From what I could see, this week was completely different, depending on which platoon you were in. Some ran more missions that others, others spent quite a bit of time doing rehearsals or classroom instruction. Regardless, you will be out in the woods for hours on end. This was basically the first experience for many people with platoon-level operations. As you would expect, we focused on raids and ambushes for the missions, with instruction being devoted to setting up security halts, ORPs, and MTC/Deliberate Attack. We operated out of a TTB, which meant warm beds for our four hours of sleep, and porta-johns to download in to. I would imagine that had the weather been more agreeable, we would have slept in patrol bases. As it were, only a couple more degrees, and Gore-tex would no longer have been effective. No joke, my canteen water was slushy, and guys with Camelbaks were SOL - their tubes would freeze up.
I won't spend a lot of time telling you about specifics - you have the field manuals, so you can see for yourself. I'm going to skip straight to the lessons learned, which were plentiful for this week:
- They are going to take away your compasses after Land Nav. Go buy one. You will need it, and they will expect you to be able to do all kinds of things you need a compass for, but won't bother to give you one. Navigation, setting fields of fire, establishing azimuths for egress, all kinds of things. You need to have one, and if you don't, find out who in your platoon has one and keep him close by. We had two guys in our platoon who had personal compasses, and they got requisitioned constantly.
- Prior planning prevents piss poor performance! Make a copy of the grading sheet the give you in week 8 for your OPORD (or get the one that I will post in a few days) and USE it during your planning. I would say 90 percent of all the heartache we ran into during missions could have been avoided with a clear and concise OPORD, with appropriate graphics. Which brings me to my next point:
- If you're going to have a sand table / graphics (and by if, I mean you will unless you're an idiot), make them big enough for everyone to see, and place them where everyone has access to them. otherwise, you're wasting everyone's time. If the cadre give you overhead photography of the objective, pass it around so everyone can see it. How silly is it to do a raid on buildings when the assaulting element doesn't know how many buildings are on the objective, let alone their layout?
- It's important to avoid last-minutes indecisiveness, but that doesn't mean you can't alter the plan, given circumstances on objective. If conditions differ significantly that for what you planned, adapt accordingly. Don't, for example, place an ORP 600 meters out (especially without those compasses we mentioned) just because on your map recon there was a huge clearing, if the whole place is densely wooded when you show up.
- Sector sketches, sector sketches, sector sketches. Have templates made up before you go out, it will save you time and energy once you establish patrol bases.
- It should go without saying, but as a leader, please keep a map on you at all times, and make sure your special teams and key personnel have important grid coordinates on hand.
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