[Ambush Master]

In Recon Company at Command and Control Central, the then Captain Bob Howard, the Company CO, would have different Teams, from time to time, give Demonstrations or Basic Blocks of Instruction on a particular or usually peculiar element, practice, technique, etc that their team used. This included Weapons, Field Craft, Tactics, Ambushes, Demo Techniques, etc. Well, he called upon RT New York to give a demo of how/why a recon team could/would use a 60mm mortar. At the time there were 2 "Heavy" Teams at Central, RT California and RT NY, both of which would usually carry a mortar.

Now RT NY was made up of 3 of us and 9 Montagnards (Yards) and our mortarman Nek was unusually tall for a Yard. We took the team down to the range to practice for our upcomming demonstration. Upon arrival Ed, myself and Nek moved about 50 meters from the team and began to make a few White Phosphorous (WP) rounds ready. We were going to demonstrate how we could use the 60 to mark enemy positions and then Ed had the idea of showing how close we could bring it in. Nek was an extremely gifted mortarman, he could knock a 55gal. drum over at 50-100 meters and then roll it up the hill with successive rounds from this handheld "knee" mortar. I mean if Nek said something could or could not be done with that 60, far-be-it for me to question him.

Ed has me strip all of the charges off and make the first round hot, I did, and handed it to Nek. Nek was squatting (butt on heels, typical Yard fashion) holding the tube with his left hand and the WP in his right and Ed sets the tube straight up and tells him to go ahead and shoot. Nek looks at the tube then at me and says this is numba TEN then he readies the round, drops it in and at the very last fraction of a second gently tilts the tube a few degrees Kachunk and the round lofted down range about 50 meters and Karump. Nek smiled ear to ear and said NUMBA ONE !!!! But Ed took off his black team hat and swatted him and said no that NUMBA TEN then grabbed the tube again held it straight up and said THIS NUMBA ONE. Make another one hot. I did and as I was doing it I suggested that maybe we should leave the pins in, just to see how close it would really get. Bad idea. I handed it to Nek, he hung it in the tube and once again looked at me and muttered numba ten and launched it.

Well, Ed and I were standing there on either side of Nek with our necks craned back squinting into the sky and I was starting to realize that we had just most probably really FUCKED UP when I hear this metallic clink noise as the tube hits the ground and then the pitter patter of feet as Nek retreated back to where the rest of the team was. As Ed and I watched we were discussing the fact that all we could see was the tail fins and then I realized that they had quit getting smaller and were starting to get bigger. I commented that we probably couldn't be lucky enough for it to come all the way down tail-first when the thing gathered enough airspeed for it to flip over. It swung great pendulum swings and at the last second Ed and I dove away from where we thought in would hit. KA-FUCKING-RUMP !! That thing hit about 2-3 meters from us in a heap of ammo crates, the thin wood kind that were wired together and would be wrapped around a couple of ammo cans, and I thought it was over. Suddenly I realized we were OK, screamed Willie Pete, jumped up and we started dodging all of this crap as it rained down all around us.

When my ears finally started to work again and Ed and I had checked each other over, we somehow had been missed altogether, I heard this noise and looking in the direction of the team, there they all were, rolling around in the dirt, laughing their asses off. Then one by one they all started chanting NUMBA FUCKING ONE, DO IT AGAIN !!!!!

Well, needless to say, once was enough and when we brought Recon Company down for the demo, we merely showed them the scorched ground where we had fired from and where it obviously had impacted. They were impressed and then they started to chant. NUMBA FUCKING ONE, DO IT AGAIN!!!

There is a pic of the team in Plaster's Pictorial History of SOG in the Weapons section.