopers are a flexible bunch. It’s part of the code that things will get mixed up and moved around, and you learn to live with it. In this case, a battalion of paratroopers would be sent, 1^st of the 505^th, along with their battery from the 319^th Airborne Artillery, and would form a battalion task force. In addition, we would have a platoon of combat engineers (Charlie Company, 307^th Engineers), a platoon of Stingers (Charlie Battery, 3^rd of the 4^th Air Defense Artillery), and even some MPs from the 82 ^nd MP Company. The local outfit in Panama, the 193^rd Infantry Brigade, was supplying a mobile field hospital, a squadron of Cobra attack choppers, and a squadron of Hueys. The brigade commander even deployed with us, since this was a big operation.

Guess which battery from the 319^th was spending three months in Latin America! Guess whose wife wasn’t happy! Marilyn was seven-plus months pregnant and ten-plus months bitchy. I was not going to Honduras! I was going to be at the hospital with her while she delivered my child! She was getting a divorce! She hated me, the battery, the battalion, the regiment, the brigade, the division, the army, and me all over again! (I guess she hated me twice as much.)

I wasn’t too worried about the divorce. She would never be able to get a lawyer in time and be able to serve me divorce papers on the base (Federal property) and I was pretty sure there was a World War II era ’Dear John’ law that said she couldn’t divorce me until I got home, by which time I hoped she’d be over the mad.

Personally, I was there for all three of my children’s births on the first go-around, and the miracle of childbirth ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. I think my dad had the better idea - smoke a pack of cigarettes in the waiting room while reading Field and Stream. We were informed of the deployment on Monday, August 31, and I spent most of the intervening week at the battery getting ready. It was quieter!

Life for me in the battalion had taken a decidedly worse turn that summer. Lieutenant Colonel Buller was now Colonel Buller and had transferred to NATO in Brussels. His replacement, Lieutenant Colonel Morris, did not turn out to be a fan of mine. Far from it. I suspected that if my chute didn’t open over Honduras, he would not be sorry.

No, the problem was a personal one, and not one easily fixed. Lieutenant Colonel Morris brought with him a nickname, ’Mighty Mouse’, and for good reason; he was only 5’7” tall. His three battery commanders were Captain Mikowski, 5’8”, Captain Borisowsky, 5’10”, and me, 5’11”. He had issues with all of us, and in direct proportion to our height! Mighty Mouse was going to make us better, and fix our problems, whatever they might be, and it seemed that the taller we were, the more problems we had. Mikowski could slump a little and get away with it, and he escaped the easiest, but Borisowsky and I were up shit creek! I had three months to go before I transferred to Sill, and I was happy to be in a foreign country! Borisowsky was facing the brunt of it on his lonesome and would probably be a corporal by the next time I saw him. I was just pleased that Buller had given me a real ‘walks on water’ OER before he left.

Even worse, the division decided that it would be an insult to our Honduran allies for the artillery battery in the exercise to be commanded by a mere first lieutenant. No, only a captain would do, so my promotion was moved forward, over Lieutenant Colonel Morris’ vociferous objections. It was a damn good thing that immediately after this deployment was over, I would be moving to Fort Sill.

So, Sunday we loaded the Hercs and Monday morning we dropped on La Paz Drop Zone in Honduras. If it weren’t for the fact that my battalion commander was holding an axe for me, and Marilyn was sharpening it, it would have probably been somewhat enjoyable. We based out of a military airfield near Tegucigalpa. The CIA and some Special Forces types were nearby, doing things they probably shouldn’t be doing in nearby Nicaragua, but we had nothing to do with them. We did spend a lot of time training with and teaching the Honduran Army and working with their parachute battalion, but that wasn’t all. The field hospital was set up and treated civilians as well, earning some good will. The Hueys would be left behind since the Army was transitioning to Blackhawks. The engineers were deployed to various places around the area to help build roads and bridges.

This whole shebang was under the command of a brigadier general named Hawkins from Fort Benning who saw Southern Shield ‘81 as his ticket to the E-ring at the Pentagon. He was constantly climbing up the asses of the majors and colonels involved and making them do it harder and faster and tougher, etc. etc. etc. As a captain, though, I was so far down the food chain that I wasn’t worthy of notice. That suited me just fine.

There wasn’t a whole lot to do otherwise. My Spanish is limited to ’Mas cerveza, por favor!’ and ’Donde esta el baño?’ Max, now a first lieutenant and my exec, did a lot better, since his Spanish was quite fluent. Besides, it wasn’t like I was going out chasing skirts like some of my troops. Boys will be boys, so I laid in a generous supply of rubbers to keep them safe. Besides, it was the late summer in the tropics, and you could melt even at night! You could find some local beer, but it generally tasted like weasel piss, so when possible, I would stock up on Heineken, which was usually available and much more expensive. I even made a few jumps with the Hondos (from the C-130s) and picked up a set of Honduran jump wings. A lot of troopers on foreign training assignments do this. I heard of one master sergeant with seven different sets of jump wings from around the world!

I wrote Marilyn a couple of times a week, and she returned the favor. She was still mad at me, and I was starting to wonder about making the Army a career. At some point later in the Eighties the military was going to be seeing a lot more action, and one way or another, I was going to catch a piece of it. She was no longer threatening me with divorce, but it did seem likely this would be our last child, and I wouldn’t be getting any more chances to start another!

