It's 3 AM - I just finished a CQ shift... it's the end of week 5 (out of 7) at BOLC II, and our last day before we go to FOB Voyager for another week. It's been a while since I updated the blog, so let me give you a recap:

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Squad Live Fire

This was very interesting. I've run "battle drill 1 alpha" many times (squad attack), but NEVER with live ammo. Here's the run down: My squad (10 people) moves in a squad column formation across a woodland clearing toward an objective where we expect to find the enemy (computer controlled popup targets). We encounter targets at a simulated listening post/observation post and take them out, then continue on to the main objective where we again fire live rounds at popup targets.

I had a lot of fun, but I have to admit that it was a little unsettling to have people walking behind me with loaded M4 rifles. In any case, it got my adrenaline pumping.

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CCTT

This was AMAZING - we ran another convoy operation, but this time it was in a giant simulator. We had two squads in four trailers with simulated humvees and weapons. You sat in the vehicles and used REAL WEAPONS that had been modified with compressed gas lines to power them with recoil and lasers to register hits on the screens that surrounded the vehicle.

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MOUT/Urban Ops

Most of this past week has been devoted to learning how to clear enemies from buildings in a coordinated effort. We started by learning how to clear a single room with only one entrance as a fire team. We culminated by learning how to clear part of a town as a platoon during the night using night vision optics. It was pretty awesome!

We used MILES gear for the earlier missions (think laser tag), and then simunitions for the later exercises (think paint bullets fired from real weapons). I was the squad leader this week, so I had the opportunity to direct my squad through the missions, while taking orders from the platoon leader and platoon sergeant over a radio - it got a little crazy at times, but I loved it!

Here are some pics from that day (I finally have a camera!):