Thank you all for the explanations for driving at night - as described here - and the other comments for my armchair understanding.
davidbfpo
Thank you all for the explanations for driving at night - as described here - and the other comments for my armchair understanding.
davidbfpo
First let me say this is my opinion based on this side of the story, the author's perspective.
All the things that stand out in my mind come down to two things training and discipline or if you want to call it what it is "leadership". The first red flag in mind is the driver apologizing ahead of time for having never driven the vehicle before. There is absolutely no reason he should not have drive the vehicle before and the first time he does is in a combat situation, way to go leadership. Another red flag is soldiers standig in the head light beams. Absolutely nothing wrong with utilizing white lights but you'd never catch me standing in the head lights. Hey bad guys here I am, look at me. Absolutely many soldiers and units are horrendous when it comes to fire control and fire discipline. This goes back to many of my rants in other posts in how we do not train this enough. POSH training, safety training, and mandatory screenings take priority in todays Army, even during a time of war. I won't touch the NVD issue because too many uknowns and who knows if they weren't using them or if they didn't have them, or if some used them and some didn't.
Just a few things that stuck out to me.
Just somethings that struck me
ODB
Exchange with an Iraqi soldier during FID:
Why did you not clear your corner?
Because we are on a base and it is secure.
In fairness to the unit I don't know when this event took place but I do know that certain vehicles were hard to come by for the purposes of training, particularly for the ARNG. There just weren't enough of them to go around and most of those were in theater. A few were available for RA training but not many and a suspect that it would have been hard for those ARNG units to get them. That in no way excuses some of the other jackassery that apparently transpired.
Ken Said
I did not mean to imply that NVGs were not valuable or that this unit did not need to be employing them. I was only offering a possible reason why they were apparently not using them.Yes, NVG are a pain but they have great value, however, one can operate at night without NVGs, many forces have done that for thousands of years and those that did / do it well train to do so (even if you have NVG; what happens if you're out long enough to run out of batteries...), it's not difficult and one can see at night.
SFC W
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