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 Post subject: Training Establishment Scenarios
PostPosted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 1:33 am 
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Feldmarschall
Feldmarschall
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Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2007 1:48 am
Posts: 1051
Location: Washington state
(Moved from old YW site)

Training establishment scenarios
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Whether in peacetime or war, military personnel all must go through the training process to become soldiers. This is done different ways in different armies, and even changes over time in the same army. In some armies, soldiers are trained right in their own units. The German Army has used this technique for a long time.

In the US Army for some time, typically soldiers have been trained in dedicated training establishments and then are passed along to units in the field for assignment after they are trained. Even this has changed a bit, with sometimes training being doing by training divisions, and at other times, training commands doing it.

When I took my training at Fort Ord, California during the Vietnam war, training centers responsible to the various regional Armies were doing the training. Looking back on this experience, Army life in these training centers is not Army life in a real sense as it is lived in field units. It's kind of like a combination of reform school and the Boy Scouts, where everything is taken very seriously without being exposed to the "real deal." Certainly people get killed in training, but through stupid mishaps, not combat.

Anyway, a couple of stories come to mind from my experiences. The soldiers guiding their trainees through this phase of army life are the sergeants. Like humanity in general, these come in all dispositions, and to get the message across, of necessity discipline must be administered and this is done in many different ways. Some sergeants have humorous ways to do this. A couple that I remember are as follows.

One time when we were on so-called bivouac, a sergeant observed a basic trainee toss away a cigarette butt into the dirt. Now, anyone who has ever gone through the basic training situation knows the meaning of cigarette butts to drill sergeants. Anyway, as atonement for his transgressions, this trainee was instructed to give this cigarette butt a proper "4x4 burial." A 4x4 we soon found out was a hole, exactly and precisely with square corners, dug into the earth 4 feet wide, 4 feet long and 4 feet deep. After the butt was placed exactly in the center of the bottom of the hole, the trainee then was required to refill the hole.

The other story also involves the art of digging. One time on a Saturday afternoon when we were to knock off a couple of hours early from training to have time to square away our barracks, a sergeant came around to the bay looking for a volunteer. He was offering to give the volunteer some training on mechanized, heavy equipment. He asked for a volunteer for training on the "Pickmatic." Sure enough, a guy stepped forward, saying he had worked with a backhoe in civilian life and could probably handle the "Pickmatic." This guy probably thought he was getting out of buffing the floors that day by going with the sarge. The sarge had a good sense of humor. He needed a ditch dug and the equipment turned out to be what the Army calls a "Pick, Mattock." In case you are from the city and don't know what a mattock is, that's a stick-tool with a claw sort of like a hoe on one side, and a cutting blade for roots on the other, rather like a modified ax. Yes, they call that "Good Army Training."

One other story I thought of while I was keyboarding this was told to me by one of my high school teachers. He had been in the Army in Germany in the late 1950's as a draftee. For some misdeed, I don't remember what, he was told to rake the ground beneath one of the barracks and clean up an errant items that might be under there. He asked the sergeant where he might obtain a rake, and the sergeant said, "Pratte, we don't have that many rakes to spare in the Army. Why don't you go over to the mess hall and see if the mess sergeant will lend you a mess fork to do it?" He did, and after many hours of raking under the building with a fork, returned to the sergeant with a small handful of wood chips to show for his efforts. At the time as a high school student, I thought that there might be a chance that Mr. Pratte had made this all up. Of course, I was to learn later on my own that this kind of folderol was not a bit unusual in the Army.


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