Around '78 or '79, we had a barracks thief that was ripping folks off. Up to that point in 2/75 history such a thing was unheard of. In fact, it was accepted that you could leave valuables of any kind, wallet, cash, watch, you name it, laying out in the open, with your door unlocked, and NO ONE would touch it; period. That's just the way it was. Well, things started turning up missing, and soon it became apparent that we had a thief in B Co. 1SG John Henry Voyles called a special formation to address the matter. He said: "Rangers, we have a thief in this company; a barracks thief; the lowest form of life on the face of the earth; the lowest slime that ever crawled out from under a rock. I want him Rangers. I WANT HIM BAD! FIND HIM RANGERS! Bring him to me, preferably with BROKE ARMS."
We had just received a new batch of "rippies" just prior to the beginning of the thefts, and most of us suspected one of them, but there was no proof. A plan developed. The next weekend, on Saturday night, an ambush was set. The door to one of the rooms on the second floor was left unlocked, a large sum of cash was left laying on a desk in plain view, and about a BUNCH of Rangers hid in a room a few doors down the hall, with a couple of cases of beer, and be began to wait...and drink. One member of the ambush crawled out on the ledge, walked along it to the room where the trap was laid and established surveilance on the objective through a crack in the curtains.
The Ranger pulling surveilance was relieved by a Ranger buddy every 15 minutes throughout the night. Late in the evening (it might have been the wee hours of the morning, I wasn't part of the operation personally) the door to the room opened and the thief appeared; spied the bait and headed directly for it. Sure enough, it was one of the the new guys out of RIP. The Ranger on surveilance ran back down the ledge and alerted the assault element which poured from their hide site, in a drunken rage, and met the startled thief as he exited the room. What followed was a level of violence easily sufficient to get the event an R rating had it been filmed. The thief was pounded into a quivering pulp and dragged semi-concious down the stairs to the CQ, who immediately called the CO and 1SG. Upon arrival they had the battered Ranger wannabe picked up by the MPs and hauled off to the stockade.
Yeah...if only the ledges on old 3470 could talk, the stories they could tell.
