Jungle Warfare Training Center

Just to let you all know, this is not Joy. It's Kyle. I thought I'd post a blog on Joy's blogger to let everyone know how Jungle Warfare Training was this past week.

First of all, I must say that I learned a lot while I was out there. I learned a lot about the Marine Corps, but I also learned a lot about myself.

So I went out there last Sunday. It's about a 3 hour drive north from where I work at Camp Courtney. We went out on 7-tons and a bus. There was a total of about 60 Marines from HQ Battalion. Sunday night we staged our gear and set up our tents at the bivouac site. Here's a couple of pictures:

After we got all settled in, we hit the rack to get some sleep before training began on Monday. The training agenda for Monday was learning how to repel and hasty repel. Repelling is basically where you have a rope that is looped around a harness on your body, and you repel down the side of a cliff, or even straight out of a chute (or helicopter), using the rope. The cliff we repelled down was approximately 75 feet high. There was the cliff and the "hell hole". The cliff is to the right of the "hell hole":


Hasty repelling is a little bit different than regular repelling. When you hasty repel, there's a rope that is attached at the top of a really steep hill (or basically cliff), and you grab the rope and sling it behind your back at your shoulder blades, holding it with both hands. Then you proceed to run down the cliff letting the rope slide through your hands. This is no joke either. These "hills" that we did were basically cliffs. We had several Marines get hurt doing the hasty repel because they just lose their footing or get going too fast and can't control their fall. For example, our Company Commander fell on the hasty repel (pic below) on Monday, and busted open his head and someone had to drive him to the hospital at Camp Lester and he got like 14 staples in his head. So he didn't train with us the rest of the week. Here's a picture of the average hasty repel.

It's not too steep, but not too shallow. This one is actually a pretty easy one because there are no trees or roots or big rocks to navigate. There were a total of 10 hasty repels that we did on the Endurance Course on Friday. Some ranging from steep hills to no-joke actual cliffs that you had to run down. There was this one that I was running down, and at the very end there was a 10 foot drop off to the stream that it ended at. So I basically just jumped that whole part. It was fun except I was squeezing the rope with my hands to slow me down, and my hands got super hot, even through the two pairs of gloves I was wearing. Also on Friday, on the last hasty repel my team went down, I rolled my ankle really bad. Just prior to that hasty repel, another Marine had handed off the radio pack to me, so now I was carrying an extra 40 pounds or so, which really threw off my balance. Let alone my rifle which kept smacking me in the shins as I went down, lol. I rolled my ankle at the very bottom of the cliff. And it hurt. I could feel it swell up inside of my boot. I could feel that it was a pretty bad roll. There were still 3 more obstacles to do on the E-course, so I pushed through, but after that next one, I had to hand off the radio pack because it was hurting too bad. Here's a picture of it after I got home:

Thank the Lord that it happened on the last day or I probably would've been out for the rest of the training. The swelling has gone down since I first rolled it (about the size of a softball), but it's pretty black and blue right now.

And yes, I know that I have creepy looking feet. And my toes are freakishly long.

So Tuesday was our Land Navigation, short course, day. Then Wednesday was our Land Nav, long course, day. Let me say that the jungle here is something amazing. Most everywhere is double canopy, some places are triple canopy. Basically, Land Nav is where we have to find various points in the jungle. We plot those points with a protractor on a grid map, then use a compass to shoot an azimuth to the points, and proceed to walk to them. Sounds easier than it really is in the jungle. When I did Land Nav in boot camp and MCT, it was a joke. Mostly because it was in California, and you could almost see your little box that you had to go to because there was no foliage. But not so in the jungle. If there was no trail (which often there wasn't), you had to blaze your own. All the while keeping your direction and pace count accurate. After doing jungle Land Nav, I'm pretty confident that I can find anything anywhere, lol.

I was absolutely amazed at God's creation out there. While walking with our team, I was just soaking in all of the amazing things out in the jungle. The crazy different plants and insects and creatures. For example the giant palm fern, the biggest fern in the world is out there. Those ferns are like trees. They are absolutely HUGE! The biggest one I saw, one of the fern leaves was probably 8-10 feet long. Also, they have these little poisonous salamandars everywhere. They are black with spots on their backs, and completely red underbellies. You could see them anywhere that it was wet, which was pretty much everywhere under the canopy, because the sun didn't really reach down through it. Unfortunetly I don't have a picture of them. And of course there were banana spiders. One that I saw was only about 3-4 inches in diameter, but they supposedly get at least twice to three times that big, bigger than your hand. Last but not least, there was the Habu snake. Very poisonous. If you get bitten by the Hemi Habu, you have 6 hours to live. If you get bitten by the Golden Habu, you have 3 hours to live. Kinda scary. And if you get bitten and you live, you have to go back to the states, and you can't ever come back to Okinawa. Pretty serious stuff. I only saw one, the Hemi Habu. It was fairly large. It was on our last obstacle on the E-course on Friday. We were carrying this stretcher with a Marine on it through this peanut butter mud, and one of the Marines goes to grab a root on the side of the mud bank, and the root moved! It was the Hemi Habu snake, and the guy freaked out! Needless to say, the instructor stopped our time and we walked around it and started again a little farther along. I guess you're not supposed to disturb them in their habitat. Hey, I'm fine with that. I won't disturb it if it won't disturb me.

