The First Time

[RobMancebo]

The First Time
by Rob Mancebo

I wanted to pass on this equine experience because, it will never happen again in the world and I think it’s something Western buffs would be interested in. 

I knew an old, retired Sergeantmajor.  People would introduce him as ‘the first Sergeantmajor in the army’, but that wasn’t precisely true.  It was close though since he was in the first *group* of NCOs promoted to Sergeantmajor when the rank was re-instated after WWII.  (First Sergeant had been the highest enlisted rank or ‘Top Sergeant’ for a long time.  Modern Army and Marine slang for a First Sergeant is still ‘Top’, even though a Seargeantmajor is higher. )

Anyway, the upshot of it was, he’d begun his army career in the *horse cavalry*.  He was a pony soldier for several years before he had to trade in his horse, a palomino name ‘Mae West’, for a half track in 1928.   So he had stories about the change-over years when mechanization finally finished working its evil way upon the Army. 

I asked him once if the troopers preferred their Springfield rifles or their 1911 pistols on horseback.  (I always figured that the handiness and faster rate of fire would make men favor the pistols.) 

He looked at me curiously and said, “Rifles?  Pistols? No-- sabers!”  And he held up his right hand and wiped his left fondly down an imaginary blade.  “You can hit *anything* with the sweep of a saber from horseback.  We used to put melons up on posts and ride ‘em down-- lop-- lop-- lop!”   (Obviously the roaring 20s were the ‘peacetime cavalry’, because I know what happened when Pershing brought the 2nd Cavalry to Europe in WWI and tried to let them lop-- lop-- lop-- in the ‘traditional manner’.  It got them all shot-- shot-- shot-- by the Germans!  But I will certainly take his word for what the cavalrymen *liked* to practice.) 

He was stationed in the Black Hills and back then they didn’t even have so much as a radio on post for entertainment.  He said that he and his buddies would spend twenty-five cents on weekend entertainment.  That was: a nickel for the bus into Spearfish & a nickel back, a nickel for a hamburger, a nickel for a movie, and five soldiers would pool their final nickels to buy a 20 cent pint of whiskey and a nickel jug of beer.  The pint meant that everyone got a ‘little snort’ before the movie.  The beer they brought back to the post for Sunday morning when everything in town or on-post was closed.  They hid that jug in the stables. 
Now when Sunday morning rolled around, they would volunteer to shovel out the stables.  Them being poor troopers, not gamblers, that was the complete extent of their Sunday entertainment ideas.  He said that they would go out there and drink beer and shovel horse sh-- er-- ‘road apples’ all morning.  Beer & road apples, beer & road apples, on and on until they were pretty well lit and there was manure flying everywhere!  The duty sergeant didn’t care because he got the stables shoveled out without having to dragoon anyone into stable duty on their time off.  (No one dared to do anything to irritate the duty sergeant on purpose.  He’d smarted-off to the Sergeant once, very early in his career, and found himself assigned to oiling saddles in the Dakota sun all day. Over a hundred degrees, covered in oil, rubbing down hot leather with his bare hands quickly taught him to never smart-off to a Sergeant again.)   

So technology and machines were pretty new to both men and horses.  He said that the troop was out riding one day and-- for the first time ever-- an airplane flew over.

Nowadays, of course, jets and planes fly over horses off and on from the time they’re born.  They’re well exposed to such things as engine noise and big machines.  They may not like the noise, but it’s not really all that new, it’s just a variation on an irritating theme. 

But these were 1920’s horses away out in the wilds of the Black Hills.  There were few enough cars, much less airplanes.  Remember, some of the plains of the Punitive Expedition of a few years earlier had run into the Sierra Madres in Mexico because they couldn’t get enough altitude to get over them.   Planes and hills were still enemies in the roaring 20s.  The horses had never been exposed to any aircraft at all. 

Well, a plane flew over their troop.  He said that the horses became skittish at the noise but they were still nominally under control.  What made them completely lose it was-- the shadow. 

When the plane’s big shadow swept across the ground in front of them, every horse in the troop dropped to the ground and lay there as if dead.  He said that you’ve never seen such a collection of kicking, cussing, shouting soldiers in your life.  Those horses must’ve thought that the plane was the biggest hawk in the world and they were about to be carried off for supper!  No matter how much abuse the troopers vented upon their mounts, not one horse would move until the plane left the area. 

He said that he never saw the like throughout the rest of his career.  And, of course, no one else will ever see it either since technology has swept out to enrich (or pollute) the entirety of the world.  But that’s how it was the first time horses saw an airplane.