Machen's Replacement.

I stayed up until 1 o'clock this morning trying to figure out a way to describe the moment I met Machen's replacement. As I went through the memories and continued to have trouble with it, I finally concluded that I was having trouble because my perception of him at first sight, was totally wrong.

As I look back upon it, I have a large number of flashes coming from my memory bank. Most of them were so far off course, it caused a writers block but I've come to the point here where I'm just going to tell it like I saw it and you make up your mind.

Morris and I were always the last one to see who was on deck because we were occupying the last cubical on the left and were fartherest away from the entrance door of the barracks. When we heard someone shout: "Ahhhhtennnnnhut", before we  had a chance to get up and assume the position of attention at the end of our bunks, we heard him say "Stand At..........EASE".

This had never h appened before. A call to attention was always followed by someone growling if not yelling instructions to us, often times, in our faces. When I stood at ease, I looked down the hall to the other end of the barracks and saw him.

He created one hell of a sight to us because we had never seen a tac officer or anyone else wearing a steel pot as they always wore the cover of the day which was typically the slim cover we called a "Piss Cutter". I don't know where the term piss cutter came from but it looked like a cloth envelope with no brim or rim around it. In any event, he had on his steel pot and it was painted black and looked like it had 400 coats of black enamel on it with multiple coats of clear behind that.

At the first sight of someone that was so impeccably uniformed, I heard a couple of the guys say: "Oh, shit". I will confess that my first look at the man walking down the hall stimulated a whisper to Morris where I said: "It looks like George Patton's son". I could go on and on about the degree of polish that we saw on his helmet, shoes, belt buckle and bars but suffice it to say that after what we had been through, we didn't know what to think and the entire Flight was at a loss for words.

Every second of those first few moments was a sight that was compared to the young and lower ranked Super Seniors that did our in-processing, the Old First Sgt that was eyeballing us as we arrived and Machen who was really over weight and totally focused on going home. It was the greatest contradiction of sight that any of us had seen.

Instead of chewing our asses and asserting his power and rank, his first words came out and also created a shock. He told the first few Candidates to "Follow Me", as he continued to walk down the aisle. No one had a clue what was coming next. When he reached the end of the aisle where his office was, he turned around, looked at  his Flight and said: "Gather Round".

Once he did, he invited us to take a seat on the floor and began his opening speech to us. He started with an introduction: "I am Chief Warrant Officer Benard T. Diable, You will refer to me as SIR or MR. DIABLE. I am you tac officer and I WILL BE HERE WITH YOU from now on until you graduate or wash out". I will NOT teach your ground school nor will I be your instructor pilot. I WILL however, teach you the things you need to learn in order to STAY FUCKING ALIVE in a combat environment that you will soon find yourself in".

I don't remember anything beyond that particular part of his speech but I do remember the shock we were all going through with the change. When he finished the first communications he had with us, he told us to fall out and get into formation in the parking lot. Many of us thought: "Holy Shit, here it comes".

As we lined up in the parking lot, Mr Diable began at one end of the formation and began his inspection and inquiries about each and every man. He pointed out a problem with every man's uniform and whether it was sub standard polish on the boots, a bad haircut, gig line out of order or a belt buckle that looked like something that was tarnished from too many days on a Tuna Boat, he found something wrong with every single Candidate in the entire Flight. Again, we thought : "Oh shit, here it comes".

After he finished with that,  he started all over again. He went back to the first Candidate in line and started asking: What's your full name, where are you from, how long have you been in the Army, are you married, did you bring your POV with you? A POV is a "privately owned vehicle" and was a rule that was, under no circumstances, allowed without special consideration and written permission..

We were hoping that we would have a little break but that was not to be. He took us back into the barracks and inspected our lockers. You guessed it, there wasn't a single locker that he didn't find fault with. One of us had our socks in the wrong place, another had his blouse hung incorrectley and THEN, the coupe de grass, BOOTS. This is when we knew we were in trouble.

