February Drill

Another drill, another posting. This month we did Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT). This involved going out and learning how to breach and raid buildings as well as how to maneuver while on a combat patrol. Before we got into our training we did our obligatory PT test. For those of us who have yet to go to basic training we do as many push-ups as possible in 1 minute then as many sit ups as possible in one minute and finished with as fast a mile as possible. For those who have already been to basic everything is doubled. I'm up to 44 pushups in a minute and 42 situps. Unfortunately, my legs were really sore from running and skiing this week so I added 23 seconds to my run and ended up with a time of 6:49. Kinda sad, but it'll improve. One thing I like about the National Guard is that our fitness is on our shoulders. It can be a bad thing for some people who end up just not working out and do 24 pushups and 11 situps and get chewed out at drill instead of working out. They'll get fixed in basic training though.

After our PT test we ate a quick MRE lunch and moved into our day. We started by prepping with M16A2 mock-ups which we call "rubber-ducks". We went through the fundamentals of room clearing and then got into fire teams of 4 or 5 to do drills in "glass houses" which are just rooms mocked up with black tape on the floor. The glass houses taught us basic movements but obviously you can only do so much with mock-ups.

After some glass house training we moved into some of the old barracks and discussed how we would clear such a building if we had to. These barracks had a total of 44 windows and 3 doors between the two floors and had lockers and bunks spread throughout as well as some half-a-dozen rooms and a latrine. Such a building makes for a very dynamic raid since you have so many "fatal funnels" (openings where people are easy targets). This, unfortunately, took forever since we are up to 97 troops showing up at drill and we still only have under a dozen people rank E-4 or higher who know what's going on and can lead everyone through. We also have a shortage of buildings and equipment which makes equipment intensive drills such as this very time consuming. Because of this we ended pretty early that night and hit the barracks to rest before we put what we learned into action by clearing rooms with paintball M4s.

At 0200 the next morning we woke up and were in the drill hall starting to run teams through our mock village by 0230. My fire-team had a visiting civilian added to it around 0500 and we practiced with him to get team cohesion until we moved out sometime around 0600. (Yes, that does add up to 3 and a half hours of waiting in the drill hall. When you have to move 97 people through a 15-20 minute exercise 9 at a time things go REALLY slow. Some people took advantage of the break to nap but I wasn't able to do so since the drill hall was kinda loud.)

When we got to our "village" we were surprised to find that the buildings were nothing like the buildings we had been training in although we had been made to believe we would be clearing the same sort of structures. I'm sure this was done on purpose as it forced us to scrap all of our plans and adjust on the fly. The buildings we cleared looked like stacked cargo containers with doors and walls added to create buildings. Each building had between 6 and 9 rooms per floor, a staircase to the second floor and a balcony on the second floor. The lights were all off when we entered and at 0600 it was pitch dark which made clearing the buildings very difficult since noone thought to check for light switches once we had secured a room. Our first building was very sloppy since we were brand new, weren't use to being unable to see and were trying to do the building without any verbal signals which didn't work as well as we had hoped. Luckily, the first building we picked to go into happened to be the one with no one in it and we were able to get away with it.

Our second building we decided to scrap the stealth approach since we weren't really kidding anyone anyways. We're newbies, everyone knew we were coming. When we started into the room with the staircase in the second building we suddenly had rounds flying all around us. We could hear them bouncing all over but couldn't pinpoint them since there were three rooms across the hall from us after we passed the staircase and the rounds we were using were rubber bullets instead of paintballs to avoid a mess. I thought I saw a shadow up on the second floor and went to fire at it while entering the room and got quite the surprise when my gun didn't react at all. Of course, being a stupid newbie, I backed around the wall again to get cover. Since I was point, the three other guys behind me followed and took cover in the other room. Unfortunately, our third man, the door breacher, was not directly behind me since he was going the other direction through the door after breaching it. He didn't realize we had left and ended up stranded in the other room for a good five seconds before he was able to get out. Luckily, he did get out since the enemy upstairs was just blind-firing around the staircase but I very nearly got him "killed". Once we got into the other room I switched out my gun with our number 2 man since, as point, I kinda needed a gun that worked. However, shortly after we switched and before we had re entered the room we realized my gun had just been uncharged by the soldier who had used it last for some reason. We hadn't checked that because all of the guns were charged on the first round and remain charged until they were manually uncharged so our cadre hadn't even told us we had to charge the weapons. Having never been paintballing before I didn't realize a paintball gun even had a charging handle like a real gun.

Switching kinda stunk though because I now had Private Gallaher's gun which only had 4 rounds in it to start the game. We reentered the room and the civilian and I charged the staircase while the other three covered us from below. We noticed SSG Walls' head sticking out around the corner of the doorway to the balcony and the civilian and I opened fire on her but she ducked back onto the stairwell before we got her. We then posted on either side of the door to the balcony and Gallaher came around and we attacked the balcony. Gallaher got the first look and got her three times as she tried to run for cover which left us with a clear building.

When we entered our third building we ran into a similar rain of fire at the staircase. Gallaher got shot in the back while moving behind the staircase to cover the men going up. The civilian was supposed to cover him while he moved around but it didn't work for whatever reason. I didn't see whether the civilian failed to watch his opening or if Drill Sergeant Zupancic simply got a good shot in. At this point I found that I hadn't done a very good job of keeping aware of my weapon again and was out of ammo since I had used four rounds getting Walls to duck back in. Thus, I had to charge the staircase with an empty weapon hoping that maybe I could help keep the Drill Sergeant's head down while the other two who were going up with me got around to where they could kill him. Luckily, it succeeded and I was able to take his gun after he died which had a good 45 rounds in it. When I popped around the corner to the balcony I saw someone lying on the ground with a gun pointed at me but managed to shoot him twice before he got me. I thought I hit him and thought he put his gun down but he was back lit and I couldn't quite tell so I shot him three more times. I probably shouldn't have done that but I did and he didn't say anything. Luckily it was SGT Cole who is huge and probably didn't care at all.

After that we simply cleaned up and did our AAR (After Action Report) and took off early because the cadre all wanted to get home for Super Bowl Sunday and I was even able to make it to 2/3 of sacrament meeting. It was a pretty good drill I think.

P.S. I should make a correction to an earlier post. I spoke before of Colonel Goodale telling the guys at Gowen to make sure to mess with "the other" Private Goodale. I realized that when I had heard this I had flipped it in my head. When I heard "the other" I thought it was from Colonel Goodale's perspective and not mine so he was really telling them to mess with his son which makes more sense.