Our last major training event at Fort McCoy was a Base Defense exercise. This involved the manning – and defending – of a mythical Forward Operating Base, or FOB.
Our Navy unit, as I said before, is fairly small, so in order to do this event, we had to team up with an Air Force unit which was also going through training at the same time. We started out on Day 1 doing actual FOB work at FOB Freedom – learning to guard the gates, do vehicle inspections and personnel inspections.
Day Two, however, would be more complex. We would move out to FOB Raider – a live-fire range where we would be tested as never before.
Because it was a live-fire range, this FOB was one-dimensional, with all the towers on one side aligned on the range, to ensure that all the live ammunition went in one – safe – direction. On the back side, there was a gate with a guard tower. Iraqi actors would come through this gate on foot or in cars throughout the exercise.
On the range in front of the towers was another movie-set like city of wooden building fronts. Also arrayed there were cutouts of Iraqi civilians, mosques, chickens and goats. Among these were a series of the now familiar pop-up targets. But before one could shoot, one had to be careful.
The whole purpose of the exercise – beyond defending the base – was to identify targets clearly before you shot.
No country in the history of warfare has done more than America to reduce the amount of suffering among innocent civilians. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to distinguish between friend and foe on the urban battlefield. So quick recognition of insurgents, civilians, Iraqi police, etc. is vital to winning the war and restoring the peace in Iraq.
So although it would be a game, in a sense, our orders at FOB Raider were very serious – do not shoot the wrong targets. Anyone who did would be subject to an investigation. If the shooting was intentional, there would be real-world consequences.
There are a dozen tasks to be done at a FOB. Tower guards, gate guards, entry control point, vehicle inspections, personnel inspections, casualty-collection point/litter bearers, Quick Reaction Force (QRF), radio control and more.
All of these posts had to be filled, and more importantly, they had to be rotated. The exercise would not end until a certain percentage of the unit members had participated in the live fire from the towers or the QRF.
The job of organizing and running the whole FOB operations was centered on the Tactical Operations Center (TOC). There would be an overall commander in charge and an assistant commander who would do the actual work of assigning people to various positions. In our unit commanders’ briefing the day before the exercise, we were told that 45 percent of the work for the entire exercise would be done by the latter person.
And they were right, as I would find out.
Because we were a mixed Navy/Air Force unit, we had to come to an agreement with our sister service on how best to manage the situation. There were 18 Navy and 34 Air Force, so the numbers didn’t give us much clout. The highest ranking Navy officer (myself) was an 0-2 (LTJG) and the Air Force had Two Lt. Colonels, (0-5) a couple of Majors (0-4) and a Captain or two (0-3). So I was clearly outranked, as well as outmanned. It was clear that the overall commander would be an Air Force officer, and the best I could hope for – and what I got – was the assistant’s job.
There, in charge of the board in which I could move people around like a puppeteer, I could at least ensure that my Navy folks were getting the training – and also the rest – that they needed. An Air Force officer was then appointed as my assistant – with the idea that he could take over once I went out to a tower to get some shooting time of my own.
As the exercise began, the base came under sniper fire, and our guys in the towers shot back at insurgents, waiting patiently through dozens of pop-ups of civilians until an insurgent popped up. When they did, our gunners would shoot them down.
The guidelines we had meant rotating each of the seven towers once every two hours. This is a complex task, as only the Sergent of the Guard (SOG) could do this – escorting the replacements to the towers, and swapping them out – all the while ensuring that no live rounds were left in the weapons once the shooters came down from the towers. This was crucial for safety within the FOB.
My plan was to rotate the tower guards first with the Entry Control Point (ECP) people, and then move on to other low-priority jobs.
But nothing ever works that smoothly.
After the first rotation was up, the sporadic fire on our base had been increased. There were now mortars running down. Suddenly, we got a call over the radio:
“Mortars have hit Tower One. We have one casualty, over.”
From there on, it developed into one of the most intense periods of my life. For five straight hours, I was at the center of a massive beehive of activity, trying to bring order out of a firestorm of chaos.
I quickly sent a man from the ECP to Tower One. The injured person was brought to the Casualty Collection Point. On my magnetic white board, I maneuvered two magnetic strips with names on them across the board to reflect the change. So far, so good.
Now it was time to rotate the towers. I started with Tower Seven and began to work back to Tower One.
But before I could act, a mortar hit the ECP, and my ECP commander was out. I quickly appointed a new commander and cancelled my planned move to Tower Seven, since that would leave the ECP down four men – two for Tower Seven, the one I had moved to Tower 1, and the one killed by the mortar. I decided to take them from one of our two litter bearer teams at the CCP instead.
And so it went, on and on. The smooth transition plan by which I would relieve one tower every 15 minutes fell apart completely as the action picked up. As the casualties were “evacuated” by helicopter or pronounced dead, they would regenerate 15 minutes later. But it was never enough, and I was always short-handed. I had originally planned to split time with an Air Force 1st Lt. when I needed a break, but after the first casualties, I had to assign him to a tower and I never got him back. Later on in the day, I brought in a chief from our Navy team to learn my job, but before 15 minutes was out, I needed to replace someone and he was the only one available.
In a real battle, you could close off the main gate, but not here. The instructors ruled that out entirely. So everything proceeded surreally as it would in quiet times, as mortar fire came through. We got word over the radio that the “mayor” of the local Iraqi village was here to meet with us. The Air Force Lt. Col. turned his duties over to me and went outside to hear what he had to say.
“Tower Five has been hit!”
I had just sent a crew to replace Tower Four. It was getting very close to the two-hour mandatory rotation time, and I still had three towers to replace: Four, Two and one man in One (the second being the man who came in an hour into the battle).
One man and one woman (both Air Force people) in Tower Five were now dead, and the tower was completely empty, exposing the base significantly. I had to act quickly.
“Fox 5 to Fox 3” I called over my walkie-talkie to the SOG, who was taking the crew to Tower 4.
“Fox 3 over.”
“Redirect crew en route to Tower Four to Tower Five, over.”
“Fox 3, roger.”
But then that screwed up my relief of Tower Four. Being the central tower, it was the only one that communicated directly with our main radio operators, and served as a relay point for all communication going to all towers. One requirement was that one of the people in the tower be skilled with a radio. I had sent an Air Force guy with those qualifications over to relieve it, but now he was in Tower Five instead.
I turned to the radio operator. (My walkie talkie connected me with only the two SOGs and my runner).
“Get a hold of the ECP. Tell them to release so-and-so and have him report to Tower Four.”
I then took a look at my casualty list. Each name had a time marked on the white board beside it. I checked my watch.
“Fox 5 to Fox 2,” I said into the walkie talkie, calling my runner.
“Fox 2 over.”
“Where are you, Fox 2.”
“Returning from delivering ammunition. Near Tower Six.”
“Get over to the CCP. They have two dead people about to ripen. As soon as they’re back alive, get one of them over to Tower 4 pronto.”
It continued like this all day long. Standing in the TOC, I at least had the benefit of air conditioning, though I still had to wear my body armor. My helmet I could do without, until I heard a mortar round coming near, in which case, everyone in our building grabbed our helmets and took cover on the floor. After ten seconds, we got up and resumed our work.
The situation was growing increasingly more difficult, but between myself, the SOGs and the runner, I had figured out a fairly efficient system, and the action seemed to mellow a little around noon. I opened up my MRE and took a few bites of my Chicken Cavatelli. I never got to finish it, but I did eat all the snacks, including the Vanilla Pound Cake, which was very good.
It was at this lull that I assessed my board. The goal was to get 100 percent (80 percent was acceptable) of our people out as shooters. I had marked with green ink all of those who had done so. The rotation was working, however there was one place we weren’t getting shooters from: right here in the TOC. I decided to see if we could get any time for these people, especially the Air Force Lt. Col.
“Sir, would you like to go to a tower?”
“Yes, if it’s possible.”
“Who would you like to replace you?” Thinking of all the Air Force officers above my pay grade, I made a few suggestions.
“I don’t care,” he said. “You’re doing all the work here anyway.”
