The Hip-Shoot

As I have mentioned before, that when I arrived in Alaska I was assigned to Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery (ARCTIC). (A-1-37 FA for short.) I’d never been in the artillery before and I quickly learned that this unit was going to be quite the learning experience for me. Here is one quote that pretty much sums up the Artillery’s attitude to the rest of the army. "Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl." Frederick II of Prussia

This unit had six, M101-A1, Korean War vintage, 105mm towed howitzers. These were all pulled by a Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV) rubber tracked vehicles as their “prime mover”. The Battery Operations Center (BOC) was the computerized control center for the guns. The entire system was mounted in the back section of another SUSV. There were other SUSVs for the Tactical Command Center (TOC) and other unit functions. I brought up the rear of every convoy with the maintenance section Prescribed Load List (PLL) truck, an M35A2, 2 ½ ton truck. I was a wheeled vehicle mechanic and this was our only “wheeled” vehicle.

No one I had ever known in the Army liked to go to the field, until I arrived in the Field Artillery. Since it is the only time they ever get to fire their guns, the artillery lives to go to the field. I had never seen people in units get so excited to go out and live in tents in sub-freezing weather, so they could stand in the snow, behind a gun, and shove 105mm shells into the breech. But there I was, a truck mechanic, in the artillery. This was about as third wheel as you could get, I truly felt out of place there.

I need to explain how an artillery battery works so that if you are unfamiliar with “guns” you can understand how a battery operates. The six gun-crews (Gun Chief, Gunner, Assistant Gunner, Loader, Ammo bearer and Driver at a minimum) all compete regularly for the title “Base Piece”. Base Piece is the most accurate and efficient gun crew and all the other guns are set into the firing position or “Laid” in reference to their position on Base Piece. Of the six guns, Base Piece is always gun three, in the middle of the firing line. When the battery is traveling In convoy, Base Piece is the first gun in the convoy. (3, 4, 2, 5, 1, 6 is the normal traveling order of the gun crews.) The Battery Operations Center (BOC) receives mission requests from forward unit and converts the map grid coordinates of the targets into elevation, range, azimuth, shell type and fuse settings for the gun crews. This information is transmitted electronically to the guns and then the commands to fire are sent by the Chief of the Firing Battery.

The advent of radar systems that can track artillery shells in flight, made dramatic changes in artillery operations. While I was in Alaska, this radar was named “Firefinder”. Firefinder had the location information of each of our guns and could track the trajectory of each shell, plotting exactly where the rounds impacted. If the battery fired all six guns, the radar could tell you and print out where each shell landed. This was great for grading gun crews, but it also had a secondary function that was downright frightening. Firefinder could also track incoming artillery rounds back to the location they were launched from, allowing for Counter-Battery fire. 

Counter-Battery fire is where you send a salvo of shells at the enemy artillery batteries that are firing at your force. Before this technological marvel, you needed an observer call in the location of the enemy guns. Now all the enemy had to do is fire one shell and the radar operator could plot the position the shell originated from in seconds. 

Previously, Artillery would setup batteries in one location for weeks or months, depending on how fast the battle was moving. Nowadays, artillery is more fire some shells and get moving before some incoming rounds are fired back at you (They call this; Shoot, Scoot, Communicate). One of the missions that we trained for in the artillery was an emergency suppressive fire mission also known simply as a “Hip-Shoot”. The term “Hip-Shoot” was a variation of the phrase “Shooting from the Hip” where a cowboy would draw his gun and shoot while his pistol was at his hip to get a shot off fast without using the sights. 

Any job we did in the Army was defined by an Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP) standard. Your unit’s overall readiness was determined by specific ARTEP tasks and the HIP-SHOOT task definition was to have a “battery, one round” on target within eight minutes of the incoming radio call requesting emergency suppressive fire. All six rounds had to land within 200 feet of the designated target. (“Battery, one round”, meant that each cannon in the battery fired one shell and they are all fired at one time as a salvo.) Not too hard, right?  Did I mention that the fire mission request comes in while we were convoying from one firing position to another?

