E-5            

D Vautier
11/2006

By some twisted quirk of fate, I made the rank of E-5 specialist in the U. S. Army in the summer of 1966.  The promotion was a mixed blessing.  There were some really good things about being an E-5, like the money and proficiency pay (propay), but then there were some really bad things about this whole thing.

By getting E-5 I was promoted out of my job as lead Theodolite Operator (a theodolite measures angles--it's a beefed up transit), something that I really liked to do and which I felt quite comfortable doing.  Instead they assigned me to do survey calculations or survey computer as it was then called.  It consisted of doing the math involved in a survey; logs, antilogs, just horrible and extremely boring stuff which dealt with a lot of plain and tedious addition and subtraction.  I no longer enjoyed it when we went in the field; in fact I hated it because I was the slowest guy on the team and I would make mistakes.  This was the classic case of the Peter Principle, being promoted beyond your level of competency (or something like that).

We calculated our surveys the old-fashioned way, using pencils and paper.  The survey computer's job consisted of the application of trigonometric formulae; Sine, Cosine and Tangent.  We recorded  angles over the radio (in mills--1600 mills in a circle), converted the angle to a log by looking it up in a great big book we called the "holy book of numbers," or just "the log book", convert the distance to log, and do some additions.  Two guys worked independently.  When the survey was complete the two people compared their work and resolved any differences.  We then come up with a closure error and determined of the survey was good enough.  Pretty exciting stuff.  Right?

I always hoped that if I made enough mistakes they would put me back on something I did well, or enjoyed, or took some pride in doing, like running a Theodolite, or recording, or DME, or anything else than what I was doing.

I couldn’t pull KP anymore.  This sounds very strange but KP was good honest work, and the mess sergeant liked me a lot.  I was a hard worker and I always got the better jobs.  Not only did I pull my own KP but I was a popular sub.  Our battery allowed guys to skip their KP if they sponsored a sub to do the work.  The money was good, usually $10 during the week and $15 on weekends (that’s in addition to your normal pay).  So I pulled a lot of KP because it was known around the battery that I was available to sub any time.  The mess sergeant liked it too because he could depend on me, and I made a lot of extra beer money while working what I considered the only decent labor around.

No more guard duty.  This was probably the biggest advantage to becoming an E-5.  I hated guard duty with an extreme passion.  It made absolutely no sense standing around in the cold freezing your member off, watching a bunch of vehicles that weren’t going anywhere and that nobody in their right mind would want to steal anyway.  But as an E-5 I did have to pull SG (sergeant-of-the-guard), which was kind of fun.  I would go out once every hour and check the guards and make sure they weren’t sleeping or missing or something.  It was a social thing too because I could shoot the breeze for ten minutes or so, knowing how miserable the job was, and also knowing that only the SG was allowed to talk to a guard.  After my shift I would do some paperwork and have the next day off—not bad duty.

Pulling CQ (charge of quarters) was fun too, but I had to stay up all night drinking tons of coffee.  It was easy duty during the week but on weekends I had to make sure all the drunks got to bed.  One night my roommate came in well inebriated and I heard a huge crash.  I ran upstairs and found him hanging there with his arm stuck through a broken windowpane.  He was mumbling something like “Where’d my damn room go to anyway?” I called the assistant CQ and we bandaged him up and got him to his bed.  In my morning report I wrote up the broken window as “maneuver damage”.

Every morning at some unknown hour the orderly room received a Teletype from group.  The CQ had to be there and acknowledge it.  The message was usually unimportant, but it was a test to see if you were awake.  On one occasion when I was pulling CQ they called an alert and all hell broke loose.

If I had to do it over, I would take the E-5 pay as long as I could work an honest day on KP.  But then, “This Man’s Army” plays by its rules.