thedrifter
08-09-09, 07:33 AM
Marines' training center mirrors Afghan dangers
BRIDGEPORT - Heavy clouds drifted in from the snow-traced peaks to the south. Thunder rumbled nearby and there was a peppering of fat raindrops. None of it distracted Chad Kaiser, 34, of Oregon City, Ore. He had driven nearly 800 miles to shoot at some U.S. Marines and his focus didn't waver.
Crouched behind a pine tree on a boulder-strewn point, he scanned a tree-covered hillside beyond the ravine in front of him through the scope of his AK-47.
"I got 'em," he told his partner, Randy Butler, who stood a few yards away with his own rifle. "Two of them just walked right out into the open."
He fired, the blasts from his gun echoing across the ravine. Faint pops of return fire rattled back in answer.
The shots were blanks. Kaiser and Butler, dressed as Afghan insurgents, are actually Portland-area police officers. But everything else about this training drill, played out in the 10,000-foot-high crags of the eastern Sierra Nevada, was as authentic as possible.
The Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, just northwest of Bridgeport, is where troops come to learn how to operate and communicate in rugged terrain similar to what they will encounter in the border regions of Afghanistan. And even though it is 400 miles and an environmental world away from the desert town of Twentynine Palms, the center is overseen by the Marine Air Ground Combat Training Center there.
Established in 1951 on 46,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land, the Mountain Warfare Training Center is the only Marine base in the country to offer this specialized training. A sister facility in nearby Hawthorne, Nev., is run by the Army and offers similar programs.
Such courses here are not required for American military personnel shipping out to Afghanistan. But Great Britain and the Netherlands send their Afghan-bound troops here for mandatory training. The Navy Seals, the FBI and other organizations also send personnel here to train.
Participants learn rock climbing and rappelling, swift-water stream crossing, cold-weather medicine, how to navigate steep terrain without making themselves vulnerable to attack, how to pack and handle a mule train and how to live off the land. Winter programs involve snowshoeing, skiing and ice climbing. Most importantly, the troops learn what it is like to live and maneuver at high altitude in a harsh environment.
By the end of the drill with the snipers, one of the soldiers in the battalion under fire would be "shot" in the leg and require medical evacuation by helicopter. The group would enlist the impromptu help of local tribesmen in carrying the wounded Marine and would also run into, and search, a mule train suspected of smuggling opium.
A few members of the unit would nearly take out the snipers.
Kaiser said he and Butler were tasked with harassing the Marines, "trying to make things as confusing as possible for them."
After several volleys of rifle fire, the two men, who use their vacation time to play the enemy here, moved out to a safer position. As it turned out, they nearly didn't get there.
"One of the squads pushed around and they were on us," Butler later told a group of evaluators at a day-end briefing. "It was everything we could do to get away from them."
That part of the operation went well. Other aspects were not so successful. But the whole point, officials said, is for the Marines to make mistakes here so they don't make them once they are deployed to Afghanistan.
"If you can operate and move in this environment, you can do it anywhere," said Maj. Urbano Cruz, 39, one of the coordinators of the day's exercise.
Tactical Lessons
Cruz has worked two stints at the training center, totaling 15 years. He said the instruction Marines receive here is sometimes as basic as learning how to climb a hill.
"You're not going to go straight up that hill," he said, looking at a nearby slope. Such a tactic, he said, would leave the Marines out of breath and vulnerable to the enemy. Instead, they are taught to plan a route using the contours of the environment, he said. They also have to know how to protect themselves by utilizing the high ground and avoiding getting trapped in a draw.
"In this terrain, you want to place watchers on the ridgelines. The enemy knows he wants you down in there," he said, pointing to the ravine dividing the snipers and the unit under attack.
Such tactics, said Capt. Dana Demer, 33, are often foreign to Marines. Because most of the force's training operations are in relatively flat locales, such as Twentynine Palms and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Marines tend to think in terms of left-right and forward-behind, he said.
"The one thing the training really opened up is that third dimension of what's above you," he said.
Demer, the training center's logistics officer, returned last November from a 10-month deployment to Afghanistan. He was in the mountainous Kunar Province in the southeast. Without the mountain training he received beforehand, he said, he might not have made it back.
"The training out here saved my life," Demer said. "One of my last firefights over there, I got pinned in a draw. Being able to read the terrain, looking at the high ground, seeing where the enemy might be, helped me get out of that area and get my Marines out of that area."
Pack Animals Key
Working now as a logistics officer at the Bridgeport center, Demer is using his experience to focus on the challenges of supplying troops in remote mountain locations. One type of training he wishes he had received before deploying was the mule-packing course.