This is where the purpose of the convoy order of the vehicles came into play. When the BOC got the radio call, they immediately stopped, and the Chief of Firing Battery (CFB) got out with a device called an Aiming Circle. An Aiming Circle is similar to a transit used by surveyors and is designated in 6400-Mils, instead of 360-Degrees. The CFB first designated the direction for the guns to line up, using a compass with his arm extended. Base Piece pulled off the road and into the firing position along that general direction. Once this is established, the CFB set up the Aiming Circle and gave exact alignment directions to Base Piece. The Gunner on Base Piece aligned the sights of the cannon on the Aiming circle and once properly aligned, the Gunner called out “Zero Mils!” When this was completed for all six guns, the CFB called out that "The Battery is Laid!". Meanwhile, the BOC was plotting the battery’s exact location into the ballistic computer to be ready to compute firing solutions.

It takes longer for you to read that last paragraph than it took to accomplish the tasks I described. While all this is happening, the other five guns were turning off the road and taking up their assigned spots on the firing line. After they pulled into the position, they started aligning their guns with the CFB. Meanwhile, Base Piece had already been given a firing solution from the BOC and fired the first sighting round. (Total elapsed time about 3 to 4 minutes so far.) I had seen Base Piece fire the sighting round before the last of the six guns had pulled off the road. Once all six guns were laid and the forward observer (FO) had given firing corrections based on the sighting round(s), the radio call “Battery one Round, Fire for Effect” was given.

The BOC informed the FO the shells are on the way with the call “Shot, over” and the FO replied “Shot, out” that he knew to be watching for the rounds to hit the target. When the rounds arrived, the radio call from the FO was “Splash over” and the BOC replied “Splash out”. It was quite an impressive sight. The last Hip-Shoot we completed during our ARTEP evaluation, all six rounds landed within 50-feet of the target. This included three direct hits, “Steel on steel”, all in less than six minutes. Even the evaluator was impressed by the speed and accuracy of the battery.

What was I doing during all the excitement? My truck had a M2 50-Caliber machine gun on a 360-Degree articulated ring mount. My job was to block the road and to provide security cover for the rear of our convoy while the gun crews were having fun. 

I don’t know exactly why, but Alaska is on my mind.

Sometimes you just end up thinking about some things, this morning it the topic was again Alaska. I have to admit, Alaska was quite an adventure. I have always said that if it had not been for my assignment to flight school, I could have seen myself trying to stay in Alaska as long as I could. In army vernacular, they call that “Homesteading”. While I was only there for two years, I got to do some pretty cool things. One of those things was a deployment to Kodiak Island.

Kodiak Island is one of the largest islands in the Gulf of Alaska and the only larger ones are in the eastern archipelago along the coast near Canada. Kodiak is near the beginning of the Aleutian Island chain and is the home to the largest US Coast Guard base in the country.

After I was promoted to Sergeant, I was re-assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company (HHC) 5th Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment (5/327 IN) where I went from doing artillery stuff to infantry stuff. 5/327 IN had a battalion consolidated motor pool and I was assigned as the Services Supervisor. To deploy to Kodiak Island, there were two options to get there, plane or boat. Since Fort Richardson was located adjacent to Elmendorf Air Force Base, deploying by plane was a logical option.

Like just about all training the Army does in Alaska, this deployment occurred during the winter months. “Train like you live” was the motto. For the most part, you lived in Winter in Alaska, so training exercises also occurred in Winter.

Airlift operations are the epitome of the army tradition of “Hurry up and wait.” You bust your ass getting the vehicles in tip top shape (the tiniest of oil leaks will get a vehicle barred by an aircraft loadmaster.) Then you have to go through a weight and balance inspection after which you go sit on the flight line, in your vehicle, freezing your ass off, in a snowstorm, and wait for the plane to arrive.

Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, a C-130 Hercules taxied up and dropped the cargo ramp for you to load. The Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV) it great for getting around in Alaska, it can conquer virtually any terrain, but it isn’t the most comfortable thing to spend hour upon hour waiting in for your plane to arrive.

Loading the SUSV on the plane was no problem. We were glad to have the ramp up and the SUSV strapped down and taxiing for take-off. Of all the Air Force planes I’ve flown in, the C-130 is my favorite. It literally jumps into the air and these planes are damn near indestructible. Definitely reliable and they are my choice for most Army operations. We didn’t have too much cargo and only three or four passengers so there was a fair amount of room.

