Photo By Sgt. Mike MacLeod | Two paratroopers armed with M249 squad automatic weapons move into position to provide...... read more read more
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It's Saturday night, the height of the weekend, and Fayetteville-area cowpokes are line-dancing down at the Cadillac Ranch on Bragg Boulevard. "Two and a Half Men" is on the tube and "Thor" in 3D has audiences at the mall cinema cross-eyed happy.
Google-earth yourself high above the city lights, those arteries of bustle fanning out from the city to the Army's Fort Bragg, where the lights narrow to vessels servicing the staff buildings, motor pools and barracks, petering to mere capillaries as they reach out toward the training ranges, to the heavily-timbered northern training area with its ticks and mosquitoes and cottonmouths, where there are no lights at all.
There we find a young lieutenant dressed not much like a soldier, more like an insurgent in fact, hunting the woods, checking all those likely places used by the first eight platoons as patrol bases before attacking his mortar bunker.
At last he finds fresh boot tracks cutting a sandy road, and he tracks them to Hell's Half Acre, a thick, miserable cove of woods that only an infantryman could love. There he discovers the patrol base of the ninth and last platoon of 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment to enter his training “lane.” He is impressed by their initiative and suspects they may be worthy adversaries. Satisfied, he returns to his men, an insurgency of six, and prepares to light up his attackers with a thousand rounds of dummy ammunition.
“Deliberate raid on a reinforced enemy compound with mined-wire obstacles, multiple enemies with bunkers, and indirect fire capabilities” is how the attacking platoon leader, 1st Lt. Daniel Loeffer, describes the night's mission. Saturday night for a paratrooper, good times.
***
The former enlisted soldier and his 38 paratroopers comprised the final platoon to be evaluated in a complex four-day training and testing exercise short-handed as “platoon ex-eval.” The exercise is designed to ready the battalion's platoons for a short-notice mission: by June 1, they will add combat strength to the brigade currently serving as the nation's “911 troops” of the Global Response Force.
According to Col. Mark L. Stock who commands the battalion's parent organization, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, the unit was already on a back-to-the-basics training plan when it was called up.
“We are building from a unit that is redeployed and regaining our proficiency in a number of areas, but primarily in the combined-arms maneuver – combined-arms tasks we have not been executing for quite a while,” said Stock, who once commanded the battalion's twin, 2-504.
To meet the June 1 goal, the training schedule for 1-504 was accelerated. In the short term, for line soldiers like Pfc. Nicholas Farrell, Loeffler's radioman, that means a weekend in the woods testing and truing basic soldiering skills.
“Everybody knew coming into this, we were going to suffer a little bit,” said the Gadsden, Ala., native. “Whereas it may not be the ideal thing to be doing right now on a Saturday night, deep down, we love it.”
In fact, to take part in the platoon evaluations, Farrell had returned early from Alabama where he was visiting his hospitalized mother. She had been injured in the same tornado-spawning storm system that ripped across the southern border of Fort Bragg in mid-April.
“For me, the mission against the mortar site was hectic,” said Farrell. “I wasn't sure what to do at first, but I just stuck with the platoon leader and just did what I was taught and it worked out.
“Overall, the training has been doing me a lot of good, and I think it's definitely been doing a lot for the team leaders, the squad leaders and their 'Joes.'”
His platoon leader, Loeffler, agreed.
“The ex-evals in general have been fantastic,” said the four-time-deployed paratrooper. “The last few days have replicated a lot of stuff that I have personally experienced in-country in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Particularly at the platoon level, units must be able to fight organically, as that's what recent battlefields have demanded, he said.
The battalion's hands-on commander, Lt. Col. Rob Salome, a former Ranger instructor, was intimately involved with the design of the ex-evals.
“All of the objectives are real houses with opposing forces,” explained Salome. “Platoons won't know their next target unless they do good sensitive-site exploitation on an objective and do tactical questioning of the insurgents.”
Information from a farmhouse captured in the morning will lead to another farmhouse that night, which will lead to a meeting with the mayor of a village the following morning. As it turns out, the mayor will say that his village has been plagued by continual attack by a mortar ...
There is more after the mortar raid, including a day of complex live-fire exercises that include sweeping a marketplace, chasing a fleeing insurgent, and clearing a large building while searching for a weapons cache; a simulated four-mile casualty evacuation on foot; and the final event, a timed marksmanship challenge, he said.
“It is a stress shoot after three days of minimal rest. What does accurate fire look like after three days of combat operations?”
***
There are lighter moments: a platoon leader bedding down for the night with a cottonmouth water moccasin already coiled in his hooch; a medic removing a tick from a paratrooper's nether regions with a multi-tool pliers; the village mayor insisting on holding hands as he strolls through his village with a red-faced platoon leader. It's a cultural thing.
The beauty of the training is that each lane has its unique challenges, so that, while platoons see general improvements on basic solder tasks and command-and-control, one lane doesn't necessarily prepare them to meet the challenges of the next, according to 1-504 operations officer, Maj. Bradley Boyd, who observed much of the training.
Back at the mortar bunker, the officer in charge said that, over the course of the training event, he watched platoons realize that they really needed to focus on the basics.
“It all comes back to the fundamentals,” said 1st Lt. Paul Park, executive officer of Company B.
“You're not necessarily going to be breaching a mined-wire obstacle going into a trench clearing in the current fight we're in right now,” said the Ranger-tabbed paratrooper from Riverside, Calif. “However, this exercise does stress the importance of how the fundamentals are important to the more advanced tactics on deployments. It sharpens the basic soldiering skills and makes platoons realize the importance of going to the field to practice the little things that platoons often overlook to facilitate its success.”
Even on a Saturday night?
“Well, yeah.”
Engineers attached to Lieutenant Loeffler's 3rd Platoon breeched the concertina wire in the southwest and stormed the trench, losing 15 soldiers in the process to enemy fire, buried mines, booby traps and a suicide bomber. The attack morphed into a mass-casualty evacuation. An earlier platoon had lost 25, but still, his paratroopers were displeased.
“We've been riding it pretty high over the past two days – pretty successful so far – but hey, we are going to re-cock,” said Loeffler. “Bottom line: we knew this was going to be pretty rough going in. There's no doubt in my mind that, by the end of tomorrow, we'll all be smiling again.”
Third Platoon finished the platoon evaluation exercise on a Monday morning and then continued on with the workweek as usual. It was a long weekend of training, but well worth it. Who needs Two and a Half Men when you have 39 hard-charging paratroopers? Besides, they were pretty sure they were the best platoon in the battalion, if not the entire Army.
| Date Taken: | 05.24.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 05.26.2011 19:08 |
| Story ID: | 71168 |
| Location: | FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 345 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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