It was perhaps an overstatement, but it was a good compliment, so I took it. In the end, I swapped out one of our two radio operators and my runner. Time, and a deteriorating situation made any more impossible.
We had all started the day with plenty of ammunition, but around this time, it became a concern. I got a call that a tower was “amber” (yellow) on ammo. Not having any stores available at that instant, I did the only thing I could. I took the ammo from myself and everybody in the TOC and handed it to the runner. He took it out to the tower.
“Get a call into the BDOC and request more ammo,” I said, referring to the overall FOB command (essentially the instructors), as we had been told to do.
It took some time, but finally the ammo came. From now on, in all the spare seconds I had away from my board, I, along with anybody else who was able, was speed-loading M-16 magazines with ammo.
1300 Hours. Time for the second rotation. Actually, with some towers hit, and others rotated in a staggered cycle, I was always rotating. But more and more casualties made it more and more difficult. I was even having to pull people from the QRF.
The Quick Reaction Force (QRF) actually drove out onto the range in Humvees in simulated action against small targets in the town. To do this safely, three towers shut down when the QRF left, and the other four towers shifted their fire. The QRF folks were all getting their own shooting time, and needed to be an organized team. For this reason, we gave the entire QRF to the Air Force. But necessity forced me to pull from this team.
One big concern was a lack of Combat Life Savers in our medical tent. As they were doing real live IV sticks in the tent, one or two was not enough. We needed four, five, or even six. I began to cycle our CLS personnel (marked on their tags with a red cross) into the CCP. I sent one Air Force 1st Lt. there to help out and she basically took over the show and ran it. Very effectively from all the reports. Suddenly, the CCP was able to operate faster, and that gave me the ability to pull one or two more people from their teams.
Ammo was running down again. At 1311, I put in a call for more ammo. Fifteen minutes passed and the best I had got is that they would try to get us some. Then another 15. I called back. Another 15.
The ammunition supply was now getting critical, and I called for conservation. I then stripped all the ammo from the TOC and from the soldiers on the CCP. The ECP I stripped also, since their job of searching visitors and vehicles did not require the use of live rounds (which would have been impossible to do safely).
“Tower One black on ammo.”
That was not a good sign.
“Fox 2 this is Fox Five. I need Ammo taken to Tower One.”
The ammo arrived. But scarcely had the catastrophe been averted than another tower popped up. And another. It was like ammunition “whack-a-mole.”
The door to the trailer opened. One of my two SOGs came in. “SOG” I was discovering, was appropriate, since it accurately described the soaked state of their uniforms. They were literally running across the base in full body armor. One of them was in his 20s. The other in his 50s. The latter one had come through the door and I told him to sit down a while.
“Tower Seven has 10 magazines.”
“What? Have they been hoarding them?”
“They have so many because every time the QRF goes out of the gate, they have to stop firing.”
It was obvious, but I had missed it. I called to the other SOG and to my runner. Towers Five, Six and Seven would all logically have more ammo than the others. I told them to collect all but three mags and spread them out among the other towers.
That alone bought us another 15 minutes, but there was still no word on the ammo. I began to get a sinking feeling, and remembered the beginning scene in “Star Trek II” where the crew of the Enterprise faced a training scenario that was a true no-win situation. The BDOC was starving us of ammo, which means the training day was coming to an end.
But I didn’t want to end on a losing note, so I called for my guys to conserve ammo and pick their targets carefully. As time went on, they nonetheless started calling in:
“Tower One, black on ammo.”
“Tower Four, black on ammo.”
“Tower Three, black on ammo.”
I turned to one of the Army instructors, who had a mischievous grin on his face. “Can I tell them to fix bayonets?” I asked. He laughed.
By 1420 it was over. Word came over the radio from the BDOC, and the shooting stopped.
I stepped out of the trailer and into the bright sunlight and heat. Slowly the troops were making it back up the hill to the room where we would break the exercise down in an After Action Report.
It had been the most intense five hours of my life, and I was emotionally drained. I had been on my feet constantly, moving constantly, but never left a space bigger than six feet by fifteen.
I had acquitted myself well – all the Army instructors said as much. And our Navy and Air Force Teams, who had been rivals for a month, had somehow coalesced into something effective. Sitting down with them, I looked at their nametags and – at least for the Air Force guys – put faces with the names that I had been moving around the board all day like mere numbers.
The Battle Commander’s position is one of the hardest in the military, but it seemed very simple to me. There were no right or wrong decisions, there was only decision and indecision. You had to make the call, and deal with it, however it worked out. There was no time to second-guess and no time to evaluate. Action did not guarantee success. Inaction, however, guaranteed failure.
It was the end of my training at Fort McCoy. Two days later, I flew out of Wisconsin. Tomorrow, I take another flight, this time to Kuwait. I may never use some of the training that I got at Fort McCoy, but I’ll never forget it. In the back of my mind, however, I know that if the worst ever happens, I’ve had the best preparation I could possibly get short of real battlefield experience.
Here’s hoping that’s all the experience I have.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Humvee Gunner
Everything in Iraq moves by convoys. Fuel, food, soldiers and yes, sailors too.
Of course, there are different kinds of convoys. Some are active patrols sent “outside the wire” to go find and engage the enemy. Others escort humanitarian supplies or Iraqi leaders threatened by the insurgency.
There are no mere passengers in a U.S. military convoy. Every person traveling in one is an active participant of a complex machine designed to evade terrorist threats, defend itself in case of attack, and fulfill a mission.
To that end, every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine who steps on ground in country needs to know the basics of convoy operations, how to defend and recover a damaged vehicle, and how to get out of a “kill zone” alive. This past week, our unit got the crash course. And I do mean “crash.” One of our Humvees came back with a little side panel damage, but no one was injured.
It started, as all such courses do, in the classroom. In this case, it was a return trip to our home away from home, FOB Freedom, for a lovely day-long class in a double-wide trailer. With our guns stowed below our chairs and our body armor in cubbies in the back room, we sat down for our lesson.
Once again, we watched a lot of videos. The video camera in Iraq, 2007, has become what the scalping knife was during the French and Indian War. Our enemy likes to film every attack on Americans, because that’s the proof that they use to show their paymasters that they did their job. No video, no money. Consequently, there are very few video tourists in Iraq. Anyone pulling out a video camera near American troops stands a very good chance of winding up on the wrong end of a U.S. Army sniper team.
I won’t go into our tactics, of course. Even though they’re not really secret, the less they are broadcast, the better. Either way, we’re constantly evolving to meet the greatest threats.
Among those threats are IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), which can range from homemade bombs to highly-sophisticated devices which may or may not have lots of parts manufactured in a certain country to the East of Iraq.
These are often triggered by an old-fashioned wire system, or by a passive infra-red system that detects movement (like the doors at the supermarket that open for you automatically), or through short-distance radio signals (garage door openers) and cell phones. IEDs can be hidden in roadside trash – all of Iraq is basically one big trash dump – in junk cars, in moving cars, on people and dead animals.
The most common one is a 155 mm artillery shell – a relatively common thing in a country smaller than Texas which 18 years ago boasted the Fourth largest army in the world after the U.S., Soviet Union and China.
Another threat – and a growing one – is Explosively-Formed Projectiles, or EFPs. These are very sophisticated devices, which uses an explosion behind a mass (usually copper), which is then instantaneously melted, shot through the air in a semi-liquid state, and hardens as it impacts the vehicle. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not a few illiterate Iraqi deadbeats – which most of the insurgents are – can build these in their garage entirely by themselves, or if they may also be looking east for assistance.
Depending on how big these devices are, how they’re placed, etc. they can blow up our biggest tanks or a group of Humvees can shoot right past them, blowing them off right and left without slowing down. When the big ones are spotted, we have remote-controlled robots we can send up to defuse them, but any time you’re stopped out on the road, you have to watch for an ambush.
After the day of classroom training was over, we moved out to the motor pool and checked out our Humvees. Our little group of sailors only warranted four of the vehicles, which made us one of the smallest convoys in the history of Fort McCoy. It reminded me of the Far Side cartoon called, “A Young Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Hordette” (with a photo of five or six Mongols on tiny ponies).