On October 12^th, Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox tracked me down in the commo bunker. He was the battalion commander of the 1^st of the 505^th. He had a shit-eating grin as he handed me a radiogram that came in through another route. Charles Robert Buckman weighed 7 lb. 14 oz. and was born at 0305 that morning. Mother and son were doing just fine. The final line read, ’Divorce cancelled. Justifiable homicide being planned.’ It took me another 48 hours with the MARS guys, the Military Auxiliary Radio System civilian auxiliaries, to get a call into her. I was grinning for two days!

Two weeks later I got a heavy package mailed to me. Marilyn had sent down a bunch of photos and a long letter. It turned out that her mother flew down to spend a week with her, and the following week Suzie did another ‘seashore’ trip and visited. It was the first I could see of my new son, and it was very disconcerting! All along I had been planning on Parker being born all over again. He was a good boy, a son any father could be proud of, and I certainly was. This child wasn’t Parker! He didn’t look at all like him. I had just figured on calling him Charlie and thinking of him as Parker, but that just wasn’t the case. It was very depressing to realize that Parker was gone, a piece of my past totally lost. Alison had died, and now Parker was gone, too. So was Maggie. I was rejoicing over my new son and distraught over the loss of my other children. Very disconcerting! Were they alive somewhere or somewhen in a different timeline or alternate universe? I just didn’t know.

A month later we had our last exercise. Hawkins decided that we would do a combat drop in conjunction with the Hondurans and utilize their assets as well. Okay, I suppose that made sense. Fortunately, we weren’t going to drop the battery, but would land them on an improvised runway after the company of the 505^th and the Hondurans secured a landing zone. Pretty routine stuff. The next day we would clean our gear and pack our bags and get ready to get the hell out of Dodge.

At least that was the way it started out.

The first inkling I had that things weren’t working out was when I got called into Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox’ office Monday morning, November 9. The brigade commander had flown to Washington the day before, and Wilcox had taken command. He was working out of a Quonset hut, and one of the parachute company captains was already in with him when I got there. It’s not as spit-and-polish in the field as it is back home, some I simply knocked on the colonel’s open door and said, “You called for me, sir?”

“Yeah, come on in, Doc.” He pointed at a chair next to the one occupied by Captain Bob Donovan, C Company, 1^st of the 505^th.

I sat down and said, “What’s up? You in on this, too, Bob?”

Donovan nodded, but it was Colonel Wilcox who answered. “You know Lieutenant Bulrush?”

It took me a second to think of who Bulrush was, but it came to me. “FIST Chief with the 505^th?” He was artillery but attached to the infantry as the team leader of the attached 10-man Fire Support Team (FIST). “Yeah, I suppose. I’ve met him in passing but that’s about it. Why?”

Donovan answered, “He’s my FIST, and was supposed to drop with us in the exercise, but he just went off to the hospital with a hot appendix.”

I nodded at that. “Well, he won’t be dropping any time soon.”

The colonel nodded and then asked, “I need another forward observer for the exercise. You’re the arty boss. Who’s available?”

“What about the guys with the other two companies”? I was a little curious, since the FIST Staff Sergeant was normally second in command and would take over.

The colonel shrugged. “Already committed. Besides, I want an officer to go along, since we are doing this with the Hondos.”

Well, that didn’t leave me with a lot of choices. Every infantry company has an artillery observer element either embedded or designated, and they’re regularly trained artillery officers. The only other ones deployed were me and my lieutenants. I shrugged. “That leaves me and my boys.”

“I thought so,” agreed the colonel. “Make a choice.”

I grinned over at Donovan. “What the hell, why not! I’ll do it. Let’s see how Max handles the battery while I’m away.” I’d act as the forward observer. It was a job for a second john, not a battery commander, but Max needed to be able to handle the battery himself. If it was really combat, I’d sacrifice a second lieutenant and keep the battery myself. “This will be my last jump before I leave the division. Time for a break!”

“HOO-AH!” replied Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox, and Bob and I both laughed. He looked over at Captain Donovan and asked, “Anything else?”

“Nope.”

“Then get the hell out of here.”

Bob and I stood up and left. I followed him over to where C Company was billeted and went into his office/bunk, where we discussed the planned deployment. It was for Tuesday morning, the next day, and we were jumping from Honduran airplanes, while the Hondurans would jump from the C-130s we had deployed with. “The Hondos have Hercs?” I asked Bob. I hadn’t seen any C-130 Hercules around without US Air Force markings, but maybe they had some at another base.

“I guess. I haven’t seen any, but they must. Maybe they’ve got some C-123 Providers. They’re similar to the 130s but about two thirds the size. Same operational characteristics, though.”

“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” I replied. I headed out to tell Max and the battery sergeant the news that they were on their own. I wasn’t even going to help. I would tell them that I just died after my chute failed and they had to run the show. The battery first sergeant was new, too. It was time to see how both shaped.

Well, we sure found out the next day! Mid-morning a string of donated deuce-and-a-halfs showed up at the Quonset huts C Company had been assigned. I had already made my way over to the company with my gear. Donovan and I curiously looked at the trucks, since it didn’t seem likely that they would be sufficient for the men and the gear. They weren’t. We loaded everything and everybody anyway, and headed towards the far side of the field, where the Honduran Air Force was set up.