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Gunner Zen - and a snark...

By The Armorer on June 17, 2009 | | Comments (3)
First up - the Zen.  A Canadian Gunner doing some pre-combat checks on his venerable WWII-era gun which still serves the Canadian Army, albeit rebuilt and with a much longer tube.  We artillerymen are always working to get longer tubes.  You may start your Austin Powers jokes now...



Now, some snark, served fresh.

Heard on "Guard" one day during Bill's tour in Vietnam...  "This is God on Guard - beer!"  "Beer?"  "Beer!"  "Where's the beer?"  "I don't see any beer!"  "Wait!  I see beer!"  "Beer!"  "Make a hole, I wanna beer!"  "Thanks, God!"  "Beer!"  "There's beer?  Outta my way!"  "Look!  Blivets of Beer!"

Beer? Beer!

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3 Comments

By Colin on June 17, 2009 10:07 AM
These are the C3 105mm Howitzer, when I was in they where the C1 with the short barrel. All of ours had the muzzle swell. They were upgraded to C2 with the removal of some of the shields, new recoil mechanism, tannoy system and new wheels. When they did the C3 version they also reinforced the trails and removed more shields to reduce weight. Sadly they reduced the number of guns when they did the C3 upgrade and our Reserve batteries where reduced from 6 guns to 4 guns. I don’t think they have been deployed overseas, as we bought some lightweight guns for that. The airborne used to use the Italian pack howitzer and now our Regular Force is going to be equipped with the M777 155mm Howitzer to replace our M109’s

I do miss doing direct shoots and Killer Junior (mechanical timed fuze to defeat approaching infantry) Did much of my live fire training in Yakima and Shilo
 
By AKirk7 on June 17, 2009 11:40 AM
Christmas Eve, shortly after midnight 1971 (on Yankee Station) while monitoring "Guard", was heard "This is God, on Guard, it's a boy!"
 
By Rivrdog on June 17, 2009 6:28 PM
Beer? BEER? Canada and BEER? Must be a joke here somewhere.

In 1982 I flew Maple Flag (a Joint US/CADF mission) as the penetrator in a lone B-52D. We entered Canada west of Thunder Bay (IIRC) and flew mostly North at low level for several hours, then West, then South to attack CFB Cold Lake, ALA (on the Arctic Circle). We flew at shrub height over the muskeg, climbing to top the 30-50 foot eskers (glacial morraine formations). CAF was looking for us, but didn't have our flight plan and couldn't pick us out of the ground clutter. Plus, their main GCI radars were pointed the wrong way (towards the USSR) It was GREAT practice for a penetration of the USSR over the pole.

When we got to within 15 minutes of Cold Lake some 5 hours later, we did a pop-up so they could get us on radar (rulez), then went back down and laid down a radar tone "bomb" on the base, "destroying" it. One CF-104 maded a high speed interception pass on us (after bomb release), we jinked, he missed and used 11 miles to turn around in to make a second pass. He finally caught us on our downwind for landing after we had dirtied up the airplane for landing.

After landing, the "follow-me" truck passed out Labatt's Blue to all hands, there was more at debrief, and at our contract motel, the bathtubs were filled with cases of beer on ice. By the time we cleaned up, got to the O Club and met the defending airmen, they had already told everyone they had shot us down. I invited them all to review my bombing film, AFTER which there was radar film of the attack (the old ASQ-48 system could be turned into a megawatt, frequency agile radar jammer if you knew what you were doing and got aiming info from the EWO)

We had a marvelous time up there, but hard as I tried, I found exactly ZERO CADF types that I could out-drink.