Once in the air and at cruising altitude, we could move about and the crew chief even offered us coffee. (Yeah, they have a built-in coffee pot among other pleasantries.) I got to see the cockpit and one of the more interesting jobs of the flight engineer was to manage the fuel in the various tanks. The view was little to see, as flying over the ocean is not the most exciting view. The only really good parts we couldn’t watch as we were strapped in for takeoff and landing.

We landed at Kodiak Benny Benson State Airport and to my surprise we quickly convoyed onto the Kodiak Island Coast Guard Base and setup a vehicle shop in a bay of a retired power plant on the base. We had lights and shelter from the wind but this was unheated space so we were kinda roughing it, but just barely.

The base itself was built in 1939 -1941 and was a US Naval base until 1972 where it was turned over to the coast guard. We spent a lot of time exploring the building. It was like a museum in many ways as the building for the most part had been left as is on the last day of use. We looked around at these massive generators and the control stations just wondering what it had been like when it was in operation.

Once something is built in Alaska it is rarely torn down or completely abandoned. Most building are continually repurposed. In this case, while it was no longer the primary power station (The original purpose) the building contained a fairly large diesel power backup generator for the base. The 8-cylinder engine was massive, over 12 feet tall and the size of a large delivery truck.

I puzzled as to how the engine was started as I could not see any starting device. That question was answered a few days later during the operational test where generator is fired up and tested for a couple hours every two weeks. (It is started with compressed air and has an operating speed of 400 RPMs if you are curious.) A group of about four Coasties came in and ran the system. It is also quite loud so for that two hours we wore our hearing protection and tried our best to ignore the noise.
This turned out to be one of the most interesting field exercises I did in the army because we really never went out of any built-up area except one trip for supplies after about a week on the island. It felt strange to leave a built-up area and drive to a field site to get supplies from a tent, then drive back to base. It was a novel experience but it beat a five-man tent and snow, we weren’t complaining.

Aside from the Coasties, we also got to meet a maintenance tech for a US Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) detachment. They were deployed without any support team and he was scrounging parts where he could. He needed a short-shaft that connected the transmission to the transfer case on a 2 ½ ton truck (M35A2) and we had one. In the spirit of inter-service cooperation, we traded the shaft for some Long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP’s) rations. Not that they were anything better that what we had, but they were something different to eat (and older, leftover from Vietnam). The SEAL mechanic was a cool dude and really appreciated the help.

The exercise was deemed a success whatever they did. (Except for that one supply trip we stayed in the shop and just fixed things brought to us.) then we loaded back on the C-130 and returned to Elmendorf. The best part of returning from the field was that our Motor Officer was Filipino and after every exercise he’d cook up egg rolls he’d frozen earlier while we cleaned all our equipment during recovery. I never got tired of his cooking.

There was nothing really dramatic about this story, just another interesting (at least to me) part of my life and the only time I deployed by an Air Force asset that didn’t drop me in an actual war zone.

Incredible, I finally quit smoking.

Okay, this doesn’t sound too earth shattering, unless you’ve tried to quit smoking yourself. I smoked cigarettes for more or less for twenty years. When you do the math, noting I was born in 1958 and quit in 1986, you can see I started quite young. I was the child of two smokers and both my older brother and I were smoking while still in grade school. He got smart, and quit before I figured it out. My mother quit after a debilitating stroke, my father never really figured it out. Both my parents died at the age of 68, six-weeks apart. I’m hoping to do better on that part.

Smoking is vile. Nicotine tops most lists of addictive substances in the world. It ranks with or above:

• Alcohol
• Heroin
• Barbiturates (Speed)
• Cocaine

That is quite a list. I think it is also pretty clear that I inherited some addictive tendency since both my parents smoked and my father was an alcoholic. I did manage to dodge the bullet with alcohol. I’ve been drunk, and I am a light drinker, but witnessing my father’s alcoholism and that of others seemed to steer me clear of that addiction. Cigarettes, that was an entirely different story.

