Day 15 at NTC

[aadler]

 

Oh my God. This was a horrible day.

Not that grueling physically. Yes, we spent most of the day sitting out in the heat accomplishing nothing, but we’ve faced almost as bad more than once in the last two weeks.

No, the thing that made it bad was that we basically screwed up everything we did or tried to do today.

We got up at 5:00 AM to get everything ready for the convoy. Except that it didn’t leave at 6:45; that was when we started the convoy briefs and the battle drills and all the other stuff that takes up time but still has to be done. We didn’t leave till after 8:00, and the fourth man we’d picked up at the helipad stayed — for now — with Team 73.

By 10:30, we were not only at the JSS base, but were about to start out the gate on the mission to Abar Layla.

My team had a decided role in this mission, and were assigned an interpreter to help us. Only, our radio spontaneously zeroed its code fill before we made it outside the wire, meaning we had no comms. We were told to fall in behind the casualty evac truck, so that communication could be done through them. Only the cas-evac kept circling the village, over and over, occasionally passing through but never stopping. I thought the scenario had changed and security was having a hard time stabilizing the situation so the planned operations could begin.

It took far too long to find out that the planned operations had been in process throughout; we’d just been tucked to the back of the line and forgotten. We pushed in and tried to get started on what we were supposed to be doing. We were tasked to deal with a situation involving possible armed people in two locations; when I questioned the advisability of doing a broadcast calling for those in both locations to come out at once (confusion being the likely result), security pulled our interpreter to deal with it themselves. Then he was brought back to us, and we were sent to deal with the second situation (apparently they’d accepted that both at once was unworkable, just hadn’t mentioned it to me). The second situation was resolved decently, but we made a hash of the process, and things got no better from there.

Our interpreter was pulled again. We argued among ourselves about how much power we had to impose our mission onto someone else’s. (They’re supposed to supplement each other, but everyone pushes his own part of it.) We eventually made contact. We got started talking to people. We were pulled away and sent back to our truck because — we discovered on arrival — our third man had gotten down out of the turret into the back seat, and they’d thought the truck was deserted. By that time, however, there were no other military vehicles around us … and we still had no comms. We drove up the hill to the first Army truck we saw and asked them what was going on, thinking the entire element might be pulling out. They didn’t know, they were getting contradictory information themselves. We stayed beside them until they moved on to ask another truck voice-to-voice what was the situation, around which time we were ordered back off the hill and chewed out for leaving our position.

And they took away the interpreter again, nor was he returned to us for the rest of the mission.

It ended and we went back, and there were no awful real-world consequences, but the fact remains: we landed in a new place, alongside people with whom we were supposed to work, and clear up and down the line we let them make us into their butt-boys. My MOS operates in a specific way, and part of that way involves a team carving out an independent niche for itself and defending that area regardless of the ranks involved. That’s not just ego or specialty-pride; it’s the way we work, and I didn’t do it right, and I’d better learn fast.

A bit less than a week ago, I heard that my team had turned out the best performance on our lane. I’d be willing to bet that today’s was not only the worst we’ve ever done, but the worst any of our teams has done since we first got here. The wonder is that I didn’t face active mutiny from the rest of my crew.

Just about the time I finished the sitrep for the debacle I had just left, the company commander brought me his cell-phone, and on the line was the team chief of the bunch we had gone to FOB Dallas to join. He had a get-it-done-now project regarding coordinating with the mullah and the imam of Abar Layla to mitigate some of the damage done by the Iraqi Army ‘casualty’, whom I had since learned had been ‘killed’ by an accidental discharge. My ATL and I immediately went (as instructed) to coordinate with the company commander … but it turned out that this wasn’t a directive from higher-up, it was just an idea that the other team chief wanted to push through, and the commander’s view from the ground prevailed. Fortunately, he didn’t hold it against us.

I spent some time discussing various issues with my ATL. Even with all the stuff we’d been through — and with a last-minute initiative dropped on us — we got to bed at a reasonable time.