America is a beautiful thing…

I ran into Colonel Sawyer on Facebook, he’s retired in Pensacola. We had breakfast at Waffle House.

Captain Sawyer was my Commanding Officer when I arrived at the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, the 1/1 Cav, at O’Brien Barracks in Schwabach, West Germany, September, 1975. He’d joined the Army as an enlisted man, 11-Bravo, Infantry; a grunt. In 1964, he was sent to Viet Nam as an adviser. He later went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, and was commissioned as an officer. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.

I was his Jeep driver in the 1/1 Cav and at breakfast, he complimented me on his memories of my map-reading skills; navigation mistakes are bad when you’re leading a two-kilometer long convoy of tracks and wheels on tiny German roads; it’s hard to turn things around. But he needed sleep so he told me where we needed to go and I followed the pencil-line roads on the plastic-laminated Army map with klicks-instead-of-miles and thickets of contour lines, and steered the convoy while he slept beside me.

We talked about Jeeps, he preferred the old Jeep, the M151, the Jeep I drove for him, to the modern Humvee. In an ambush, he explained, you can roll out of the Jeep and onto the ground in one fast motion whereas you have to open doors and scramble to get out of a Humvee and that takes time. His unit was ambushed several times in Viet Nam.

When my younger brother, Greg, had his backpack stolen while hitchhiking around Europe, Captain Sawyer let him stay in my room in the barracks, against all kinds of Army regulations. Greg slept on the floor next to my bunk in my Army sleeping bag on my Army air mattress. When he arrived, he had no money and hadn’t eaten in days. When the Supply Sergeant was in the latrine, the Cav donated a case of C-rations to the cause. Greg finished them off the week he was with me, that was twelve high-calorie combat meals in addition to the three meals he ate every day in the mess hall.

Colonel Sawyer was interested in my life and I told him highlights. Breakfast was almost three hours.

I sent him an email afterwards that read in part:

“I spent three years on active duty, perhaps the most significant three-year period of my life. The Army taught me a lot about people, about life, about myself. It gave me time to grow up. I came away proud that I’d served, with an admiration for the institution, and with a deep gratitude and a profound respect for the professionals I served under such as yourself. For that I thank you.”