Day 16 at NTC

[aadler]

 

Another day with lots of movement but little actually accomplished. I heard of a demonstration at the front; gate and found the JSS CO to offer crowd control messages; turned out to be a protest inside the village, at one of the mosques, and the CO elected to place us at the wire where we could broadcast into the village without actually leaving the camp; then, after tracking events by radio, he used an interpreter to deliver his own message through our system, making us technicians rather than operators.

There was an IED casualty outside the wire; we did rear security for a field ambulance until an air medevac could arrive. Again, one of the things any soldier has to be ready to do, but not pertaining to our MOS. In the afternoon, a mission to the village was planned, and I tried to negotiate a place for us in the proceedings wherein we could make a contribution from our own skill-set. Didn’t work out that way: first, the CO elected to place us just as before, at the edge of the camp but still inside the wire; second, events changed the mission almost as soon as they arrived in the village, and our part in it became non-pertinent.

In the early evening, the team chief (TC) of Team 73 came in on a convoy to check on things, bringing the fourth man with him. Here in the field, I’m technically his equal; at home station, however, he’s the ranking member of my platoon, plus he has a wealth of experience at this, so I listened and paid attention and mostly agreed with him, and we tried to formulate a plan for how to proceed from here.

(Part of the problem is that, as we near the end of the exercise, the OCs are ramping up activity, and the response called for is more and more kinetic — force on force — which not only is less than fully compatible with our approach but requires the commitment of resources that are then no longer available for any operations we might want to do. As an example, there was a notional suicide bomber at the gate while we were talking, ‘killing’ a junior officer and an interpreter. Under a press of such events, we tend to get pushed off to the side.)

One favorable note, though not military in any sense: I managed another 600 words on “Zero-Sum Game”, finishing the third of the projected four parts. I’m almost certain to complete the story before we leave, and it now looks to run around 4,000 words, maybe a bit above.