Photo By Gunnery Sgt. Tyler Hlavac | Groups of U.S. Marines and Caribbean soldiers and police clash during riot control...... read more read more
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ST. JOHN’S, Antigua and Barbuda – When the rioters first hit the defender’s lines, there is a brief moment of disorder and confusion as dozens of screaming protestors throw bottles, kicks, punches and taunts at the defenders. The defenders step back, quickly reorganize their lines and begin to slowly move forward, pushing the aggressors back with shields, batons and oleoresin capsicum spray. The confrontation is loud, messy, aggressive, chaotic and over within minutes as the defenders snatch up the riot leader, bringing an end to the hostilities.
The riot is simply training for the U.S. and Caribbean service members and police assembled at the Antigua and Barbuda Royal Police Force’s training school, but it’s a subject the participants could easily find themselves tested on in the near future.
The training began in the morning with basic instruction for the students on how to handle a riot. The students spent the early part of the day practicing formations, learning commands and learning how to use riot shields effectively. Monitoring the training were military police from Military Police Company’s A and B, Headquarters and Service Battalion, 4th Marine Logistics Group who had spent the previous days teaching the students such subjects as hand-to-hand combat and the use of non-lethal weapons, such as tasers and batons.
The bulk of the training concentrated around perfecting formations, which are the lifeblood of defenders during a riot. The majority of the formations revolved around using riot shields similar to the Spartan style of defense popularized in the movie “300”, where a group forms a line of shields and are able to push back an even a larger group of enemies.
After getting the basics down, the students then suited up in full riot gear, including face shields, flak jackets, Kevlar helmets, riots shields and thick pads to protect their legs. The defenders then faced off against their fellow students posing as rioters. The groups took turns each as rioters and defenders and spent the day clashing with each other, with each new group of rioters getting more serious about their role.
The climax of the training occurred when the rioters and defenders took up their positions in what would be the last scenarios of the training. Eager to make the training more realistic, Cpl. Wilson Sylvain, a SWAT team member from Haiti, volunteered to lead the rioters.
Drawing upon his past experiences, Sylvain quickly organized his fellow students-turned-protestors and the training began to take on a more serious tone as the protestors, now organized, began to heavily taunt and antagonize the defenders.
Chanting ‘Pigs go home!”, stomping and clapping in unison and throwing packages of Meals, Ready-to-Eat at the defenders, the rioters were prepared to go all out as the training began to wind down.
Faced with a surprising level of intensity from the rioters, defender leader Lance Cpl. Von Richcreek, a squad automatic weapon gunner with Company I, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment and Nashville, Tenn., native, organized his defenders into solid lines. He then led his defenders towards the rioters, with the defenders grunting loudly in unison at each step in an attempt to demoralize the rioters.
The two groups quickly met and hostilities started slowly with a few rioters throwing punches and kicks at the defender shields, which quickly escalated with both groups in an all out brawl with each other, with cries of “Hold the line!”, coming from the defenders.
The rioters broke contact after a few minutes and withdrew in an attempt to regroup. The defenders quickly regrouped themselves and now realized who their main target was.
“The man in the brown shirt! He’s in charge!” shouted Richcreek, in an attempt to shut the rioters down permanently. Several defenders made a grab for Sylvain, who quickly realized he was now the main target and broke free and sprinted behind other rioters for cover. Sylvain only bought himself a few minutes as the defenders made one last aggressive push forward, utilizing a liberal dose of mock OC spray to chase away enough rioters to snatch up Sylvain and bring the riot, and the training, to a close.
After the training, Sylvain, speaking through an interpreter, explained that the training was very close to the real thing.
“This is what the people do during a riot. They will throw bottles, stones, tree stumps or whatever they can get their hands on. The techniques we used today are similar to what we use back home and the dangers today are also similar.”
Many of the students gained a sense of camaraderie from the training as well as preparation for the future.
“People say, man this is the Caribbean it can never happen here…but it can,” said Royal Barbados Police Force Constable Richard Walkes. “It (the training) builds bonds and it’s nice to have someone in another country you can correspond with if you go there…and you don’t have to think twice, you know their level of training.”
Despite the level of seriousness involved the training, there was an element of fun for the students involved.
“It’s really chaotic, you have to watch your guys and watch the mob… it’s a whole lot of input at once,” said Richcreek, describing his experience as defender leader. “It’s nice when you call a command, like ‘snatch team up’ and they grab up a guy.”
When asked whose group performed better, Richcreek, Richcreek unhesitantly named his group as the best performers.
“I didn’t expect the rioters to get that into it, at one point a guy slammed into me and I had to beat him down,” said Richcreek. “However we all pulled together despite the language barrier and we definitely won.”
The training was part of exercise Tradewinds 2011. Tradewinds is a joint-combined, interagency exercise involving U.S. personnel from the Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard, Joint-interagency Task Force-South, Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation along with forces from: Antigua and Barbuda (host nation), Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Colombia, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Suriname, Trinidad-Tobago.
| Date Taken: | 03.06.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 03.07.2011 11:50 |
| Story ID: | 66623 |
| Location: | ST. JOHN'S, AG |
| Web Views: | 300 |
| Downloads: | 3 |
This work, Riot Games: Richcreek vs. Sylvain, by GySgt Tyler Hlavac, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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