Not A Blog™

Well it only took ten weeks. Ten weeks to get me to where I’m finally doing work directly related to my deployment. I’ve finally started the Army’s combat training and it has kept me busy, tired, and busy.

Monday and Tuesday was the RFI: Rapid Fielding Initiative. That’s a fancy term for “getting gear issued to you”, and while I suppose it was rapid enough, it does make one wonder how long it took when it was just a regular, average-speed Fielding Initiative. That’s probably the sort of the thing they do when there’s no non-declared war going on, and the contractors can take even longer doing such complex tasks as “putting sets of gloves in bags” and “telling people to stand behind the line in front of the table”. But this is the Global War on Terror, and the Jihadists win when the Fielding Initiatives aren’t Rapid, so we were fed through at a pace slightly greater than leisurely.

Now that I’ve been moved in for a week, I can also speak to the condition of the facilities. We live in a three story barracks building, circa the Vietnam war era. It’s functional, but not very pretty. Generations of dirt, dust and insect husks have built up over the years covering the entire place with a permanent layer of grit. I’m on the second floor in a twelve person room with eight other people, and the entire floor has maybe fifty people sharing two bathrooms. It could be worse; a few weeks ago I was living in open bay barracks with fifty people in one room, and two of these sharing one larger head. Either way, they are definitely not nice accommodations, and I miss my privacy.

If there’s one good thing I can say about the barracks, it’s that they have wireless internet. It’s slow, and sometimes unavailable (especially in the evenings) when everyone’s trying to connect at the same time, but it’s there at least some of the time. I’ve noticed in my travels that as long as I have internet access and my laptop with me, my location doesn’t seem quite so remote. There’s no place like 127.0.0.1.

On Wednesday, we started our familiarization and qualification course for the HMMWV (or Humvee, as they’re more colloquially known). The first day was all bland classroom training. Not the most exciting stuff, but it has to be done.

Thursday we went through the HMMWV Egress Assistance Trainer, called the HEAT trainer, for short. (Yes, this means everyone is referring to “HMMWV Egress Assistance Trainer Trainer, but it sounds better than just saying “heat”). As seen in some of the photos, the HEAT trainer is basically a Humvee cabin mounted on a giant gimbal which allows it to rotate laterally. The purpose is to simulate roll-overs, which have increased dramatically with the increased use of up-armored Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s sounds quite simple: you climb inside this Humvee cabin and they flip it upside-down. Then you climb out. It turns out this is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Most people, myself included, discovered that it’s difficult to find your way around when you’re inside a small space like that and gravity is inverted. You wouldn’t think it would be a problem at all, but even little things threw me off.

For example: during the exercise, I was in the gunner’s position (the guy who sticks out of the roof). The gunner’s harness latch is between his legs, yet when I was flipped upside-down, my first instinct was to look down in the direction of gravity—which of course is up with respect to the inverted cabin. So I’m looking out the gunner’s hatch at the floor of the garage, wondering where the gunner’s latch went.

Besides that, the gunner is not actually strapped into a seat the way the rest of the passengers are, so they end up flailing arms and legs trying to grab on to something. Even if your teammates in the cabin grab you, you end up fighting them to try and keep yourself from falling out the hatch. The first time we were in the trainer, I landed hard on the guy in the back-right seat—and I mean hard. Almost the entire weight of my body slamming into him, pinning him to the door. I was flailing with my right arm trying to grab onto anything remotely handle-esque, and in the process strained my shoulder. Fortunately it was only sore for a few days.

The HEAT trainer was more for familiarization of an inverted Humvee cabin than anything else. As they told us many times, most roll-overs happen so fast and are so violent, you don’t even have time to blink before you realize you’re flying through the air. Although the trainer flipped over pretty quickly, it definitely didn’t whip you around like a real, high-speed roll-over would have done. All things considered, this made the HEAT trainer seem less like a real life simulation, and more like a dangerous amusement park ride.

I got to drive Thursday afternoon. We didn’t do anything crazy, just took it out on the roads and through the fields around the motor pool area. It was enough to get a feel for the vehicles. All of them were brand new, and the one I was driving had just over 200 miles on it. They also had working A/C, which was most welcome because we were doing all of this in full body armor.

Speaking of which, part of the RFI was receiving our Interceptor Body Armor (IBA). The full package consists of front and back kevlar pockets, with Small Arms Protection Insert (SAPI) plates. The SAPI plates are a ceramic composite which, when bracketed by the kevlar, can theoretically stop a 9mm round at point blank range. There are also two side kevlar pockets with plates, and additional kevlar that goes under the arms, a groin protector, a neck and chin piece, and deltoid/shoulder protectors. This entire ensemble weighs about 30 pounds altogether. Additionally, the kevlar helmet weighs three and a half pounds, and we were also wearing elbow pads, knee pads, gloves, and had sundry extras attached to the vest, such as medkits, seatbelt cutters, and multitools.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wear the entire thing all the time, often forgoing the most cumbersome pieces, notably the groin and shoulder protectors. Even so, I’m glad I spent all that time working out while I was down in Virginia Beach. It was only six weeks, but it was better than nothing. While I’m a little sore in the shoulders, and the IBA gets heavy towards the end of the day, it’s not really that bad. I could complain about not doing anything relevant to the mission for the first nine weeks of my deployment, but if I had been at home, I definitely wouldn’t have been working out, and subsequently would have been much worse off.

It’s interesting to note that the spacious interior of a Humvee is quickly diminished by all this stuff one carries around. I couldn’t help but think how crappy it must be to be obese and having to deal with all that extra weight and girth all the time. Anyway, everything we did in the heat trainer and the familiarization courses was done in full IBA. And this makes sense because we’d never go anywhere outside the wire without it.

Friday was the fun day where we actually got to take the things off road. I didn’t get as much time as I would have liked, unfortunately, but the drill instructors had probably fifty people (between two groups; ours is twenty five) and only six vehicles, and everyone had to get a shot. We met bright and early at a remote off-road training course and ate breakfast at the site. Fortunately it was a nice day, so we could enjoy the weather (as much as we could with the IBA on) while waiting for our turn. We went in teams of three to a truck (the truck commander being one of the drill sergeants), in convoys of six to keep everyone together, and in case any of the vehicles got stuck.

The new Humvees did fantastic in all kinds of rough terrain, and they ran very smooth—certainly much better than I was expecting. I’ve driven four-wheel drive in snow before, so I had no problems at all plowing through the sand and mud, and a few puddles deep enough to get some water in the cabin. The driver in front of me was rather cautious, so there were a couple of times when I waited for them to get way out in front so I could tackle the obstacles at a faster and perhaps slightly more reckless clip.

Finally on Saturday we had the formal testing for qualification to drive the Humvees around base. The qual is only good for the base we’re at, so when we get in theater, we’ll have to requalify there. Not that it’s a terribly big deal; nobody fails the qualification because a) it’s extremely easy and 2) they just want to move everyone through training as quickly as possible.

Obviously the rest of us want to move through training as quickly as possible, as well. Every day I’ve heard comments to the effect of, “I can’t wait to get out of here”. Yesterday someone said, “I just want to get this done, so we can go get the next stage done, so I can get over there and get this deployment over with.” That seems to be the universal sentiment right now. We all have to put up with the lousy living conditions, the weight of the IBA and being on lock-down (not allowed to drink alcohol, leave base, or have visitors), so the faster we can knock out the training we have to do, the better.

-Ted

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