by Tom Kratman
He has a tactical plan: The two attached platoons are going to be a) a diversion, then the force to grab the near side of the “bridge.” Thus, he doesn’t absolutely have to get them across by boat. The machine guns, too, can cross over later. They’ll support by fire initially, so that's another dozen or so men that didn’t have to cross right away.
But I've still got about a ninety of my own men and I can, in theory, only get nine of them across, at which point the boats are on the other side and they can't be rowed back.
Asks Hamilton’s supply sergeant: “What the fuck we gonna do, sir?”
Hamilton looks at the boats. Looks at the far side of the stream. Looks back at the boats. And then he has one of those epiphanies, rare in anyone but perhaps rarest of all in himself:
“Get me,” he tells supply, “a roll of 550 cord or, failing that, that twine that comes on the conical spool."
"Huh?"
"Just do it."
Then he goes to explain how they’re going to do this to the men.
******
What they end up doing is grossly overloading the RB-3s with five men each, no packs. To the stern of each boat they tie off a length of twine. And for each boat there is a three man team to haul it back from the far bank in a hurry and force feed the next load on. The two diversionary platoons are AT, hence somewhat less than ept as dismounts. This is good; Hamilton doesn’t want ept; he wants want noisy. They’re bait and good bait’s supposed to wriggle.
So the AT platoons, acting as riflemen, make a horrific racket by the “bridge” east of the crossing point. All the OPFOR pick up and move to cover the bridge, apparently on the theory Hamilton might just be stupid enough to try one of those Charge of the Light Brigade rushes.
While they’re doing that, the rest of the troops sneak up to the river / canal (it was actually more like a canal, though, technically, it was a river), bearing the boats, already prepped with twine. The machine guns go to the right of the crossing point, about forty-five degrees from the far side of the bridge.
The boats are loaded, the guns in position, and the MGs well sited to support. In they go. The machine guns kick off with pretty impressive support, actually. OPFOR are pinned in the wrong place. Row-row-row your pissant RB3. Dismount. Secure the far side. Start hauling the boats back. “Hey, Schmidlap; where’s the twine?” “I dunno; I thought Weaver had it.” “Hell, no, you were supposed to make sure…”
Yep: All three boat teams lost the twine. Damn!
Into the water go the load teams splashing around looking for the twine. They find it. The boats get hauled back and the next fifteen men board the grossly overloaded RB3s. Row-row-row…
Dismount. Splash. Loose footing. Glub, glub, glub.
“Haul the boats back.”
Somehow, two of the load teams manage to lose the twine again. Into the water….splash-splash… “I’ve got it…here it is.”
Haul the boats back. Force feed the load…row-row-row…this time they don’t lose the twine.
On the far side, it’s just a wonderful cluster. Some of the OPFOR (on their left) realize what’s going on and try to shift. Others, further away, are still fixated on the two AT platoons. And, losing the frigging twine or not, Hamilton and crew are still building up combat power a lot faster than they can shift around.
And then there are seventy or so men on the far side, sweeping the entire bank, left to right.
Contemplate that in relation to two young privates from a shattered platoon accomplishing a mission that should have taken a platoon.
Combatives
Outside of in Ranger School, the Army’s usually not overly enthused about training combatives, close, hand to hand, combat. There are a lot of good reasons for that. One, troops get injured in the normal course of the thing, simply from hitting and throwing each other. Either that, or the thing ends up being slow motion nonsense, or pull your punches bad training. Then, too, actually fighting like that is, like a bayonet fight, among the least likely things to happen in battle. Thirdly, we don’t really have a good, practical, teachable system of combatives. Indeed no system could be very good for the highly limited time we can spend at it.
Still, there are some benefits to spending a few morning physical training sessions pounding on each other, notably character development through physical pain. That said, I recommend the following:
Do so many pushups first and during that the soldiers’ muscles are exhausted. This way, they can strike with all the force and speed they can muster, but that force will be very light and the speed slow.
Do no pushups if you’re practicing throws and falls. You want them to be able to roll with the throw and you want your throwers able to let them down in fairly controlled fashion.
Borrow some foam neck braces from the medicos for strangulation and garroting practice. Watch carefully because they might hurt each other anyway.
Remember that even sheathed bayonets and pugil sticks can damage people. Watch these things most carefully.
Counseling
A good maxim to follow here is that nobody’s OER or NCOER should ever come as a surprise. Another good maxim is that nobody’s going to get any better unless he knows where he’s deficient.
Because of these, I strongly recommend using the very same forms for regular, routine performance counseling as are used for the current OER and NCOER. I further recommend turning all those graded areas into tasks, with conditions and standards. Lastly, I recommend being honest, in real English, as opposed to honest in the parody of English normally used in evaluations. You know, the parody whereby “somewhere a village is missing its idiot” turns into “this sergeant / lieutenant / captain is the greatest thing since canned beer.” If you’re going to be honest with performance counseling, be sure you explain to your subordinates that those honest comments and numbers, if numbers ever make a return, will be translated into parody English and be suitably inflated for actual evaluation for record purposes. They won’t believe you at first but you have to try.
