Adventures of a Fobbit, Part I

Late Tuesday, we got all our gear, left our barracks, and taking the bare necessities, moved into a Forward Operating Base, FOB Freedom.

A FOB, as its name implies, is a forward base, often in hostile or questionable territory. Ours, of course, is just for training purposes. FOBs are well-secured compounds enclosed in razor wire and protective berms, with guard towers and other security measures. Inside a FOB, it’s a MASH-like setup, with portable tent buildings, some trailers, and few luxuries (there’s a small store, but I never had the time to use it). The restrooms are Port-A-Johns and the showers are in tents.

The inhabitants of a FOB call themselves Fobbits, and have grown accustomed to doing everything from going to the showers to going to dinner, wearing their full body armor and weapons. Depending on the security posture at the moment, body armor may not be required, but in the training environment, it is required for most daylight hours. It’s certainly a different existence, standing in the shower tent, brushing your teeth, trying not to get toothpaste on your assault rifle, which is hanging across your body. I never seemed to have that problem at home, but then, I’m from South Texas, not East Texas.

The Camp Freedom Fobbits are an interesting group, constantly rotating through training, as opposed to the in-theater Fobbits, who stay there as long as their unit is at the location. Most are Army, a few Air Force. Again, we were the only Navy people there. Some of my enlisted guys got saluted by a few confused members of the Louisiana National Guard, who had never seen Navy rank insignias before. Of course, wearing my body armor, no one salutes me because it covers up my rank insignia and I don’t have any ACU cammo markings yet.

I guess I just assumed that everybody knew that we had all services on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of my navy friends – particularly in the field of Intelligence – have already gone over. However, even some of the army guys were surprised to see Navy personnel on base and training alongside them. Of course, we, like the Air Force folks who share most of our classes, are primarily there in support roles. We’re not trained as infantry, and though we’re getting some infantry-like training here, it’s only the bare minimum we need, not extensive classes.

Nonetheless, the training is fairly comprehensive. Wednesday and Thursday were very long days of training on our M-16 rifles. Wednesday was mostly classroom instruction, with a few practical exercises, including time in an indoor simulator. However, the majority of the day was spent in classrooms set up in old garages, with no A/C, plywood on the broken windows and small gopher-like rodents zipping through the room in the middle of class.

The heat was fairly intense, particularly once you put your body armor on, which you had to do when doing practice exercises on your weapon. It was over 90 degrees, with about 70 percent humidity – and they say that the body armor raises your core body temperature by five degrees. At one point, one of my sailors got up from a shooting position, his face almost purple. I pulled him out of the exercise and started going into our heat injury prevention routine, which we had learned the previous week. We had him remove his body armor and his uniform blouse. We then placed him in front of the one fan and started cooling him down with cold water, and asked him questions:
“Where are you?”
“Fort McCoy, Sir.”
“What is your name?”
“My name is ---”
The medic in our class then asked him the square root of some very large number, to which he said, “The hell if I know.” But it startled him out of his rote memory stage of answering and brought a little humor to the situation. I was about to send him to the sick bay for observation, but the Medic said he was responding well and we had gotten him cooled down before any serious symptoms showed up.

Instead, we sent him back to the barracks for the evening, instead of the hot tent out at the FOB. Not just him, of course, but also his battle buddy.

What’s a battle buddy? A battle buddy is an army idea, and it’s a good thing. Each soldier has a partner who does virtually everything with him, eats with him, goes virtually everywhere with him, and in stressful situations, has his back. This is an excellent way of making sure no one is left out, left alone, or left behind.

Myself and the Chiefs were very judicious about who we assigned as battle buddies. Mine is Chief Keefover, the next-highest ranking member of the unit. Because he and I frequently have to attend meetings apart from the rest of the team, we’re always together anyway. Chief Keefover, who’s a few years older than me, is a good ol’ boy from Alabama, and we get along real well.

