Recap of 3/9 through 3/13

The week started with a 10k hike to MOUT Town. MOUT stands for military operations in urban terrain and MOUT Town is a little town that has been set up on top of a mountain. It consists of several one and two story concrete houses with different floor layouts. I was really nervous about the hike Sunday night and Monday morning because I had come down with a pretty bad case of bronchitis and had some really bad chest congestion and was having trouble breathing. It turns out the hike itself wasn’t that bad for me or the majority of my platoon but the two other platoons seemed to struggle with it. My platoon brought up the rear on this hike so we go to see all the weak bodies fall back into our formation. At the beginning of every hike the formation stops to do a 5 minute gear check. This means that everyone inspects their buddies gear and makes sure that everything is zipped up and nothing is going to fall out. We did this at a small hill about 15 minutes from our starting point at the squad bay. It was funny because some kids were already falling out and didn’t make it to the gear check spot with the main body.

The first mile was straight up hill but afterwards leveled out for the next 3-4 miles before we had to climb up a mountain for the final two miles. The last stretch kids from the other two platoons began to drop like flies. We even had to stiff arm some kids out of the way because they were getting in our way and we didn’t want them to be the reason we got separated from the main body. Once we made it to MOUT Town we dropped our gear and received classes on clearing rooms and how to move through streets in a hostile environment. It was probably the most enjoyable part of training for me so far because it required everyone to work together as a team and it was more applicable to the conflicts that the US is currently engaged in. The drill involved us entering the room in pairs after prepping the room with a grenade and shooting insurgent targets hidden in the room with blanks.

My partner and I performed the drills without any problems although some of the other kids weren’t as lucky. The instructors at any time can deem someone a casualty for doing something stupid. Usually it’s done when some kid wanders off alone to the bathroom or is walking around without all his gear or rifle. When a kid becomes a casualty they have to lay on the ground and can’t move until one of their platoon mates comes and drags or carries them to a site that the instructors designate a safe zone and then by magic they are revived. Well this time several people died for screwing up on the drills. These included: rushing into the room without a magazine inserted in their rifle, rushing in with their safety turned on, throwing a grenade into the room but missing and having it roll back out and landing next to their own feet, and the funniest but most serious offense involved a pair throwing a grenade into the room and rushing in right away even though the fuse had not exploded. By the end of the drills there were around 20 people dead around the entrance to the house. It’s somewhat humorous in the training but if the same thing happened in combat it would result in the serious injury or death so the instructors give a nice butt chewing to the guys that screwed up.

The rest of the week the training was fairly light as we spent a lot of time in classes and took our second test. The instructors were preparing for the splitting of the platoons that would happen at the end of the week so there was a lot of what we like to call in the Marine Corps as “standby time.” Here at SOI that usually means we sit in the squad bays in front of our wall lockers cutting up and secretly napping.

Within infantry there are several job specialties such as rifleman, machine gunners, and mortar men, assault men which use demolitions, and TOW gunners which use anti tank and anti armor weapons. I’m going to explain the basic breakdown of an infantry company and what all it entails. Within an infantry company there are usually three rifle platoons and one weapons platoon. Every infantry job other than riflemen would fall under a weapons platoon. A platoon is usually made up of three squads of 13 men. A 13 man rifle squad is pretty much the nucleus of the Marine Corps. There is actually a mission statement for the 13 man rifle squad. “The mission of the Marine Corps rifle squad is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver or to repel the enemy’s assault by fighting in close combat.” Every other job including the other infantry specialties is in support of the 13 man rifle squad. In short they do the majority of the fighting, dirty work, and if need be dying in the Marine Corps. Some people are shocked when they find out that only about 10% of the Marines are infantry.

When deployed the 13 man squads will do a majority of the patrolling and execution of missions. If command knows that the squad will need assistance from any weapons then they will attach to the rifle squad for the patrol or mission. The riflemen squad is further broken down into three four man teams called a fire team. The three fire teams are led by the squad leader. Each fire team is led by a fire team leader. The rest of the fire team consists of a point man, a man that carries the SAW which is a light machine gun, and an assistant gunner that carries extra ammo for the SAW gunner. It’s really cool how the Marine Corps focuses on small unit leadership. Therefore, if anyone in a leadership command becomes a casualty in combat the squad or fire team can be quickly taken over by another individual.

Well anyways that’s a quick synopsis of the breakdown of infantry. So anyways the platoons were split out into one weapons platoon and two rifleman platoons by the end of the week. It’s kind of funny because there is a little jealousy and light tension among the rifleman platoons and the weapons platoon. The riflemen spend our entire time out in the field not getting to shower and eating MREs while all the weapons kids get to spend their time back at the squad bays and classrooms. They get to shower and sleep in their racks every night and get to eat at the chow hall every night.

The weekend was really good because we were starting to get a little cabin fever from spending so much time standing by in the squad bays.