Week 10 - MOUT

I use MOUT loosely for this week - most of it was spent doing the same glasshouse drill over and over until you went blind.  The focus for this week was room-clearing, which would culminate in a live-fire room clearing.  As I said, we started with glass houses, but also incorporated the empty room of the not-yet-renovated BOQ space in the building that BOLC occupies.  Bonus tip - if you're looking for a good place to poop (is poop a doctrinally correct term?) during the duty day, the bathrooms still work.  Just bring your own toilet paper / babywipes.  After a day of that, we spent the next couple of days at MOUT sites.

We started out by conducting a raid on the MOUT site (something we never practiced or rehearsed for, which I found odd) - this took up the majority of the day.  At night, we cleared buildings using our NODs (something else we had not practiced or received instruction in - I'm noticing a trend here), learning how to traverse stairwells, pieing corners, buddy-clearing smaller rooms, and taking corners by force.  Needless to say, when we practiced doing this stuff in the daylight for the first time the next day, it was much easier to grasp the basic concepts.  For those of you who are curious, you can't see a damn thing with those NODs on - it's not that things are out of focus or there's not enough light (which, well, there wasn't, but it was a problem we found workarounds for), but you have no depth perception and your field of vision is so narrow.  You just run in to everyone and everything.  It's not something I would do in real life without extensively practicing first.

During the day it was much better, and quite a bit of fun, actually.  Unfortunately, inclement weather cut things short, and we had to return early to run glasshouse drills until about 2000 or so.  Thursday we went to the kill house proper, did blank certifications ,and then live fire certifications.  A word to the wise - no matter how hot and painful the brass that just went down your neck is, don't lean in front of your buddy's barrel.  Shenanigans will NOT occur.  Friday was the usual - weapons cleaning and lots of standing around.

Lessons learned?  Perhaps:

• Winter tactical gloves would be a wise investment.  All things being equal, fingers were the hardest thing to keep warm, because you're holding on to a chunk of metal that sucks away all of your heat.  It made what would have otherwise been a comfortable get-up absolutely miserable.
• You'll want your terrain model kit ready to go this week - they way they explained it to use, we thought we would just be practicing MOUT, but they through in that mission, which the PSG and PL were graded on.
• MRE heaters make nifty warmers in a pinch, so long as you fold the bag in a way to prevent spilling.  I also use them to heat up my shaving water in the mornings.  No reason to be uncivilized, even if one is, as they say, roughing it.
• If you can wing it, try to volunteer to be a FO, RTO, etc., because it means you're not lying in the prone for hours on end during missions, freezing to death.  It also allows you to actually see what's going on and learn s thing or two before its your turn, as opposed to being a Joe on the line.