Steel Horses- Learning to Ride the Abrams Tank

Here I am, another Saturday night spent crazy partying with all the other 20 somethings in the city of Columbus, GA. Oh wait. That’s not quite it… Let me rephrase. Here I am, another Saturday night spent packing and getting to bed as early as possible, not quite looking forward to the 0300 wake up for another long Sunday. Oh well, such is life? At least we’ll be doing something that can only be described as truly awesome: Abrams tank live fire. I’ll let you know how it goes afterward, but I can assure you it’ll be pretty darn cool.

As for this past week, we’ve been learning everything there is to know about tanks. We started with the driver’s position, learned the loader’s trade and spent the most time on the two most technical jobs, gunner and tank commander (TC). In the new M1A2 SEP (the Abrams version currently being operated by our Regular Army units) there are all sorts of computers, buttons, knobs, switches, touch screens, and sights that need to be identified and learned. In order to do this, we spent countless hours in and around the Abrams at the motor pool fiddling with the instruments and putting the tanks through their paces in order to prep them to fire. We were tested on loading the 50-70 lb. ammunition into the breech (in less than 7 seconds, no less) and various emergency procedures such as what to do in case of fire (slightly more complicated than simply running away screaming, tempting though that may be). Perhaps the easiest drill we had to learn was the rollover drill, which involved trying to turn the main gun to act as a tripod and, failing that, simply waiting upside down until someone comes and pries you out. Not a whole lot of fun, I imagine, but easy to remember.

Beyond the practical drills we spent another 20 or so hours in the AGTS (Advanced Gunnery Training System) or, the ultimate computer game. You and your partner (a fellow LT) spend hours in a very detailed M1A2 simulator running engagement after engagement. As both a gunner and TC, you fire multiple engagements in all sorts of scenarios dealing with all sorts of malfunctions, enemies, and munitions. By the last few iterations, the computer generated enemy was almost certainly wishing they’d stayed home. LT Matt Condon (my partner) and I were a lethal team, blasting troops, Soviet personnel carriers, Soviet tanks, and Soviet helicopters out of the sky with frightening regularity (thank goodness for the Cold War- nothing like a standardized enemy). But the Red e-Horde kept coming, thankfully in manageable twos and threes, and we scored an endless series of electronic victories for democracy. The final engagement was against an onrushing group of T-72 tanks, no doubt infuriated by the predictable, yet senseless demise of their digital comrades. Unfortunately, after this engagement both Matt and I realized we have a long way to go to be anywhere near as good as our instructors…

During all of this excitement and excellent training, there was an incident that surprised me to no end, but that very short story will wait until my triumphant (hopefully…) return from gunnery. Goodnight, and have a good weekend! Go Jags…

A Short Week and a Shorter Weekend

Sorry for the long delay!! I keep promising myself that I’ll be better at regular posting, but general exhaustion and procrastination generally combine to thwart even the best of my intentions. So, either way, I’ll spend my last few moments of this wonderful weekend (Jaguars AND Spurs won! Hooray!) going over some of the events of last week, both mundane and humorous. 

First, a humorous little Hawk Troop anecdote: Last Friday, the day before the three day Labor Day weekend, we were cut loose at 3pm at which point everyone scattered to the four winds, intent on enjoying their three days to the fullest after the 12 day week. However, as soon as I arrived home, I got a call from my student Platoon Leader telling me that I needed to be back at the office for a ‘meeting.’ I was literally just about to get into the best shower of my life and the prospect of getting back into my uniform and driving the half hour back to work was daunting to say the least. Luckily, I got another call about 15 minutes later saying I didn’t need to go in. The shower was fantastic. BUT the student PL and Platoon Sergeant did have to go in and they were treated to an absolute corker of a class, one hour on how to read a training schedule. Apparently people have been confused about when and where to be causing lateness and LTs showing up in the improper uniform. Of course, a training schedule, just like any schedule, really, is incredibly easy to read. It has a column for date, time, event description, uniform, location, and who the information pertains to. So, an hour long class on how to read it was a painful and insulting way to deal with a situation that has literally nothing to do with LTs being unable to read the schedule but rather that the schedule is more often than not, dead wrong. 

