The pace of our training from day to day varies pretty dramatically. There tends to be a period of intense training followed by several days where we lick our wounds (in the form of vehicle maintenance, weapons cleaning, group discussions, physical training, and the omnipresent Pashtu training). This schedule works pretty well for me; it acts as a cycle of stimulus-response-recover that quickly pushed me back into my old Marine Corps habits. I've also discovered that my time in school gave me additional perspective. I can see how every part of our training interacts with and supports the others in ways that were impossible five or six years ago.
The Infantry Immersion Trainer (IIT) in northern Camp Pendleton is a great opportunity to take advantage of my maturity (a term I use lightly: I am still a seven year-old boy by most measures). A large L-shaped warehouse located in the middle of some old tomato fields, the IIT was the brainchild of Marine General James Mattis. He oversaw its construction in 2007, envisioning it as a realistic environment designed to produce the stresses of combat. Mistakes made in training could be used to improve performance on the battlefield, as well as to build confidence and unit camaraderie.
We arrived on a Monday morning and were greeted by the now-familiar contractor. Few of our instructors are Marines nowadays, instead former military dominate the ranks. They dress in the same fashion regardless of the weather or location: tan/khaki shirt, tan or olive green trousers, combat boots, a tan hat, goatee or beard, and wide, dark sunglasses. "Adam", as he introduced himself, ran through the safety rules of the IIT and had us start preparing for the first scenario.
The IIT is designed to look like an Iraqi village but has been modified as much as possible to Afghanistan's architecture now that the Marine Corps focuses exclusively on the latter. It has a small residential area on one end with several two story buildings, a marketplace, a district police station and hospital, a mosque, and then a residential area criss-crossed with narrow alleys. Each scenario is meant for a 7-13 man group and usually entails meeting with a village elder or the police chief, securing an area for a meeting, then patrolling out of the village.
During each mission our team was tested in different ways. Once we received fire immediately upon entering the village but ended up treating an Afghan who was wounded in an IED blast. A second time we received sniper fire and had to clear some buildings. In our third run-through an assassin tried to kill the district governor as he was giving a speech.
Despite only lasting about an hour per patrol, we were thoroughly tested in many of the skills we'll need in Afghanistan. Of all the great lessons here, however, the best is operating under stress. We use rubber bullets with paint tips (called sesam rounds) shot at about twice the muzzle velocity of a paintball fun: translation, they really hurt. The anticipation of this pain adds to the stress of the situation: the masks fog up, your heart rate skyrockets, breathing is unsteady, it's hard to hear the other Marines, the Muslim call to prayer sounds hauntingly over the loudspeakers, and you can taste the sand kicked up by everyone ahead of you. Take all this and then add in civilian actors, any of whom could be an insurgent, and this training feels pretty darn real.
After training we sat down with the assessors (contractors, naturally) and went over what we did well and what could be improved. After two days of this, broken only by a road march around 0400 the second morning, our team felt much more confident yet very aware of how far we had to go. That night we rode home to Las Pulgas in our uparmored Humvees, a little more prepared for the upcoming journey, now less than three months away.
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