MILITARY SERVICE REQUIREMENTS

[Ninurta]

 My second tour was with the 75th Inf. Div. yes I should have known better. 

LRRP?

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Yes.

75th Infantry, ranging across the countryside.  Long walks, dry rations.  Hard core, oh yeah ... o7

Cheers

DRY rations? Mostly cold, but dryer than normal, I reckon. Canteen cup coffee "fortified with vitamin C". If you were lucky, you had a little canteen stove to heat the coffee water on. If you were even luckier, you had a trioxane bar to break a piece off of to heat it with. Learning how to make icing for the cake out of the creamer and sugar packets that were supposed to be for the coffee, just to make the cake a little less dry...

It was Vietnam graduate LRRPs who taught me the fine art of Ranger patrolling in squad and fire team sized units. Nowadays, I think they send them out mostly in company strength or larger, but LRRPs were a special breed. I had a cousin who was in Co. C, 75th Inf, who sat on a rooftop in Beirut for 17 hours in the early 80's when they blew up the Marines. Whole company sat there, for 17 hours, then got pulled out. never got the GO. It was supposed to be a retaliation raid.

Surving LRRPs are pretty rare. There weren't that many to begin with, and they had a high attrition rate. I used to have a t-shirt with the Recondo School logo on the upper left chest. Only had one guy ever stop me - it was in a court house and he was in a suit - and ask me if I knew what "Recondo" was. I did. I even had the t-shirt to show for it.

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