In the 1960’s, when I started smoking, cigarettes were still a cool thing. Yes, there was some talk about cancer and smoking being addictive, but there was also advertising everywhere. Cigarette makers sponsored everything. Golf, Racing, tennis, just about every sport. Television, radio, billboards, the advertising was everywhere. And for me, the best part was cigarette vending machines. No ID, no clerk to ask questions. Even then, most the time you could say you were getting cigarettes for your mother and no one would raise an eyebrow. So, access to cigarettes was easy. When I was twelve, I took over the local paper route from my brother. Now I had both a source of income, and three hours away from home every day, logistics was also solved. It is no wonder I was smoking a pack a day by the time I was fifteen.


It was about the same time that I started smoking in front of my parents, the last taboo was broken and the one thing that had somewhat moderated my smoking was I’d done it out of the house. So now I was smoking without many restrictions and of course I started smoking more. When I turned sixteen, I started driving and had a car, so ever the trip to and from school I was smoking. I didn’t smoke while dating because my girlfriend didn’t like it, but I smoked before and after our dates. I smoked all through the engagement and of course I had one just before entering the church to say; “I do.”

I’d been married for seven years and during that entire time my lovely wife been urging me to quit smoking. It was inconvenient, expensive, and we really didn’t have the money to spare. Like so many others addicted to these foul devices, I braved the weather outside and forfeited other items so I could have my smokes. While we lived in Alaska, I didn’t smoke in the house or in our truck. This meant that I had some really cold smoking sessions.

The most remarkable thing about the day that I quit smoking, was the fact that I had no intent to quit smoking until I did. Quitting was a very spontaneous decision and quite frankly I surprised myself when I finally quit. Every smoker has recalled tale after tale of trying to quit and returning to the habit. I was no saint, I’d quit smoking with miserable results at least a dozen times.

The day I quit was Wednesday, May 28, 1986. It was a normal workday in Alaska which entailed my getting up at 04:30 or so, getting dressed and arriving at PT formation at 06:00. After the formation, I had a a quick breakfast in the dining facility (We couldn’t call it a mess hall anymore), and the I was off to work in the motor pool. I was reviewing DA Form 2405 trailer maintenance records in preparation for an upcoming inspection by 07:00. I was alone in the office and at my desk when I lit my eighth cigarette of the day. Do some quick math and you’ll figure out I was going through about two and a half packs a day.

The time was 07:45. I’d just opened a pack of Marlboro Menthol less than an hour before and this was the third cigarette from that pack. These were kind of a treat as I’d been buying generic cigarettes at the commissary for $3.25 a carton and these were more expensive, but tasted better. The only problem is this cigarette didn’t taste good. It just tasted bitter (If you ever accidentally got your tongue on the filter of a cigarette you know the taste) and with every puff it seemed to taste even worse. Finally, about halfway through the cigarette, I put it out in the ashtray and pushed the ashtray to the far edge of the desk and went back to work on the maintenance records.

Shortly before 08:00 I paused and thought for a moment. Then I reached into my pocket and pulled out that pack of cigarettes. About the same moment, the Motor Sergeant (my boss) walked into the office from my left. I looked at that pack for a moment, then crushed it in my right hand and made a three-point toss into the garbage can, in front of the Motor Sergeant, as he was walking to his desk. He stopped and gave me an astonished look asking “Why did you do that?” I casually replied that I’d just quit smoking. He said that was bullshit and that was the end of that conversation.

The amazing thing was, I had really quit smoking. I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t have urges throughout the next few days to smoke, but it seems that the memory of just how bad that cigarette, and several other previous cigarettes had tasted, bothered me more than the urge to smoke another one. I also noticed that after about three days, my craving for tobacco had greatly subsided as the minimum time required to get nicotine out of my system had passed. It took a few more days, but soon my wife noticed that I didn’t smell as strongly of smoke (I worked in an office where three others smoked.) and that I wasn’t going outside for five minutes at a time anymore. A carton of the generic menthols with 7 packs in it sat on top of the refrigerator. This carton was exactly at my eye level. I just left it there and after a couple more weeks, my wife asked me if I wanted to throw them away. I told her I was going to leave them where they were at. If I couldn’t walk by that carton every day, on my way out of the house, and leave them alone, then I hadn’t really quit smoking. It was sort of a badge of honor to be able to sneer at them as I left for work.

