ARL Greening Course
Day 1
Classroom stuff about the army. Then we got to fly in a Huey Helicopter to another site where we rode in some tanks!!! It was only around a track and wasn't really too impressive but it was fun!
Day 2
Shoot some guns! AK-47, M-14, M-16, M-4. The M-14 was supposed to have the most kick which it did but still was not a lot compared to a shotgun... I was surprised. The AK-47 on full automatic drafts a LOT!! The M-16 and M-4 have a setting called burst which is 3 rounds per pull of the trigger. This was pretty nifty and we speculated this was to keep the soldiers from using to much ammo...
Then we went to the obstacle course and cooked up some MREs which stands for Meals Ready To Eat. I had the chicken fajita and I did not like it at all. The obstacle course was fun, but I only went through it one time. I am out of shape what can I say.
Day 3
Got up really really early and went to fort dix where they have specialized training modules. All of the current training we saw is geared towards urban desert type stuff. They had 4 different areas. The first we did was shooting at a projected screen of enemies running towards you and shooting at you. You had a gun that was linked up somehow and they tracked where you shot and who you killed. Kind of like those arcade games except we had 9 people lined up in a row. The fault of this one is that a lot of the guns were not calibrated and basically did not work so 3 or 4 people had all the kills.
The next station we did was sitting at a computer with a sim of a urban town that you had to run through a clear all the bad guys. The point of this scenario was to communicate with your teammates and stay together while taking down the enemy. The bad part was there was no structure they just had unlimited enemy and lives for the group. Though this would probably be a lot better for training if you had one life and a clear objective.
The next simulation we did was called VICE. Some kind of acronym for virtual combat. This was pretty cool in that it combines the 2 first stations we did into one. Having a real gun in hand to shoot opposed to a keyboard and moving around opposed to staying in one spot like in the first one. The enemy could kill each person and we actually had objectives in this sim!! It turned out really well. I do not think this has been approved yet for army use but it looks very promising.
The last section we did was a convoy exercise but it wasn't great at all. Again it was not set up for an objective all we did was avoid debris on the road and get shot at by artillery batteries. The debris we had to avoid because they could be IEDs and we did blow up from one of those one time.
Day 4
We went to the museum on base for the last day. This had tons of weapons and things like that it was too cold to go outside and learn about the tanks but it had those too. He took us to a back room where he showed us a ton of weapons that the army used throughout it's history. Not sure if anyone learned anything useful but it was neat.
Next we went back to the building we were at on the first day and had a guy come talk to us who trained military dogs. The dogs are used for Narcotics, Explosive Detection or attack? I forget what the last one was called but he is not a friendly dog to anyway! He is meant to defend a soldier in combat or something like that. Was pretty interesting how well they can get the dogs trained.
