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Wednesday, September 01, 2010

How Amateurs Get You Killed

Steven Petrick writes:

This is real world military, even if the incident was in training.

Back in 1980 I was tasked to lead a collection of "soldiers", but not "infantry" to probe the defenses of various units of the 36th Engineer Group. My "soldiers" were helicopter mechanics, clerks, and other individuals in uniform, but whose primary job was not running around in the dark carrying firearms looking for strangers.

At one point I had them formed up into a column with myself at its head as we advanced on a suspected enemy position. I had taken "point" because I was the "trained" infantry type, and did not have enough time to explain to one of them all the things I expected a pointman to do. Feeling the ground (sorry, it is hard to explain, think of it as paying careful attention to all of your senses and feeding all of the data through your mental processor so as to form a picture of things from what you sense even if you cannot really see) as we advanced, I got the impression we were "close", so I started moving cautiously from tree to tree, peeking around the edge of each tree as I reached it.

Finally, I found what I was looking for.

A trip flare planted behind the tree to mask it from observation with its tripwires extending across the avenue of advance.

Smiling smugly to myself at this point since I knew we would be able to circumvent the flare easily, moving farther up the slope and getting into assault position (getting my soldiers deployed in line abreast instead of column), I turned to begin issuing instructions to my "soldiers".

To my absolute horror, I saw that one of them had decided to move out to our left flank, leaving the column and thus the trail I had "proofed" by advancing over it myself while looking for tripwires and possible enemy listening posts.

Desperately I began waving my arm to try to get the man's attention, but he never once looked at me as he headed out. If I called out to him, we would be revealed, and dashing after him meant I would have a good chance of triggering another, as yet undiscovered, trip flare or other simulator device.

All I could do was keep desperately signaling the man, hoping he would look at me before it was . . .

. . . too late. He triggered another trip flare, and within seconds the enemy defensive line erupted in weapons fire.

The opposing force had been totally unaware of our presence until that flare went off (they were in their fighting positions because they were being evaluated on conducting local defense, but half of them had been asleep). We had not made any noise that they had detected to that point as I had led the column up the slope. But for that man I would probably have been able to initiate the assault into the defender's lines out of the darkness. (With real, regular, trained, infantry, I would probably have tried to inch considerably closer to the defenders before initiating the assault.)

As it was, I very probably (in a real world case) would not have survived the night.