I have been unlucky enough to obtain a video of the infamous stress shoot that I described in the previous post. The fourth guy coming up and plopping down in the mud is me. This is at about the 400 meter point just before we had to shoot. Enjoy my pain!
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Training Continues......
I apologize for the long delay in providing an update. The pace has been fast and furious with long days and little sleep. Plus my computer died a couple of weeks ago and is somewhere in Sony land getting fixed. I have been jumping on one of the computers in our admin spaces a couple of times a day to check email but I always have a forlorn looking petty officer staring at me and waiting for me to get off the computer so he can get his work accomplished. Today I borrowed the computer of one of my department heads so I could do more than just a quick check of email. Besides, he has a new IPAD and doesn't use this computer much anymore.
So, what has been going on? Since Easter when I last wrote, we have continued to evolve into a strong team, and I have no doubt that we could leave today and absolutely flourish as a PRT in Afghanistan. We have gone through exercise after exercise and drill after drill and through every evolution we have shown that we always do it right. We have a great mix of people that make good decisions and conduct business safely and effectively. Whereas we started out with each individual qualifying on the different weapons systems, whether it be 9MM pistol, M4 rifle, 240B Machine Gun, 249 SAW or M2 50 cal machine gun, we have moved into working as truck crews and full patrols with five trucks moving together and reacting to enemy contact or learning how to spot IEDs on the road. In the past month I have disassembled and reassembled machine guns, shot the M4 rifle at night while looking through night vision goggles, acted as a truck commander on a live fire range and even learned how to enter and clear a room as a member of a fire team. Although 99% of what we are learning we should never have to use while in Afghanistan, it is good to be comfortable with the weapons and to understand procedures.
One of the sillier things we had to do was the Stress Shoot, which involved running with your weapon for 400 meters and then immediately shooting forty rounds at a 100 meter target. Of course, when I say run I am referring to the Army way of running which is running for three to five seconds and then dropping down to the prone position for a few seconds and then getting back up to run for three to five seconds more. While you are doing this you have a number of instructors yelling and screaming at you like you were in boot camp, trying to stress you out even more. Another factor to consider in this evolution is that we are in Indiana. I don't ever want to hear people complain about how much it rains in the great Pacific Northwest. That is all it does in Indiana. In fact it is raining right now, just as it has throughout the spring. So, the field we were running in was wet and nasty and muddy. They had eighteen people at a time go. I chose to go in the last group, but by the time the last group came around there were only four of us. That meant that we had seven or eight instructors screaming at four of us...much more individual attention. Of course the yelling and screaming did not affect me in the least, and I barely heard them because I was concentrating on breathing and getting up and throwing myself on the ground over and over again. I could not figure out why they kept telling us to shift left. Over and over they would yell "shift left, shift left!" But then I understood....there was a lot more mud and water to the left. So I played the game and made them happy by flopping myself into the middle of the mud puddles the size of small ponds. Reminder....fifty years old....I'm just sayin'. Finally they had us belly crawl the last bit up a berm so that we could shoot our forty rounds. Not sure what I learned through that whole exercise but it was fun...I guess.
Yesterday half the PRT returned from a three day exercise that was held at another training facility about an hour away. It was a scenario that had us visiting a district in our province to assess a possible road project. Throughout the three days I had to sit down for three key leader engagements with local officials and UN representatives (all role players) to talk about the project. The first night we slept in our vehicles, so I was sitting in the front seat of a large Mad Max vehicle all night long. Not much sleep was to be had. Since we were bored and we knew that the scenario would call for us to be attacked, we sent a small team out to check out some suspicious vehicles and they ended up catching one of the bad guys. That made the evening entertaining (I found out today they immediately changed the rules for the other PRTs going through it that you cannot run around outside your vehicles catching bad guys). The second day the meeting with officials was followed by a very good Afghan meal. That night we slept on the floor of a building that was used in the 1930s as "a dormitory for females unable to attend to themselves." In other words the training facility we were on used to be an Insane Asylum. We were hoping to see some ghosts but no luck. Not much sleep that night either sleeping on a hardwood floor. It was actually a great three days with some excellent scenarios and opportunities for our security forces to set up security and engage with civilians that may or may not be bad guys. They did very well, as always and I believe everyone was satisfied with the training.