The other two Chiefs in our unit, the third-and-fourth (respectively) ranking members, are also battle buddies. They have a lot of responsibilities which I have delegated, plus they oversee efforts to get our Petty Officers to take leadership roles in special tasks, from medical issues, to supply, to administration and physical fitness.

We have two loners in the group who always hung out with each other from day one. One, a very large African-American guy, and an Italian guy from New York. They were a slam dunk as buddies. The two females in the unit, who by necessity, live in separate quarters, were also obvious. We have two heavy smokers, so we put them together.

Battle buddies are there for their buddies, but they’re also there for us. When our heat casualty was asked how he was doing, he was reluctant to admit he was hurting. His buddy, however, could tell us a very good deal on how much he was drinking, how he had been doing throughout the day, and other things. And when we gave his buddy instructions on what to watch for, he became a valuable resource. Which was good, because the next day was even hotter, and even harder. And despite that, we didn’t have a repeat of that circumstance.

Thursday
Thursday, we got up at 4:15 a.m. and headed out to the shooting range. First task on top was to zero in our rifles. That meant shooting at a set of targets until we got at least five out of a six-round group inside a circle about 2 inches in diameter.

I shot six rounds and was done: My rifle was already set up well for me. This was pure luck, as every shooter is different. But some of our other sailors couldn’t get good enough groupings to even know how their rifle was set up. Many took four, five, even six tries to get zeroed in. This was hard for the Army folks to understand, but unlike them, most of our guys have never fired an M-16, and a few have never fired a rifle at all before.

We then moved on to another range, where we spent the rest of the day. We weren’t alone, as there was a crowd of Army soldiers and a covey of Air Force folks. Generally, we get along well with both services, but the Air Force people are a bit pampered and stuck up, so we have jokes at their expense about how they start building a new base by building the golf course, then complaining to Congress that they don’t have enough money for an airfield.
“Of course,” one of them said. “That’s the smart way to do it.”

I stopped calling them the Air Force and now simply call them the Air Fore!

So our group, mixed in with these folks, went up to shoot our qualification rounds. The area we were shooting into was about the size of three football fields, side by side. Small earthen mounds were raised up throughout the field, and large retaining berms surrounded it on four sides. On one side, a small gravel path was laid out, with square shooting stations – 13 in all.

As the round of shooting began, small green dummies would pop up behind the earthen mounds. Your job as shooter, is to shoot as many dummies in your lane as possible. Forty dummies popped up, and you had forty rounds to shoot at them. A passing score is 23. You shoot 20 rounds from the prone (lying down), supported (rifle resting on sandbags) position, 10 rounds from the prone, unsupported position and 10 rounds from the kneeling position.

The M-16 rifle is difficult for me, as it uses a peep site, as opposed to the open sites of all the other rifles I’ve shot. It’s easy enough for shooting at stationary targets, but for moving and pop-up targets, it’s tricky at first.

And here’s the other catch. You’re not just shooting like you do back home – you’re shooting in full body armor. It’s like dressing up in a turtle outfit to go deer hunting. Not exactly easy.
The first time I shot, I got a 22 – one short of what I needed. I soon made up for it, shooting a disappointing 24, but that was enough. Most of our guys took much longer to qualify. A couple of our people never got it, and we’re going to work with them to try to get them over the hump.
It was a long day, exhausting, standing in the sun out at the range, where one had to wear full body armor almost the entire time.

When the sunlight faded, we lined up for the next portion – our night firing qualification.
This was fairly similar, only the pop-ups were closer, and they were lit with a dim light. It was easy – I shot a 13 out of 15.

It was nearly 11 p.m. when we got home – a 19 hour day. I was exhausted. I’d worked hours like that before – on the Hutchison campaign, for example. But that wasn’t in 40 lbs of body armor. Nonetheless, as the next few days would soon prove, 19 hours at the range was a cakewalk. Because the next thing on tap was the real no sh-- Army Training. But I’ll save that for the next email.