One Shepherd

I was lying face down in a ditch; the cacophony of gunfire and shouting was all around me; I was pinned down, and alone.  This is what they were talking about in the basic class when the instructor told us, “Never lose your battle buddy”.  I had agreed with him; it made perfect sense, but until I got out here in the fire fight, I had not understood two important things: A. how easy it is to become separated from your battle buddy, and B. how deadly it is when it happens.

I was exhausted from two days patrolling, topped off with a morning fire fight.  With my lungs busting for air I screamed out “Kruger!” as loud as I could, hoping he would hear me above the din of battle.

No response, but I could hear the voices of the men hunting me: “Noah, he’s in the grass right on my twelve. Move up, I have him suppressed.”

To say I was in a ditch is a bit of an overstatement. It was really the muddy rut of a farm road, not more than four inches deep.  With my head turned sideways I tried to lift my left eye above the edge of the dirt in an effort to see my attacker.   Beep! my harness sounded indicating an enemy shot had barely missed me.  Reflexively I smashed my head back down into the mud.  I had to move, and I had to move fast.  Like a centipede, I began crawling; but instead of having a hundred legs to propel myself, I had only my ten fingers and toes.  I dared not lift myself up to my elbows for a low crawl. I had no idea if there was cover ahead, but I knew I was not safe here.

“Jackson, move up, he’s moving.” Again, the voice was my enemy’s.  I swung my M4 up over the edge of the rut and sent a half dozen rounds of grazing fire in the direction of the voice.  It was blind, un-aimed fire, but at least it might slow them down.  I dragged myself forward as fast as I could, my head scraping the ground, my right ear filling with mud. The worst of it was my wagon rut was playing out, growing shallower as I progressed, and leaving me more exposed.  I tried to call out again in an effort to locate the rest of my team, but as I filled my lungs to shout I inhaled a mouth full of acrid smoke.  Someone had popped a smoke grenade, and the gentle breeze wafted the orange smoke across the battle field.  The epicenter of the cloud was too far away to provide real concealment, but I took a chance, and, pointing my weapon straight ahead and holding the stock close to my body, I rolled to my right, over the median, and into the other parallel rut of the farm road.  The gunfire intensified, but I had already moved, and, just as I had hoped, the right hand rut was a bit deeper in this spot.

“BSR, BSR!” I shouted again hoping to locate any member of my team (we were the Baltic Slav Republic for this exercise), but it seemed that the bulk of the fighting had moved away and to my left; there was no answer.

The plan for the assault had been straightforward and workable, but now we were less than two minutes into the contact, and the plan seemed to be a long- ago piece of fiction.  The battle was going on elsewhere, and I was fighting, not to take an enemy position, but simply to stay alive.

Channeling, or Funneling, was another thing they had warned us about in Basic.  Human beings will take the path of least resistance, especially when they maneuver under stress. Usually this causes fighters to bunch too closely to provide mutually supporting fire.  However, it can also cause you to be channeled away from your team, too far away to maintain visual and auditory communication.  Again, it had made sense, and in the shoulder drills we had practiced maneuver, learning how to avoid it; but here I was, channeled away from my team.  I continued forward, heart pounding and lungs gasping for air.  My one eye, gazing over the edge of the wagon rut with a tortoise’s eye view of the world, spied an inviting fold of the land, a depression large enough to hide a man on hands and knees. If I could just make that! Then I could really move, then I could turn this thing around and bring the fight back to the enemy!  Just then the enemy came into view, he rose up out of the grass ahead of me and took two steps before he planted again, firing as he moved.  I had my rifle up, and fired as he did, but my shot went wide. One of his registered, and my ears filled with a loud, persistent buzz, indicating I had been killed.  I took off my hat, signaling to all friend and foe that I was no-longer in the fight, and stood up.

This account is written, mostly from memory, of my first Field Training Exercise with One Shepherd, some five years ago.  Some of you reading this may be chuckling to yourselves at the dramatic tone I evoke. This is on purpose. The training at One Shepherd is immersive, it is normal to forget that it is all a training game.  Yes, the ammunition fired by both sides are blanks, but the adrenalin is real.  I tried to capture that feeling in this piece.

One Shepherd teaches light infantry tactics and small unit patrolling, as a vehicle for teaching leadership.  If I had to sum up what they do in one sentence, I would say that they are an NCO school for civilians.  They typically outline the classroom instruction briefly, and then put the students immediately into force- on- force training, to cement the lesson.  The fact that I can, to this day, remember that firefight this clearly, and the lesson it taught me, is testament to their unique teaching method.  The FTX is the three day force- on- force culmination of each of their semesters.  For more information, or to sign up for classes go to: http://www.1shepherd.com/

WWI Memorial and Museum

My wife and I went to K.C., and, among other things, visited the WWI museum and memorial. Here are some of my thoughts.

I can’t say it was fun; it is, after all, about one of the greatest catastrophes to have occurred in human history.   It is, however, a place that everyone should probably visit.

The Memorial, dedicated in 1921, and the museum, built in the late 1990s, each have very different messages and meanings.

The memorial is very much about remembering the fallen. It was built by people who had lost loved ones in the war, and wanted to be certain that their sacrifice was remembered, and that it mattered.  Noteworthy is the inscription on the base, with the words: “The World War”. No one expected that there would ever be more than one, at that time.

The Museum is very much from a current perspective, the same that I learned in school: The war was pointless, no one really knows why it happened, the reasons for the U.S. getting involved were largely trumped up.

I have to wonder whether we are looking at the actions of the world leaders of one hundred years ago with too much smug self-righteousness.   It is easy to look at a slogan like “war to end all wars” and scoff, but then again we have the benefit of hindsight that they did not.

“Make the world safe for democracy” in another phrase that is widely derided, without considering that, had Germany won, people the world over might have felt that their democratic governments were weak and ineffectual; strong man dictators would have certainly been more appealing.

Then there is the nationalist propaganda, depicting Germany as a barbaric nation bent on evil.  I have never quite understood why this is so widely mocked. If anything, the actions of Germany in that war and the next war were far worse than even the worst allied propaganda depicted.

The cost of WWI was truly staggering, and the museum does an excellent job of depicting that cost. A war that claims  19 million combat deaths, 7 million civilian, and another 11 non-combat military deaths, indeed deserves close scrutiny, and  somber remembrance.

https://www.theworldwar.org/