Scouts face worst-case scenario: You’ve been found. Now what?

Photo By Brandon Honig | Scouts with the Cal Guard's 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment, break contact with enemy "guerrillas" from the 578th Brigade Engineer Battalion on June 11 during their two-week annual training period at Camp Roberts, Calif.  

CAMP ROBERTS, CA, UNITED STATES

06.13.2015

Story by Brandon Honig 

California National Guard Primary   

CAMP ROBERTS, Calif. - You’ve been lying in a hole for days. It’s your turn to get 30 minutes sleep, so you roll over, using every last inch of space. Within moments, you get an elbow in the back — a teammate alerting you someone’s coming.

This is the “oh no” moment — the moment scouts hope never comes.

“He’s 10 meters out. You know he sees you, and he knows you see him,” Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Nelan said to a scout platoon from Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment, on June 11 in the dry yellow hills of Camp Roberts, California. “What do you do now?”

Nelan didn’t bother explaining to these troops what they already knew: These types of missions take place behind enemy lines, where scouts are outnumbered, with no hope for immediate support if discovered.

“Seconds matter at this moment,” he said. “The ‘blowout’ is what’s going to save your life.”

A good three-person team’s surveillance site is virtually undetectable, which is why troops practice facing an enemy only 10 meters away: From any real distance, their location should blend perfectly with the surroundings.

“The guy on glass” — the one looking through his scope or binoculars — “engages the contact. Bang, bang, bang,” Nelan said. “The guy [taking] notes blows the claymore [mines] and throws the smoke grenades, and the guy [who was] on rest does the blowout — throws the nets and branches off, and tosses the ruck[sacks] out behind him."

“Then, whoever’s on rest, grab a ruck — it doesn’t matter whose — get to cover, and start firing,” he continued. “It doesn’t sound too complicated, but [contact] always comes when you least expect it.”

The scouts’ hidden lair during their missions is 3 to 4 feet deep and just long and wide enough to accommodate three soldiers. The trench is dug a little deeper on the edges to handle their waste. All the dirt is carried off in duffel bags at least 100 meters from the surveillance site, where it is spread around to blend with its surroundings.

Branches are measured and cut to fit the surveillance site, then stacked over the dug-out. Camouflage nets go over the branches, then foliage is placed on the nets. The process takes six soldiers five to six hours, working in complete darkness and complete silence.

The 1-184th scout platoon had been inserted to this location on Camp Roberts via CH-47 Chinook helicopter the previous night around 10 p.m., when they set up two three-man surveillance sites on opposite hills overlooking a road. The spot was on a suspected smuggling route for weapons and military advisers on their way into the fictional country of Atropia from neighboring Donovia.

The movement the 1-184th was looking for began at daybreak.

“We saw vehicles and weapons traveling down this road beginning at 0515, and reports of additional activity came in continually throughout the day,” said 1st Lt. Stephen Strickland of the 1-184th. “We monitored patterns of movement, equipment, uniforms, times, number of people, any information we could gather.”

In the late afternoon, three members of Delta Company, 578th Brigade Engineer Battalion, who were dressed as guerrillas, walked down a road near the fictional border of Atropia and Donovia, where they happened upon the 1-184th scouts’ position. (For the purpose of this portion of the exercise, the scouts positioned themselves unusually near the road, and they did not fully conceal themselves.)

The guerrillas approached at a normal walking pace, and then suddenly contact was made — it was the I-see-you-and-you-see-me moment.

The soldier on glass fired first, popping off blank rounds repeatedly while the soldier on notes mimicked setting off claymore mines and throwing smoke grenades before training his weapon on the enemies. The soldier on rest leapt into action, throwing off the notional camo-nets and tossing three heavy rucksacks to the rear, then sprinted to the treeline, grabbing a ruck on the way, and turned to fire.

Once he began firing, the notes soldier jumped up and found his way to cover, where he turned to fire, and was followed by the glass soldier, each finding his way to a strategic point that would enable his teammates to move under the cover of his fire.

No words were spoken or shouted — the soldiers just listened for each other’s M4 carbines.

“At any point, anyone can go. If two go at the same time, that’s fine, as long as someone is covering you,” Nelan said. “So pay attention to the sound of each other’s fire to know if it’s OK to go. ... The point of this is to be unpredictable.”

The Atropia-Donovia border is currently an area of secondary concern for the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, the higher headquarters for the 1-184th and the 578th, which has been focused on another military confrontation during its two-week annual training period this June.

“The 79th IBCT is involved in a command post exercise focused on a more traditional battle, supporting Atropia against Ariana,” said a chief warrant officer for the 79th’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company, who organized this portion of the scouts’ training and led the guerrilla role-players. “The Donovians saw that the 79th is busy with Ariana, so they’re pushing arms and military advisers to a guerrilla group in Atropia in hopes of destabilizing Atropia.”

In addition to putting the 1-184th to the test during this annual training period at Camp Roberts, the Donovian smugglers and guerrillas are performing this opposition-force mission to train scouts and snipers from the Cal Guard’s 1st Battalion, 160th Infantry Regiment; 1st Battalion, 185th Armor Regiment; and 1st Squadron, 18th Cavalry Regiment.

“This training is so important because we need accurate intelligence for our brothers-in-arms,” Nelan said. “If we fail at this mission, lives are lost. It’s that simple. And if we do our job right, we can save lives.”

The value of the information gathered by scouts makes the specialty appealing to many soldiers, but both the danger and the conditions associated with their missions turn many away.

“Once you’re in the surveillance site, you can’t leave until the mission is complete, which could be a five-day position,” Nelan said. “You can’t get up to stretch or move around, and at most you get to sleep one hour at a time.”

The three-person team rotates through the three positions — glass, notes and rest — typically at intervals closer to 30 minutes. Nelan said the intervals don’t last longer because it is “painful” to be on glass for long periods of time, constantly peering through your scope or binoculars.

The people who commit to the scout specialty and the danger and grit associated with its missions tend to be “type A personalities,” said Spc. Nicholas Maness, “smart, hard-working, aggressive guys.”

“[The missions] are physically and mentally demanding, but you know that going in,” said Maness, who has been a soldier for three years and a scout for four months. “I initially joined the infantry because I thought it would be challenging, but then I moved to the scouts, because I thought it would up the [intensity].”

So far, he said, being a scout has been the most challenging and most rewarding experience of his military career. And to hear him tell it, passing the time in that little hole doesn’t sound so tough.

“When you’re out there in a surveillance site, you’re very focused the whole time, so you don’t even think about [comfort or boredom],” he said. “You’re so focused on your task, you’re not thinking about much anything else.”

• Date Taken: 06.13.2015
• Date Posted: 06.13.2015 20:39
• Story ID: 166565
• Location: CAMP ROBERTS, CA, US