Confessions of an Airborne Dedicated Individual Combat Killer (ADICK) - Part 7

Just Pretend the Trees Are the Enemy

I think it was Konstantin Jirecek who said "we have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing." This is about as apt a description as I can think of for Airborne training operations as I can think of, save maybe for something my drill sergeant said in Basic to us dumb privates: "Life is garbage. Embrace the suck." Wise words. That first quote, though, basically sums up the training environment of the Airborne Corps, at least as far as my unit was concerned.

You have to understand that combat skills are just like any other trainable skill. You learn through repetition and practice, and you maintain your skills through repetition and practice. A soldier can train and train until their combat skills become motor reflexes, jumping into use without conscious thought, but ultimately if he doesn't continue to train, those skills will degrade over time. So it should come as no surprise that the Airborne Corps trains pretty constantly, both to maintain combat skill levels and airborne proficiency. We're supposed to be America's first-responder fighting force, ready to go anywhere, any time, at a moment; naturally, we have to train often to maintain that combat readiness.

What is surprising, though, is the utter lack of funding for meaningful training. The unit can put a training event on the calendar, but unless that training has some sort of substance to it, it's basically worthless. Without breaching opsec too terribly much, that's what a large majority of our training exercises consisted of. We were scouts, so our job was to conduct forward reconnaissance and report back about target objectives. Well, that's all fine and dandy, and I got a ton of training driving around to places and learning how to camouflage the hell out of my truck. Even learned how to work an Improved Target Acquisition System (ITAS) mounted on top of the truck to a TOW-missile tube. What I didn't do a whole lot of was observe the enemy.

The only time we ever got to deal with simulated enemy combatants was when we did our training rotations at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Ft. Polk, Louisiana (more on that slice of humid hell in a later episode). Otherwise, we trained at Ft. Bragg and a couple other no-name places (at least while I was there), and our training consisted of driving down dirt roads to emplace our trucks in the woods behind trees. After that was done, which was where I learned my sweet camouflaging skills, we stayed in place for a couple of days, watching not a damn thing. Seriously. We never had the manpower or funding to call in another unit from the 82nd to play the opposing force (opfor), so we got to pretend there were things walking along the firebreaks. We did a force-on-force training drill with blanks within the unit once that I can recall. Otherwise, we got to watch trees for 36-72 hours and pretend they were the enemy.

I know what you might be thinking: "well, emplacing in a hide sight and learning how to operate your equipment is good and necessary training!" Yeah, you're right. You know what else is necessary training for a reconnaissance scout? Reporting enemy activity in real-time based on observation of that enemy. I can't tell you how many times I had to make up something to report to the lieutenant so that he could send up a situation report to the troop commander. It was asinine. If the standard is supposed to be training how you fight, 95% of our training exercises fell woefully short. Rather than being armed reconnaissance missions, they were glorified off-roading trips with mounted weaponry.

Join the Army as a cavalry scout, they said. It'll be great, they said. You'll do really awesome, realistic training, they said.

Andrei Chira is a vaper, voluntaryist, and all-around cool dude. Formerly a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, he now spends his time between working at VapEscape in Montgomery County, Alabama, contributing to Seeds of Liberty on Facebook and Steemit, and expanding his understanding of...well, everything, with an eye on obtaining a law degree in the future.