Basic Training
Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 10:19 am
There is a facebook page on Harmony Church at Ft. Benning. Apparently that part of Ft. Benning has been training troops since WWII and maybe before. Most of the people posting on facebook were trained in the 80's. Apparently, for many of them, that training was the hardest service they ever experienced....and good for them. I, recently, out of boredom, posted a few things from my souvenir cycle book from the summer of 69 on that page. One thing I posted about this morning was the "infiltration course".
The infiltration course was a sort of amusement park military exercise. It was done for affect at night after doing a dry run in the daytime. Some of the family members of the cadre even came out and sat in some bleachers set off to one side to watch the fireworks. Trainees marched into a deep trench at the end of the special infiltration course as the sun went down. When it was completely dark Machine guns on short towers would start firing and the tracers would make the real bullets evident in the night air. Then some explosions would go off from shallow craters and continue in random sequence. Then it was show time.
The trainee, with rifle in hand and helmet liner on head comes up out of the trench and begins to low crawl. He doesn't get far before he finds himself crawling under wire entanglements. All the while the machine gun bullets and the explosions going on.
Of course the machine guns were high enough up and locked into a trajectory that wouldn't likely cause them to depress and actually shoot any trainees. A trainee could have gotten up and walked through the course without getting shot in the head. But... the trainees weren't told anything about how it worked and nobody wanted to test the theory out.
The infiltration course was a sort of amusement park military exercise. It was done for affect at night after doing a dry run in the daytime. Some of the family members of the cadre even came out and sat in some bleachers set off to one side to watch the fireworks. Trainees marched into a deep trench at the end of the special infiltration course as the sun went down. When it was completely dark Machine guns on short towers would start firing and the tracers would make the real bullets evident in the night air. Then some explosions would go off from shallow craters and continue in random sequence. Then it was show time.
The trainee, with rifle in hand and helmet liner on head comes up out of the trench and begins to low crawl. He doesn't get far before he finds himself crawling under wire entanglements. All the while the machine gun bullets and the explosions going on.
Of course the machine guns were high enough up and locked into a trajectory that wouldn't likely cause them to depress and actually shoot any trainees. A trainee could have gotten up and walked through the course without getting shot in the head. But... the trainees weren't told anything about how it worked and nobody wanted to test the theory out.