Of course, we could have hooked up with the Air Force engineering group, which has shadowed our movements from day One. But the Air Force didn’t want us, and frankly, we didn’t want them either. Having two separate command structures for one convoy would make coordination impossible. So they went out in their convoy of seven, and we went out in our convoy of three, one after another, on the same route.
As we reached our vehicles and climbed around, we began to assign people to vehicles. The drivers were pretty much set. Only five of our sailors had been through the required Army Humvee drivers’ course (which they took while I took the Combat Life Saver course and others took classes like advanced hand-to-hand combat).
Again, I took the opportunity to assign jobs to my subordinates to get them to practice their leadership abilities. With the input of our Chiefs, I chose Petty Officer Rogers – who is from my same reserve unit back in San Antonio – to be the Convoy Commander. We chose other Petty Officers to serve as Truck Commanders for the various trucks.
Climbing up into the turret of one of the Humvees, I made some comments about how fun it would be to be a turret gunner, and though I was only making that comment in passing, being the superior officer, it was interpreted as a command, and henceforth, I was to be a Humvee gunner. Only after I climbed out of the vehicle, which was already lined up in the formation, did I realize I was also on the lead truck.
(Photo: Me atop my Humvee)
The lead truck in any convoy is the most exposed vehicle, because it usually trips all the automatic IEDs. And the gunner, sticking out on top in a protected, but open (on the top) turret is the most exposed person in that vehicle.
In the entire U.S. military vocabulary, the most courageous statement a man can make is “I’ve got point” – the lead, most exposed position. That’s what the lead Humvee Gunner essentially is.
Of course, this was just an exercise, and the only real danger – until the live fire exercise – was a rollover, since the gunner has no seatbelt. In that case, he has to fall back into the vehicle and try to grab something before the vehicle – which is very top-heavy – goes over. In all the drills, I never once found a position in which I felt I would be able to survive a roll-over. The best I figured was to jam my feet below the radio, grab the back-seat passenger’s seat belt with my hands and pray.
Fortunately, it never came to that. I was blessed to have the best driver in our convoy, Petty Officer Killian, who is also from my reserve unit, and in his regular job works for the Austin Police Department. Unlike two of our drivers, who had a minor fender-bender, he executed all of his movements flawlessly.
Also in my vehicle were both of our females, Petty Officer Moore (our Truck Commander) and Petty Officer McGuire. Although Humvee gunners usually have crew-served weapons – 50 caliber machine guns or 240 Bravos, our unit doesn’t have any, so we just went with our M-16s. For training purposes, it worked.
Lined up behind our vehicle on a rainy morning the next day, our mini-convoy moved out. Following an Instructor’s Humvee, we drove out to the course. As we had been told, this was a “Crawl, Walk Run” exercise, and Day Two was crawl.
The course was a short one: a straight run through a movie-set-like village. As lead gunner, I was the one person in our convoy who would see the most action.
In reality, the scenarios weren’t much of a surprise, because we were behind the Air Force, and as we sat there waiting our turn, we could hear some of what went on ahead, and see a little as well.
The first run was simple. We drove right through with no incident. The people waved at us with friendly waves, and despite one or two folks walking around with weapons – common in Iraq – none raised them at us, and none of our guys fired.
The next run, we got a different reception. Although most of the “villagers” were friendly, a man jumped out from behind our village and pointed his rifle directly at me.
Now, I’ve been firing guns since I was six or seven years old. I’ve shot thousands of rounds of ammunition, and seen others shoot as well. But never in my life had I had the experience of someone aiming a weapon directly at me and pulling the trigger. The muzzle flash of a rifle – which I’d seen so many times before – suddenly looks different from head-on.
Of course, the impromptu insurgent was firing blanks, and at almost the identical moment, I was lined up on him, firing a burst of blank rounds from my M-16. Despite the novelty, nothing about it really felt all that weird. I aimed my weapon at another human being and pulled the trigger. As we passed by, I thought about that, and how incredibly easy it was to do. Blanks are blanks, but I had gone against lessons my daddy had taught me since I could crawl, and I expected a bit more hesitation. The ease of it left me slightly uncomfortable, but I would soon get used to it.
The next time, we came into the same little village and this time there were dozens of “protesters” formed up in a line across the road, with tires and tree branches spread out in front of our path. I followed our escalation of force guidelines, also known as the Five S’s:
Shout (Tell them to move away: “Imshee. Imshee”)
Show (Show your weapon, look mean and let them know you’re ready. At the same time, the driver guns the engine.
Shove (This works better on the ground, but the driver can move forward slightly and have the same effect.)
Shoot to warn (A shot into the air)
Shoot to kill
Fortunately, in this situation, I reached Step 4 and as soon as I fired my shot, the protesters dispersed.
The next scenario of note involved an IED strike on one of our vehicles. We had to form into a position that screened the injured vehicle from attack, have one person jump out (behind the protection of the screening vehicle) and attach a tow rope to the damaged vehicle. We then got out of there as fast as we could.
It’s a complex operation, and it took a long time the first go-round. But as the next couple of days went by, we got increasingly faster.
Day Three (the second day of actual exercises) was the “walk” phase of our convoy operations training. This time, we went out on a very long course, ranging over several miles, with various scenarios and two villages (which we went through twice each).
We started out with an escort mission. Our VIP was an Iraqi politician (one of our many great, awesome and friendly Iraqi Americans who do this stuff full-time). With his van in the middle of our convoy, we proceeded down the route.
Entering the outskirts of one village that our intelligence report said was mostly friendly, I spied something in the middle of the road. Instantly, I called down to the driver “Possible IED, 12:00.”
Killian stopped quickly, and I turned my turret off-center to provide protection against any blast. We were a good distance away – 200 meters – though we needed a little more space, and I guided Killian in backing up, which we could only do after vehicles Four, Three, Iraqi and Two had done so.
Our truck commander verified the IED – an artillery shell – and we called in the Explosive Ordnance Detail to defuse it.
Our instructors then told us that defusing the device would take a while and routed us off the main road through the village.
We entered cautiously, though as expected, the village was very friendly. But there were rumors that the insurgents were trying to pry the village from its friendly atmosphere by attacking Americans and trying to trap us into using excessive force.
Sure enough, after we had passed through the “buildings” (mostly stacked freight cars), we got attacked on the outside of the village.
I shot a lot of rounds, but probably shouldn’t have, since I couldn’t actually make out the targets. Fortunately, there were no civilians in the area to hit.
A few seconds later, our truck was hit by an IED (an instructor threw a flash-bang grenade by our tire and then, after we stopped, threw out a smoke grenade). There were no casualties, but I had to keep covering my sector of fire as the other vehicles came up and pulled us out.
After a few more scenarios, we arrived at the destination, dropped off our Iraqi and ate MREs for lunch while the instructors went over what we did right and wrong.
We did more of the same the rest of the day. The highlight for me was when our truck was again struck by an IED (the instructors always had to blow “invisible” IEDs, because myself and our truck commander saw every single planted one in the scenario).
After our truck stopped, an instructor came out, and handed me up a laminated card showing my “injury” – an amputated right hand.
I fell down into the vehicle and then proceeded to put my own tourniquet on with my left hand – just like I learned in my Combat Life Saver class.
After towing our truck out of the “kill zone” to a safe area, I was pulled from the vehicle and placed on the ground. I screamed a little to make it more fun, but after one of my buddies pulled out the needle for a field IV, I decided I would rather have my fellow sailors calm and relaxed for a few minutes.
The first stick didn’t work, so he switched arms. I decided that for the sake of this exercise, I’d only have my hand amputated, and slid down my tourniquet to give him more room. This time he stuck me well, and though it left a bruise that’s still there four days later, it worked.
After I had been treated, the “helicopter” arrived. We had called it from the command truck, and the instructors reported departure, 20 minutes out and 5 minutes out. As the instructor who simulated the helicopter walked up, one of our sailors waved him in using the signals we had pre-arranged, along with a canister of purple smoke, which gave him the site – and the wind direction.
