Training in Mongolia

Mongolia was fantastic! In fact, I cannot just do one blog post for it so I will do as I did earlier for Torres del Paine - in a few themed posts.

This one is about the training, as the header very explicitly indicates. But I was not really able to take pictures during the training itself for one simple reason - the training was very good, and I didn't have the leisure to go around playing photographer.

First of all - I had been told our platoon would be the trainer platoon. That was not in fact true. The trainers were selected from each participating army - Indian, Nepalese, Mongolian, Thai and US. There was then one trainee platoon from each army, and a lot of Mongolian support. This system worked very well, and all the soldiers were very professional.

This Mongolian officer is telling us during an After Action Review that our Cordon and search method is "bad - very bad." "I made a list" - he says - "of all the things that went right, and all the things that went wrong. Eight things went right, and fourteen things went wrong. Very bad."



The Indian Army was very good - their officers are very proficient, and they have a lot of experience in places like Cashmere.


As for the Nepalese, they have a lot of UN experience in places like Haiti and DRC Congo. They also like to sing and dance, with drums in the tents at night, and with AK-47 magazines if they are stuck in formation long enough.



Many of the UN peacekeeping / peace enforcing TTPs were very similar to US army TTPs. Convoy operations, for example, were just like Iraq but with a blue flag and a different set of rules of engagement:


The range was fun, and I had time to take pictures there. Here is our motor sergeant reading up on the AK-47 and RPK before coming up to shoot:


And I really enjoyed being a safety and trainer for the M4 carbine live fire range. Here, SPC Thompson helps a Mongolian soldier safely clear a feeding malfunction.


The Mongolian army also had shoot the Dragunov sniper rifle. I know, that's not really UN related, but it is a very nice weapon so I was glad I got to shoot it.


The lanes for this exercise were: convoy, checkpoint, aid relief distribution, patrol, cordon and search (contraband interdiction), and disarmement. This is a picture of our platoon with a Mongolian contingent of role players and trainers, and a Nepalese officer, on a UN color BTR-60:

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The summer of my content happiness

Hello everyone. My regular coffee shop connection has been refusing to upload pictures to this website, so I will simply give an update.'

It's been a busy summer and I am tired, but I have also enjoyed myself very much. This last weekend the Mongolia contingent went up to Anchorage to do paperwork and health screenings, and the mission is now official, and not classified at all: we'll be in Mongolia for about three weeks next month, helping the Mongolian military in the capstone exercise of their UN certification. Our company will consist of our platoon (US), a Mongolian platoon, and an Indian or Nepalese platoon. This should be a wonderful way to finish this interesting summer.

Some recent highlights of my Sitka Sound adventures have been: a largely fruitless abalone hunt on weather-beaten rocks south of Sitka at very low tide (although I do have some cool pictures of undersize abalone, and horrendous scratches on my kayak to show for it), a couple of good hikes on Verstovia, and pretty good birdwatching from the tour boat on board which I now work - the St Michael. I have learned a lot about botany, but still not nearly enough to really know what I am looking at. In fact, I made a pretty embarrassing mistake last week when I triumphantly announced that I had found a rare Botrychium. Matt Goff politely suggested that it was in fact the very same Cryptogramma I had photographed and posted on this blog last winter.

Maybe I just shouldn't post anything when there is not much to say...

I almost missed my weekly post deadline again! Of course, it'd be easier if I had bird pictures...

This has been a very slow week of reading, sleeping, watching TV in the condo (I have become strangely addicted to a show about a guy called Anthony Bourdain who travels all over the world and eats food), and going to school.

Last weekend was a drill weekend, so we organized a hike on the Herbert Glacier trail that would keep us out of reach of the officers. The forest there was very beautiful second growth, smothered in mosses and lichens.

So drill was not very eventful for me, but for Jad it was quite an exciting affair. Apparently, some overpaid, overzealous paperwork clerk up in Anchorage kicked him out of the National Guard without so much as a warning to Jad, or to anyone in the chain of command! Jad joined the Army National Guard without going to basic training because he had been in the US Navy before, and because he had trained with the US Marine Corps, he was deemed OK to join the National guard without going through the Army transition course. So he went through infantry school, warrior leader’s course, and a year in the Middle East without any problem, and now this dim-witted office-dwelling invertebrate tells him he can’t be in the army because he doesn’t have the transition course! This, in my professional opinion, should have been transition enough:

And of course, whenever it isn’t snowing, I can always count on politicians to provide an easy target for my impotent anger. This morning on the radio, McCain was talking about lifting a fuel tax in the summer, and now I’m hearing about more tax breaks for auto makers, airlines and “alternative energy producers” (corn growers, I bet). So this must be the new conservative motto:

“Inflation and debt: two easy ways to make environmental destruction more affordable for everyone!”

Six months down - six more to go!

Two days ago, while updating my calendar, I realized that we were halfway through this deployment. Now it is just a matter of patience and tolerating six months of summer heat, and we will be out of here. Well, some of us will be out of here...

The soldier in this picture is SPC McPhail, one of my roommates and a good friend even though Jad and I like to joke about kicking him out of the room. He has been in the Army National Guard for seven years (out of Petersburg, Alaska), and just signed a contract to extend it by another six. In exchange, the Army will give him an extra $15000.

He will also spend an extra year out here, which will enable him to qualify for even more money. He is not the only one to make a carreer of sorts out of what is meant to be a part-time job responding to contingencies. So many reservists are extending their tours and volunteering for extra deployments that they often make up about a third of the units out here, which makes for very experienced reservist elements. On the other hand, there are many reserve soldiers signing up to spend significant portions of their lives in the National Guard and the Middle East in exchange for money that in the end doesn't amount to very much back in Alaska.

We have been working on improving our equipment and skills for the last two weeks. I got to fire hundreds of rounds on nearly all the weapon systems, and I am learning a lot about a radio system that I am not yet very familiar with. Thankfully, we have been provided with adequate time and resources by our upper chain of command. The talk about US soldiers not being adequately equipped does no in any way apply here; we have everything we need and more.

As for time off, it has been quite hot and birdless outside lately so I spent a lot of time reading. I finished Winter World and a really good book about camels, and read a little in Spanish. I am developping a real appreciation for camels, and I hope I will get to spend more time with the herds in the next six months.

Today's quote also comes from Bernd Heinrich's Winter World. It is about the maggots of an African desert fly:

“The larvae are adapted to survive losing 92 percent of their body water, and such desiccated larvae are essentially immortal and can survive immersion in liquid helium (to -269 degrees C), within 4 degrees or potentially at absolute zero, or zero degrees K, the lowest temperature in the universe. When rehydrated by dropping them into water they become “instant insects.” They then again have only narrow temperature tolerances, surviving only from 10 to 42 degrees C.”