Final Exercise

Well, it is finished. Today we completed our final training exercise. We arose for an early breakfast and then convoyed in our humvees out to the training area. We completed two passes on the convoy training site. The first pass was done with blanks in our weapons and the second was done with live rounds. The pass consisted of enemy forces in the form of pop up targets to one side of the convoy that were engaged by the gunner who has his head out of the top of the vehicle. The next part required us to tactically dismount the vehicle and all return fire. We practiced this many times - we got pretty good at the choreography. The key to the drill is to make sure the muzzle of your weapon does not "flag" (point at and potentially hurt) one of your teammates. The next phase was an IED that disabled a vehicle requiring us to react by moving our vehicles into a good security position, treat the casualty, give him an IV, move to a safe point, call for medevac, set up a landing zone and then move out. The remainder of the lane was the gunner engaging a few more targets from his position. The whole lane took about 70 minutes. We had an after action review and then did the same thing with live rounds. There were three groups going through so it took a while. Thanks to the person who decided to put air conditioning into the new up armored humvees - it sure made my last two days here alot more bearable - and I'm sure the troops in the theater happier as well. Again, this does not really match my projected mission, but it was a good familiarization.

We returned to the barracks and now all that remains is to turn in some equipment and pack up to move to the airport to fly to theater next week.

This will be the last post from here. Thanks for your thoughts and prayers and following along. I am hoping that my friends and family enjoyed the information and that follow on teams from my unit can benefit from the daily descriptions of activities.

Once downrange, I will research ways to maintain communication. If I can access this site, I will continue to blog from here. The posts will be generic due to operational and security reasons, but I will try to paint a picture of my living rather than specific schedule or projects. If this site is not available, I believe that facebook is. This would require some of you to join facebook to participate - I will let you know. Either way, I can be reached at todd.hirneisen@us.army.mil and my mailing address is:

Major Todd Hirneisen
R-5 Department
25 NCR (Det 1)
FPO AA 34099-4922

Thanks again and I look forward to keeping you posted in the future.