We use smoke a lot, but the colors vary. We never tell the helicopter what the color will be, because the insurgents listen to the radio too, could have captured smoke, and they’d love to get their hands on an American helicopter through deception. So the smoke – and other things – are designed to vector the helicopter to one and only one spot.
So I was hauled out to the invisible helicopter on a stretcher, and then released by the instructors. After dusting myself off, resetting my body armor and retrieving my gun, I was back in business.
On our way back through the village we’d been through before, we were supposed to have a meeting with the local Iraqi Police Chief. So we parked, let some of our guys out, and for 20-30 minutes, we were left idling in the middle of the village.
Our back-seaters got out and provided additional security, keeping the villagers away from our vehicles while we gunners continuously rotated our turrets and scanned for possible insurgents. There were curious women walking back and forth, some offering us food – which we couldn’t take – and some sketchy-looking men in long “man-dresses” as we call them, who could easily be hiding a bomb, a weapon, or nothing at all.
We got out of there without any incident, although some of our guys fired warning shots. At the edge of the village, we did get a sniper, but we shot back right at him without “hitting” anything else.
Day Four was the real thing – with real live ammunition.
This, as a leader of a unit, was the most stressful thing of our training. We would have people exiting our vehicle and on the ground during a live-fire exercise. It turned out well, because we were never “attacked” until our people were in safe positions behind the truck, but it still scared me.
In one exercise, we were attacked by insurgents (pop-up dummies) while we stood there waiting for an IED to be defused. I shot them down by the dozens from the turret, while my crewmembers shot across the hood or from behind the vehicle.
When the bomb was gone, the “attacks” died down and our instructors gave us the go-ahead to move out. We mounted back up and drove through another movie-set village, this one with cardboard cutouts, not real actors. The insurgents were either placed up beside them, wearing plywood rifles or popping up as targets, holding Kalishnikovs and RPGs. I shot as best I could, but found it difficult to hit a target while the driver accelerated, slammed on the breaks, or took a turn.
As chaotic as it sounds, it was all very safe. I was restricted most times to only a 30 degree angle to the sides, and all of the targets were on one side of what was effectively a massive, 150-200 acre shooting range.
On our very last run, we got a “casualty” and as we headed back to FOB Freedom, we did something that impressed our instructors. In Vehicle 2 behind me, one of our team’s Combat Life Savers performed a live IV stick while moving – across railroad tracks.
Finally, we returned back to the FOB, and pulled in back safe behind the berm and razor-wire defenses.
Ultimately, our guys may rarely use these skills. Most likely, we’ll be back-seat passengers with limited duties, while the real experts do the bulk of the work. I damn sure hope I’m never a gunner – certainly I never will by design, but I hope not by circumstance either. And I really hope I’m never the lead gunner. IEDs are the number one cause of American deaths in Iraq, and the lead vehicle is hit in the majority of cases.
But there’s always the possibility, as the case of Jessica Lynch and her transportation unit – hardly a combat unit – clearly shows. Although none of our sailors feels like an expert on convoy operations, we all have a clear idea of the tasks assigned, and if called upon, I think we will acquit ourselves well. We’re all a bunch of sailors going to Iraq to help out the army with our special skills, not fight their fight for them.
But you never know what will happen in a country where every road is a battlefield and every village can either be a haven of pro-American Iraqis, a death trap – or even both at the same time. So we prepare for everything, because in Iraq, anything can happen.
James
P.S. By the way, the Fort McCoy newspaper did a story on our unit. Here is the link:
http://www.mccoy.army.mil/ReadingRoom/Triad/current/Navy_Learns_Army_Ways.htm
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Combat Life Saver
American medicine is the greatest in the world, and nowhere is that more evident than the combat casualty numbers from Iraq. At the current rate, America would have to stay in Iraq for 80 YEARS to catch up to the deaths from Vietnam. Of course, comparing the wars is ludicrous, because the level of combat in Iraq is nothing like what we saw in Vietnam.
Even so, part of the explanation for the low number of deaths is the amazing care our soldiers get – in the hospitals, and on the battlefield.
Consider this – of all of the wounded who are evacuated to a hospital, 90 percent survive their wounds. That is an incredible record.
Over there, there are only so many medics to go around, and often they can’t get to the patients in time. If a column of Humvees is hit by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), you can’t always just stop and call for a medic. Often, the insurgent (or “Serge” as he is personified by the Army) will set up snipers and other IEDs to create a “kill zone.”
One of the best ways to get quick medical coverage – sometimes on the fly – is the presence of Combat Life Savers.
CLS’s – as they’re called – are not quite medics, but can do a lot of the basic lifesaving tasks quickly, which buys the patient crucial time. Time that often means the difference between life and death.
Among the tasks CLS’s perform is diagnosis of wounds, as well as initial treatment. Wounds treated by CLS’s include amputations, serious arterial bleeding, facial wounds and tension pneumothorax (a buildup of pressure inside the chest cavity often created by a chest wound. This last wound is dramatized in the movie “Three Kings” and is treated by shoving a very large needle and catheter into the person’s chest. It takes nerve to do, I’m sure, but the patient will die 100 percent of the time if it isn’t done.
I know all of this because I am now a fully-certified Combat Life Saver, a task I accomplished this week. To get this certification, I had several long days of classroom work, plus an amazingly intense day in the field.
We started out with a gory video of various wounds, including those inflicted on innocent Iraqis by insurgents as punishment for helping Americans. I will spare you the details.
We then went through the full gamut of battlefield health issues, from heat and cold weather injuries to amputations and sucking chest wounds. And then came the kicker – learning to give IVs…to live patients no less.
Our class – 50 people, mostly Air Force and Army, but five Navy – was broken into pairs. For this exercise, I chose Chief Huzy, one of my Navy buddies. After practicing numerous times on the dummies, we got to do the real thing – on each other.
To insert an IV into a patient, the following procedure must be followed:
1. Prepare your supplies. As a combat life saver, you will have a bag of goodies that you carry around. This bag should include two or three smaller packages of IV supplies pre-organized so that you’re ready to “stick” someone on short notice. Items you need, include:
a. 18 gauge IV catheter/needle set
b. Saline lock adapter plug
c. Constricting band
d. Tegaderm dressing
e. Alcohol pads
f. Sterile gloves
g. 21 gauge 1 1/4 inch needle (For flushing your saline lock, if needed)
h. IV bag
2. Prepare the IV bag with the appropriate fluid (usually a saline solution, but also a blood expander called Hextend can be used). Attach the IV tube to the IV bag, and then run out the fluid until it fills the whole tube.
3. If needed, fill up a syringe with fluid from the IV bag. This is used to flush your saline lock if the IV is to be delayed.
4. Select a vein. The best area for a CLS is in the inner area of the elbow, where the veins are large, exposed, accessible and best suited for treating in a difficult environment. Usually, you stick someone a couple of inches from the crease in your arm towards your hand. You want to avoid actual joints, or areas where a pulse is easily felt. Obviously, you do not put in your IV below or near an injury. Typically, if the right arm is injured, you stick the left arm.
5. Apply a constricting band. Everyone who’s had an IV done on them knows this trick. A big rubber band is tied tight around the arm about 2 inches above the IV site. This is like a mini-tourniquet. It slows down the blood flow to the arm, which exposes the veins a little more.
6. Put on your sterile gloves, and locate the vein again. Clean the site with a sterile pad.
7. Insert the catheter/needle. Go in about 30 degrees, pulling back on the skin as you do. At some point, you will get a “flash” of blood in a small chamber in the needle. That means you’ve hit the vein. Go in a bit more, then push the catheter (a small plastic sleeve that goes in around the needle itself) forward. Once the Catheter itself is in the vein, the needle is not necessary.
8. Remove the constricting band (unless you want this guy’s arm to go entirely numb).
9. Remove the needle, holding pressure above the vein, which presents…let’s just say it prevents a big mess from happening.
10. Screw the saline lock onto the catheter. Once you’ve done this, you can release pressure. The saline lock is like an airlock on a space ship. It prevents blood from flowing out of the vein, but gives you an entry point to add in your fluid. In a hospital setting, this step is sometimes skipped, because you’re going directly to an IV and don’t need it. In a combat situation, you may need to stop treating your patient and start shooting. Or, you may not need to give them fluids now (for a minor wound), but may want to put in an IV portal so that you’re ready to go when you do need to do that.
