69th Chemical Company

I can tell a little of the history -

 I arrived in Germany July of 1990 along with a lot of my fellow Soldiers from the same Basic/AIT (OSUT) class, and many from my same platoon.  So a lot of us  already knew each other fairly well. At that time, 69th Chem was made of a Chemical Recon Platoon with newly fielded German Chemical Recon Vehicles (FUCHS), 1 Smoke Platoon with M1059 Smoke Tracks (This was my platoon) and 2 or 3 Chemical Decon Platoons.  

 I arrived in Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield on Christmas morning in 1990.  Our Recon Platoon had already been in theatre for a few months.  Since the smoke platoon was a Division asset. We were split off from the company and sent to directly support the front line of 1st Armored Division.  (That's where the picture in the banner of the unit page comes from.)  My buddy Stokes took it from his track driver seat of my track with the 1AD front line in the background.  The photo was actually taken shortly after cease fire was called. Our immediate formation there was 3 M1059s in a modified wedge with the Brigade Commander's track acting as PSD for him (we only had M2s, M60s, M16s, a bunch of grenades, and our smoke so I'm not sure how effective we would have been if a PSD was needed behind the line of M1 Tanks and Abrams Tanks ahead of us), in our same formation was an M88 for tank recovery, another M113 medic track, and another M113 Combat Engineer Track. We were direct combat support for that part of the front line.

  When we initially rolled out for the ground war, I stayed awake and driving that thing pedal to the metal for 3 days streight.  An M1 Abrams Tank had a huge speed advantage on an old armored personnel carrier modified with smoke generators and instead of people, we had a giant 120 gallon fog oil tank inside, plus the deisel tank and 20 more gallons of MOGAS to run the smoke system. Our top speed was 25 MPH downhill.  Luckily the Tank Commander's vehicle was also built from an APC Chassis, so they had to wait for us to catch up. as we did the famous Norman Schwarzkopf left hook and literally caught the Iraqi Republican Guard with their pants down.  Their tanks had been dug in pointing the other direction towards Kuwait.  They didn't expect us to come from where we did.  It was a duck shoot.  I felt sorry for those guys, but glad I was on our side of the carnage. The morning it lit up, I didn't know the moment was at hand.  I had been driving for days, kind of on autopilot.  It was still dark out, so it was that early in the morning. Several MLRS Rocket Launch Vehicles had pulled in the rear of us, and they let a barrage fly over our heads.  My driver's hatch suddenly lit up like daylight.  Scared the shit out me, I thought we were on the receiving end od something at first.  Only took a second to realize what was going on, but those things are awesome to see. I was wide awake after that, and it was on. We tore through the enemy like paper.  It was more trouble to handle POWs then it was to fight. There are a lot of other details I'm leaving out, some of them I have a hard time with chronology, but this is already getting long for such a short period in the unit's history.

 After the cease fire, for whatever reason, smoke platoon carried a GP Medium with us.  Nobody else that far forward had tentage, we spent a few months moving every 2 or 3 days just to move while waiting to go home, but we always set up our GP Medium out there and had all the tankers and infantry guys over for spades, dominos, MRE mash up dinners and candy, it turned into the party place to be in the middle of the desert nowhere courtesy of 69th Chemical Company. Back then they got away with stuff they wouldn't these days.  I remember we got a female in our company as an attachment from somewhere.  We didn't have any other females at the time but her, and she was smoking hot.  That wasn't just my deployment eyes saying that, she really was.  The 1st SGT would bring her out to the front with him when he hand delivered our mail from the combat trains (awesome 1SGT to take care of troops with mail like this given our situation, it was a long ride from where they were) for a "morale boost"  That would never fly today being considered sexist, but it never got dirty or nasty beyond that back then, it did put a few smiles on some faces, and she seemed to like the attention, so it was all good.

 When it was all said and done, we redeployed back to Germany (as opposed to actually going home to the states) and spent the next few months drawing down.  deactivating the unit, and turning the Kasern over to the Germans.  I had a German girlfriend at the time so didn't really want to leave and managed to delay my departure for several months by volunteering as the official driver for the Battalion to take Soldiers to the airport as they flew out.

 All said and done, as far as the assignments go, this was my favorite duty station and assignment out of the 20 years I ended up doing. So this may not be a history of many years, it's 1 Soldier's snapshot of how things went down for us during Desert Shield/Storm, but an important part of the unit legacy.

SFC Holcombe (Retired 74D44 - but I was 54B before NBC turned into CBRN)