In New York: Summer Soldiers vs. Soviets

It is 5 in the morning on a warm Saturday. New York City is asleep. But the crenellated red brick armory of the 101st Cavalry Squadron on Staten Island is busy. Hundreds of men in Army greens and black combat boots load trucks and Jeeps with weapons, tools, radios, medical gear. At 6:35 a.m., a 48-vehicle column rolls out, past the sleeping homes of Clove Lake Park, across the Goethals Bridge and into New Jersey. In twelve hours the 101st will reach Fort Drum on New York's border with Canada to begin its annual two-week summer training as scouts for the 8,500-man 42nd Infantry Division, Army National Guard.

Somewhere along Route 80, civilian life drops away. Instead of bus drivers or cops, insurance men or factory workers, the men begin to feel like troopers in the 101st Cavalry, a proud and dashing outfit that in 1916 chased Pancho Villa across Mexico. The horses were replaced by tanks in 1942, but a certain amount of cavalry elan persists. Thoughts of home and work are replaced by simpler concerns —food, a cigarette, a breakdown ahead. Vocabularies slide easily into the four-letter Anglo-Saxon mode. At dusk, when the group rolls into Fort Drum, the barracks area is like a class reunion as men greet one another after a year apart.

Fort Drum is huge. You could lose Detroit inside its perimeter and still have room for Manhattan Island and then some. Its rolling hills resemble the Rhineland, and this year's exercise, appropriately enough, involves a breakthrough by "Soviet" forces. Early Sunday the influence of legendary Tanker George Patton is obvious. Major General Joseph A. Healey, 50 (general manager, public services, New York Telephone Co.), trim and tough in freshly pressed greens, tells unit commanders, "These few days are precious. Begin to get angry about your mission of killing 'Russians.' "

The 101st checks out its 18 tanks. They are "Iron Coffins," old M48 Pattons, recently modernized with 105-mm turret guns and twelve-cylinder diesels. Crashing through trees and brush, the 54-tonners seem invulnerable. Tankmen know better; but they think they can shoot faster and straighter than the "Russians." They have set up camp at a tank range, miles of scrub and shrubbery dotted with pop-up silhouette targets that look like Soviet tanks, trucks and armored cars. Staff Sergeant Donald Fogal, 36, tank commander (foreman in an auto parts plant), and his regular gunner, Sergeant Ron Pospisil, 31 (Xerox representative), have to run through the qualification course with a pickup driver, Corporal Victor Feliciano, 32 (nursing home worker), and loader, Corporal Terry Bell, 27 (prison teacher). They all work up a sweat piling the tank full of machine-gun ammunition and 105-mm shells that weigh 38 lbs. apiece.

"O.K.!" Fogal yells on the intercom. "Crank it up!" The diesel roars to life. They move out over the dusty range. Three T-62 tanks appear suddenly nearly a mile downrange. "Gunner! Heat! Tank!" Fogal screams. The words alert the crew, order a high-explosive antitank round to be loaded and specify the target.