11. If you go directly to an IV, you can simply plug in the IV bag. Otherwise, you should flush the saline lock, which basically fills it with a small amount of saline fluid. The other thing this does is verify that your catheter is in the vein and not past it. If the latter is the case (which it was one time for me) the fluid will create a little bulge above the site of the needle and you have to star over. This is called “infiltration.” It can be a little uncomfortable for the patient, as it was for me.
12. If there is no infiltration, let the juice flow.
So, after only two days of classes – and maybe only three hours on the IV itself – two amateurs were about to stick needles in each other. Neither Chief Huzy nor myself were too afraid of getting stuck, but I think it’s safe to say we both had a little trepidation about sticking the other person.
Our CLS class was in an old movie theater on base. Almost all the buildings on Fort McCoy were temporary wooden buildings built for World War II, from the barracks buildings we live in to the church where I went to mass the one Sunday I had off. (As a side note, there are about a dozen chapel buildings, easily distinguished, across the base. All but two (one Catholic, one Protestant) are closed.)
Most of these buildings were built hastily – intended to last five years and no more. For the most part, they’re built identical to one of two or three patterns. In fact, I suspect that the army had them all built in Henry Ford/mass-production style at one single location, then had them assembled in place on the post.
The movie theater, therefore, looks like any other two-story barracks, with the exception of having no windows and no second floor. Inside, it’s all been changed around, but several of the wall panels have homemade cartoon-like artwork painted on them. They appear to illustrate scenes from a movie – or perhaps a play that the soldiers on base in WWII presented. I’m sure it dates from the war because of the style of the artwork and the clothing that the people wear.
One panel has a very ugly woman in a crown descending stairs inside what looks like a castle. Another has a similarly ugly woman dressed like a mermaid. They have names stenciled above them (the mermaid was “Rose” and I can’t remember the other). Their features look somewhat masculine, which leads me to believe it had to do with a play performed on Fort McCoy during the war, because (much like Shakespeare’s plays in the 1620s) almost all actors in military plays were men, and it was very common for the female parts to be played by men in drag.
So, getting back to my story, Chief Huzy and I followed one instructor – a combat medic with a couple of tours in Iraq behind him – into a back room and sat down at a completely un-sterile table. Of course, the battlefield isn’t sterile either, so this was a good simulation. And the equipment actually used is very sterile.
I volunteered to go first.
Starting with my right arm, the chief began his stick. Of course, he had to choose a vein next to a nerve. It was unpleasant, but I said nothing.
He never got the “flash” in the chamber, and had to pull the needle out. He tried two more times on my other arm. The first failed as well. The second was in the vein, and a lot of blood came out (he missed the step where you pinch off the arm above it (which I later missed on him). Nonetheless, that stick didn’t work either because of infiltration.
We then gave up on me (the chief would later stick the instructor, successfully), and I had my turn to stick the chief. With the exception of letting out some blood – I let him rib me about that so he didn’t feel bad about my own thirty-minute personal torture session that he put me through.
But this wasn’t the end of CLS. Neither was it the end the next day after we took our test. In fact, the real work only began after the test was done. The first thing to do was to learn more about treating a casualty in the field – from litter carries to Humvee extractions. After a half a day of those practical exercises, we moved back to FOB Freedom for Day Four of the class.
We broke up the class into teams of about 12 people. Ours had four Navy, four Army and the rest Air Force. We then went out on short combat “patrols” within the FOB.
The day we did this (Was it a Wednesday? They all seem to run together), the temperature had dropped from the 90s down to the 60s, and it began raining. But, as we had learned a few days before, the Army doesn’t stop work until there is lightening (that handy-dandy M-16 you carry around apparently makes a wonderful lightening rod). As they say, “If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training.”
So we organize in a wedge formation and start our patrol, heading to a point only about 200 meters away. Before we get there, of course, our instructor, who is behind us, pulls the pin on a flash-bang grenade and throws it to our side. A loud boom comes and he runs up to one of our guys and slaps him on his right arm.
“You’ve just been hit. Fall down and start screaming.”
The first thing we do, of course, is the right thing. We get cover, and aim our weapons in the direction of a supposed sniper. In wartime, you can’t sit there exposed to enemy fire and treat a patient. That will only create two dead people. If you’ve seen “Saving Private Ryan” and saw the scene where one of their soldiers goes down to a sniper in a French Village, you can see what I mean. The others couldn’t get to him until the sniper was dead – or distracted.
So we gave covering fire (not really fire, as we had no blanks for this exercise), and some of our team pulled the wounded man to cover using the handle (made for just this reason) on the back of his body armor.
Then, as the rain poured down, we proceeded to give him an IV right there in the rain, muck and mud. I didn’t see how it went, as I was protecting the right side (after grabbing the wounded man’s weapon, which we also don’t leave behind). But apparently it went well.
We returned to the center of the FOB and crouched inside a concrete bunker for another 30 minutes before our next scenario. In this one, I got to do a tension pneumothorax stick. Since you can’t do this on a live patient, we used a dummy, who just happened to be lying in the foxhole we pulled our next casualty into. So, as this next member of our team was being stuck with an IV needle, I was jamming a bigger needle into a standard issue Army dummy. (They all look the same – a white guy with brown hair – though for our IV practice, they had some arm-only dummies and one of the arms was black. Viva diversity!)
We did two more patrols and three more sticks. We ended the day by gathering all but a couple of us into a tent. The instructors then simulated a mass-casualty event. They gave us all little cards with grotesque clinical pictures of wounds. We were then told to scream “like you wanted an Oscar” and the other class members were then brought into this chaotic hell to triage and treat patients.
I didn’t have to get stuck with an IV (they weren’t doing this here), but I did get a tourniquet placed on. I wasn’t much into screaming, and since my wound was severe enough, I just lay there in the mud and took a little nap.
When I woke up, they handed out our certificates. I was now a certified Combat Life Saver, though I had to use my last water from my canteen to wash my hand clean of mud before I took the piece of paper.
It had been an exhausting day. I was completely soaked, my back ached from my body armor, and my M-16 was covered in mud. Arriving back at the barracks, I walked into the shower with my weapon and all my gear and turned on the hot water. Later on, I’d have to strip my weapon down and spend an hour cleaning it thoroughly, but for a few minutes, standing there in the welcome rain of steam, I felt at peace with the world.
Even so, part of the explanation for the low number of deaths is the amazing care our soldiers get – in the hospitals, and on the battlefield.
Consider this – of all of the wounded who are evacuated to a hospital, 90 percent survive their wounds. That is an incredible record.
Over there, there are only so many medics to go around, and often they can’t get to the patients in time. If a column of Humvees is hit by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), you can’t always just stop and call for a medic. Often, the insurgent (or “Serge” as he is personified by the Army) will set up snipers and other IEDs to create a “kill zone.”
One of the best ways to get quick medical coverage – sometimes on the fly – is the presence of Combat Life Savers.
CLS’s – as they’re called – are not quite medics, but can do a lot of the basic lifesaving tasks quickly, which buys the patient crucial time. Time that often means the difference between life and death.
Among the tasks CLS’s perform is diagnosis of wounds, as well as initial treatment. Wounds treated by CLS’s include amputations, serious arterial bleeding, facial wounds and tension pneumothorax (a buildup of pressure inside the chest cavity often created by a chest wound. This last wound is dramatized in the movie “Three Kings” and is treated by shoving a very large needle and catheter into the person’s chest. It takes nerve to do, I’m sure, but the patient will die 100 percent of the time if it isn’t done.
I know all of this because I am now a fully-certified Combat Life Saver, a task I accomplished this week. To get this certification, I had several long days of classroom work, plus an amazingly intense day in the field.
We started out with a gory video of various wounds, including those inflicted on innocent Iraqis by insurgents as punishment for helping Americans. I will spare you the details.
We then went through the full gamut of battlefield health issues, from heat and cold weather injuries to amputations and sucking chest wounds. And then came the kicker – learning to give IVs…to live patients no less.
