Sergeant Johnson, a team leader of his 4-man infantry team, pins up next to a door of a house with enemies in it. The rest of his team stacks up behind him. Johnson reminds his men.
“Remember, we train like we fight, so we are ready for this!“
After the team’s rocking signal, Johnson enters the room.
Immediately, to his right, he sees an enemy with his AK-47 pointed right at Johnson’s chest. Without hesitation, Johnson neutralizes the threat with two shots to the chest, collapsing the enemy immediately.
Next to enter was Specialist Henderson. Without flagging Johnson, Henderson engages the next enemy combatant to the left. Henderson’s controlled pair pierced the enemy’s torso, causing his eyes to open frighteningly as he drops.
Finally, Privates Gondola and Smith enter and choose the paths of least resistance. The team checks for any other threats. The first enemy lies motionless, blood spurting from one would. The second enemy reaches for his rifle, which is not anywhere in arms reach.
“Oh no you don’t!” Henderson proclaims just before another controlled pair immobilizes the enemy.
Johnson, “Clear!”
Henderson, “Clear!”
Gondola, “Clear!”
Smith, “Clear! Door to my front!”
Sergeant Johnson pins up next to the door and his team stacks on him, ready to continue to execute their MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) training on the next set of enemy combatants.
Too bad real life doesn’t work out so smoothly!
After seeing this article’s first two paragraphs about medics training, I thought about the phrase “we train like we fight,” and wanted to put my two cents on that.
Training Before My First Deployment wasn’t “Train like We Fight”
Before my first deployment, I went through a good chunk of MOUT training. Joining as an infantryman, it was something I definitely didn’t want to do, but there was some patriotic need built inside of me to do it. Also, the Guidance Counselor at MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) didn’t really give me much of a choice.
However, I figured MOUT would be like the uber-cool black and gold poster on my Army Recruiter’s wall. The poster depicted what looked like a SWAT team member aiming a pistol in a kneeling stance, if I remember correctly. The photo was taken at an extremely low angle, giving the perception of dominance. I asked my recruiter if that is a special unit or something, and he said something about how it was for urban environments.
I never saw any soldier with that type of uniform in my 6 years in the Army.
However, some parts of the MOUT training I received I felt was decent. We started with “tape drills”, where “rooms” are laid out with tape or long pieces of fabric. As soon as we got those down, we would move to ranges with a building(s) built to simulate a possible urban environment.
We would go through without ammo, then blanks, then live ammo. I would say it was most common sense way of doing things. However, if the “train like we fight” mentality went on, we would have so many mishaps in training!
Then We Deployed!
Boy howdy, the training we received wasn’t very comparable to The Iraq. My squad was extremely fortunate to never go into a room and have enemies waiting for us like the above example did. What we did encounter was mostly chaos, much smaller rooms and hallways, and walls!
Mostly Chaos
I don’t know how much training a unit needs before the chaos does not affect it, but I’m sure there isn’t any amount. No one really knows how s/he’ll react until the bullets start flying. Training is extremely important and it needs to be done, but “train like we fight” should really taken into practice.
During training, it’s almost as though things are almost perfect, and that’s not how it should be. There’s way too much going on for things to be perfect, and mistakes (even forced) need to be made in training.
I remember the first spontaneous raid (it may have been my first raid actually) I had ever partaken in on my first deployment. One of the squads in my platoon had claimed to have spotted a “haji” (a not-so-nice term soldiers used to identify any possible bad guy, or just a term for a person of Arabic descent) with an AK-47 that ran into a house.
We went to that house and it was chaos. We forced our way into the home. Children were crying. Women were screaming.
And there I was, yelling, mind you, “ALA-KAY FEK!” over and over. When you yell at hysterical people “CALM DOWN,” it turns out that it doesn’t work! That was the one phrase I made sure to learn, and I misused it terribly!
Of course those women and children were terrified. Just a minute ago, they were enjoying their day. Now foreign soldiers dismounting from armored personnel carriers with rifles and automatic weapons have stormed into their home trying to order them around. I can still see the face of one woman screaming her head off at me to this day.
