Without Coke |
 With Coke |
HERE, FREDDY...HAVE A COKE ON ME!
by Mike Medley
"A" Btry FDC
|
Without Coke |
With Coke |
I
remember Freddy Fadac well. Our FDC goal
was always to get a first round smoke out in less than a minute after
"contact" came over the horn. Hopefully, the enemy would break contact
with the first pop of the round of smoke, thus inviting the dinks to "didi
mau" (get the hell out of Dodge) before smoke's big brothers arrived
(better known as the High Explosive (HE) shell).
While
getting the nightly H&I program ready to go, we gave Freddy a proper tryout
over several evenings. I would compute with the sticks (manual slide
rules) while Clint
(Curry) would run "Freddy" as a shadow test/data check. Try as he might,
it took Freddy well over two minutes to plot the simplest fire mission. Clint
and I finally gave up and poured a Coke into it (a beer was too valuable to
waste on its sorry butt) and it got shipped to the rear.
When
it came back out, the industrial "accident" would be repeated. I don't
know if (FDC Section Chief) Bodie Biggers or the FDO du jour ever realized what we were
doing. They probably just put it down to a couple of rednecks who couldn't
be trusted with machinery beyond the crowbar. However, Freddy should
have been recognized for his sacrifice by keeping someone in the rear too busy
with repairs to get involved in the war.
{Freddie replies, "BURP!"}
submitted
by
Sgt Mike Medley