Our class – 50 people, mostly Air Force and Army, but five Navy – was broken into pairs. For this exercise, I chose Chief Huzy, one of my Navy buddies. After practicing numerous times on the dummies, we got to do the real thing – on each other.
To insert an IV into a patient, the following procedure must be followed:
1. Prepare your supplies. As a combat life saver, you will have a bag of goodies that you carry around. This bag should include two or three smaller packages of IV supplies pre-organized so that you’re ready to “stick” someone on short notice. Items you need, include:
a. 18 gauge IV catheter/needle set
b. Saline lock adapter plug
c. Constricting band
d. Tegaderm dressing
e. Alcohol pads
f. Sterile gloves
g. 21 gauge 1 1/4 inch needle (For flushing your saline lock, if needed)
h. IV bag
2. Prepare the IV bag with the appropriate fluid (usually a saline solution, but also a blood expander called Hextend can be used). Attach the IV tube to the IV bag, and then run out the fluid until it fills the whole tube.
3. If needed, fill up a syringe with fluid from the IV bag. This is used to flush your saline lock if the IV is to be delayed.
4. Select a vein. The best area for a CLS is in the inner area of the elbow, where the veins are large, exposed, accessible and best suited for treating in a difficult environment. Usually, you stick someone a couple of inches from the crease in your arm towards your hand. You want to avoid actual joints, or areas where a pulse is easily felt. Obviously, you do not put in your IV below or near an injury. Typically, if the right arm is injured, you stick the left arm.
5. Apply a constricting band. Everyone who’s had an IV done on them knows this trick. A big rubber band is tied tight around the arm about 2 inches above the IV site. This is like a mini-tourniquet. It slows down the blood flow to the arm, which exposes the veins a little more.
6. Put on your sterile gloves, and locate the vein again. Clean the site with a sterile pad.
7. Insert the catheter/needle. Go in about 30 degrees, pulling back on the skin as you do. At some point, you will get a “flash” of blood in a small chamber in the needle. That means you’ve hit the vein. Go in a bit more, then push the catheter (a small plastic sleeve that goes in around the needle itself) forward. Once the Catheter itself is in the vein, the needle is not necessary.
8. Remove the constricting band (unless you want this guy’s arm to go entirely numb).
9. Remove the needle, holding pressure above the vein, which presents…let’s just say it prevents a big mess from happening.
10. Screw the saline lock onto the catheter. Once you’ve done this, you can release pressure. The saline lock is like an airlock on a space ship. It prevents blood from flowing out of the vein, but gives you an entry point to add in your fluid. In a hospital setting, this step is sometimes skipped, because you’re going directly to an IV and don’t need it. In a combat situation, you may need to stop treating your patient and start shooting. Or, you may not need to give them fluids now (for a minor wound), but may want to put in an IV portal so that you’re ready to go when you do need to do that.
11. If you go directly to an IV, you can simply plug in the IV bag. Otherwise, you should flush the saline lock, which basically fills it with a small amount of saline fluid. The other thing this does is verify that your catheter is in the vein and not past it. If the latter is the case (which it was one time for me) the fluid will create a little bulge above the site of the needle and you have to star over. This is called “infiltration.” It can be a little uncomfortable for the patient, as it was for me.
12. If there is no infiltration, let the juice flow.
So, after only two days of classes – and maybe only three hours on the IV itself – two amateurs were about to stick needles in each other. Neither Chief Huzy nor myself were too afraid of getting stuck, but I think it’s safe to say we both had a little trepidation about sticking the other person.
Our CLS class was in an old movie theater on base. Almost all the buildings on Fort McCoy were temporary wooden buildings built for World War II, from the barracks buildings we live in to the church where I went to mass the one Sunday I had off. (As a side note, there are about a dozen chapel buildings, easily distinguished, across the base. All but two (one Catholic, one Protestant) are closed.)
Most of these buildings were built hastily – intended to last five years and no more. For the most part, they’re built identical to one of two or three patterns. In fact, I suspect that the army had them all built in Henry Ford/mass-production style at one single location, then had them assembled in place on the post.
The movie theater, therefore, looks like any other two-story barracks, with the exception of having no windows and no second floor. Inside, it’s all been changed around, but several of the wall panels have homemade cartoon-like artwork painted on them. They appear to illustrate scenes from a movie – or perhaps a play that the soldiers on base in WWII presented. I’m sure it dates from the war because of the style of the artwork and the clothing that the people wear.
One panel has a very ugly woman in a crown descending stairs inside what looks like a castle. Another has a similarly ugly woman dressed like a mermaid. They have names stenciled above them (the mermaid was “Rose” and I can’t remember the other). Their features look somewhat masculine, which leads me to believe it had to do with a play performed on Fort McCoy during the war, because (much like Shakespeare’s plays in the 1620s) almost all actors in military plays were men, and it was very common for the female parts to be played by men in drag.
So, getting back to my story, Chief Huzy and I followed one instructor – a combat medic with a couple of tours in Iraq behind him – into a back room and sat down at a completely un-sterile table. Of course, the battlefield isn’t sterile either, so this was a good simulation. And the equipment actually used is very sterile.
I volunteered to go first.
Starting with my right arm, the chief began his stick. Of course, he had to choose a vein next to a nerve. It was unpleasant, but I said nothing.
He never got the “flash” in the chamber, and had to pull the needle out. He tried two more times on my other arm. The first failed as well. The second was in the vein, and a lot of blood came out (he missed the step where you pinch off the arm above it (which I later missed on him). Nonetheless, that stick didn’t work either because of infiltration.
We then gave up on me (the chief would later stick the instructor, successfully), and I had my turn to stick the chief. With the exception of letting out some blood – I let him rib me about that so he didn’t feel bad about my own thirty-minute personal torture session that he put me through.
But this wasn’t the end of CLS. Neither was it the end the next day after we took our test. In fact, the real work only began after the test was done. The first thing to do was to learn more about treating a casualty in the field – from litter carries to Humvee extractions. After a half a day of those practical exercises, we moved back to FOB Freedom for Day Four of the class.
We broke up the class into teams of about 12 people. Ours had four Navy, four Army and the rest Air Force. We then went out on short combat “patrols” within the FOB.
The day we did this (Was it a Wednesday? They all seem to run together), the temperature had dropped from the 90s down to the 60s, and it began raining. But, as we had learned a few days before, the Army doesn’t stop work until there is lightening (that handy-dandy M-16 you carry around apparently makes a wonderful lightening rod). As they say, “If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training.”
So we organize in a wedge formation and start our patrol, heading to a point only about 200 meters away. Before we get there, of course, our instructor, who is behind us, pulls the pin on a flash-bang grenade and throws it to our side. A loud boom comes and he runs up to one of our guys and slaps him on his right arm.
“You’ve just been hit. Fall down and start screaming.”
The first thing we do, of course, is the right thing. We get cover, and aim our weapons in the direction of a supposed sniper. In wartime, you can’t sit there exposed to enemy fire and treat a patient. That will only create two dead people. If you’ve seen “Saving Private Ryan” and saw the scene where one of their soldiers goes down to a sniper in a French Village, you can see what I mean. The others couldn’t get to him until the sniper was dead – or distracted.
So we gave covering fire (not really fire, as we had no blanks for this exercise), and some of our team pulled the wounded man to cover using the handle (made for just this reason) on the back of his body armor.
Then, as the rain poured down, we proceeded to give him an IV right there in the rain, muck and mud. I didn’t see how it went, as I was protecting the right side (after grabbing the wounded man’s weapon, which we also don’t leave behind). But apparently it went well.
We returned to the center of the FOB and crouched inside a concrete bunker for another 30 minutes before our next scenario. In this one, I got to do a tension pneumothorax stick. Since you can’t do this on a live patient, we used a dummy, who just happened to be lying in the foxhole we pulled our next casualty into. So, as this next member of our team was being stuck with an IV needle, I was jamming a bigger needle into a standard issue Army dummy. (They all look the same – a white guy with brown hair – though for our IV practice, they had some arm-only dummies and one of the arms was black. Viva diversity!)