We never found a single AK-47 in that raid.
In hindsight, I was relieved that was my first “raid” experience. It knocked a lot of nerves out of me, and since it was such a chaotic scene that I made it through, I was able to make it through every other raid without much hesitation. It told me I can handle all future raids, something the training I had didn’t.
However, I’m not glad that we terrorized those women and children. No one should be, but Chicken Hawks sure are cool with it.
But, no matter how much planning on training you get, you should always plan to fail, which is something we didn’t get much of in training.
Another Training Failure
One difficult Army stint of mine was getting attached to an Army Reserve unit when I got called back into the Army. After telling so many prospects in my time of being an Army Recruiter that the Army Reserve had no combat units, I end up in the one combat unit in existence, the 100/442nd Infantry. No one ever told me about that unit!
The unit spent some time at Ft. Hood training for its deployment to do some “train like we fight.” One exercise was an assault on urban terrain at a MOUT site.
During this assault, my squad advanced. I felt we were too clumped together. One thing I’ve always worried about encountering was explosives – grenades, mines, rpg’s, etc. We advanced to a car for cover. Then more soldiers advanced to that same cover.
Soon, there were about 10 of us hiding behind a car under enemy fire.
My leadership’s ego was huge. There was no way they were going to listen to what I had to say at that moment. However, the trainers should’ve just had us all “killed” at that moment. I don’t know if it had been brought up in any AAR’s (after action reviews), but I sure hope it was.
Luckily, though, my deployment with that unit was baby cakes (at least combat wise) compared to my first deployment.
Smaller Rooms and Hallways
One would’ve thought that we would’ve received more intelligence stateside about the houses and buildings in Iraq before my unit deployed. Perhaps we did, but that information never made it down to me. We had already been in Afghanistan for a while before I went to Iraq as well. I don’t know too much about the urban similarities, but I figure they can’t be too far off.
After being in the Middle East for more than a day, the military should’ve immediately began building mock sites at the ranges on U.S. military bases. But no, I had to have all of my cool-guy gear instead.
If you’ve been in the Army for more than a day, you know communication is one of its failures.
Walls
One of the worst experiences I had on my first deployment was after a raid. The raid turned out OK, but we had one issue in our platoon – we had some trouble scaling walls. It turns out we did not train like we fight!
We planned to enter a house targeted by the U.S. government by entering a neighboring house (it was 2 houses down, I believe) and then get into the target house by climbing over the walls between the houses. It seemed like an OK plan.
However, scaling the walls was difficult for most of us, as we weren’t use to climbing walls in full battle-rattle, plus carrying breaching gear. The battering ram, hooligan tool, and other equipment made our approach on the house slow and sloppy. I’m pretty sure any element of surprise we had was thrown out the window!
When we got back to our forward operating base, FOB Patriot, my platoon leader was angry! He made us practice climbing over walls for a while in full battle rattle. This, of course, was a little difficult for a lot of us, since we hadn’t trained in this prior.
My biggest concern every time I jumped off the wall was for my knees. The M249 SAW, body armor with SAPI plates, 800 rounds of 5.56mm, and all the other weight on my body coming down on my knees over and over again started to have me worry. Luckily, to this day, my knees haven’t failed me yet!
Training After Deployment
After we came back from Mosul, we got new soldiers in our unit. When we got around to training them, we started with tape drills…just like the ones I did before I deployed. This “train like we fight” was irritating to me because that’s not how things were in Iraq.
Before those tape drills, somehow, my name got put into an Army Recruiter list. I had told my First Sergeant that I didn’t want to go to recruiting. He tried to convince me, but there was no selling me on it. I don’t care what people do with their lives, and I surely didn’t want to try to convince people to join the Army.
Ironically, shortly after those tape drills, I ended up Department of the Army (DA) selected to be a recruiter. I felt I was left to either be doing the seemingly-no-experience training and possibly get stop-lossed, or go on a recruiting tour.
I made the huge mistake of choosing recruiting.
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