All this to say, God's creation on the other side of the world is breath-taking. While we were doing Land Nav, I paused to take some pictures of it:

And here's a picture of me:


And an example of one of the 'hills' we climbed:

Here's my first Land Nav team on Wednesday:

And some pictures of the jungle:


Thursday, we did patrolling. It was fun because we actually got to break up into teams and shoot each other with paint. It's not quite paintball guns, because we actually use our M16's with shells that fit into the chamber, but it's called SESAMS. And I forgot what it stands for. 'Simulated' something or another. SESAMS was tons of fun, except that they hurt a bit more cause the paint 'bullets' are smaller than paintballs and they come out of the M16 with quite a bit more velocity. And of course it's not fun when you are in the jungle and your teammates can't tell who is who, and they shoot you in the arm from like 10 meters away. Friendly fire, good times. But I had quite a blast. And of course the instructors are there to stress you out as well and yell at you and tell you that you're not doing anything right. That's always enjoyable.

So by the time it was Thursday night, I was pretty dog tired. No shower all week, continually walking everywhere, and carrying things; it all adds up when you're not used to doing it regularly.

Friday: the day everyone had been waiting for. We'd all heard about the 3.8 mile E-course and we all couldn't wait to see how awesome it was. And it was definitely awesome. It was a timed event. I guess the best time to beat was 3 hours, and I think that an Infantry Battalion team had set that. We were broken up into groups of 16 to run the course. They said that the average time it took to complete was 6 hours. My group did it in 5 hours 45 minutes. Now that's an intense E-course! Just think of anything hard core Marine Corps, and that's what it was. All those cool recruiting posters of the Marine Corps showing Marines being tough climbing over walls and nets, running through mud, scaling cliffs and pulling themselves on ropes across rivers, etc. It was totally cool, because it gave me an opportunity to do what I kind of originally had fantasized in my head what the Marine Corps was going to be like.

There was a total of 10 hasty repels on the E-course. There was also two rope-bridge crossings over a deep ravine (I only wish I could've taken pictures of the view). Then there was a stream run where we ran down a stream that was up to our chests at spots. Then several hills, so steep that you had to grab roots and trees to keep from falling backwards. Two such hills were called 'Hamburger Hill' and 'War Dog Hill'. Hamburger Hill definitely made my thighs feel like hamburger meat. I was dead after that one. There were a couple of river crossings, one of which we had to do the 'monkey crawl' on rope suspended about 30 feet from the river. The second one we had to do the 'commando crawl' on rope suspended about 50 feet from the river. The 'monkey crawl' is hand-over-hand, but you're hanging from the rope. The 'commando crawl' is hand-over-hand, but you're balancing on top of the rope. I did the 'commando crawl' with the radio pack on and a rolled ankle. I was hurtin pretty bad, so I didn't make it all the way across only about half way, then I fell. I had a safety line and everything, but they still had to pull me in. There was also the 'Pit and Pull'. Wow. Basically low-crawling through trenches filled with water and mud and salamandars swimming all around. Oh ya, and barbed wire that you have to lift up to get by. Good times. A Marine actually tripped a makeshift 'booby trap', so our team got to do it twice. Yay. Then finally, there was the stretcher carry. We get to carry a Marine on a stretcher through some pretty intense terrain, plus peanut butter mud. Peanut butter mud is mud that won't let go of you. You step in it, and you can't step out. You only sink deeper. It has such a suction on your feet that it takes more than one Marine to get you out of it. And we had to carry a stretcher through it. Oh ya, and that was the part that we saw the Habu snake at. So you can imagine we were scrambling a bit.

All in all, a great week, a great time. I really learned a lot about myself actually, as well as about the Marine Corps. I have been realizing over the past few weeks that I'm not very confident in myself. And it shows. I tend to second guess myself alot. Small example; if someone asks a question, and I know the answer, I still don't say anything for fear that I might be wrong. Or I'm not confident in the answer that I have, so I just choose not to say anything at all. That's a small example, but really, that fear of not being right, or of being wrong has stopped me from doing many many things. It has kept me a timid person more often than not. And this past week, I had to step up as an NCO and be confident in the knowledge that I had. It was really a huge stretch for me, and it scared me to put myself out there.

One example of this was when we were doing Land Nav. I was one of the only ones who really knew how to read the grid map well, mostly because I do it at my job. Well, I was the navigator, and I took my team probably almost 2 kilometers into the jungle. We get close to our point, but we couldn't find it. So I'm starting to get more and more nervous and begining to think that I lost my group because I might not have read the contour lines on the map right, and took my group up the wrong hill. Eventually we found it, but I was definitely sweating for a while there, and lost all confidence that I led our group in the right direction. That's a small example, but I've just been learning to be more confident. And when I'm wrong or I make a wrong decision, I just need to learn from it and move on, instead of completely stress over how incompetent I am as a person.

God has also been placing on my heart to be more generous to others. Sometimes I tend to be a little introverted, and oftentimes selfish, which is completely prideful and wrong of me. A small example of this was eating MRE's this past week. Each Marine gets 3 MRE's to eat a day. So naturally, I get mine and they're now mine. It's not natural for me to share my food with other Marines. They have their own, they can eat them. But God was really laying on my heart to be more generous to others, so I decided to just offer some food to some people if they were still hungry. Some took it, some didn't, but I was amazed at the response. And later on in the week, people were offering me stuff! I don't think that would've happened if I would've kept all my food to myself. It's really neat how when you are generous and giving, then others are generous and giving to you. But when you are not (and there's been plenty of times I haven't been), then it seems no one else really is either.

Those were just a couple of things that I've been learning recently. Nothing really huge, but I thought I'd just share with you all how my week went and what I've been learning through it all. God is really an amazing God to show me these things about myself.

Well, hope you didn't mind a blog from Kyle and not from Joy. I'll get off here so that she can write more blogs.