We did two more patrols and three more sticks. We ended the day by gathering all but a couple of us into a tent. The instructors then simulated a mass-casualty event. They gave us all little cards with grotesque clinical pictures of wounds. We were then told to scream “like you wanted an Oscar” and the other class members were then brought into this chaotic hell to triage and treat patients.
I didn’t have to get stuck with an IV (they weren’t doing this here), but I did get a tourniquet placed on. I wasn’t much into screaming, and since my wound was severe enough, I just lay there in the mud and took a little nap.
When I woke up, they handed out our certificates. I was now a certified Combat Life Saver, though I had to use my last water from my canteen to wash my hand clean of mud before I took the piece of paper.
It had been an exhausting day. I was completely soaked, my back ached from my body armor, and my M-16 was covered in mud. Arriving back at the barracks, I walked into the shower with my weapon and all my gear and turned on the hot water. Later on, I’d have to strip my weapon down and spend an hour cleaning it thoroughly, but for a few minutes, standing there in the welcome rain of steam, I felt at peace with the world.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Adventures of a Fobbit - Part II
It’s hard to keep track of time out here, as one day runs into another. We’ve been training long hours, seven days a week. If I didn’t have meetings to attend as the senior Navy officer, I’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint the day of the week.
Today is Saturday. I know that because I was hoping to finish up my training in time to catch the Steve Miller Band concert that was scheduled to be held on base. I made it off in time, but I was too exhausted. It looks like it will be rained out anyway.
But let’s back up to where I left y’all off last time. Even though my last email was a few days ago, I was a little behind then, so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
After qualifying on our M-16s last week, we had one day of classroom instruction prior to going out into the field for three days. The class was a crew-served weapons familiarization class. The idea is to teach the basics of very heavy weapons to people who don’t normally use them. Then, if the worst happens, we can jump on them and fire away – like U.S. Navy cook Dorie Miller did at Pearl Harbor.
I brought him up to our guys during a unit meeting, just to remind guys that you never know when this training will come in handy. And being a Navy example, it hit home well with them.
As I said, I’m the only officer in our unit, and am therefore in charge. A friend on the phone the other day asked what it meant to be an officer. I’ve been giving thought to that a lot. It means leading, of course, but it also means developing leaders below you. It means going to boring meetings with higher-ranking officers and staying up late at night to fill in paperwork. But it also means going through every last crap-filled bit of training as your subordinates. If they crawl through the mud, you crawl through the mud. If they sweat out a quart of water through their body armor, you do too.
Being an officer – being a good officer – means never pulling your rank to get special privileges. But it also means pulling your rank to make sure some Army Sergeant stops training when one of your sailors is showing signs of heat stroke. It means taking the advice when an Army instructor below your rank is telling you what your team did wrong, and it means standing up and telling an officer above you that the equipment you were issued is unacceptable – because your life and those of your sailors may depend on that equipment one day. It means doing all the grunt work to make those below you respect you, and then doing all the other crap as well.
The other day, an Army Corporal (enlisted) was chatting with myself and some of my enlisted sailors, and laid out exactly what he thought made a good officer. The first thing, he said, was to be in shape. He pointed to me, and said, “Like you, sir. Soldiers will follow folks who are in shape, and look like they can do everything they can.” A simple thing, but as a metaphor or symbol of leadership, it’s big. An officer who is not in shape conveys the impression of someone who is enjoying luxury, getting out of duties, and getting away with things – while ordering others to live up to the standards they themselves cannot match.
All these things and more make a good officer. Certainly, I’m not an expert. Frankly, it scares me to half to death sometimes, knowing that I could conceivably be in a position of deciding which one of these kids lives or dies. Making that decision with yourself is relatively simple, when the stakes are high enough. But when “dying” means sending out a 21-year-old kid who’s shown you photos of his wife of seven months? That’s another story entirely.
Anyway, back to my story. After qualifying on our rifles, we went out to another FOB here at Fort McCoy. There, we had our IED (Improvised Explosive Device) recognition class, complete with insurgent videos. It was the most sobering thing imaginable. Here we are watching American troops get blown up in Iraq. Troops dressed identical to ourselves, wearing the same body armor and carrying the same equipment. But it was very practical. We could break them down like some macabre version of John Madden and find out what those soldiers did wrong, and how to avoid doing the same mistakes. We then spent some time outside at the IED “petting zoo.”
Later that day, we went through some basic infantry training, including fire and maneuver exercises, live fire (with blanks) and throwing practice grenades. In the latter portion, we had to crawl on our bellies, dragging our M-16s, and throw some grenades in a bunker. We waited and they went off. (Practice grenades don’t explode, they just shoot flames out of the bottom and make a very loud boom. You could only injure yourself if you were actually holding it when it goes off.)
We then moved to an area at the top of a hill and began a series of maneuver exercises. We went in teams, and as one team cleared the area, and moved down the hill, the next would take its place. It reminded me very much of field day in 1st Grade. Back then, myself and Jimmy Rodriguez won the three-legged race because we made up a plan, and kept our legs in sync, whereas everybody else just started off with no idea what they were doing and fell on their faces.
In much the same way, we made a plan here too. Part of this was dictated by the Army tactics – one group fires while another moves closer. The details, we worked out in our group of about six people.
As we rushed from one sandbag barrier to another, we were covered. When we jumped down behind cover, we raised our rifles and began to fire (with our blanks) at a series of dummies propped up at another position. In one spot, there was a box of grenades, and I threw a few of these. In all, I threw five grenades that day. All went boom, which was pretty exhilarating.
Returning to our home on the FOB, we then geared up for the most demanding part of our month-long training – the STX lanes. Pronounced “Stix”, these are essentially some land navigation routes with various scenarios thrown in.
On Day Two (the obstacle course being technically the first day), we started out mid morning, and it was already in the lower 90s, and very humid. Even though I’m the officer in command of our unit, I turn command over to some of our petty officers for various tasks as a leadership training exercise. I gave the reins here to Petty Officer McGuire, and took my spot as a mere soldier – though as a forward rifleman, I was to see a lot of action. We formed up in a wedge formation and moved out.
The first scenario was incoming mortar fire. This was simulated very accurately by loud explosive noisemakers that created a whine like an incoming shell, then a very loud “boom.” We had to hit the deck (as we Navy folks say) and then get up and run for cover.
The next obstacle was an IED – in this case, a rocket tied to the side of a tree. We cleared the area, evacuating our squad to 100 meters – in the real world, you’d seal off up to 300 meters, depending on the size of the IED. Once our instructor came out and “detonated” the device with a flash-bang grenade, we were free to move on.
We then did so, and before long, a machine gun opened up on our column. We ducked down for cover. After crawling for about 20 feet on the ground, I spied the spot from which the fire was coming (The “gun” is in fact a dummy hooked up to an acetylene-based noisemaking device, with an Army instructor behind it).
I provided covering fire for IS2 Rogers, who was on my right, and he swung around and “killed” the position. As we moved out, I spied a dummy propped up in the trees, and I shot it. The instructor said, “Darn, you got my buddy, who was going to sneak up behind you.”
After lunch, we went through the same course again, with some additional lanes and scenarios. At one point, we came across a guy in Arab dress carrying an AK-47 rifle (rubber). We took up positions and began calling out to him “Ogaf tara armee!” (Stop or I’ll shoot) and “Thib SlaHak!” (Put down your weapon). He more or less ignored us. Finally, he lowered his weapon in a sudden manner and IS2 Merck took a shot. The Insurgent (An Army Sergeant wearing the garb) crumpled to the ground.
Turns out, according to the instructors, the Insurgent was putting his weapon down, but Merck (hence forth called “Trigger Happy Merck”) thought he was going to shoot.
What this episode points out is the almost impossible-to-perfect concept of “Escalation of Force.” In a country in which everybody is armed, and only some of whom are hostile, you can’t just shoot anybody who’s carrying a weapon. You have to make snap decisions of life and death. The very next day, we had an almost identical scenario. This time, however, the Insurgent was going to shoot at us. We shot him down then too.
