We weren’t back from Germany to Fort Hood very long when suddenly, without warning, we saddled up again and were on troop trains to the Mojave Desert of Arizona and California. Before we left for Germany we heard the scuttlebutt about it. We had prepositioned equipment there that had been routinely maintained. This time, however, it took us by surprise, and our armor went with us.
Desert Strike was supposedly a mock war between Nazona and Calonia and the fight for control of the Colorado River. That’s what I believed for years.
The entire operation took the lives of 30 men, two whom were with the 1st Cav. of the 2nd AD. Near Parker, AZ and the Colorado River, Pfc. Jerry C. Lodwick, Kalamazoo, Mich., and Pfc. Douglas C. Harper, Tallahassee, Fla. were in sleeping bags on the ground behind their tank. The unknowing driver backed up, crushing them from the waist down. They didn’t survive for long. According to reports they were the ninth and tenth men to die since maneuvers began.
Our 2nd Armored Division wasn’t the only unit operating in the Mojave. It was a colossal operation also involving the 1st AD (also from Ft. Hood), the 82nd an 101st Airborne Divisions, a California National Guard Armored Division and the U.S. Air Force.
Some years later, I was sitting in my Family Room recliner watching a show on UFOs when suddenly something in me ticked. The story was spinning headlines of western U.S. newspapers about numerous UFO sightings. I jumped up to get closer to the TV to see the dates. Holy Moley – May, 1964! Sheesh! So, THAT’S why were there.
Our government previously dismissed sightings as Weather Balloons and the like. As a nation we need to know NOW what the hell is going on. At least they are finally acknowledging their existence. In 1947 something occurred in the Desert. Col. Philip Corso wrote “The Day After Roswell” in which he stated he saw remains of a spaceship that had crashed and also its occupants, of which at least one had survived but later died. Lest anyone think Corso was a crackpot, he was a confidant of President Eisenhower.
Today, our MIA Teams are involved in attempting the recovery of the remains of our servicemen from Korea and Vietnam. My imagination makes me think that perhaps all the sightings to this day have been beings from elsewhere in the universe searching for their missing. Measured in our time frame, who knows how long it would take them to travel from their distant galaxy to ours?