"It's something you chuckle about and laugh about until you realize that there are some places on this earth that you're only going to get into with helicopters, when the weather is reliable, or with donkeys," he said. "We used donkeys on a number of occasions. Since we didn't have that training, we had to bring local handlers with us who we really didn't trust."
Demer did his pre-deployment training at the Army's Hawthorne facility. Unlike the Bridgeport center, there is no pack-animal course there.
Anthony Parkhurst, a retired Marine master sergeant, runs the pack-animal training. The course, he said, grew out of the Russian-Afghan war. The Russian Army kept breaking the supply lines from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The U.S. covertly provided training and sent mules to aid the mujahideen forces. Within a few years, all those mules had died, unable to handle elements and local diseases.
Now troops are trained in how to load and handle mules and donkeys here and procure the animals from local sources once they are in Afghanistan. The animals also are used to teach the Marines how to handle encounters with mule trains, particularly those that might be trafficking drugs.
The troops may have occasion to commandeer the animals.
how to use mules
At the day-end briefing, Sgt. John Freesehn said the encounter between the Marine unit and the mule train went well, but the troops failed to take advantage of an opportunity.
"They could have thrown the casualty onto a mule," rather than using six men and a sling stretcher to carry him to where a helicopter airlifted him from the mountain, Freesehn said. "If they have pack animals there, they might as well use them."
One more lesson to add to a long list.
It's those lessons that make the training center indispensable, said Col. Norm Cooling, 44, who oversees the base. With the increased effort in Afghanistan, he said, "I think it will become increasingly valuable."
Limited capacity has forced the center to actually turn troops away in recent months, Cooling said. His challenge right now is trying to coordinate better schedules that will allow Marines to fit both mountain and desert training into their tight schedules. He is also envisioning more cooperative efforts with the Army base in Hawthorne.
Cooling says his base can accommodate 1,800 troops. A recent joint operation with Hawthorne, dubbed Javelin Thrust, incorporated 4,000 personnel.
The bottom line is saving lives.
Kaiser, the sniper, said that's what keeps him coming back to lay in ambush for the Marines. He believes he is helping to save lives.
"That's why I take my vacation time to do it," Kaiser said. "If we can save one Marine from doing something differently in the field that he screwed up here in training, it makes it all worth it."
Reach Mark Muckenfuss at 951-368-9595 or mmuckenfuss@PE.com
Pix's
http://www.pe.com/multimedia/slideshow/2009/20090809_marine/
Video
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_N_marine09.47107a3.html
Ellie
BRIDGEPORT - Heavy clouds drifted in from the snow-traced peaks to the south. Thunder rumbled nearby and there was a peppering of fat raindrops. None of it distracted Chad Kaiser, 34, of Oregon City, Ore. He had driven nearly 800 miles to shoot at some U.S. Marines and his focus didn't waver.
Crouched behind a pine tree on a boulder-strewn point, he scanned a tree-covered hillside beyond the ravine in front of him through the scope of his AK-47.
"I got 'em," he told his partner, Randy Butler, who stood a few yards away with his own rifle. "Two of them just walked right out into the open."
He fired, the blasts from his gun echoing across the ravine. Faint pops of return fire rattled back in answer.
The shots were blanks. Kaiser and Butler, dressed as Afghan insurgents, are actually Portland-area police officers. But everything else about this training drill, played out in the 10,000-foot-high crags of the eastern Sierra Nevada, was as authentic as possible.
The Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, just northwest of Bridgeport, is where troops come to learn how to operate and communicate in rugged terrain similar to what they will encounter in the border regions of Afghanistan. And even though it is 400 miles and an environmental world away from the desert town of Twentynine Palms, the center is overseen by the Marine Air Ground Combat Training Center there.
Established in 1951 on 46,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land, the Mountain Warfare Training Center is the only Marine base in the country to offer this specialized training. A sister facility in nearby Hawthorne, Nev., is run by the Army and offers similar programs.
Such courses here are not required for American military personnel shipping out to Afghanistan. But Great Britain and the Netherlands send their Afghan-bound troops here for mandatory training. The Navy Seals, the FBI and other organizations also send personnel here to train.
Participants learn rock climbing and rappelling, swift-water stream crossing, cold-weather medicine, how to navigate steep terrain without making themselves vulnerable to attack, how to pack and handle a mule train and how to live off the land. Winter programs involve snowshoeing, skiing and ice climbing. Most importantly, the troops learn what it is like to live and maneuver at high altitude in a harsh environment.
By the end of the drill with the snipers, one of the soldiers in the battalion under fire would be "shot" in the leg and require medical evacuation by helicopter. The group would enlist the impromptu help of local tribesmen in carrying the wounded Marine and would also run into, and search, a mule train suspected of smuggling opium.
A few members of the unit would nearly take out the snipers.