Moving on, we then had our first real event of the day. As we stopped to check our position on the map and prepare our next move, I noticed one of my sailors was turning very red. This is the same person who became overheated the previous week. I immediately called a halt (even though I’m not commanding the actual exercise, I am still in command of the unit) and myself, our instructor, and our combat life saver (CLS – like a medic) evaluated him.
My briefing before the exercise was that if there was any doubt about heat exhaustion, heat cramps, or such, it was better safe than sorry. So I called over our radio man and had him call in an ambulance Humvee. We kept our sailor cool until it arrived, and they took him off. He was fine later on that day when we returned to the starting point.
The next scenario was an attack from the side. A sniper waited until half of our column passed, then opened fire. This effectively split our column in two. However, we reacted well, as both the front (the sniper’s right) and the back (the sniper’s left) flanked the position. Working with two other riflemen, I moved from the front position in short runs, taking cover, then firing to cover the others. Finally, I ran in my short burst and came up directly behind an army sergeant concealed in brush with a few fake guns and an RPG. I shot him down, and then called out to him to tell him he was dead, in case he didn’t hear my gun over his.
We proceed through numerous more obstacles throughout the rest of the day, and the next day. I took out a group of three insurgents with a grenade at one point, and then did the same with a group of five. Being up at the front, I was involved in all of the ambush scenarios, and provided cover during the insurgent/detainee encounters.
In the end, it turned out to be three of the most physically exhausting days of my life. Underneath my 40-lbs body armor, I was completely soaked in my own sweat. But I had not a single scratch on my body, despite all the abuse I gave it. Running in body armor is not like normal running. It’s like driving a truck after driving a car – and then expecting it to have the same breaking distance. Once you start to fall in body armor, you’re going to fall. It’s very difficult to keep your balance because of all the weight and consequent momentum. At one point, I came down a hill and landed on my shoulder. I thought for sure I would injure something, but that was four days ago, and I’m perfectly fine. Another time, sprinting over what was once a tank training ground (while under fire), I dove for cover and landed on my head. However, my Kevlar helmet meant that there was almost no sensation. My first thought, as I pulled my face out of the dirt was, “That was fun, let’s do that again!”
It was just like being a kid again, to a point. Running around with real guns instead of wooden ones, with body armor and 35-year-old bones instead of a t-shirt and 13-year-old bones. But on top of that, the reality that these skills could make a difference in whether I – or the 17 sailors under me – return home alive or not, makes it incredibly more real, intense, and sobering. So does realizing that being able to pick out a small red wire sticking out of a pile of trash – indicating a hidden IED – can mean the difference between living and dying. That wakes you up like nothing else.
A few day after coming back from STX training and moving off of the FOB back to our barracks, we got another surprise to bring home the reality of where we are. A young army soldier – who both lived with us at the FOB and was in one of our language classes alongside us – died of Meningitis.
I won’t go into the details here, as I really don’t know all that much. They told us he was in our class, but all the Army guys looked the same – literally, in their uniforms – and nobody in my unit remembers him. But since a large number of my sailors have come down with flu-like symptoms (Chief Keefover calls it “The FOB Crud”), I don’t take any chances. Fortunately, at this point, it appears the event was isolated, and most of my sailors are fine. Still, all the more reason to be vigilant.
We’ve all learned a lot more about health. In fact, I just finished a four-day CLS (Combat Life Saver) class that really made me look at health, the body, and how to treat it, in a whole new way. But I’ll save that for the next email.
James
P.S. Nobody here calls me James, Jim or anything like that. I am “LT” or “Lieutenant”, or “Sir.” That’s it. I usually address my sailors by their ranks, or more commonly, since several have the same rank and rating, by their last names.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
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.
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.
Your tax dollars at work
Still here at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, doing my Army training, even though I’m in the Navy. Early last week, we went and got all our equipment. If you remember from my previous email, I already got a bunch of stuff in Gulfport. That was mostly Uniforms, because that was stuff the Navy gave me.
This week, we got all our “Army” stuff. Here’s a rundown:
Items issued:
Weapons
M-16 Rifle (I will also get a 9 mm pistol, but that’s been delayed because of bureaucratic issues.)
Uniform
4 sets, Desert camouflage uniform - Gulfport
3 camouflage uniform caps - Gulfport
2 camouflage boonie caps – Gulfport
Additional uniform items from the Army
3 pair T-shirts (expensive sweat-removing synthetic kind)
1 black belt with buckle
1 desert tan belt with buckle
2 pair boot blousing straps
3 pair hot weather desert tan boots
1 pair cold weather desert tan boots
3 pairs Army green socks
Other Clothing
1 Wet weather poncho
1 Wet weather poncho liner
1 Desert camouflage cold/wet weather parka
1 Desert camouflage cold/wet weather trousers
1 ACU camouflage cold/wet weather parka
1 ACU camouflage cold/wet weather trousers
1 cold weather fleece sweatshirt
1 cold weather fleece bottom
1 pair thermal underwear
1 pair working gloves
1 pair cold weather gloves
Bags
1 Large backpack
1 Medium backpack
3 large duffel bags
2 large regular bags
1 laundry bag
1 Waist pack
2 Waterproof clothing bags
Body Armor/vests
1 body armor vest (This is the Army ACU color, which doesn’t match my uniform, but is still camouflaged.)
2 side armor plates
2 under arm plates
2 shoulder plates
1 Kevlar Helmet (Also ACU camouflage)
1 tactical vest
1 pair sand goggles
Other
1 pair sunglasses
1 Entrenching tool (collapsible shovel) with case
1 Camelback water container
2 One-quart canteens with cases
1 Two-quart canteen with case
1 sleeping mat
1 Modular Sleep System (sleeping bag)
1 Mosquito Tent
1 Gerber Multi-Tool
1 strap cutter
First Aid Kit
This week, we got all our “Army” stuff. Here’s a rundown:
Items issued:
Weapons
M-16 Rifle (I will also get a 9 mm pistol, but that’s been delayed because of bureaucratic issues.)
Uniform
4 sets, Desert camouflage uniform - Gulfport
3 camouflage uniform caps - Gulfport
2 camouflage boonie caps – Gulfport
Additional uniform items from the Army
3 pair T-shirts (expensive sweat-removing synthetic kind)
1 black belt with buckle
1 desert tan belt with buckle
2 pair boot blousing straps
3 pair hot weather desert tan boots
1 pair cold weather desert tan boots
3 pairs Army green socks
Other Clothing
1 Wet weather poncho
1 Wet weather poncho liner
1 Desert camouflage cold/wet weather parka
1 Desert camouflage cold/wet weather trousers
1 ACU camouflage cold/wet weather parka
1 ACU camouflage cold/wet weather trousers
1 cold weather fleece sweatshirt
1 cold weather fleece bottom
1 pair thermal underwear
1 pair working gloves
1 pair cold weather gloves
Bags
1 Large backpack
1 Medium backpack
3 large duffel bags
2 large regular bags
1 laundry bag
1 Waist pack
2 Waterproof clothing bags
Body Armor/vests
1 body armor vest (This is the Army ACU color, which doesn’t match my uniform, but is still camouflaged.)
2 side armor plates
2 under arm plates
2 shoulder plates
1 Kevlar Helmet (Also ACU camouflage)
1 tactical vest
1 pair sand goggles
Other
1 pair sunglasses
1 Entrenching tool (collapsible shovel) with case
1 Camelback water container
2 One-quart canteens with cases
1 Two-quart canteen with case
1 sleeping mat
1 Modular Sleep System (sleeping bag)
1 Mosquito Tent
1 Gerber Multi-Tool
1 strap cutter
First Aid Kit
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Liberating "Davy"
I got this quarter back in change from the coke machine at the LaCrosse, Wisconsin Airport. It is a Texas quarter. I felt it my patriotic duty as a proud Texan to liberate it from the clutches of the nefarious Yankees heretofore holding it in bondage. I will keep it with me for the entire trip, until we’re both back in Texas where it will be free to roam free in the pure air, bluebonnets and endless expanses of the Lone Star State. Just like all Texas quarters should do. I will name it “Davy.”
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