This point was not lost on one of the LTs who had sacrificed two hours of his weekend to receive instruction on what location means. The very next day of work, Tuesday, he decided to follow the training schedule to the letter. Of course, the very first event on Tuesday, PT, was scheduled for 0630. Now, PT is never at 0630. It’s always at 6am and no matter what the training schedule says, everyone showed up at 6. Except LT Shortt. He bravely took the lessons from Friday on board and strode up confidently at 6:30. Of course, he’s getting in a fair bit of trouble because, “LT Shortt, you know that PT is at 0600 no matter what the training schedule says.” Oh the irony…

Anyway, the other major events of last week were the Land Navigation test and, at long last, our introduction to the M1A2 CEP Abrams tank! The land nav test was pretty rough. We were dropped at 4am in the middle of the woods with a map and a set of points and a red flashlight and given 5 hours to find 6 of 8 points in the woods. Now, I was pretty confident in my land navigation skills after bossing all the land nav West Point could throw at me, but I was in for a pretty rude shock. It turns out that land navigation in the pitch black of a Georgia night in terrain that you’ve never even seen during the day is rather difficult. Despite all that, I managed to cover about 8km and find 5 points before the sun came up. I was sauntering towards a 6^th point when I was dissuaded from that course of action by multiple boar attacks on rather panicked classmates. It doesn’t take very many terrified, sprinting, knife wielding LTs coming bursting from the forest that you’re about to enter to persuade you to find some other point. No one wants a boar tusk in the kidney… to make a long story short, I had two and a half hours to find my last point and get back to the start point. My confidence was very nearly my undoing because it took me roughly 2 hours and 20 minutes to find my last point, leaving a rather ill-tempered Chris to sprint the last kilometer back to the start point just as time expired. I passed, but it was not an enjoyable experience…

Well, sorry for the rather mundane post. I’ll go into the tank stuff at a later date, as we still have nearly two weeks left of Abrams gunnery. This next week is another super week, so goodbye to the weekend for another 12 days!

The 2nd Longest Day

My Vehicle Commander and buddy, 2LT Tyler Smith, from the Kansas National Guard doing what he does best.

So. Live gunnery. Had a blast (pun intended), started a pretty serious fire, put some heavy rounds downrange, got yelled at as a group at 2:30am on the side of a road in the middle of Ft. Benning and stayed awake and in my full gear for 25 hours. It was a roller coaster of emotion… 

 

My "Ma Deuce" M2 .50 machine gun, getting ready to rock and roll.

Firstly, that training was fantastic.  We were intimately familiar with the weapons we were using (M2 .50 Cal and the M240B machine gun mounted on Humvees) and we were pretty darn familiar with the fire commands we needed to use after a full class and multiple days at the electronic range. So, when it came time to do it live, as they say, all we needed to account for was the nerves of doing it with live ammunition and for a grade. The actual firing iteration is like an oddly choreographed dance that you must control every move of. You have to tell the driver to move and halt, and where to go, tell the gunner where, what, how far the target is, make sure he sees it (especially hard at night with optics) and then call your superior to alert them of the results of your engagement. It’s a lot to remember especially with a big 50 cal banging over your head. By the end of the day, however, we were all pretty comfortable, confident and excited about the day’s results although a bit exhausted.  

On the way to fight the fire with our 5 gallon "water source"

One of the reasons we were so tired was the fact that we never got out of our gear. After 19-20 hours, body armor, tactical vest and camelback starts to really weigh down, especially when you’re carrying crates of 50 cal ammo and fighting fires. Which leads us to the fire. Luckily for us, Phil Baki, my roommate, had fired the day previously and started a fire that burned most of the flammable material in the range area. The forestry guys were chopping down trees to keep his from consuming everything it was so out of control, if that gives you any idea… despite that, during one of my firing iterations my gunner sent some tracers downrange (tracers are bullets that are actually burning, giving off light so you can see visually where your rounds hit) where they hit a clump of dried grass and started a brush fire. Of course, we thought it would burn itself out (which it didn’t) so it was pretty out of control by the time we got to it. So off we went. A van, 5 LTs, 4 shovels, and a 5 gallon container of water (thus the picture), a lot of motivation, and no experience fighting fires. Luckily, despite all the smoke, the fire was pretty small and it only took us about an hour to fight it back to a manageable size and continue on. Still, it convinced me that fighting forest fires is something I’d never want to do. It was hot enough outside without the added heat from the flame and the irritation from the smoke… No thanks…