Those cigarettes occupied that place of honor for seven months until one afternoon when our next-door neighbor, Yvonne, was out of cigarettes and didn’t have access to her car to go get some more. I showed her some mercy and asked my wife to go get the carton off the refrigerator. I warned Yvonne that they were probably stale, but stale cigarettes were better than nothing.

I think the process of quitting was just one of the steps in my personal development, during that tour. Shortly after I quit smoking, several events occurred in my life that individually were only minor achievements, but as a gestalt, they were evidence of a change in my personality. A change that I think helped me to be more successful than I had ever thought I would be. These events included:

·              I was promoted to Sergeant (E-5)

·              I passed the Flight Aptitude Suitability Test (FAST)

·              I completed my Associates Degree

·              I was selected for the Rotary Wing Aviator’s Course on my first application

Not long after I quit smoking was another small personal event that had major consequences the rest of my life. I had always struggled with self-confidence. I’m not sure of the root of why I felt this way, but it had always been a struggle for as long as I could remember. I was bullied some when I was younger, but I really don’t think it was a lot more than most other kids endured. I could be wrong, I only have my personal frame of reference on the subject. Regardless, there I was at 26 or so, married with two kids in Alaska. I can remember sitting at the kitchen table. For no apparent reason that I can recall, I was thinking about how I felt insecure about life in general. I suppose I started taking stock of how successful I had been recently and I realized somewhere in that jumble of thoughts, I was making myself miserable for no justifiable reason.

I was exceeding all the standards that I was being evaluated on at work. I had a fairly meteoric rise in the Army (E-1 to E5 in less than two years) and I’d just completed my application packet for flight school. The epiphany that occurred to me was that if I did everything in my life to my own personal standards, then I would be successful. My personal standards were higher than the standards I was being held to. I realized that It really didn’t matter what other people thought (This was my most overwhelming concern doubting myself.) It was this realization, more than anything else that I can define, that changed my life. I’m not going to say this was an overnight change in my personality or my outlook on life. It was more a catalyst of personal change that slowly occurred as I continued down the path of my life.

I have to credit my wife Anna, and here unflagging support. Anna is the mainstay of my life. Like most Army wives, she has made countless personal sacrifices allowing me take advantage of career opportunities. She managed to scrape together enough money from a ridiculously tight household budget for me to start college while I was still a private. She gave me the encouragement to slog through the classes to get first my Associate’s Degree and later, my Bachelor of Science.

When I read in the post newsletter that flight school had finally opened up and they were accepting application packets again, I absently commented that it was too bad that I couldn’t apply. (We’d agreed years earlier that she would never have to live with the fear of being married to a pilot, she is scared of flying.) She replied calmly, in an almost offhand manner, and told me to go ahead and apply. She just made it clear that if I was going to go kill myself learning to fly I should get more life insurance. This way, if I died, she could still feed the kids. This started a discussion where she wisely explained to me her rational for this change of heart. When the Army wasn’t accepting flight school applications, it wasn’t an issue. But now that the opportunity was available to me, if she stood in the way, her preventing me from following my dream would always be a wedge between us. She said she’d rather lose me to my passion than to make me miserable keeping me from it. Two and a half years later, she was the one who pinned the wings, on her newly minted, Warrant Officer, husband.

Some of the most inconsequential moments can have some of the most profound effects upon your life. Don’t discount them. They may well shape your future.

Tales of the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade (ARCTIC) (Part 2)

Most of my time in Alaska, my duty Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) was as a Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic (63B). I found it wryly amusing since most the vehicles I worked on was the M978 Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV). The SUSV was made by Hagglunds and Sonner (A Swedish Company) and is a two-car tracked snow cat with hydraulically actuated steering between the cars. Each car has a pair of two-foot wide rubber tracks with steel inserts and there was a driveshaft through the interconnecting link giving all four tracks drive.

My initial reaction was “What the Fuck (WTF)?” I’m not a track mechanic! But being in the army is mostly doing what you were told and I quickly learned all I could about this critter as they kept me busy repairing them. I can’t blame the SUSV so much as the Army for forcing a re-design of something that wasn’t broken. The Swedish version uses a six-cylinder gasoline engine. The US Army wanted all Diesel-powered vehicles. This resulted in a re-design with a Mercedes-Benz TD 300, five-cylinder turbo-diesel engine. The engine itself was great, but some design changes used to make it fit, those caused problems.

