Written by Kevin Checchia
One night on patrol at an East German check point, our six man patrol was at our third stop looking through A/N PVS5’s. The NCOIC said that the East Germans in the guard tower were taking infared pictures of us, that’s why we kept seeing the flashes in PVS5’s. Well, this went on for about a half hour we headed back to the jeeps. Someone had broke [out] the famous 1″ bologna sandwhiches to munch on. We all started munching when all of a sudden there was a real loud wrestling noise coming from the brush to the right of us. We were all tankers that night so, with in about a second all six of use pulled our 45’s from the shoulder holster and locked and loaded pointing in the direction of the noise. The noise stopped as fast as it started. SSG Hare told every one to calm down and put the safetys on and clear their weapons.
Needless to say we were all pretty pumped from this little incident but, that was just the begining that night. I was in 1/2 squardon so we patroled both East German & Czech borders. Well about three check points into the Czech that night was a point that was called the “Little Finger” this was a part of West Germany that protruded into the Czech land. We drove down to the “Little Finger”. We stopped about 100m from the border. Everyone dismounted the jeeps and began scanning with PVS5’s. Through the nods you could see the tree lines and a clear field in front of the tree line. All was quiet for about 5 minutes, all of a sudden white star clusters were going off on the otherside of the tree line then, bursts of automatic weapons fire.
We radioed border ops and like usual the reply was “continue to observe”. The automatic fire stopped after about 2 min. then the star clusters stopped about a minute after that. Everyone circled into a 360 so we could see all us because in the “little finger” a patrol could be easily blocked off from leaving the patrol area. Everything was quiet for about ten min. when a mobile Czech guard tower turned on it’s spot light right on us. We just froze. The light stayed on for what felt like forever but, it couldn’t have been more then 30-45 seconds then it was dark again.
We started looking through the nods and in the field that was clear some 10-15 minutes earlier had what looked like tree stumps. SSg. Hare called border ops and said that it was a Czech patrol. Border ops wanted to know if they were moving toward our position. So, we watched the stumps and they were slowly moving toward us. Border ops was contacted and told that yes they were moving toward our position. About a minute later border ops came back on the net and told us to lock and load all weapons and don’t anyone get trigger happy.
So, all six of us locked and loaded our weapons for the second time that night but, this time it was a lot more serious then a noise in a bush. We stayed loaded for about 15 min. That’s when the stumps began disappearing back into the tree line. Border ops was told the stumps were gone and we were told to stay 15 more minutes and then get the hell out of the “little finger”.
To this day I felt like World War Three was going to start that night, I thanked the Lord for all of us that night that it didn’t.
