Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [154]
Following Major Kennedy’s remarks, the team leaders and their assistants receive a series of briefings from cadre serving as the forward operating base intelligence, supply, and communications officers. Then it’s back to the team huts for more planning and preparation.
Late afternoon on day twelve of Phase IV, 915 and the other teams leave the Rowe Training Facility on a three-day mission-readiness exercise. This is a short field exercise designed to develop and rehearse their standard operating procedures and to brush up on their tactical movement as a team. They’ll also conduct mission-specific rehearsals for Robin Sage. The exercise begins with an equipment jump. The heavily laden teams are trucked to the Camp Mackall Army Airfield, where they board C-130s and are dropped into nearby Luzon Drop Zone. Once on the DZ, 915 gathers at the rally point and patrols off the DZ to their assigned linkup point. There they’re met by their cadre truck, one of the large four-by-four trucks that support the training. Nine-one-five piles into the back of the truck and the canvas flaps are pulled tight. They are then driven all over the back roads of Camp Mackall. The drill is for them to estimate their speed and direction of travel without visual reference. In the back of the big truck, the members of 915 huddle around their maps and try to track their movements with penlight and compass. Shortly after midnight, the men are dropped at their training area, surprisingly not too far from where their back-of-the-truck navigation said that they would be.
They are up well before dawn conducting preplanned cross-training, beginning with combat first aid. Most student ODAs in Class 2-05, like 915, have only one medic. Sergeant Andrew “Doc” Kohl drills his teammates in combat casualty care, including assessment of the victim, controlling bleeding with tourniquets and bandages, splinting, CPR, and giving IVs. The training is much like the trauma lanes in the combat medic training, but without the makeup and fake blood.
“Get a system of assessment and treatment in your mind and follow it each time you work with a casualty,” Doc Kohl tells his teammates. “Do it the same way each time.”
After medical training, the 18 Echos run the team through some comm drills. They train on the PRC-119, the PSC-5, and the PRC-148 MBITR radios, all radios they will take with them into Pineland, and on the KL-43, a small keypad used to send a text message when a toughbook computer is not available. Specialists David Altman and Justin Keller serve as primary trainers and drill their teammates on each radio—how to set in the frequency, adjust the power setting, and transmit. After the commo training, Sergeants Aaron Dunn and Daniel Barstow, the team engineers, hold a class on demolitions using dummy charges, det cord, and blasting caps, but with real time fuse and real time-fuse calculations. They cover circular and linear charges, charge placement, knot tying with det cord, the dual priming of charges, and the safety considerations associated with nonelectric firing assemblies. They set up demo training lanes, so each man can set up a charge and dual prime it. Then the weapons sergeants, Baker, Costa, and Kendall, hold a quick familiarization on the M240 and SAW machine guns, and the optimum placement of these weapons systems. They also inspect their teammates’ personal M4 cleaning kits. Where they’re deficient, they provide their teammates with spares.
Sergeant Blackman stops by late morning to see how they’re doing. He gives them a short, informal class on linkup procedures for Robin Sage, along with some ideas to get them thinking about near and far recognition signals in a rural setting. He watches his team’s training for a short while, then leaves without comment. These cross-training drills serve two purposes. The first is