He picked up a pair of boots that were highly spit shined and possibly the best prepared pair of boots in the Flight, and slowly turned them over. He looked very closely at the bottom of the boot and said: "Ah Ha, look at this". 

He lifted the boot and displayed the bottom. He pointed out that there was a pebble stuck in the sole of the boot. It wasn't any bigger than the size of a bb but to him, it was the mortal sin. He began a speech about paying attention to detail and that missing a detail as large as this was an indication that we didn't have the type of "Attention to Detail Skills" that were required to be a safe pilot. I WILL,
he said, correct your shortcomings in this area. From this moment forth, you will NEVER allow a descrepancy such as this tarnish an inspection. When he finished, he looked at  us and in a loud voice said: "DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR". We collectively responded with Sir, Yes Sir. After that he left the building and we began to talk about the things we had just seen.

Miles, being the most experienced of everyone in the Flight was picked to supply the answers. When we asked him for his opinion, he told us that DIABLE IS THE REAL DEAL. He went on to say that he had seen the un-mistakeable yellow of the Vietnamese Campaign ribbon, neatly pinned on his chest.

With all the other medals there and all the colors that came with them, they were referred to as SALAD. Miles said that "this guy has enough salad to open a resturant. As an explanation of that he told we newbies that Diable had pretty much been there and done that and we should listen very carefully to everything he says regarding attention to detail even if we thought that polishing the bottom of our boots was stupid. He closed his explanations by telling us that we were lucky and that so far, Diable was best thing he'd seen since he arrived at the Preflight reception station.

Everybody agreed with Miles' conclusion that we were fortunate to have him and that he stood much more than head and shoulders above any officer we'd seen since we had arrived. Despite all that, there was something that still bothered me, Morris, Thompson and a couple of the other guys.

It had to do with his eyes. He had the most piercing eyeballs I'd ever seen on anyone. As we talked about it, Miles joined in to discuss that part of the conversation. He told us that he had seen that before.

Miles said that it might be due to his tour of duty in Vietnam and that he had possibly seen too much combat. He also said that at some point in time we needed to find out what it was that he did in Vietnam and, that hearing the details would almost certainly define the "look" he had. Miles said that he thought Diable was a shooter, the term commonly referred to guys that flew gunships.

After we broke away from those discussions and finally got in our racks to try and get a little shut eye before the next day began, I continued to think about the sight picture I had when I first saw him.

I had a gymnastic instructor at Northwestern who was named Vega. He had actually made it to the Olympics and was one fhose guys who could do the balance beam. the rings, tumbling and any other event in the field of gymnastics. He was a guy who didn't have so much as one single gram of fat in his entire body and he was bad ass to the bone.

In more modern day terms, I visualized that opening walk as one that could have been copied from Chuck Norris. I still couldn't make up my mind if we had a Karate Champion, George Patton's son or a natural born killer on our hands.

I was hoping like hell that I was wrong and that we really had a combat helicopter pilot who had the discipline of a martial artist. At that point, being day number one with Diable, it was too soon to tell what we had. All we knew surrounded the fact that Miles said he was the real deal and that we were really lucky to have him as our tac officer.

The thing that compounded our initial fears that he might be a maniac, unfolded the next morning when the entire company fell out for formation and the dirty dozen exercises that were to be our pre breakfast routine.

On that morning, I met the tac officer from the Flight upstairs and in an instant, I figured something out. His name was "Savage" and he had a face that went perfectly with the name. I immediately and incorrectly concluded that the 5th WOC was infested with tac officers that had either seen too much combat or simply wanted to train the new breed of pilots to become killers like I thought they were.

I will stop here as the initial experiences of having Mr. Diable as a tac officer, had already been survived. I will put this down and prepare for the Super Bowl but I will continue with the idiosyncracies that unfolded from his character and show some specifics that came from all that.

Enjoy your day. More coming soon. Tim