29 August 2007

BOLCII Day 18: Shooting house

0550 PT lead by LT Monique Miles. Upper body circuit training in the sawdust pit. We did it in 4-man teams. LT James, LT Grams, LT Boudrou and myself. 15/10 partner resisted P/Us, 10/8/6 pull up bars, 20/15/10 dips. 50 overhead arms claps/50 cherry pickers, 2 min bear crawl, 2 min wheel barrow carry. We completed (2) complete circuits. There was 20’ rope that another cadre said was shut down so we did more P/Us or S/Us. There is a reasonable PT equipment setup for a good work up with a little planning.

Off to showers and uniform for the day then to chow, as we get in line it becomes very apparent that food service ran had out of food, not cool considering there was half of 3rd yet to go through. We made due with some odds and ends.

After loaded 40 rounds blanks it was on the bus at 0820 for Booker range. The army has some very nice shooting houses setup there included live fire with overhead view, a three story sim-munition concrete house complete with plywood door and windows for breaching and trap doors between the floors. There is also a plywood city called “The wild, wild west.” They also have a complex underground tunnel training system that the IOBC guys will get to do.

First off the cadre demonstrated clearing a glass house (just engineer tape on the ground) then SSG Butler and SSG Vega took 3rd and part of 2nd off to the shade while 1st and the rest of 2nd baked in the sun for practice (did I mention our cadre is the best?) with 4-man stacks to clear a corner and middle wall door rooms. It was great training, learning how to “flow” into a situation, never stopping and trust your teammates to do their part and interchanging roles from situation to situation.

It was then time for a tasty MRE and then some time at “the wild, wild west” w/SSG Butler showing how to cross a liner danger area in a Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUNT) environment then off to see actual footage or a 4-man Ranger team clearing the same live shooting house we would be working. –It would take months of working together as a team to achieve their level of flow but it was cool to watch. It was then off to the 3-story house for stair clearing and finally we got our turn at the live round shooting house (just dry fire for us today) and we pretty much worked on our own in 4 person teams, that was a lot of fun practicing.

Oh yeah the other highlight of the day was they decided to pump out the latrine at the range today for about 4 hours the whole range was covered in a heavy pungent odor of well… you can guess!
LT Fields has started video taping segments of our training for a class DVD, he interviewed the latrine cleaning crew today… the DVD will probably turn out to be a Michael Moore style documentary of BOLCII -Ha!


Back in the FOB it was rest and refit for tomorrow enjoy another MRE while C Co got hot chow (yeah, they get TWO hot meals a day and D Co only gets one!) and read a few academic papers for an upcoming discussion. http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2752865 and http://nationaljournal.com/njcover2.htm

It will be a long couple of days with a night mission so I am going to wrap this up.

2 comments:

Joe Gentry said...

Hey my buddy 2LT Jonathan Diaz from Fresno State is in D/CO. Do you know him? I am enjoying the blog updates. Keep up the good work.

LT Gentry

networker2000 said...

Hi Joe,

I am sorry; I have not run across your buddy LT Diaz. I am in 3rd PLT and due to our training schedules we don’t get to meet very many LTs from other PLTs. -I will definitely keep an eye out for him. Thanks for reading my blog, I hope it will be of good use to you!

LT Perez