We got a VERY brief phone call from Ivygirl on Sunday. They didn’t release the results of the second peer eval, just told everyone that no one was getting peered out. So despite my worry, that tells me that this is just a tool used by the Army to whip the recruits who have some improving to do into shape. If there were truly an issue, it would have been addressed.
She is over her multiple infections and passed the final PT test by getting her best time yet in running two miles. This is her last week of training…next week she graduates. Her father and I will be flying into Missouri on Monday.
Ivygirl is on her last week of training. They are taking the company out for a four day field exercise, where “they will be running squad mission around the clock and will be getting in sleep when they can between operations. This will be the toughest week they’ve experienced here at Basic Training and before it is over they will be pushed to their mental and physical limits.”
Apparently, they call this The Crucible. It’s a four day force on force mock war in the hills and forest south of the post.
Actually, the Crucible is the Marines’ term for their Final Exercise. Navy calls it Battle Stations. The Army called it Victory Forge but somehow it hasn’t caught on quite as well in popular attention.
Missed edit window: And apparently “Victory Forge” was never officialized as the name for all their BT courses - it figures, unlike the other services the Army has more than one single BT program at all their 5 BT sites.
Yep, the sleep dep can be a bitch. When I did it, I recall having micro-dreams because my brain was going all hypnagogic every time I so much as blinked. When I got back from the exercise I had to clean my weapon. I actually fell asleep standing up and woke up when the piece I was cleaning hit the floor. Not cool.
And if she thinks that’s bad, wait till she does her first trip to NTC…
Chihuahua I loved going to the NTC, but, I was a mechanic. Mechanics and the Cooks during Turn-In Week, Oh Yeah Baby, we got the hook up!
That and Mojavia is more reminiscent of home than Kansas or Georgia.
Speaking of which, ivylass, another bit of advice to pass on, on training deployments such as to the NTC, Advance party going out and trail party coming back is the way to go if she can swing it. The actual travel portion for those two groups is usually much more relaxed in attitude, and sometimes comes with a few days in really nice accommodations before main body starts arriving or after main body has departed.
*Dear Dragoon friends and family, it’s Wednesday and we are in the middle of a very busy week here at Fort Leonard Wood. For our two companies out in the field the weather has been cooperating very nicely for them, and for the others things have been moving along at a brisk pace. It’s hard to believe that we’ll be graduating two of our companies just one short week from now.
And now for the update:
Alpha Company (Week 10): Alpha Rock is in their second day of FTX III. Command Sergeant Major Hall and I took some time to visit with them out in the field today and we were very impressed. They had established defensive positions out in the woods with dug-in foxholes and interlocking fields of fire. We even had an opportunity to watch one of the squads execute an ambush on another and their subsequent battle drills. All in all, they looked good and they are getting quite a lot out of this training.*
A particularly grueling large scale long duration training event for journeyman units. Often done before deploying into the real war as a final tune-up & foretaste of extended battle against near-peer forces. And fighting in typical middle eastern terrain and cities with civilians, guerrillas & regular enemy.
Lots of fun, but very little sleep for a couple weeks.
I’ve “bombed” both good and bad guys there. And killed their helos. Such fun.
Well, she has her medic training to get through, and then it depends on where they deploy her. Do all recruits do this or just the ones going into combat?
WAG: They want the recruits to know that yes, it is possible to function on less than eight hours of sleep (should they be in a combat situation where they have to stand watch all night) and to teach them to fall asleep when they can (I’m reminded of Saving Private Ryan, where they all bunked down in a church and were out like a light.)
Actual combat is a sleep-deprived situation. The enemy runs 24 hours / day. Or at least he can. So your forces must too. At minimum, you need to maintain a guard force 24/7. Which means sleeping in shifts.
The US is especially adept at night ground warfare. Far more so than any other force I’m aware of. As such, we have a special advantage when we fight at night. So we do. Particularly if we got wrapped up in a real war against a real military, versus irregulars, you’d see massive night combats.
Finally, training has a real big difference from war. Nobody is dying or being crippled. Which is pretty stressful when it happens to you or your pals. Sleep deprivation is a very effective form of artificial stress. So lots of lesser training events, including basic boot camp, include sleep deprivation and circadian disruptions
as ways of toughening the trainees to work better under stress.
No. It depends on the unit. NTC is just one of many possible exercise locations. Basically every unit will have some kind of annual culmination exercise, especially before deployment. I’ve done them everywhere from home station, to NTC, to places like Hohenfels and Grafenwoehr. In between these major exercises there will be many smaller exercises.
[QUOTE=MichaelEmouse]
For what reasons do militaries use sleep deprivation so much during training?
[/QUOTE]
As LSLGuy mentioned, the war doesn’t stop. There is activity going on at all hours of the day. If you are in the field, fighting the enemy, then people need to be alert 24/7 to guard the camp and react if there is an attack. They will sleep in short shifts, if the opportunity presents itself. In a longer battle, a person might go days with minimal sleep.
[QUOTE=MichaelEmouse]
How much sleep do US combat personnel typically get during conventional or counterguerilla warfare?
[/QUOTE]
It depends. If you are in the middle of active combat (for example, the initial US invasion of Iraq) the answer is “very little.” In later phases of the campaign, once things have settled down and the large camps have been built, the situation might improve. Even then, your ability to sleep is dictated by the unit’s OPTEMPO and the amount of work that needs to be done. Even staff officers working in the headquarters might only get 4 hours of sleep a night, just because of the volume of work to do. I’ve seen people working in office settings fall asleep and smash their faces on the keyboard. The fact that they were in a (relatively) controlled environment didn’t change the fact that they had to work at all hours. Then a mortar comes in an wakes everybody up, and they have to do a head count to make sure nobody’s dead, and so on…
Just by way of example, I was on a mission to patrol outside of Bagram. The idea was that we would park our MRAP somewhere, and if a mortar attack occurred we would be pre-positioned to zoom on over to the attack site. We just found a secluded spot to park and took turns standing guard all night, waiting for the radio call to direct us where to go. I might have gotten an hour’s sleep or so, because trying to rest inside an MRAP is NOT FUN. Every time we rolled back into base we’d get four to six hours to sleep in and recover, and then it was back to work because there was still a war to fight.
I was told that it’s crucial to see how recruits deal with stress and sleep deprivation introduces an artificial sense of stress. The recruits are not stupid, they are aware that they are not actually at war, but once you are exhausted, things can feel much different.