The problems were two-fold; vibration, and an off-set auxiliary drive shaft for the hydraulic pump. The cooling fan for the radiator was offset from the centerline of the engine and was mounted on an X-brace with a tensioner pulley on one leg of the brace. The vibration of the diesel engine caused brace welds to crack and the fan belt tensioner would then lose tension, causing the engine to overheat. Additionally, there were defects in the fan hub design that caused the fiberglass fan blades to come loose from the hub. What made all of this so special, was limited access to the front of the engine, due to the swim capability of the vehicle. The hydraulic pump was just left of the radiator and its drive shaft was offset ten-degrees from the engine drive line. The original T-type universal joints didn’t fare well and were replaced with flex packs that were much hardier. I became adept at pulling the radiator, replacing the fan, the fan brace and universal joints. (You had to remove the radiator to access any of those items.) Once those design flaws were fixed, (an improved fan design, a substantially reinforced X-brace and the flex packs), the majority of problems with the vehicle design were resolved. But in other ways, the vehicle was financially lucrative to me personally.

Like many companies, the Army had a suggestion program. I first learned how nice these programs could be from my father who earned over $4000 from Keebler on a suggestion he made. In general, most suggestion programs have a payoff of say ten-percent of what is saved in the first year using the suggestion. I had two suggestions payoff for me. 

The first one was easy. I noticed that we were replacing the brake light switch on SUSV’s, somewhere between 12 to 18 months after they were built. It was a plunger switch and when you braked, the plunger was released and the brake lights illuminated. When you took your foot off the brake, the plunger was depressed and the brake lights were turned off. Between 12 and 18 months after they were built, the brake lights would not go off, running down the battery. Installing a replacement switch resolved the problem. It was a five-minute job and the switch was like $12 so it didn’t involve a lot of money, but it was an annoying problem. 

After I replaced my third switch or so (My unit had about a dozen SUSVs) I noticed that the jam nut for adjusting the switch was all the way down on the failed switches. When you installed the new switch, there was an adjustment. The new switch, when properly adjusted, had the jam nut exposing about five threads. It appeared that during the assembly process at the manufacturer, the person installing the switch wasn’t adjusting it during the install, just screwing it all the way in. The switch would work for a while, but over compression the spring in the switch eventually caused the spring to fail. I suggested a one-time inspection of the entire SUSV fleet to adjust the brake light switch per the service manual. Viola! Problem solved. My net income from the suggestion was the minimum payment of $50.00. Not bad for a simple observation.

The next suggestion was more convoluted, but also more lucrative. This suggestion involved scheduled maintenance services on the SUSV. All army vehicles have a service schedule. Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annual, Annual and Bi-annual are the general service periods. But there is also a mileage maximum you might exceed triggering the same services. Services were triggered by either meeting the mileage requirement, or the time requirement, whichever was met first. The monthly service was simple and only took about 20 minutes. However, one check required a mechanic (The rest of the monthly service was done by the vehicle operator.) and that one check required scheduling someone to come in with the vehicle and having a mechanic make that one check. These monthly services were waste of time for both the crew and the mechanic. They also really annoyed me as I was the vehicle service supervisor for the battalion.

I also noticed that all the services for SUSVs were triggered by the calendar requirement. We had never met the mileage requirement for any service. (One year or 15,000 kilometers for example.) We were spending about half the total manpower available for service, scheduling these monthly services alone. These manpower requirements were starting to add up. I did some math and the distance required for a quarterly service was rarely if ever met in a year of use. The vehicles were averaging about 2800 KM a year and the quarterly service was required at 300 KM. I pondered this for a few days, did some research with other motor pools and made a suggestion. Incorporate the Monthly service into the Quarterly service and change then cut mileage requirements for the remaining services 50% to align the service scheduling with real life usage. The hardest part of the suggestion was figuring the math in a way that couldn’t be argued. I was able to show that across the 172d brigade, applying these changes would save over $24,000 in man-hours and materials. End result was $2,400 bonus ($1200 after taxes but still free money) and at that time over a month’s net pay. Not much physical labor, but some serious skull sweat.