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1986, while living quietly in Taft, Texas, he was contacted by 3-32
Armor members who were doing research on the unit history. He was
invited to visit then at Ft. Hood. He was very surprised to find out
they remembered him. The first thing that he did when he got to Ft. Hood
was go for a ride in an M-1 tank. Afterwards, Pool told the young 3-32
tankers gathered around him some differences between being a tanker in
WWII and being one today. "The most important thing for a
tank commander to do is keep his crew alive. The tank crews today have
the technology to do what we had to do with our eyes and ears,"
Pool said. "We did very little fighting at night."
He added "I only fought once at night and I never wanted to
do it again. Today you have the thermal sighting capability that we
didn't have."
On his third visit to the post he watched the
tanks live fire on the range. "Colonel, if we had the
equipment back then that you have now, we would have cleaned up,"
he told the commander of the 3-32 Armor. The Colonel said of Pool,
"I want him to talk to the soldiers. He tells them the same kinds
of things that I try to teach them, but coming from him it's special
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because
he's lived it."
Later Pool was the honored guest speaker at
the battalion NCO ball. Three hundred twenty five NCO's attended.
Lafayette was adopted by the 3-32 Armor and he, in turn, adopted them,
referring to them as "His Boys."
Desert Storm found the 3-32 Armor in the
thick of battle against the Iraqi Armor. Lafayette was in a hospital
bed, very ill, but he watched the war constantly on television fretting
and worrying about "his boys." When the fighting had ceased he
kept asking his wife Evelyn, "Honey, are my boys back yet?"
When they finally got back to Fort Hood, Evelyn told him they were back
and soon after this on May 30, 1991, Pool passed away in his sleep.
Pool was survived by his wife Evelyn, three
sons and four daughters. One other son Capt. Jerry L. Pool, was missing
in action in Cambodia in 1970. Before his death, the Army decided to
name its new M-1 tank driver training facility after Pool, even waving
the fact that he was still alive. Dedicated on July 1, 1993, today the
facility at Fort Knox serves to train new tank drivers to drive the M-1
series of tanks.
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At
present the facility has ten systems of two simulators each. One system
has been converted to M1 AR configuration. The authors were able to try
out a simulator thanks to Irene Armstrong, secretary of protocol and
found it an excellent approach to learning to drive. The savings in
fuel, thrown tracks, and wear and tear, plus damage to real tanks is
tremendous, and will more than pay for its initial cost. Each new tanker
is given twelve hours of training before he transitions into the real
thing. Scenarios can be varied from desert and artic terrain to urban
driving. Weather can vary, artillery fire can be received, the tank's
main gun can be fired by the controller, plus night or day time driving
with open hatches or closed down on periscopes, all these things make
this simulator the closest thing to actual driving a real tank to date.
Our controller, SFC Byrd, told us the simulator is much more difficult
that actually driving the "real" M1.
Today Lafayette G. Pool is remembered not
only as our top tank ace but also as a man who believed in training hard
and doing the job right the first time, as there may not be a second
time in modern warfare.
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