At Fort Lewis, training usually meant raining. You know, if it ain’t raining, it ain’t training. We had to deploy to the field in preparation for an upcoming flyaway deployment with the Signal Battalion. But we’d been blessed that week. It had been dry and sunny all week. The only real problems we had were the temperature and the frost. It got pretty damn cold every night, down into the low 30’s. And it was pretty slow to warm up every day once the sun came up. But you know what they say, practice makes perfect and all that rot. Since we were aligned with the Special Forces Group, we invited them along for the ride and asked them to be the OpFor (for the civilians, OpFor is an acronym for Opposing Forces or in other words the pretend bad guys). The OpFor posed their own unique challenges (like forgetting to pretend). We had set some ground rules going in, but since when do the bad guys ever play by the rules. Short answer, never. Long answer, still never. I just thought I’d throw that out there to level the playing field. Not that it needed leveling or that there was even a playing field cuz, with those guys, there never was a playing field. For example, we said going in that they couldn’t use night vision devices because they weren’t standard issue for us. Naturally, they ‘agreed’. And of course, ‘we believed them totally’. Of course, we did. The problem is, soldiers will be soldiers and boys will be boys. The first night of bivouac, the OpFor infiltrated our field site by the only way we left open to assault (by design). We had set up adjacent to an eastern hillside with deep ravines to the south of the site. We put triple strands of concertina wire to create a no-man’s-land just inside of the ravines, and we put our heavy guns on all of the other avenues of approach. Obviously, we wanted them to attack by coming down the hill. It was no secret that soldiers who refused to use the port-a-johns, went up that hillside to take care of business. Yeah, so that meant the OpFor was crawling through shit to get to us. Nice. One of the OpFor decided to come through the ravines, which was a bad idea as well. A couple of our soldiers who liked to play with fireworks, hotwired the concertina with M80’s on trip-wires. We also wired in some flash-bangs, just for shits and giggles, cuz they were going to ‘play by the rules’ after all. And we ‘believed’ them. Of course, we did. The dude who came through the wire got lit up like a Christmas tree. And since he was wearing night vision goggles, his vision was shot. The dude who had infiltrated down the hillside now smelled like shit, literally. So, he was out for blood, as it were. He crawled under a deuce and a half to hide. Bad plan. Really bad plan. Remember how I said some soldiers refused to use port-a-johns. Yeah. You guessed it. One guy decided he needed to relieve himself and picked that particular deuce and a half to do it. He couldn’t have known he’d be pissing on one of the OpFors, but that is exactly what he did. That OpFor dude was fuming. He bashed his head coming out from under the truck. Now he smelled like piss and shit. Yeah. Nice perfume. Essence of toilet. In French, that would be “Eau de toilette,” literally. One of the soldiers even pointed it out to him, “Dude, you smell like a toilet!” “Why you son of a bitch. I ought to…” His team leader stopped him from taking further action. On the other end of the field site, another OpFor team member had just raided a tent that had been set up as sleeping quarters. As he rushed the tent and pulled back the flap, he yelled, “Hosed in your sacks,” and he started popping off M-16 blanks. He was so busy having fun that he didn’t notice that the tent was a decoy that was wired with CS gas grenades. The CS grenades were wired to the flaps. When the OpFor guy pulled back the flap. The pin on the canisters of gas that were daisy-chained together were pulled, and the dude gassed himself for his trouble. He ran around cussing with snot running out of his nose and tears streaming from his eyes. Occasionally, he stopped to puke his guts out. That’s when the OpFor team leader called off the attack for the evening. Sore losers. They said they had to regroup and rethink their strategy. They also accused us of not playing by the rules. Who, us?!? Really? We would never think of it. Besides, who wore the night vision goggles? Hmmm… Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Yeah. Seems to me, they broke the rules first or at least tried to. Meanwhile, I was thinking that this whole OpFor drill was just another exercise in futility.
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