To Prepare for War, G.I.’s Get a Dress Rehearsal

by Babel-Fish | November 28, 2009 at 05:58 pm

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Training really has progressed since I left the forces (Brit Vet), however that's just part of what I see here. At a guess these are part of the forces being pledged to Afghanistan. I always wonder that the reality being different than the non reality. That is the stress is different when you know someone may have a rifle trained on you.

When you know you really can be shot, most of the time you are too busy to worry about it. Until a buddy gets shot then the stress kicks fully in thankfully it overwhelms the fright, then there is the feeling you want revenge.

Real stress is waiting to the time of the next patrol or the next guard duty where you are once more a target. But the odds of getting killed are pretty low normally in my case it was always some one else.

These guys when in battle will always hope its someone else and not them and they will learn what that feeling of regenge is all about. some will see the blood and the gore. Some will wish they was not a soldier but most of them will feel they are being useful and serving to protect the country.

I hope each and everyone of them survives but know that will not be the case a small percentage (yes I know there has been a lot of deaths) of them will not come back home alive, but in a box drapped with a flag.

Just another day in Afghanistan? More like the dress rehearsal for war, played out on 100,000 acres of snake-infested pine forest on an Army post near the Texas border.

Here, thousands of soldiers prepare for deployment each month by patrolling Afghan villages built by professional set designers, battling roving insurgents played by American soldiers and negotiating with actors playing tribal elders, many of whom speak real Pashto.

It is Counterinsurgency 101, about as realistic as the Army can make it in Louisiana, never mind the alligator-filled swamps, the “mud” huts assembled from metal shipping containers and the Afghan “villagers” who stir pots of Cajun rice and beans between Taliban raids. The training scenarios, created from intelligence reports fresh from the front, are capable of bringing stressed soldiers to the brink of tears, commanders say.