Headspace and Timing

[Pete]

In around 1980 when I was a lieutenant I brought up the issue of headspace and timing with our battery first sergeant, who had been in the 1st Cav in Vietnam. He said the gun chiefs were doing it, but I don't believe it was true; they were only drawing the weapons out of the arms room and taking them along on field exercises.

All the talk that was going around at the time about lieutenants listening to their NCOs, or that one of an NCO's main jobs was to train lieutenants, was true in the abstract (especially when it pertained to the WW II and Korean War generations of NCOs, not as much with the Vietnam ones), but de facto it sometimes meant shut up and don't bother us ell-tee, with the practical effect of making weak junior officers even weaker.

Later at Fort Ord when I told my battalion commander that many of our soldiers probably couldn't disassemble and reassemble our M60s properly he acted as though the problem wasn't the deficiency, but rather my blunt way of of stating it, as though him having a subordinate like me might undermine the image of "outstandingness" and "excellence" he thought we should be trying to cultivate. Some decades later after my time the Army got PowerPoint and now there's the "show biz" element entered into the equation.

I wasn't the best Army officer that ever served, but I was far far from being the worst, and IMHO these kinds of things prevent the Army from being better trained than it is. One of our finest forum members has railed about the inadequacy of Army training so I thought I'd back him with my own personal experiences.