The weapons that won the Cold War

[F2d5thCav]

Supposedly, we "won" the Cold War.  But how?  What did we use that brought about such an outcome?

You may be thinking ... tanks ... fighter aircraft ... maybe helicopters.

NOPE.  The truly important stuff was much more mundane.  Take a gander:



This little gem was known as the P-38.  It is without a doubt the finest can opener known to man, and was absolutely essential in the days of canned rations.  Practically indestructible.



A soldier doesn't get far if he or she can't take a dump.  Thus, one of these TP packets was included in every c-ration or MRE.  Sometimes, that meager ration of paper wasn't enough. 



An army goes absolutely NOWHERE without potable water.  These trailers carried water, and had an outlet for a plug to run from a generator and provided heated water as well!  A helmet-full of hot water made cleaning up outdoors much more pleasant.  Known as the "water buffalo".


Rolling along unpaved roads kicks up a LOT of dust.  An unofficial but popular uniform item was the "drive-on rag", otherwise known as a neckerchief.  Tied behind one's neck, it could be pulled over the mouth and nose to keep the dust out.  Often, medical service units traded tourniquets that were ideally sized to serve as a drive-on rag.




100 mile per hour tape.  This literally held the Army together.  It was employed in so many ways that it deserves the description, "universal".

Oh, but what of the heroes of the rear echelon?  You know, the guys and gals who had desk jobs.  Well, they had their essential tools as well:




Actually, two items in this image.  COFFEE ... consumed in inhuman amounts by practically every soldier in and out of the field.  Usually the quality was akin to Maxwell's, but we cared not, drank it, and demanded more!  And what produced the coffee in the office was the venerable "silver bullet": huge percolators that held gallons of piping hot coffee.



This weapon of war was manned by clerks, secretaries, and other admin personnel: The IBM Selectric II electric typewriter.  Having access to one of these ruined manual typewriters forever for me.



A neat thing about the Selectrics was that one could change the font by changing the print ball.  A very useful font was known as "OCR", for optical character recognition.  That was the font used to type messages for the record communications network, because a message typed in that font could be automatically read by message network hardware and did not have to be manually entered by a network operator.



Now, if you wanted to get anything done, and I mean ANYTHING, in the Army, you learned the magic of Optional Form 41: the routing and transmittal slip.  It accompanied much correspondence and often served purposes for which it was never intended.  A pad of these was always kept close by in office environments.

Cheers