Command and Training

I arrived at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin on Saturday at sundown. The bus dropped me off at one of literally hundreds of identical old WWII barracks. I introduced myself to a chief, who was sitting on the porch. He said, “Oh, you’re an officer. I didn’t know we were going to have any officers. That means you’re in charge.” As we are the only Navy unit going through training, I find myself the commander of the entire navy detachment. In fact, whereas the ratio of officers to enlisted in the reserves makes me about the exact mean of people in our unit, it’s a lot different here. Here I outrank about 75 percent of the people on base.

So in addition to training, I’ve got 16 sailors I need to watch over, and prevent from getting themselves arrested, run over by a Humvee or whatever. I’ve got to coordinate our training routine, fix administrative problems and go to meetings with the base commanding officer and other bigwigs. I somehow need to fit this all in with all the training. Fortunately, I’ve got three chiefs (senior enlisted sailors), who are pretty squared away, as well as an LPO (lead petty officer) who knows his stuff. To the degree that I can, I will delegate.

As for my position, I have some pull, but it’s not infinite. The army refused my request for a microwave, but they did give us an industrial size ice chest. I bought some soft drinks for my people and stocked it.

To get an idea of the training we’re doing, forget entirely that I’m in the Navy. To borrow a line from “Stripes” we’re doing “aaarrmy training” here. We are all going to Iraq and will be on the ground in country. No navy training we could get at this point would be relevant. And we are on base permanently now. Can’t even run down to the local Wal Mart. Of course, they’ve got a store on base, so we don’t need anything there.

The training is really in flux, but we’ve got a bunch of classes to get through in the next few weeks. We start each morning with a 5:45 PT run in formation. I ordered our guys to do this, even though I don’t really want to do it myself. But we’ve got to get in good shape, as we’re soon going to be hiking around with 40-60 lbs. of gear, including body armor and weapons. Although we are not necessarily going to do all of this stuff we’re training on over there on a day-to-day basis, we have to know how to do it, in case we have to.

Yesterday morning, we started out with our initial hand-to-hand combat training, plus a five-hour Arabic language class, which we continued today. Most days we’ll be returning to the barracks in the late afternoon. However, next week, we go into the field for a week at a “forward operating base” which is like a campout inside a razor-wire enclosure with fun exercises like hiking, weapons training and convoy exercises. We’ll live in tents there, but it’s really not so bad.

Chatting with the Army types today, it began to hit me a little more the reality of what we’re going to face. All of which brings home the point of how important the training is. When we face the enemy, we win and they lose, and the reason is training. That’s not new. At the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914, the average Russian soldier could only march 5-10 miles a day. The Germans, on the other hand, were highly trained and in excellent physical shape, and they could march 20 miles a day with full gear. They were able to envelop an entire Russian Army and inflict a staggering defeat. History is full of such examples. Of course, I almost outweigh the average Iraqi, so there you go…

I’m getting a better idea of the work I’m going to be doing, but I can’t talk about that now. Most of the training we’re getting, however, is training that everybody who goes on the ground in Iraq gets. There will be Navy guys doing a lot of this stuff, riding in humvees and going on convoys. Whether I will be with them, or whether I’ll be sending my enlisted guys out while I have to stay behind, I’m not sure. I’d rather be where my guys are, but we’ll do what the mission requires.

I’m staying in an open bay barracks, just like in the movies (no A/C either), so I don’t have a ton of space here anyway. I can shove stuff under my bed to my heart’s content, because I’m the officer in command of our unit, but I don’t want to abuse my privileges and make all these enlisted folks jealous. So for the most part, I’m living out of a foot locker like everyone else. We all sleep in one room, with the exception of our two females, who get an entire floor to themselves.