Crawl, walk, run – at light speed

Training schedule shifts to high gear for 4th Battalion, 23rd Infanty Regiment

By Don Kramer, Northwest Guardian

It’s a crawl, walk, run approach to training, but with hair on fire.

The training schedule shifted into high gear in 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment with the recent delivery to B Company of Stryker vehicles.

As a consequence, the battalion hit the accelerator as 2007 came to an end.

“From about November we’ve kicked it up,” 4-23 Inf. Command Sgt. Maj. Gary Mayo said. “(We went to) Yakima in November-December, mainly going through the shoot house and the urban assault course. This is really the first collective training (our Soldiers) have done with Strykers. They’ve got a learning curve and they have to drink from the firehose of knowledge. We’ll get there.”

Bravo company, the first in the Tomahawk Battalion of 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division to receive Strykers two months ago, immediately underwent Operator New Equipment Training and hit Fort Lewis training ranges last week with a fast-paced realistic scenario.

Enemy insurgents had slipped away from a raid on the mock city of Regensburg, with Army intelligence resources telling the battalion intelligence officer about spotting members of two Shiite militia splinter groups reorganizing at Range 76. Follow-on reports fixed high-value targets and a weapons cache near a building complex on the range.

All B Co. platoons participated. Everyone got into the infantry act at the end of the field problem, with 11C mortar men and 19K tankers from the headquarters platoon taking turns with their 11B counterparts assaulting, clearing buildings and working with Strykers in support.

“It was nice that the platoons that were not traditionally infantry also hit the objective,” said 1st Lt. Price Smith, B Company executive officer. “The mobile gun system combined with the mortar section of the headquarters platoon of each company got a chance to do that. They’re triple threat: singers, dancers, actors.”

Private first class Robin Costello, an 11C with headquarters platoon, said he liked developing infantry skills.

“This was my second time with Strykers,” Costello said. “We did 11B and 11C stuff. We cleared rooms last week. This week we shot (mortars). I got a lot out of it by training with each other, 11Cs and tankers. It was our first time working together. So it let us know exactly where each other was at. I thought it was really good training.”

The line-infantry platoons earned their pay by dramatically removing an obstacle with explosives on the way to the final objective. A lake and a mine field channeled the company onto the main road to the objective, obstructed with mines and concertina wire.

First and second platoons took turns going by the numbers of Army doctrine to emplace and detonate bangalore torpedos, a type of pipe-bomb used to clear obstacles. The munitions ripped apart the wire, sent billows of black smoke into the air and violently opened a path to the suspected insurgent hideout.

“There was only one corridor to the objective,” Smith said. “There was an obstacle there where the enemy could stop us and put us in a bad, enfilading fire situation so that we needed to use speed, violence, action to get out of that obstacle and the wire. We needed to employ good intermediate support by fire for the bangalores using the Strykers. Another team came in and blew it with the Bangalores, and they went off and run-ning, seized the objective and carried on.” As Tomahawk Soldiers finished clearing suspicious houses, one spotted insurgents behind a berm 200 meters away. With a Stryker’s .50 caliber machine gun providing initial supporting fire, squad leader, Sgt. Donald Webb, bounded his fire teams toward the new objective. As the B Company teams overtook it, Webb’s squad found a cache of enemy weapons and equipment.

The squad leader set out security and radioed for his company’s team to perform tactical site exploitation, a structured inspection of an enemy area that mirrors police actions at a crime scene.

“As my commander would say, we are all CSI investigators,” Smith said.

The executive officer declared the assault on Objective Niagra at Range 76 a success, in part because of the array of weapons B Company Soldiers employed.

“(The exercise) incorporated every weapon that is organic to our company, from the sniper rifle to our mortar sections,” Smith said. “The second day is where the battalion purposely put on the shoulders of leaders a compressed planning time to see how they made decisions. Every platoon had a different mission.”

A follow-on scenario forced company leaders to deal with a power station crisis in Leschi Town, another realistic scenario involving a missing power plant manager.

In the span of two days, Smith said, the company managed to exercise most of its major muscle groups — a reflection of its focus on preparing Soldiers for combat, which in turn reflects the times. Fifth Brigade is the next Fort Lewis Stryker brigade combat team scheduled to deploy to Southwest Asia.

Major Andy Allen, 5th Bde., 2nd Inf. Div. intelligence and security officer, said there is no deployment date set; training is conducted to prepare thoroughly, but as quickly as practical.

Bravo company commander, Capt. Chris Molino, said he knows what’s at stake. He aims, he said, at the same thorough, but punishing training program that has taken his company to Yakima at the end of the year and for which his company has made sacrifices. Bravo Soldiers were in Yakima on Super Bowl Sunday, for example.

“The guys are going to go into harm’s way and they’re moving at a furious pace,” Molino said. “We’re asking these guys to do it in a very small window of time.”

Molino said different companies train at different rates and levels. He feels fortunate, he said, to have some high-quality officers and NCOs to meet the challenges of the intense pace. His Soldiers respond to the leaders’ experience, but still require starting at a basic level.

“These guys, what have they been doing every day?” Molino said rhetorically. “It’s taking those baby steps. The theory is the crawl, walk, run. The train’s moving. These guys have to jump on or get left behind. That’s kind of the reality.”

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