With the ranges behind us, we transitioned to a more sedate classroom pace for most of the rest of the week. Wednesday morning we got to go to the Leader's Reaction Course, a kind of obstacle course that requires each team to get through various obstacles while giving them odd limitations. For example, the last obstacle we had to traverse was a ~20 foot high cargo net with a six foot wide platform on top. We had to get the entire team across, plus a 'wounded' soldier (a dummy) on a stretcher. To do this we had a stretcher, a back board, and three ropes. That was a rather straightforward challenge: we tied the ropes to the stretcher and pulled the casualty up one side and lowered him down the other. Some of the others were more esoteric, requiring us not to touch the ground and so on. The purpose of the course is to help the team learn to work together while challenging them to be creative, and it worked pretty well. It was a good time.
Most of the rest of the week was classes on communications and various other technical systems. They're good classes, but the instructor-to-student ratio is so high that it's hard to get as much out of the classes as you should. Given the Army's current financial woes, it's unlikely things will get any better.
Saturday we had a great time, as we went out to a range to practice reflexive fire. As the name implies, reflexive fire involves learning how to fire your weapon rapidly. You start at 25 meters from the target and bring up your weapon as quickly as you safely can and put two rounds in the target before returning the weapon to the low ready. You do this while facing the target and while turned left and right from the target. Then you move in to 20 meters and fire from the kneeling position, still bringing the weapon up to fire two rounds and returning it to the low ready. Then the real fun begins: you walk towards the targets, stopping when a target is presented. We burned about 200 rounds per man and had a great time, as it's a lot more challenging than simply engaging targets on a qualification range. Better yet, we then took the rest of the weekend off, so I was able to spend a little time with Delenn.
This week is all classes. Yesterday we trained on calling for fire, including artillery, rotary wing, and fixed wing. I've done artillery before, but calling in air support is a whole new ballgame and the training was interesting and challenging. Explaining target location to a guy moving at at least 100 mph is a lot different from telling a fixed artillery piece to fire at a target, to put it mildly. Today we had two hours of Iraqi before moving on to personnel recovery, which helps to train you on what to do if you are cut off or captured. That's valuable training, but the execution was horrid. Hopefully the rest of this week's classes will be much better done.