Anyways, we finally finished up around 2:30 AM, and, after some hijinks that ended poorly for us (involving a 2LT taking charge and sending our convoy off with no safety precautions and, more seriously, no cadre) we found ourselves getting berated on the side of some deserted road in the middle of Fort Benning at 3 AM. A moment that is rarely seen in Army recruiting videos… Of course, with a marked amount of irreverence often shown (perhaps a bit insensibly) by our Platoon, we have changed our Platoon nickname to “The Midnight Express” in homage of our wild midnight ride. A crazy day, but a productive one. That’s how we roll.

The Good Stuff

The Scout's Noble Steed

Again, my profoundest apologies for the long delay between posts. I’m halfway through the superweek, I’ve only slept three hours in the last 48 and it’s only Monday… But despite all that, a lot has gone on in this past week and I’ve certainly had some fun and gotten some good training. As I wrote previously, our platoon is currently in the Cavalry Scout phase of Gunnery which, though we still have several days left of it, culminated yesterday in a 25 hour extravaganza of Humvees and heavy machine guns. More about that later though. 

I’d like to hit on a few events that transpired last week that I found amusing and some of the training I found particularly useful and, well, downright fun. I’ll go for the training first. Over the course of the week, we continued to work on the weapons systems until we really knew them inside and out (literally). Although it felt a bit (ok, extremely) tedious at points, it’s all stuff that we’ll really need to know when we get to our units, so not much complaining. Along the way, we got a good look at some of the fantastic optics the Army uses, both for mounting on weapons and the LRAS, a giant box on a tripod that lets you watch soldiers smoking from about a mile away in alarming detail (at least that’s what we used it for…). 

All that was good stuff, but the real fun began on Thursday. We’ve been rolling in Humvees exclusively (the Bradleys are still being unpacked after the move from Ft. Knox) and so we needed to do the class on what to do if your Humvee rolls over. With all the extra armor and weapons, these formerly light vehicles have an alarming tendency to roll over with serious repercussions on the crew inside- and especially the gunner sticking out the top hatch- so the Army has invested in a rollover simulator. And boy was it fun. Probably the best parts were the cameras and microphones mounted inside the vehicle body which was then rotated 540 degrees, coming to rest on its back, upside down. The driver and three passengers are all strapped in with seat belts, but the poor gunner must rely on the passengers to hold him to the ground/ceiling/ground/ceiling of the vehicle as it flips. This is tough under normal circumstances, but one of our poor platoon mates found himself in the gunner’s seat and, looking down to ensure that the passengers were prepared to hold him, found Lt. Aziz and our Jordanian in the back seats. Over the loudspeaker, we heard, “Hey guys, you got me, right?” On the cameras we saw Aziz shaking his head vigorously and pointing to the door and the Jordanian pressed worriedly up to the window. Needless to say, when the Humvee started rolling, you didn’t need a microphone to hear the poor gunner’s body slamming from floor to ceiling to floor to ceiling. He was not a happy camper… At the end of the day, however, it was great training and there’s something pretty entertaining about dangling from the roof of a car by your seatbelt then having to use the steering wheel to orient yourself enough to find first the door, then the handle, a process much more challenging than one would think…

Later that same day, we had the opportunity to spend more time on the Electronic Skills Trainer, this time with heavy weapons, simulating the fire commands we would be using during live gunnery over the weekend. After two hours of repetition on pop up wooden trucks, our cadre decided to have some fun and switch things up. For iteration after iteration we fought off enemy helicopters, tanks, personnel carriers in all sorts of environments from downtown Chicago to a hamlet in Vietnam. The hardest scenario by far, however, was trying to defend your position from a horde of escaped zoo animals. Who says training can’t be fun? 

