Excerpt



The next hurdle was firing a pistol at full gallop at silhouette targets. You rode your horse around a figure eight course. At different places in the course you would fire at the silhouette of a man. You were supposed to fire over the head of your horse, first to the right of his head and then to the left. The horses hated it! A blast of a caliber 45 service pistol going off in their ear almost always brought a violent protest from the horse. Sometimes they just stopped galloping and began to buck or rear. I wasnt uncommon for an inexperienced horse to rear clear over on to his back!

The sergeants hated it. They had to load the pistols and hand them to the cadet whose turn it was to run the course. This could be scary and very dangerous for the sergeants. While I was in line watching the cadets ahead of me struggle with the course, one cadet was handed his loaded pistol by a sergeant who promptly dived under a mesquite bush. The cadet lifted his pistol gingerly up to his right ear and spurred his horse. The horse bolted! The cadet squeezed the trigger of his pistol sending a bullet through the brim of his hat, a government-issue wide-brimmed Smokey-bear type hat. The bullet struck the back of the brim knocking the hat over the cadets eyes blinding him! The horse began galloping full tilt down the figure eight course and the cadet continued firing several rounds from his pistol scattering sergeants, cadets and horses in all directions! Everybody on the ground hit the dirt but we cadets were mounted and couldnt take cover! Order was restored when the unfortunate cadet stopped firing and regained control of his horse! Training on the figure eight course ceased while all cadets got yet another lecture on gun safety.

It came my turn when the firing resumed. I approached the sergeant handing out the loaded pistols with some trepidation. I was lucky! My horse performed beautifully! He had done it all before, many times. He flinched when I fired the first round, but he kept his slow easy gallop. I didnt realize it but he was almost galloping in place. He knew exactly what he was doing and what I needed. I completed the course and the sergeant in charge of the course congratulated me. I had had really very little to do with my success. My lazy old plug, an ancient regular army soldier horse was responsible. You could not help but admire those old cavalry mounts. I can understand why old cavalrymen fought so hard to keep them in the active army. They were the last gasp of the romantic soldier. You cant feel any affection for a tank! No matter how efficient they are in battle. The struggle of General Herr and other old cavalry generals to keep horses was based on sentiment. It was time for the horse to go but old cavalry officers didnt go quietly!

At that particular time a clinical psychologist would have diagnosed me as a case of acute depression. One dark evening my mental state reached the breaking point! I sat down and wrote a long rambling letter to Janice breaking our engagement. The burden in my mind of going to war and caring for a wife I knew I would have to leave was too much! The very unfavorable odds of ever coming back, the prospect that at the least I would be gone for years, I didnt want that on my mind! My letter was final! We would not get married! I told her she was free to find someone who had better prospects. Mine were much too shaky, to stake her life on.

That ended our relationship! I thought I felt not better but relieved of some of the burden and sense of guilt!

After I mailed the letter I actually felt a physical pain in my guts! It was there for several days. It finally subsided a little.

The camp routine helped me. Up at dawn Reveille, feed and water the horses. Breakfast on awful food. We were into tactical maneuvers now. Exhausting rides that involved crossing miles of flat barren fearfully hot and dry desert. The only plant life was prickly pear cactus. Frequently a horse would lunge into a cactus and get painful cactus needles into its chest and legs.

This required the stable sergeant to put a twitch on the horse and immobilize it, sort of! A twitch was a leather strap that was wound tightly around a horses muzzle and was intended to keep his head from jerking wildly and dangerously while the stable sergeant removed the cactus needles with a pair of pliers.

On our first long march, I was detailed to lead four spare horses. I soon learned that horses have a malicious sense of humor. In fact, they are incurable practical jokers! Their favorite joke is to be led quietly and apparently in full cooperation with the trooper leading them until they reach a dry wash or arroyo. These are dry stream beds that can have near vertical banks as high as twenty feet! The unsuspecting horse leader spurs his horse down the banks of the dry was and of course, once committed cant stop until he and his horse have reached the bottom of the wash. The horses being led, I swear, would work as a team. All four would walk up to the banks of the arroyo, their reins held firmly by the horse holder on his mount.

The horse holder commits himself and his horse. They lunge down the bank. The horses being led dont do that! Right up to the last second they appear to be in full agreement with the horse holder. They too appear to be ready to plunge down the bank of the arroyo on the horse holders command. They dont! At the last second they wait until the horse holder has committed himself and his horse pell-mell down the vertical sides of the wash! Then with perfect timing, they plant their feet and refuse to budge a step further!

The horse holder, in this case me, is then faced with a terrible dilemma! He can hang onto the reins of the horses he is leading and be jerked off his horse and, horror of horrors, have the horse he is riding lunge right out from under him or he can let go and at least stay on his own horse and not be left afoot in the middle of the Texas desert. Of course in this case, he then has the job of climbing his horse back up the bank of the arroyo and rounding up the horses he was leading. And they, of course, have gleefully scattered and require chasing them down and getting them under control.