Johnnyringo
12-09-2003, 07:34 PM
For all the former Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, or Airmen. Anyone that has ever served has at least a few stories of when they had it tough, or did something stupid, or favorite training ops. Like the first time you forgot to remove the thumb clip on a grenade. Seeing your buddies face turn green his first float through the straight of Taiwan. Learning the different hand signals for "Cover me, I'm F*cked" and "F*ck you, I'm covered". Hopefully we can all get a good laugh from this topic.
I'll start...
We were doing force on force mout execrcise in Okinawa during my first deployment, and my company(Echo) was going first as the raid force. Fox company had a day to set up their defense and we were going to fast rope into several lz's about 2 clicks from the mout town in the early evening. Each stick after insertion had a different route to the town and each had a different obj within the town. Our stick had no problems during the fastrope besides the fact our company C.O. wanted us to fastrope with combat gear PLUS packs. Now I don't know how many people besides Marines know how hard it is to quickly get out the ass end of a CH-46 fastroping. Ducking under the frame that the rope connects to is a pain so the added bulk of the old large size alice packs didn't make it any easier. One Machine gunner (240G) on another stick, slipped a little to fast on the way down and blew out his knee... helloooo new armorer! So at about midnight all the different sticks are checked in on the Company TAC and (one Marine short) Echo co. is ready for the assault planned for one hour prior to BMNT. Two sniper teams were also involved in our little war one in general support of Echo and another in direct support of Golf. Sure enough a half hour after we're all set the sniper team attached to Golf starts taking pot shots on one of our squads. They have to pick up and find a new step off point where they can assault the town. This goes on with various squads the remaining 3 hours. So finally at about 4 AM, 3 arty sims go off next to the buildings where the imaginary SMAW shots hit and each squad begins clearing their assigned buildings. Our squads plan was to have me and another boot run up a certain window where the SMAW shot was to hit, and then my buddy was going to kneel down just under the window so I could jump off his knee and launch myself( and one by one the rest of the squad following behind us) through the window. Doing my best superman impression I jump through the window and land on an MRE box left in the room. As I roll off it in pain I watch the three next Marines do the same thing... dumbasses! We're up and moving room to room finding nobody when there's all kinds of commotion in the rooms we've already cleared and the rear security men that were SUPPOSED to cover our entry point are dead. Over the radio different squad leaders are saying that Fox co. is trying to come up on them from OUTSIDE the town. Not content to just play "room to room who shot who" Fox's strategy was to wait until we gained our footholds and then run up our backs hoping we'd forget all about rear security. In my squads case they were right. We got ours though... during our defense we strung up barb wire between some of the buildings. It's pretty funy watching people run full speed into waist high wire, even funnier is seeing them later on in the chow hall with 6 or 7 seven stitches in their arms.
I'll start...
We were doing force on force mout execrcise in Okinawa during my first deployment, and my company(Echo) was going first as the raid force. Fox company had a day to set up their defense and we were going to fast rope into several lz's about 2 clicks from the mout town in the early evening. Each stick after insertion had a different route to the town and each had a different obj within the town. Our stick had no problems during the fastrope besides the fact our company C.O. wanted us to fastrope with combat gear PLUS packs. Now I don't know how many people besides Marines know how hard it is to quickly get out the ass end of a CH-46 fastroping. Ducking under the frame that the rope connects to is a pain so the added bulk of the old large size alice packs didn't make it any easier. One Machine gunner (240G) on another stick, slipped a little to fast on the way down and blew out his knee... helloooo new armorer! So at about midnight all the different sticks are checked in on the Company TAC and (one Marine short) Echo co. is ready for the assault planned for one hour prior to BMNT. Two sniper teams were also involved in our little war one in general support of Echo and another in direct support of Golf. Sure enough a half hour after we're all set the sniper team attached to Golf starts taking pot shots on one of our squads. They have to pick up and find a new step off point where they can assault the town. This goes on with various squads the remaining 3 hours. So finally at about 4 AM, 3 arty sims go off next to the buildings where the imaginary SMAW shots hit and each squad begins clearing their assigned buildings. Our squads plan was to have me and another boot run up a certain window where the SMAW shot was to hit, and then my buddy was going to kneel down just under the window so I could jump off his knee and launch myself( and one by one the rest of the squad following behind us) through the window. Doing my best superman impression I jump through the window and land on an MRE box left in the room. As I roll off it in pain I watch the three next Marines do the same thing... dumbasses! We're up and moving room to room finding nobody when there's all kinds of commotion in the rooms we've already cleared and the rear security men that were SUPPOSED to cover our entry point are dead. Over the radio different squad leaders are saying that Fox co. is trying to come up on them from OUTSIDE the town. Not content to just play "room to room who shot who" Fox's strategy was to wait until we gained our footholds and then run up our backs hoping we'd forget all about rear security. In my squads case they were right. We got ours though... during our defense we strung up barb wire between some of the buildings. It's pretty funy watching people run full speed into waist high wire, even funnier is seeing them later on in the chow hall with 6 or 7 seven stitches in their arms.