Target Acquisition

Dominic Vautier
 8/11/2011

So what did I do in the army besides drink beer and smoke and fraternize with the froileins?
I worked in a Target Acquisition Battalion.
A what?

It all started at Fort Sill when I got to go to advanced survey school.  Instead of being immediately shipped out overseas I was sent to this Advanced Artillery Survey Specialist School for an additional five weeks specialized training.  Only some of us were selected to go, but  I'm not sure what criteria they used.  It may have had something to do with background, or education or attitude--well, probably not attitude.  Anyway that's where I went.

The school involved a lot of advanced survey techniques; triangulation, sun shots, star shots, and some experimental gyroscopic equipment--which never did work.  We spend many hard hours in class crunching numbers, applying formulas and solving advanced trigonometric functions, and of course, working the ever tedious log and anti-log conversions.  Military schools are not easy and they expect you to do all the work and get all the assignments right and on time.  The instructors were top notch and know the subject material completely.

Most surprising of all, we were actually treated like human beings for the first time.  When we got up in the morning there was no reveille—we just cleaned up, shaved, went to breakfast, then to class.  At four in the afternoon we were dismissed, and got to do whatever we wanted to do for the rest of the day; see a movie, go to the PX, visit Lawton, get a hamburger at the snack bar, go to the library or the day room and shoot pool and smoke, or just goof off.  We couldn't get drunk except on weekends because if you missed class you were washed out.

What a life indeed—no KP, no GI parties, no spit-shine boots, no polished brass, no harassment, no footlocker inspections, no bad-ass sergeants breathing down our necks.  All we had to do was study--that's it--pure heaven.  It seemed like we had been taken out of those hot flames of purgatory and thrust directly into heaven itself.  Nobody was going to blow this sweet gig.

I arrived in Germany about the middle of April, 1965 and was assigned to “A,2/25 Arty 7 Cor”, which is military parlance for A Battery 2nd Battalion 25th Artillery Regiment, attached to 7th Corps Artillery, which is the Army’s own unique nomenclature.  It was all part of UASREUR (pronounced use-a-rar) standing for U. S. Army Europe.  My unit was a target acquisition outfit, or FATAB (Field Artillery Target Acquisition Battalion).  Our mission was simple—go find targets quickly when they fire, and tell the big guns where they were and how to bring return fire.

We had 2 commissioned target ACQ outfits in Germany, and another in Vietnam, but the role of target acq was far more difficult in Vietnam where no set lines of battle existed, and the enemy kept in constant motion.  FOs (forward observers) was particularly dangerous.  "In country" the life expectancy of an FO or surveyor was about four days, so you didn’t want to go to Nam.  Unfortunately I know a few guys who wanted "to see some action", and volunteered to go.  Sadly to say, these statistics proved correct.

A typical TAB battery consisted of around 110 men, divided into six platoons, three operational platoons and three support platoons.  Each platoon had a specific assignment:

Flash was probably the worst possible place to be during an actual wartime engagement.  Those poor guys had to go out with their scopes and establish FO (forward observer) positions well ahead of a main military force.  We in survey carried “control” to the FO positions, so they would know where they were and then could “bring fire” on enemy positions.  During maneuvers and actual war games we were always loosing flash guys.  They had a way of getting missed or left behind because frequently their positions had to change.  Being an FO did not require a lot of intelligence in the first place, and it seams that anybody who wanted to be an FO didn't have very much to begin with.  Sometimes these guys would get lost, go the wrong way, or get captured by the “enemy”.  Being in flash, to put it mildly, was not a great sign of distinction.

I seems flash collected the flotsam and jetsam of life, the dropouts, the malcontents, the groaners and moaners of the world.  It’s safe to say that they were a fast-moving, heavy drinking, and spirited bunch, because they knew that if war ever did break out, they would be the first exposed, and probably the first to go.  If an FO got sent to Vietnam, it was equivalent to death sentence.

Sound were usually smart guys, engineers and electronic dudes mostly.  They were quiet and kept to themselves a lot, but I did know a few people from sound.  Their mission was to set up mike bases, a series of sensitive microphones placed at specific locations more or less in a line.  A mike base usually consisted of six microphones, 100 meters, 200 meters, or 400 meters apart.  A 200 meter mike base was the ideal and easy to survey in.  400 meter mike bases were really really big--2400 meters long.  they were a bear to survey in.

The mikes recorded sound activity.  They were able to factor in temperature, air pressure, and wind direction, and pinpoint enemy positions quickly.  Surveys job was to established “control” for the mike base.

Radar -  We had two radars in our battery.  It seems that they were always breaking down, or getting stuck in the mud somewhere.  Ideally the radars were positioned on either side of a mike base, and these things could track trajectories of “incoming” and quickly calculate the origin.

By the use of sound, flash, and radar, enemy targets could be very accurately acquired, that is, if everything worked right, which seemed never to happened. never did.

We also had three support platoons in the battery:

Headquarters consisted of cooks, clerks, bookkeepers, motor pool mechanics, and anybody who had nothing to do in particular, or who washed out at anything else.  I got to work in the motor pool for awhile.  It was something to do, and kind of fun, but I never seriously considered transferring to HQ.

Commo was, as near as I could tell, a bunch of clowns who ran around stringing wire everywhere.  Seems like that's all they ever did was string wire.  But I do have some other stories about these guys.

Survey was the glue that held all this stuff together, the framework that made the whole unit work.  Without survey nothing could or would function.

The survey platoon consisted of 4 survey parties (or teams) of 6 to 8 men each, but we never had the equipment or manpower to run more than 3 teams at one time.  The 4th party was used as a spare, so if any equipment broke down, it would be automatically reassigned to 4th party.  It was also a place where we put the non-performers and goof-offs.  It became the garbage collector party of the platoon.

One time we actually tried to run 4 parties.  It was a disaster.

I don't know exactly how much of the 25th artillery regiment was active when I served, but I think a lot if it had been decommissioned after WW2.  Our battalion had two active batteries that I was aware of, A Battery stationed in Bamberg and C Battery in Sweinfurt, Germany.

The entire concept of target ACQ has changed considerably with GPS and newer electronic surveillance.  Targets are immediately electronically acquired in today's army.