Army training, Sir!!

So, by popular demand, or by request by my mother (which ever one you want to believe) I am going to update my post to include some of the most intense and entertaining things I have done in the past 24 hours...or week or two, or month. Well, today I'll describe Close Quarters Combat training that I was involved in. CQC is a style of combat that is probably the most dangerous and most unlikely to happen during my deployment. I, being a mechanic, might be close enough to throw a wrench or a ball peen hammer at someone when I'm in close quarters combat. It is the style of combat when we are kicking down doors and running through rooms trying to rescue the princess or someone else of import. It is intense and demanding physically and mentally. We are constantly yelling out commands and communicating amongst one another.

Here in the picture you see a building with walls that are made for people like Gooby and maybe an umpa-lumpa. This is a "glass house", a house built by the three little pigs for the sole purpose of training in close quarters. The short walls are so that instructors can easily see and hear what the soldiers are doing in order to complete the mission at hand. That way the instructors can give us feedback on our movements as we crawl through our exercise and work out the kinks before we practice in more realistic environments. Eventually, we moved on to bigger and better houses, like ones with full sized walls, but were not good enough to practice with a house with a roof on it. The big bad wolf blew it's top of long ago and it hasn't been repaired.

The final house was made of bricks and we used live ammo (real bullets instead of yelling out "click, BANG BANG, click" to simulate switching off of safe, firing two rounds, and switching back to safe). It was cool. This house even had a system of security cameras that recorded our movements so that we could rate how hot we were on camera and also to see if we did our mission well.

Funny note: We were on our last room in the brick house. The targets were represented as posters on the walls of angry dudes with guns pointed at us and evil grimaces on their faces. Well, so there was this one dude that had the goofiest surprised look on his face and he was holding a sprite can in his hand. The point man on this particular room was so excited that he started to engage this poster as a hostile target. At the last moment he recognized his mistake, but it was too late. The trigger was already squeezed...squoze...squozed...squoshed...? So, in a last ditch effort to save the paper man he pulled his barrel away from the target and deflected his two shots. The bullets missed the man but hit directly into the sprite can leaving two huge holes in his aluminum can. I could see the paper sprite draining onto the floor and his surprised look on his face somehow seemed more realistic.

So, that is my update for today. I'll have more to follow. Stay tuned. Probably tomorrow. (yeah right, more like next month again)