I used to have a couple of pretty good sets of tasks, conditions and standards for these, as part of a pretty good SOP. The rating systems have changed too much for those to be useful to you. Still, to give one example, suppose there’s a block for physical fitness, as there always is. The task for counseling purposes might be called something like, “Attain and/or Maintain Physical Fitness.” The conditions may read, “As an officer or non-commissioned officer, in an MTO&E infantry unit, with not less than X days a month off, and not less than Y days a month not in the field and hence available for physical fitness training.” Standards might read, “Pass the APFT2, fall out of no runs or road marches without a doctor’s letter affirmation of illness or injury consistent with inability to complete same.” The counseling SOP might then say that failure to meet the bare minimum standard will result in a less than top score in that area, with a negative comment, while meeting the bare minimum will result in a normal, maximum score in the area (recognizing that said maximum is the result of score and language inflation), while achieving a score in the APFT of between the minimum to pass and the maximum possible might get a favorable comment, space permitting, in the evaluation report and maxing it would get a favorable comment in the evaluation report.
And surely, since I’ve spent some time here talking about integrity, someone is going to observe, “But isn’t using bogus verbiage and ridiculously inflated numbers an ethical violation?”
It’s a good question, but it’s not exactly the right question or, rather, questions. The right questions are, “Beyond destroying my subordinates by using standard English and standard numbers in my evaluations, when no one else does, or won’t for long, and no one believes at face value those numbers and comments, anyway, what good am I doing?” and “When language and numbers are grossly inflated for a particular purpose, and everyone knows they are, isn’t the real lie in using standard language and numbers, which everyone reads against that inflated system?” My answe
rs to those questions are, “none,” and, “yes.”
I suppose I’ve seen a dozen or more different OER and NCOER systems, over the years. In every case that I’ve seen, the systems started with, “This time it’s going to be different. This time we’re going to be honest.” It never is and stupid officers who believe the Pravda, and enforce the lie (see above, yes, in this case honesty in one sense is a lie in another) invariably cause vast damage to juniors whose only crime was being assigned to units commanded by morons. When this happens again, and it will again, zip your mansuit all the way up to the neck and say, “No, we’re not going to play this. I will not wreck my subordinates so my boss can make a purely spurious comment on his OER support form.”
Vignette Twelve: No, hitting a moving target is very difficult indeed.
Hamilton – and this is a very different manifestation of the eternal Hamilton than usual – found himself as a, no lie, no joke, horse-mounted dragoon in Grey’s Scouts, Rhodesia, in the mid-seventies. This particular version of Hamilton had been a United States Marine, once, and thought he could shoot. His Rhodesian colour corporal thought rather differently.
The corporal lined his squad up along a slope, the line running downhill. Then the corporal produced a large truck tire, in the center of which he’d mounted a target. “Lock and load,” ordered the corporal. “Now see if you can hit this,” said he, starting the tire rolling downhill. Every man basically emptied a magazine at the target and not one hit it, not with even a single bullet, on that first attempt.
Think about how simple that is to do. How it doesn’t require electronic devices, radio bandwidth, computers, fragile controllers, or much in the way of time or other resources. And consider, too, that the technique will be available anyplace you can find a tire, a cardboard or paper target, and a slope. Oh, and a little instruction on lead and in flight ballistics would probably be useful, as well.
As mentioned elsewhere in this article, though, marksmanship is one of those things that needs mostly to be conditioned. This is also true for hitting a moving target. Contemplate, however, MILES, the laser training engagement system mentioned previously. It has no ballistic properties. Time of flight is much faster than for a bullet, indeed it is essentially instantaneous.
I would suggest that using MILES is training people, conditioning them, to be bad shots, and that the more they use MILES the worse shots they are being conditioned to be.
Cause and Commitment
It’s a truism that men don’t fight for causes, they fight for their comrades. It’s a half-truth, though, and like other half-truths, wholly misleading.
Why? Because the cost of fighting is pain, pain from the loss of those same comrades. In the absence of a reason to put up with that, the sensible group of soldiers, neither wanting to die nor wanting to lose friends, simply deserts, or carries out their missions in the most lackadaisical and safest manner possible. In short, without a cause they can believe in, eventually the day comes when the soldiers won’t fight at all.
Go look up, “combat refusal Vietnam.” And then, since it can actually get worse than mere mutiny, look up, “Fragging.”
That doesn’t mean the cause needs to be drummed into them with the most heavy-handed propaganda Hollywood and Madison Avenue can come up with. Frankly, as with EO nag sessions, gender sensitivity training, and any of the other, similar wastes of time, the troops just tune it out, as they tune out all the politically correct propaganda regularly inflicted on them by the EO fascisti. They don’t usually care all that much about who invaded who, or the pristine excellence of the current president, nor parties, nor spreading democracy around the world, nor preserving feudalism in Kuwait. It’s sufficient for them to know they’re fighting for secure energy supplies, so we don’t fall into an industrial dark age and so our people do not starve. It’s not bad for them to know – indeed, it can overcome all kinds of gray areas in a nation’s past conduct – that we’re fighting for survival. Revenge is good, too.