That being said, we are having a blast, because the guys are fantastic and a lot of fun and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that our platoon is the most motivated, effective, and certainly the most fun of the group. It makes the long hours and early mornings seem almost enjoyable…

Something to Smile About

The 5th Platoon lads looking fly.

Finally, at long last, a fantastic day in the office! Today was our first hands on day of weapons training. Not M-4s, M-16s, or pistols and the like. We’re talking M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons, M-240 machine guns, M2 Caliber .50 machine guns, and Mark 19 automatic 40mm grenade launchers. From 9am to 5pm we went from weapon to weapon and learned how to clear, disassemble, assemble, load and unload each of these awesome weapons. There was enough firepower in that building to lead a fairly successful invasion of the DRC and that’s before the 16 M1A2 Abrams tanks are taken into account. It was truly one of those days where you sit there and think, “Man, I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this…”

 

Additionally, CPT Lichlyter, the Troop CO (Troop being the Cavalry equivalent of a Company- about 110 students and NCOs in this instance) gave us a bit of a pep talk at the weekly safety brief. He recognized that it’d been a tough week for a lot of us between the BRM failures and the additional failure of about 70% of the Troop on the Supply and Maintenance tests and exhorted us to not let it bother us move on. For the majority of us who have known nothing but academic success, or at the very least fairness in testing, this has indeed been a tough week and hopefully we’ll all pick ourselves up from it. Nothing like the weekend to recharge and get that sharp mindset back! Because next ‘week’ is a superweek… no weekend means 12 straight days of training. It’s going to be a rough one…

The Not Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Well, ladies and gentleman, the horror show of inefficiency and confusion that is BOLC crawls into its third painful week. We finished up rifle marksmanship, both beginning and advanced, and spent another several days cramming 30 minutes of work into 10-14 hours of 'work'. We managed to somehow qualify with a broken qualification range, all the while being mocked for not being able to shoot (cue indignant outrage as 50 Lieutenants who've all shot incredibly well previously get harangued for being able to hit half of the targets which are clearly not going down when hit...). Luckily I qualified on my second attempt and didn’t have to hang out at the rifle range until 8pm like some kids, who I know can shoot from time at West Point, try to qualify for the 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th times. It was painful… 

Anyway, yesterday set a new standard for the futility and needlessness at TRADOC (the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, our parent unit whose motto I’m pretty sure is: “We’re really far behind the rest of the Army in terms of training, but we’ve got the past decade down pat” or “Let’s read every PowerPoint slide, no matter how needless or trivial!”).

The M-16A4 rifles we were issued, when they were issued, were filthy. When I broke it down there were chunks of carbon on the firing pin, which is probably the easiest piece of the weapon to keep clean. After three days of use and several field cleanings, my rifle was already significantly cleaner than it had been when I had received it. So, when we found out we only had rifle cleaning yesterday afternoon and then calling it a day, I was excited. Even the most diligent rifle cleaning has never taken me more than two hours and I thought I might actually be getting home at a reasonable hour after multiple days of going home much later than scheduled. In the end, it was the optimism that made the result so much worse. At 5:30pm, after 4.5 HOURS of cleaning my rifle without pause, I was finally able to turn in my rifle. And I was one of the first. I’m pretty sure I did more damage than good to the rifle as I went to town on the years of carbon buildup in the most inaccessible crevices of the rifle. I got turned away on multiple occasions for dust in the most obscure places that most certainly have no effect on the functioning or appearance of the weapon. On the plus side, at the end of the day, I did turn in the cleanest weapon I’ve ever seen (that’s not factory new). On the negative side, all of my weapons cleaning equipment, carefully hoarded and collected over the past four years, was stolen right off of my table. I left cursing the Army, a condition that is always cured by a good night’s sleep and an opportunity to vent to someone else.

Sorry for all the negatives! Today we’re working on the fundamentals of tank gunnery. It’s a bit tedious, but incredibly pertinent to my future job so I enjoyed it! And as a teacher at West Point once told me, “Once the Army stops infuriating you, you’ve failed; become part of the broken system. You need to keep that frustration and work against it.” Of course, staying sane long enough makes this difficult.

Almost the weekend!