One Hell of a Day

We moved out to the field today for Victory Forge, our final FTX (Field Training Exercise). Victory Forge brings together all of the soldering skills we have been taught as we apply them to lifelike training scenarios.

The first day in the field is a day to setup things, get squared away, and prepare for the start of the scenarios the following day. I volunteered for a work detail that was finishing up one of the training areas – a vehicle checkpoint. Much had been already built, but there were many sandbags to be filled, which had to be placed to make fighting positions, and hundreds of meters of Constantine wire (similar to barbed wire) to be laid. Putting down the Constantine wire involved pounding large metal stakes into the ground, and then unrolling large spools of the wire between the stakes. A spool of Constantine wire looks like a large Slinky (about 4’ across) with razor-sharp protrusions along the entire length. The wire then needs to be fastened to the stakes. Three spools of wire are used for each segment: Two on the ground next to each other, to make the obstacle wide, and a third role on top of the first two, to make the obstacle high. Finally, barbed wire is laid over the top of the Constantine wire to hold everything together firmly.

The job would not take very long with many people working on it. However, to work with Constantine wire, you need to wear special, heavy-duty work gloves. Unfortunately, they were in very short supply. Most people on the work crew finished up about 9PM. Six were selected to stay on to finish the work requiring gloves. Tall people are needed so, lucky me, I was one of the six. Once the work force diminished from 40 people down to 6, the pace slowed as well. Add to that the fact that we had all been working for 12 hours already, and it started taking a long time to get things done. To top it off, about midnight thunderstorms started moving in, and we had to pause the work repeatedly as heavy rain burst forth from dark clouds overhead.

Apparently, the First Sergeant promised the Company Commander that the work would be done in time for training the next day. If we had not finished everything to standard, there would not have been any real impact on training. Still, the First Sergeant said the work had to be done, so we had to get it done. He did stay out there, with us, until we finally finished – at 4:30am! Weary, we returned to our encampment and laid our heads down to rest. A good hour after finally falling into a deep, satisfying sleep, I heard a deep voice boom “Soldier, why are you still asleep?!” Used to little sleep, I instantly became awake enough to say, “I was on a work detail that got off at 4:30am.” Now, some details begin in the early a.m. hours and last only a few hours, so DS McMillan, who turned out to be the one standing over me, asked “and when did this detail start?” When I responded “at 9am the previous day” he said in a deep, friendly voice “Get some sleep, soldier!” I drifted off into pleasant dreams until I awoke on my own some four hours later.

Even though it was one hell of a day, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was quite an experience working in a team, completing a must-do task against a deadline, using brand-new skills. I have done that kind of thing countless times in my software development career, but it was a different kind of experience building something like that with my hands and surveying the work when it was done.