FT Stuff, part V

One real quick that occurred to me because I've been doing some reading about combat training and such tonight...

We were getting an afternoon worth of deployment training before going out on FLX. SABC (Self Aid/Buddy Care), Land Nav, and some basic individual and fire team movements. As part of the individual movement we learned how to low crawl, high crawl, and do rush and rolls. Low crawling and high crawling should be self explanatory; I messed up my face pretty good low crawling over some dirt, another cadet low crawled his face right into a fire ant mound. Anyway, rush and rolls, for those of you that don't know, is a basic fire team movement in which two members remain prone and lay down some covering fire while the third member pops up, advances (rushes), gets down, and then rolls to vacate the position in which they initially got down (rolls). You should be up (exposed) no more than 3-5 seconds during this exercise. During that 3-5 seconds you have to advance beyond the furthest member of your fire team so you are gaining ground. As part of the training they had us use some verbiage while we were moving to help us remember what to do and when to do it. When we popped up, "I'm up." When we were moving, "They see me." When it was time to get down, "I'm down." So it went something like this: pop up "I'm up," rush for a second "They see me," rush for another half second to second, get down "I'm down." Now, some of the slower and/or shorter cadets sometimes had trouble making it all the way beyond the further member of their fire team. One such cadet was the only female cadet left in our flight at this point in training. Her fellow fire team members weren't very considerate and had rushed a considerable distance beyond her position. So she gets up, "I'm up," rushes for a second or two, "They see me," continues to rush...and rush...at which point the SF SrA instructing us interjects "And...you're dead."

At which point we all had to stifle a chuckle.