Scouts out!

The view from the .50 Caliber while waiting for the rest of the Platoon to get back from a patrol. Definitely the best job to have on a fine Autumn day.

Loading up the Stryker for our final mission. This is our lead vehicle with the .50 Caliber on the right and the LRAS the big boxy thing to the left of it.

5th Platoon 'Attack Cats' looking cool. L-R: LTs Culver, Divito, Thomas, Mian, Smith, Condon, with Estep in the turret.

LT Vansyoc briefing his mission on the last night. LTs Smith and Shepard take notes.

I sit here at the end of another brutal 12 day week, looking back, glad that it’s done and simply amazed at the amount of information that I’ve crammed in my brain. Our instructors like to call it ‘drinking from the fire hose’ and the image that this phrase conjures up is entirely appropriate. Of course, once we’re done drinking from said fire hose, it often feels like we’re beaten with it; it’s amazing how much your body just aches after five days of running with body armor, weapon and gear, slamming into the ground, jumping across creeks, hitting your head on pointy pieces of vehicle, etc.

Anyway, in this week’s post, I’d like to give you, dearest reader, a little taste of what a scout mission is like. In our 5 days in the field, with rotating leadership, we planned, prepped and executed 8 scout missions. This left little time for sleep or recovery and it was pretty exhausting. Our days started at 5am and ended around 11pm which wouldn’t have been bad except we were sleeping in our Humvees (not as comfortable as the civilian version, especially with boxes of ammunition, rifles, machine guns, radios, everywhere that your feet could possibly go comfortably). On top of that, we had to pull guard all night, which, with only three of us in the Humvee, meant one hour up, two down, all night, all 5 days. Even more, it got down into the low 30s with a cold wind whipping down the road into our patrol base, so your face, torso, and hands absolutely froze while your legs were a toasty warm. It was unpleasant, and by the last night we were all hurting pretty badly. Of course, the last night we were out we had to do our one night mission of the week.

I’m going to go through the night mission for a few reasons. 1) All of our other missions were pretty ragged. We are all new to scouting and it didn’t help that SFC Maloy, our primary instructor, was liberal with the artillery simulators (loud fireworks that, well, simulate artillery fire). Each time one went off, the mission would be on hold while we pulled ‘wounded’ out of the hit Humvee, brought them to a clearing and called in a medical helicopter. Our last mission was therefore the culmination of all we’d learned on the previous missions. 2) This mission was at night, which is just cool. 3) We got to use Strykers for this mission, which was pretty awesome. And 4) we got to use lots of our cool scouting equipment, most notably the LRAS, a giant box with two handles sticking out of it. It can zoom up to 50x (or something like that) and use thermal sights. It’s a pretty amazing optic, and it’s a little like being able to see in the dark, but 50x times better than you would in the day.

The Platoon Leader for this mission was Todd Vansyoc, a National Guardsman from Iowa, and he received the mission around 4pm. The mission was to travel to and observe a village for signs of enemy presence. The village had been attacked and cleared earlier in the day by another ABOLC company, but we were going in to see if the enemy had come back or not. The mission was to begin at 10pm, and with sunset at around 7pm, it was going to be pitch dark. We were given 2 Strykers, one with the LRAS, and one Humvee and 12 hours to complete the mission. LT Vansyoc briefed the mission, assigned us to vehicles, made sure our weapons were prepped and we knew the route and mission.  We were to get within two kilometers of the village, then unload the majority of the platoon to sneak on foot to within eyesight and earshot of the village to see if we could see any enemy. At 9:30pm we headed out to test fire weapons and get on our way.

Now, this mission had been attempted by the other two scout Platoons each of the nights preceding ours. Neither of the Platoons had even reached the village, instead getting hit on the way and being forced to turn back with knocked out vehicles and casualties. Their mistake was taking a much shorter route, but one that passed close enough to the village for the enemy to hear the vehicles, at which point they attacked the scouts with all they had. We didn’t know this, but the PL correctly identified the short route as too dangerous and decided to send us the long way around. Going 15 kph this route took us almost an hour to negotiate and had far more turns to take, but we would be able to approach the village from as far out as we wanted without worrying about being heard or spotted. I was navigating the lead vehicle using night vision optics attached to my helmet (no mean feat considering our maps are terrible and there are no road signs, just dead reckoning and a little luck) and we inched forward on the road leading to village, waiting to crest a hill that I knew would be able to overlook the village. I wasn’t sure if it would be far enough away, so we took it nice and slow. Finally, we crested the hill, the vehicle commander, Kerry Mian, stopped the driver, and I crawled forward to look through the LRAS.

We were about 2 kilometers from the village as it turned out. From our perch on the hill, we could see every inch of the village and, when zoomed in to 50 power, the detail was incredible. It was a pitch dark night, two kilometers away and I could see the cigarettes dangling from the villager’s hands in the thermal image. I began scanning the village, noting everthing I was seeing and relaying it to LT Mian who was calling it up to LT Vansyoc who was filtering it for critical information and sending it up to the Troop Commander. With such a good view of the village, it was possible that we might be able to determine if there were enemy in the village without sending out people on foot who are decidedly NOT stealthy in the pitch dark.

The view was amazing. There were three ‘villagers’ loafing by one of the buildings, smoking and occasionally dancing to Arabic music that we could, incredibly, hear faintly drifting over the long distance (we later learned that sound travels farther in the cool night air). It was apparent that these guys hadn’t heard us sneak up and it felt vaguely voyeuristic but distinctly thrilling to be watching their every move from such a long distance. We watched them for almost an hour, but we saw no weapons or any sign they were an overt threat and we were getting ready to send the dismounts in to get a closer look when the Troop Commander called LT Vansyoc and told him that a curfew was in effect and that anyone seen out past midnight was assumed hostile. It had just passed midnight and our mission was accomplished. We could then call to follow on forces who would raid the village again, no doubt surprising the enemy who hadn’t realized that we were watching their smallest movement from a long distance. Mission complete, we headed home to sleep well.

I later talked to one of the guys who’d been in the village (they were soldiers from our support unit in the 16^th Cav) and said they were shocked that we’d been able to see them and that they hadn’t heard anything. When they’d gotten the radio call to come back to the patrol base they’d been surprised considering the amount of action that had occurred on the other nights. It was a proud moment for all of us, and indicative of the professionalism and skill we are developing as a platoon.

They won't forget the night the 5th Platoon 'Attack Cats' went stalking in the woods of Georgia.