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It was September 1955 and a very hot day, especially for Germany. The 3rd Battalion, 86th Infantry Regiment stationed in Schweinfurt was in the second day of a three-day Army Training Test (ATT) at the Grafenwohr Training Area. Umpires seemed to be standing behind every other tree, and the troops, most of them draftees, were trying hard to "play the game."
The ATT, the precursor to a series of evolving unit evaluation programs, had been around since World War II. It finitely tested a unit's individual and collective administrative, logistics, operational and tactical functions by using numerical scores. By the end of three days and nights, for example, one battalion might score 91.6, while its sister units might score "only" 89.8 and maybe a 90.2. The unit with the highest score was considered the best unit, hence had bragging rights until the next ATT. Unfortunately, what made this system even more lopsided was that oftentimes a commander's efficiency report reflected his unit's ATT scores, thus adding an unnecessary dose of artificial stress within the chain of command. This is sort of silly, looking back on it, which is why some smart people at Training and Doctrine Command changed from testing to the nearest tenth of a decimal point to a more realistic and useful evaluation system.
On this day, however, the ATT still ruled and 3-86 had just started to prepare its positions for "defense against daylight attack." I was a first lieutenant and the battalion's assistant S-3. Shortly after we established the battalion command post (tactical operations centers had not been invented yet), the S-3 asked me to walk the line to see if the company commanders had everything they needed. I arrived at King Company's position just as Sgt. Steve Mulkey, an enormous soldier who was the platoon sergeant of Mike Company's heavy machine-gun platoon, reported to the company commander with a section of two M1917A1 .30-caliber watercooled heavy machine guns. The section had been assigned to support King Company, and Mulkey and the company commander, a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, were discussing the best positions to emplace the heavies to support the defense.
The heavy machine-gun crews were tired, sweaty and starting to look a tad...