Mountain Training Event AAR

This past weekend I had the privilege of spending a few days in the mountains of Western NC training with some friends. There was a combination of force-on-force exercises, radio practice, TCCC training, and the fieldcraft involved with just dealing with the elements of being in the mountains in winter. 

I came away from this event with several AAR points for myself, my gear, my training, and just in general. I will share these lessons learned below, so you can learn from my mistakes and successes.

Fieldcraft

• Temperatures ranged from 20 degrees Fahrenheit at night to low 50s during the day. This meant that a balance had to be struck with my warming layers. Being inactive at night and active during the day leads to quite the variation of body temperature, so I had the opportunity to experiment with a couple of different things.
• At one point I hiked up a mountain at a steep incline gaining 600ft of elevation over less than half of a mile. I did so wearing a heavy field jacket over my combat uniform. Halfway up the hill I had to stop and shed my coat, cramming it into my assault pack. Shedding layers as you become active is natural, but my nice warm coat was very bulky and heavy in my pack. I didn’t like the inefficient use of valuable space and weight.
  • Lesson learned: lighter warming layers that can be worn underneath the field uniform were far more space and weight efficient while keeping me just as warm as my coat did. I used my old USMC “wooly pully” 100% wool sweater for this, and it was worth its weight in GOLD. A goretex shell or similar would have been nice to reduce windchill.
• I didn’t have a cold weather sleeping bag, so I improvised by putting my lightweight Snugpack Jungle Bag inside of a mylar emergency sleeping bag. This was only effective the first night when the temperature reached about 35 degrees Fahrenheit, but was insufficient once temperatures dipped into the low 20s the following night. I had to use several hand and body warmers to keep myself from freezing, but at least I never caved and went back to my truck.
  • Lesson learned: Invest in a quality cold weather sleeping bag. Surviving the night is not enough, sleeping through the night is necessary to be well rested.

Equipment

• It rained the day before the event, melting all the snow that had covered the landscape. Sadly, I didn’t get to use my over-whites, so I opted for MARPAT desert camouflage fatigues. The desert MARPAT worked incredibly well blending into all the dead leaves on the ground.
• I carried my assault pack (SOG Ninja) with my Can Cannon strapped to the side of it in an experimental grenadier loadout, in addition to my belt kit and chest rig. This setup worked well, and the can cannon was easy to deploy from this position.
• I used a surplus SAW ammo pouch on my assault pack to hold 66mm DPS rounds for the can cannon. It comfortably held 5 rounds ready to go, in addition to the three I had on my gear.
• I tried to use my AR-152 radio with a PTT and headset, but this setup did not work as intended. I was unable to transmit anything but static using the headset/PTT, and had to remove it to use the external speaker/mic on the radio.
  • Lesson learned: Not all PTTs are made alike. All radio checks before a patrol must be done with ALL radio accessories attached, especially handsets/headsets. If I hadn’t been thorough on my equipment checks, I would have stepped on a patrol unable to hear or transmit.

• At one point I had to take off my assault pack to low crawl underneath some low pine boughs. Dragging it along with one hand with my rifle in my other hand was not ideal.
  • Lesson learned: A drag strap with a large carabiner would have been very useful to attach to my belt and pull the pack behind me while keeping one hand free to crawl more silently. I will be adding one to my assault pack in the near future.

• I experimented with Enola Gaye WP-40 smoke grenades. These are smaller than the EG-18s which I use for screening, but they cost half as much and I wanted to see if they had any real-world usefulness. During a raid, I handed one to the Team Leader of our maneuver element to mark his position to our support element. It worked great for that purpose, with 90 seconds of red smoke thick enough to see from several hundred yards away.
  • Lesson learned: For the size, weight, and cost, these are handy little tools that make a fine addition to any team leader’s analog signals kit (alongside chemlights, flares, and a whistle). 2 of them fit into a magazine pouch nicely, or 1 inside of a flashbang grenade pouch.

Tactics

• The Can Cannon proved to be very useful with the DPS rounds. This topic deserves it’s own article/video, so I won’t try to go into depth here. Suffice to say, the Minuteman/Jäger Grenadier is here to stay.

• I led a 3-man ambush on a 5-man patrol. The ambush plan went well until I tried to execute a withdrawal from the ambush site. Due to a miscommunication on my part and a lack of time to conduct rehearsals, I got “shot” while attempting to move.
  • Lesson (re)learned: Rehearsals are critical. Every part of an ambush must be rehearsed: setting into position, initiating the ambush, exploitation, withdrawal, and any contingencies. Failure to rehearse leads to greater risk.

Personal

• I underestimated my physical fitness. Hiking up steep mountain slopes took more out of me than I’d like to admit, and running around with my assault pack and grenadier’s loadout made me more winded than I expected to be.
  • Lesson learned: I need to include more inclines into my run/ruck routes and just get out to PT more often. Combat is cardio.

Summary

You can read all you want, buy all the gear you want, and watch all the cool videos on how to do things. But nothing substitutes actually going outside and getting a little bit uncomfortable to test yourself, your gear, and your team.

Go for a hike. Take your gear camping. Attend a training class. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.