close call

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson

It was cold. Germany in the winter is like living in an icebox. The cold it gets under your field jacket and into your underwear, and even into your Mickey Mouse boots. Your hands and all your bones ache from the cold. It gets so cold that the equipment stops working, the trucks wouldn’t start, and the theodolites wouldn’t even turn. Some days we had to get our trucks going by throwing the spark plugs into a can of gas and lighting the gas, and sometimes we couldn’t get the gas to burn--it was that cold. But every day we had to get our trucks started. How did the Germans win wars around this place?

In early 1966, January, we were doing a winter exercise in Grafenweir, a training center very near the Czechoslovakian border. We did these exercises all the time. "Graf" is about 100 Ks from our home barracks in Bamberg. The wind was coming down from the north hard and we were struggling to complete our last survey of the day so the team could get out of that awful cold. One of our DME (distance measuring electronic) broke down and the spare wouldn't fire up. The knobs just froze up. I volunteered to drive the 12 miles into camp and pick up another unit. I’m not too sure what I was thinking of at the time, and why I volunteered, but I did. Maybe I thought I would get warmer by driving.

The road was ill defined and bumpy and I was in an open jeep, and I was in a hurry too--a surefire combination for disaster. I took one curve just a bit too fast, and in front of me I saw this vast surface of ice covering the roadway. The next thing I remember is waking up. On top of me I could make out what looked like the jeep, and something was holding me down. I was numb all over. I also remember hearing the distinct blub…blub…blub… of gasoline. I looked up and realized that the gas tank was pressing against my chest and gas was soaking into my field jacket. I decided to try to wiggle my legs. They were OK. I felt my arms. One arm was pinned but the other arm was free. I tried to wiggle and before I knew it I was out and standing beside my overturned jeep. The ground was extremely hard and frozen. Right where my hips had landed was a small grove in the hard ground. Otherwise my hips would have been crushed.

When I got out on the road a deuce-and-a-half came lumbering by and I waved it down.

They put a wench on the jeep and it was out in no time and I was on my way again. I drove back to camp very slowly, still quite in shock, and I didn't seem to notice the cold as much. When I got to camp I explained what happened to the motor sergeant.

Close Call - Too Close