So now we start our final push, and in a few days our culminating exercise will begin which will encompass a week long scenario that will be the final exercise before we take a well deserved week off at home. This has been a long, long two and a half months, and there is still about nineteen days to go. But it has been worth it watching the team come together. This is why we do it.
So, what has been going on? Since Easter when I last wrote, we have continued to evolve into a strong team, and I have no doubt that we could leave today and absolutely flourish as a PRT in Afghanistan. We have gone through exercise after exercise and drill after drill and through every evolution we have shown that we always do it right. We have a great mix of people that make good decisions and conduct business safely and effectively. Whereas we started out with each individual qualifying on the different weapons systems, whether it be 9MM pistol, M4 rifle, 240B Machine Gun, 249 SAW or M2 50 cal machine gun, we have moved into working as truck crews and full patrols with five trucks moving together and reacting to enemy contact or learning how to spot IEDs on the road. In the past month I have disassembled and reassembled machine guns, shot the M4 rifle at night while looking through night vision goggles, acted as a truck commander on a live fire range and even learned how to enter and clear a room as a member of a fire team. Although 99% of what we are learning we should never have to use while in Afghanistan, it is good to be comfortable with the weapons and to understand procedures.
One of the sillier things we had to do was the Stress Shoot, which involved running with your weapon for 400 meters and then immediately shooting forty rounds at a 100 meter target. Of course, when I say run I am referring to the Army way of running which is running for three to five seconds and then dropping down to the prone position for a few seconds and then getting back up to run for three to five seconds more. While you are doing this you have a number of instructors yelling and screaming at you like you were in boot camp, trying to stress you out even more. Another factor to consider in this evolution is that we are in Indiana. I don't ever want to hear people complain about how much it rains in the great Pacific Northwest. That is all it does in Indiana. In fact it is raining right now, just as it has throughout the spring. So, the field we were running in was wet and nasty and muddy. They had eighteen people at a time go. I chose to go in the last group, but by the time the last group came around there were only four of us. That meant that we had seven or eight instructors screaming at four of us...much more individual attention. Of course the yelling and screaming did not affect me in the least, and I barely heard them because I was concentrating on breathing and getting up and throwing myself on the ground over and over again. I could not figure out why they kept telling us to shift left. Over and over they would yell "shift left, shift left!" But then I understood....there was a lot more mud and water to the left. So I played the game and made them happy by flopping myself into the middle of the mud puddles the size of small ponds. Reminder....fifty years old....I'm just sayin'. Finally they had us belly crawl the last bit up a berm so that we could shoot our forty rounds. Not sure what I learned through that whole exercise but it was fun...I guess.
Yesterday half the PRT returned from a three day exercise that was held at another training facility about an hour away. It was a scenario that had us visiting a district in our province to assess a possible road project. Throughout the three days I had to sit down for three key leader engagements with local officials and UN representatives (all role players) to talk about the project. The first night we slept in our vehicles, so I was sitting in the front seat of a large Mad Max vehicle all night long. Not much sleep was to be had. Since we were bored and we knew that the scenario would call for us to be attacked, we sent a small team out to check out some suspicious vehicles and they ended up catching one of the bad guys. That made the evening entertaining (I found out today they immediately changed the rules for the other PRTs going through it that you cannot run around outside your vehicles catching bad guys). The second day the meeting with officials was followed by a very good Afghan meal. That night we slept on the floor of a building that was used in the 1930s as "a dormitory for females unable to attend to themselves." In other words the training facility we were on used to be an Insane Asylum. We were hoping to see some ghosts but no luck. Not much sleep that night either sleeping on a hardwood floor. It was actually a great three days with some excellent scenarios and opportunities for our security forces to set up security and engage with civilians that may or may not be bad guys. They did very well, as always and I believe everyone was satisfied with the training.
So now we start our final push, and in a few days our culminating exercise will begin which will encompass a week long scenario that will be the final exercise before we take a well deserved week off at home. This has been a long, long two and a half months, and there is still about nineteen days to go. But it has been worth it watching the team come together. This is why we do it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)