Shaffer
08-23-02, 08:25 AM
While jets and helicopters roared through the valley below dropping ordinance, Wolfe and his team of Recon Marines sat on a 4,000-foot peak and relayed radio messages.
The Marines of 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 2d Recon Battalion had a lonely, but important role in CAX-9
“Communications is kind of the luck of the draw,” Wolfe said. “If you just happen to get on the right hill, and if you happen to throw up the right antenna and get the right freq at the right time of the day you could talk to China if you needed to. But sometimes you can’t talk 10 feet in front of you, so we spent most of the
TWENTYNINE PALMS, Ca. – The war isn’t over. For weeks Marines from Eastern North Carolina battled the heat and an unseen enemy as part of CAX-09, the Combined Arms Exercise in the high desert of California.
When the radio signal “EndEx” went out at noon on Thursday, a battalion of enemy forces had been eliminated by Marines from Camp Lejeune and Air Stations at Cherry Point and New River. But the final victory will be up to Marines who picked up where the battle left off when CAX-10 starts this week.
“CAX has changed a little bit,” said Lt. John Worsham, the S-2 for the Air Combat Element (ACE). “We used to do individual exercises, all self-contained, and now this year we have one large intel scenario, called the grand unified scenario.”
When the war started, a make-believe army made up of two battalions, with a third battalion in reserve, drove south and east onto Marine positions. The enemy’s goal was to capture the “port” of Twentynine Palms in the rear. When CAX-09 ended, a battalion in the north had been significantly beaten, but with CAX-10, the threat in the west remains.
The Marines of 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 2d Recon Battalion had a lonely, but important role in CAX-9
“Communications is kind of the luck of the draw,” Wolfe said. “If you just happen to get on the right hill, and if you happen to throw up the right antenna and get the right freq at the right time of the day you could talk to China if you needed to. But sometimes you can’t talk 10 feet in front of you, so we spent most of the
TWENTYNINE PALMS, Ca. – The war isn’t over. For weeks Marines from Eastern North Carolina battled the heat and an unseen enemy as part of CAX-09, the Combined Arms Exercise in the high desert of California.
When the radio signal “EndEx” went out at noon on Thursday, a battalion of enemy forces had been eliminated by Marines from Camp Lejeune and Air Stations at Cherry Point and New River. But the final victory will be up to Marines who picked up where the battle left off when CAX-10 starts this week.
“CAX has changed a little bit,” said Lt. John Worsham, the S-2 for the Air Combat Element (ACE). “We used to do individual exercises, all self-contained, and now this year we have one large intel scenario, called the grand unified scenario.”
When the war started, a make-believe army made up of two battalions, with a third battalion in reserve, drove south and east onto Marine positions. The enemy’s goal was to capture the “port” of Twentynine Palms in the rear. When CAX-09 ended, a battalion in the north had been significantly beaten, but with CAX-10, the threat in the west remains.