Story and photos by Ian Graham
A Marine trainee takes a knee, watching for the "enemy" assault on his position. Click for full size.
QUANTICO, Va., March 3, 2010 — This morning was rough. To be completely honest, it’s been some time since I’ve been up before the sun; the trip from Washington, D.C. down to Camp Barrett in Quantico, Va., wasn’t an easy one.
I’ve covered Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) training before when I was working for an Army publication, so I had a picture in my head when prepping for this outing, where I would see Marine 2nd lieutenants getting their first runs through urban combat training. I knew there would be a few fake buildings, some mock exercises, and maybe some faux insurgents.
I was almost, sort of, not really right at all.
After driving 20 or 30 minutes into the woods (luckily not far enough to totally lose 3G service, as I was tweeting live on @DoDLiveMil), we arrived and I got a glimpse of what we were in for.
Entire villages, convoys and vehicle checkpoints, some with Afghan and Pakistani nationals playing non-English-speaking villagers, were nestled amongst the Virginia trees. By the end of the two days, our crew (consisting of myself, Doug Moss and Petty Officer Molly Burgess) would see checkpoints destroyed, hidden insurgents sought and detained, convoys defend against roadside assailants and platoons of Marines both invade and defend a small city.
Trainees invaded the combat town under the cover of green and yellow smoke. Click for full size.
We were each issued Kevlar helmets and flak jackets – some of the mortar and grenade simulators would spread shrapnel, better safe than sorry – then led to the combat city: a mass of concrete buildings, some four stories high, equipped with DITS sensors (a high-tech radiolocation system) to track Marines’ location and determine whether they were “killed” or not in the fight and ultimately how each team fared in battle. The Marines’ fired blanks for added realism, though the rounds themselves had no actual effect on the Marine’s status in the training.
Instructors explained to us what we could expect as we watched the battle begin. Troops would first take this building, then backup would come in and move to assault that building. Another platoon would come from the north toward those buildings, where they’ll have a better line of attack toward that building over there.
For a civilian whose combat experience is limited to laser tag and Playstation, it was confusing, to say the least. For the instructors, each of whom have done at least two or three deployments to Iraq and/or Afghanistan and were hand-picked to teach new officers infantry basics, it was just another day at the office, and mild compared to what they’d seen overseas.
Now, let me backtrack, I’ve seen some MOUT training in my life. Raiding buildings, watching for hypothetical baddies, someone shouting “BANG! You’re all dead!” if a fatal mistake is made. I wasn’t prepared for Quantico’s version.
Faux fatalities plagued the assaulting troops at MOUT training. Click for full size.
I heard gunshots, and saw green and yellow smoke rise into the air as platoons began their offensive. The next three hours or so was like living in a movie or video game.
Multicolored smoke poured down the streets, Marines concealed within, rattling under the weight of their field gear. The sound of rifle and machine gun fire echoed across the combat town, the shouts of the “wounded” came out of the trees and from buildings as they were overrun.
Had it been a real fight rather than a training exercise, “Hell on Earth” would have been an apt description for the pungent odor of smokescreens, the disorienting and eerily empty cinder-block buildings and the cacophony of gunshots, grenades and screaming Marines.
The wounded were made to lie where they had fallen and request help from their fellow troops; at one point I heard an instructor shout, “Don’t you dare help him!” to a faux-wounded Marine as another picked him up. Authenticity — in this case faked unconsciousness — is paramount to MOUT training.
And on Day One, during my first live MOUT assault, there was no shortage of it.
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