Vignette Thirteen: We become brave by doing brave acts. – Aristotle, Nichmoachean Ethics
Aristotle looked at this as a matter of habit. There is surely some truth to that, but I would suggest a good part of it is process, too. From Carnifex:
Escuela de Montañeros Bernardo O’Higgins, Boquerón, Balboa, 8/3/467 AC
Jesus, this shit terrifies me.
Ricardo Cruz had his left hand jammed into the crevice of an otherwise nearly sheer rock wall. The hand was formed into a fist, effectively locking him to that wall. His other hand searched for further purchase higher up while his booted feet rested precariously on a couple of finger-widths of ledge. A rope was coiled around his torso.
Cruz’s job was to get the bloody rope up the cliff, attach a snaplink to whatever could be found, and create a belay system so that the rest of the men could follow safely. On the way up Cruz mentally recited the very unofficial and much frowned upon version of the Cazador Creed.
Considering how fucking stupid I am . . .
Aha! There was a little outcropping of rock. He grabbed tight hold of it and began working his left leg to another little spit of a ledge.
Appreciating the fact that nobody lives forever . . .
The ledge and the outcropping held. Heart pounding, Cruz unballed his left fist, removed it from the crevice and began feeling up and along the wall for another place to anchor his hand before he risked moving his lower foot.
Zealously will I . . .
Cruz’s foot slipped.
*****
…try to fuck every female I can talk into a horizontal . . . FUCK!
Cruz felt his lower foot slip vertically. That put excess demands on the other one, which likewise lost its hold on the rock ledge. His left hand hadn’t quite found purchase. In much less time than it takes to tell about it he found himself hanging by the fingertips of one hand, and not even all of those.
His body slammed the cliff face, almost causing him to lose his death grip on the outcropping. Moreover, while his helmet protected the bulk of his head, in slipping he had managed to scrape the left side of his jaw along the rough rock wall. He felt hot blood drip down his neck.
His first instinct was, frankly, akin to panic. It lasted milliseconds before training and experience took over.
I’ve been scared witless before and overcome it.
I can again.
*****
The first thing Cruz’s questing fingers found was a tiny little spur of rock. It would never do to support his entire weight but, gripped by two fingers and a thumb, it was just enough to take some weight off of the overstrained fingers of the other hand. His heart began to slow, if only slightly.
Okay . . . so I have at least two or three more minutes of life. My fingers will hold that long. A lot can be done in two or three minutes.
Next, his foot found the previous ledge it had occupied. He was unwilling to take quite the same perch he had had previously. He spent some of his one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty seconds feeling around for the best position he could find. When he found it he tested it, spending a few more precious seconds. He then allowed his foot and leg to take some weight from his whitened, tired fingers. At last, breathing a little more easily, Cruz found a spot for his other foot and began to rest his fingers in turn.
*****
Yeah, it’s a true story.
Officer and NCO Professional Development
We pay a lot of lip service to this. Actual execution? Not so much.
In my not so very humble opinion, Professional Development, properly, is training of leaders in one of three areas: To take over higher levels of responsibility, to perform in MOSs not their own or work more closely with MOSs other than their own, to learn more esoteric areas that are within the leader’s MOS, but not normally well trained either in the school system or in the Army at large. I would say, thus, that a class in how to conduct a 100% inventory for a change of command is proper for lieutenants, since most of them will be tak
ing over companies and thus have command responsibility for property at some point. Road marching an entire company would be, for a platoon leader, similarly useful. Planning air support or artillery support, which is normally done at higher levels would be the same. Military history is a clear subject for professional development, for every level and rank. Cultural studies could be legitimate subjects, and almost certainly are for areas where we are going to fight where the culture is, in some sense, itself the enemy. Training management fits, especially since the demise of BTMS3.
What’s not OPD or NCODP, though it is often presented as such, are subjects that are better put out in meetings, or in specific classes, that do not accomplish those three things mentioned above. The latest nonsense on gender orientation sensitivity from the EO fascisti is not really professional development. Nuances of the latest scheme for evaluation reports likewise doesn’t fit.
Music and Song: “The song for the soldier is a war song,” it is not, “I don’t like spiders and snakes.”
The great thing about war songs is that it’s conditioning below the conscious level. You see, soldiers will often resist conditioning, if they know that you’re trying to condition them. But singing? That’s so innocent, even as we “Rally round the flag, boys,” that we’ll gladly go, “Over there,” to be “Dog-faced soldiers”…
Even the act of singing – quite without any martial theme – has training value: “We’re here and we’re together.”
That said, lotsa luck, actually. Though there is vast training value is having the troops sing together, actually getting American soldiers to sing, other than cadence songs, which don’t usually work the same way or for the same reason or to the same ends, is about impossible.
I recall an article I read once in the old Infantry Journal (the predecessor, along with the Field Artillery Journal, of AUSA’s Army Magazine, not of Infantry Magazine), written during WW II by a US Army infantry private who had been a German Army infantry private in the Great War, lamenting our unwillingness to sing. According to the article, in the old German Army singing was a training event and they had singing lessons and practice at company level. Maybe that would work, but one doubts we’ll ever find the time and determination to do it.