I'm thinkin' luvanwilder, perhaps it was unfortunate that you rescued that akio.
As huge as a pain as they were/are, we had enough stuff on our backs. BTW, is that old design still in use or has something newer replaced them? Yeah, heavily loaded they can scream downhill just fine as opposed to what seems to be an inch at a time on anything resembling fairly level terrain, let alone up a steep incline. Any of us taking our turn as brakeman, knew we were DEAD men if we screwed that up. But hey, it would take those wiped out by the thing, time to extricate themselves from the bottomless snow, head toward the track of the akio, because, it at least packed the snow. Next, they had to climb up a 30, 45 degree incline or more. That is easily an hour or more, plenty of time to evade and let them "cool" down some.
A quick story. As for "only a support guy", we had a Marine Captain come to Flint to challenge a couple of our A Teams to a mountain march. This was summer. Word came down through a few of the teams, mine was one of them. We just said f**k No! We were always humping them, saw no point in it, just so we could smoke a couple squads of Marines ( no offense Jarheads)
Any way, some of our support guys were sent out to do this 'thang'. The support guys kicked ass.
Read your profile, found it interesting that you said you didn't like Germany. I loved it there, the area, the people, all of it. Only reason, I can think of, is that you are in Stuttgart. I was stationed in Toelz. Perhaps some of the other FOG's on here can help elaborate on that, because I need to end this post.
Except for one thing, but I'll post this in an equiptment thread.
Thanks for your service "young pup"