Kaiser said he and Butler were tasked with harassing the Marines, "trying to make things as confusing as possible for them."
After several volleys of rifle fire, the two men, who use their vacation time to play the enemy here, moved out to a safer position. As it turned out, they nearly didn't get there.
"One of the squads pushed around and they were on us," Butler later told a group of evaluators at a day-end briefing. "It was everything we could do to get away from them."
That part of the operation went well. Other aspects were not so successful. But the whole point, officials said, is for the Marines to make mistakes here so they don't make them once they are deployed to Afghanistan.
"If you can operate and move in this environment, you can do it anywhere," said Maj. Urbano Cruz, 39, one of the coordinators of the day's exercise.
Tactical Lessons
Cruz has worked two stints at the training center, totaling 15 years. He said the instruction Marines receive here is sometimes as basic as learning how to climb a hill.
"You're not going to go straight up that hill," he said, looking at a nearby slope. Such a tactic, he said, would leave the Marines out of breath and vulnerable to the enemy. Instead, they are taught to plan a route using the contours of the environment, he said. They also have to know how to protect themselves by utilizing the high ground and avoiding getting trapped in a draw.
"In this terrain, you want to place watchers on the ridgelines. The enemy knows he wants you down in there," he said, pointing to the ravine dividing the snipers and the unit under attack.
Such tactics, said Capt. Dana Demer, 33, are often foreign to Marines. Because most of the force's training operations are in relatively flat locales, such as Twentynine Palms and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Marines tend to think in terms of left-right and forward-behind, he said.
"The one thing the training really opened up is that third dimension of what's above you," he said.
Demer, the training center's logistics officer, returned last November from a 10-month deployment to Afghanistan. He was in the mountainous Kunar Province in the southeast. Without the mountain training he received beforehand, he said, he might not have made it back.
"The training out here saved my life," Demer said. "One of my last firefights over there, I got pinned in a draw. Being able to read the terrain, looking at the high ground, seeing where the enemy might be, helped me get out of that area and get my Marines out of that area."
Pack Animals Key
Working now as a logistics officer at the Bridgeport center, Demer is using his experience to focus on the challenges of supplying troops in remote mountain locations. One type of training he wishes he had received before deploying was the mule-packing course.
"It's something you chuckle about and laugh about until you realize that there are some places on this earth that you're only going to get into with helicopters, when the weather is reliable, or with donkeys," he said. "We used donkeys on a number of occasions. Since we didn't have that training, we had to bring local handlers with us who we really didn't trust."
Demer did his pre-deployment training at the Army's Hawthorne facility. Unlike the Bridgeport center, there is no pack-animal course there.
Anthony Parkhurst, a retired Marine master sergeant, runs the pack-animal training. The course, he said, grew out of the Russian-Afghan war. The Russian Army kept breaking the supply lines from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The U.S. covertly provided training and sent mules to aid the mujahideen forces. Within a few years, all those mules had died, unable to handle elements and local diseases.
Now troops are trained in how to load and handle mules and donkeys here and procure the animals from local sources once they are in Afghanistan. The animals also are used to teach the Marines how to handle encounters with mule trains, particularly those that might be trafficking drugs.
The troops may have occasion to commandeer the animals.
how to use mules
At the day-end briefing, Sgt. John Freesehn said the encounter between the Marine unit and the mule train went well, but the troops failed to take advantage of an opportunity.
"They could have thrown the casualty onto a mule," rather than using six men and a sling stretcher to carry him to where a helicopter airlifted him from the mountain, Freesehn said. "If they have pack animals there, they might as well use them."
One more lesson to add to a long list.
It's those lessons that make the training center indispensable, said Col. Norm Cooling, 44, who oversees the base. With the increased effort in Afghanistan, he said, "I think it will become increasingly valuable."
Limited capacity has forced the center to actually turn troops away in recent months, Cooling said. His challenge right now is trying to coordinate better schedules that will allow Marines to fit both mountain and desert training into their tight schedules. He is also envisioning more cooperative efforts with the Army base in Hawthorne.
Cooling says his base can accommodate 1,800 troops. A recent joint operation with Hawthorne, dubbed Javelin Thrust, incorporated 4,000 personnel.
The bottom line is saving lives.
Kaiser, the sniper, said that's what keeps him coming back to lay in ambush for the Marines. He believes he is helping to save lives.
"That's why I take my vacation time to do it," Kaiser said. "If we can save one Marine from doing something differently in the field that he screwed up here in training, it makes it all worth it."
Reach Mark Muckenfuss at 951-368-9595 or mmuckenfuss@PE.com
Pix's
http://www.pe.com/multimedia/slideshow/2009/20090809_marine/
Video
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_N_marine09.47107a3.html
Ellie