I just got back from a week in the field, where we put our theory and doctrine into practice. USACAPOC cleared an small area of forest and built a forward operating base where CA and PSYOP students can live and work for a week or so at a time. I checked Google Earth and the imagery isn't new enough to show it, but I have some pictures.
Anyway, we started with a long walk, 19 miles in 23 hours, with 7 scenarios to play along the way. It was a demonstration of negotiation, mediation, and culture built into a story line simulating civil military operations after a short war. The introduction to the arab culture was very eyeopening. The seven days that followed gave us all a chance to try to figure out what the story was and work together to bring it to a happy end. There wasn't much sleep, and there was a lot of work to do. It has been a long time since I was that physically tired. Usually, it takes me as much as an hour to fall asleep after I go to bed, but every night on the FOB, I was asleep in just minutes. Unfortunately for my tent mates, that didn't leave them much time to get to sleep themselves before the snoring started. The last night there, the next tent over said they could hear me, so it must have been bad in my own tent.
Its over now. I get to go home for a week, then to Fort Dix in New Jersey for two months. Its hard to believe that I have been on active duty for more than two months now. I still have more than a year left, though. More later.
Interior of my tent (GP medium with HVAC)
This is the FOB from one of the guard towers. It can hold up classes up to 2-3 hundred students. Ours was only 52, so it was pretty empty.
There were just barely enough of us to man all of the fighting positions for base defense.
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