On the difference between "Armor" and "Cavalry"

RetRsvMike has it right.

When you look at the branch insignia, what do you focus on?

Tankers focus on the tank, and fancy themselves the Second Coming of Heinz Guderian,  Michael Wittmann,  Israel Tal and George S. Patton.

Cavalrymen focus on the sabers, and fancy themselves the Second Coming of Ghengis Khan, Michel Ney, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and J.E.B. Stuart.

A Cold War era Armored Cavalry Troop was the smallest combined arms team on the battlefied, with dismountable scouts to act as infantry, Self-Propelled mortars for artillery, and Sheridans or M-60A1's for armor.  Couldn't sleep much conducting an economy of force mission with one troop along a brigade-size front.  Thus the popularity of "cavalry chemicals".

BT, ok, so it was a kinder, gentler, less 'engaged' army of the immediate post-vietnam era....  :-)

Small things made for a big deal while everyone worked off their own version of PTSD.  Ft. Hood in '74 was really a dangerous, crazy place that usually saw a murder every couple of weeks or three, a race riot at least once a month (usually outside the 1st Cav Specialty House at the late breakfast the last weekend before payday), guards jumped and their weapons stolen (so they gave us clubs to use instead), lots of stolen, mishandled pyrotechnics going off all the time, and LOTs of drug and alchol abuse...   It wasn't FOB anywhere (I'm not at all trying to equate it to the war), but it was a place of intense emotions and lots of left-over baggage from the war, and our barracks was right across the street from the Minidome, which was new then, so we got a lot of the transient lost drunks traffic too.  Schofield in '75 was better, but not much, and fortunately, by the time I hit Erlangen Germany in '76, the days of 'blood alley' and officers being tossed out windows had passed (for the most part).  We still had a few murders and such, but nothing like what I experienced at Hood.  All of which made the buckles and crap more meaningful to me, I guess.  Something good among all that....

BTW, I'm a Jew as well, and your experiences are similar to mine (said in the most stereotypical Philly Jewish grandmother accent  "What're you gonna do in the (ugly Yiddish term here) Army?!?  Jews don't go in the Army and the (ugly Yiddish term here) will treat you bad too when they find out!"  I wasn't all that worried, but I picked no preference for my religion just in case...  Then, when I was in basic about 2 weeks (mid Sep) at Ft. Dix when they called a Bn formation and from the exercise platform the Bn CO asked if anyone was Jewish.  I blanched!  And no one raised his hand, so they asked again, they said they knew we were there, they just didn't want to have to look up our records, so a few of us (not me first) stuck our hands in the air.  I was really a bit nervous...  They called us all forward and told us we could go home for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah if we lived close enough.  Being from Philly I was allowed to go.  Imagine, 2nd or 3rd week of basic and I was allowed to go home twice.  Of course, the (ugly Yiddish term here) made me pay for it when I got back, but screw e'm, I got to go home and they didn't get a pass for another 3 weeks!   :-)  

V/R

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

He is Sgt. Dougall H. Espey Jr., U.S. Army, of Mount Laurel, N.J. He will be buried April 3 in Elmira, N.Y.

Representatives from the Army’s Mortuary Office met with Espey’s next-of-kin to explain the recovery and identification process on behalf of the secretary of the Army.

Espey was assigned to Company L, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. On Nov. 1, 1950, the 8th Cavalry was occupying a defensive position near Unsan, North Korea, in an area known as the “Camel’s Head,” when elements of two Chinese Communist Forces divisions struck the 1st Cavalry Division’s lines, collapsing the perimeter and forcing a withdrawal. The 3rd Battalion was surrounded and effectively ceased to exist as a fighting unit. Espey was one of the more than 350 servicemen unaccounted-for from the battle at Unsan.

Between 1991-94, North Korea turned over to the U.S. 208 boxes of remains believed to contain the remains of 200-400 U.S. servicemen. North Korean documents turned over with several boxes in 1993 indicated that the remains from those boxes were exhumed near Chonsung-Ri, Unsan County. This location correlates with Espey’s last known location.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons in the identification of the remains.
 

AFSis, the Horse Faces forward on the left sleeve, rearward on the right.  Period.  I've seen home(Korean) made patches for the right sleeve that shows the horse forward facing, 'cause we never retreat, etc.  In fact, I was told once that the horse faces the way we're going: To war and Home from war, and that's why it was left that way.  And yeah, BillT, we all used to know that ditty about the patch, which is in fact a norman shield, with scaling ladder, horse, and Cav yellow center. The orginal had a blue border, I believe, like the old 2nd Cav Patch, but not sure of that.

BillT: the way I learned to screw with 1st ID guys was to put the emphasis on the Red instead of the One.  Drove 'em nuts.

BT:  I left the Army in 87, at the height of the Cold War size.  I always felt bad reading about what was done after that, and glad I wasn't part of it.  Of course, I always wanted to be Team Yankee, too.  Maybe just a little....  As for the rest, I was 17 when I got to Hood and I met more truly screwed up people in my first year in the Army than I have since.  It was fun and exciting mostly, until people started getting hurt, which happened more often than was ever allowed to happen after that.  Frankly the Army I left was orders of magnitude better than the one I joined, in just about every way imaginable except one: it wasn't nearly as much fun to be a soldier in '87 as it was in '73.

And as for the beret, many Cav folks on Hood wore a beret in the early 70s.  Black, blue, red, grass-green, etc.  It was a pain in the butt.  As for the sun, we used to rotate the cardboard riser over the forehead, then snap/flip it down so it looked like a driving cap.  I still have mine, and I still wear it that way when i wear it.  Of course, since everyone had to be idividual too, there were all sorts of ways to deal with the little tails.  I let mine hand loose, but many people braided them, knotted them, cut them off, etc.  See?  Small things for screwy times.

And don't even get me started about the earplug case, shorttimers wheels (german curtain rollers), P38, blousing rubbers, and C-ration spoon fetishes... :-)

 

I really can't understand why the military, which certainly is in need of useful, practical equipment, has such terrible hats, by and large.  The Air Force Flight Cap has got to be the worst hat on the face of the Earth.  I refer to mine as my "Official United States Air Force Silly Hat".  I can't for the life of me figure out what the hell it has to do with "flight" (if there was ever a hat that would fly off when any plane within a mile started its runup, it would be the Flight Cap) and let's be honest, it IS a fast-food frycook paper hat dyed blue.  Don't deny it.