Direct Fire

Just over a year ago, I write about my experience on a training exercise where I dismounted and moved up to a vehicle that just had a simulated IED hit. For the past four months, I have been working with the Marine run this exercise, known as Combat Logistics Patrol Exercise, or CLPEX ("clip-ex") for short. Sunday we had a special treat--we got to watch direct fire by an artillery battery. Typically, the Marines in the training (we call the the Exercise Force, or EXFOR--"ex-fore") are from a Combat Logistics Battalion, or CLB ("see-el-bee"). However, one day of each Mojave Viper is dedicated to the Artillery Battery.

On that day, their mission is to move to a patrol base and set up a support position with their Howitzers. Along the way (this is part of the exercise), they are attacked by an entire platoon of insurgents that they cannot suppress with the weapons they have in the patrol. Typically the CLB will stop and request artillery fire. Today, since the patrol had heavy guns with them, they dropped their guns, or took them off their wheels, and shot directly at the targets. Howitzers are designed to fire from a long way off--a Howitzer can be located up 24km away from the target it is shooting at. Today, the targets were in sight just off to our left, less than 3km away.

As the patrol rolled towards the end of its exercise, the call came over my coyote radio--one coyote would detonate the explosives he had set on the side of the road, and the rest of us would tell our EXFOR that they were taking fire from the pre-designated target. I heard the explosion and picked up my radio to the EXFOR truck in front of me. They pulled off the road so they could start engaging the enemy I had just told them about with the heavy weapon on their truck. All through the rest of the patrol, the rest of the trucks were doing the same, and the trucks hauling the Howitzers were dropping the guns.

The live fire events go fast and furious--some times the radio traffic is so busy that it is difficult to get the correct calls in over the radio to the coyote running the exercise. We all heard the call over the radio from the coyote next to the Howitzers that they had fired a shot, but his next call was something no coyote wants to hear: "Emergency, stop exercise! We have a casualty!" Throughout our exercises, we very carefully avoid using the word "casualty". When we simulate injuries to Marines so they can practice their first and and medevac procedures, we call those Marines "cherrypickers". If a coyote accidentally calls a "cherrypicker" a "casualty", he owes every coyote on the range that day a beer. This wasn't a simulated injury. I couldn't see what was going on at the guns, so I had no idea how serious the situation was.

Seconds later, the lead coyote was calling over the radio "hold exercise force in place and go clear, cold, condition four on all weapons systems"--everybody stay where you are, and make sure there is no live ammunition in any of the weapons. A few seconds later, we all breathed a sigh of relief when we heard the primary injury was a broken foot. We waited to resume the exercise as corpsmen assessed the injury and arranged a ground medevac to the hospital on mainside.

We resumed the exercise about half an hour later, once the injured Marine was safely on his way to the hospital. The Howitzers resumed firing at the targets with two different types of rounds. The first type detonated as soon as the round hit the ground. They created a brown poof as they hit the deck and were easy to see once they were down range, but the explosion was contained and not that exciting. The second type of round is designed to explode above the ground and send shrapnel down on troops not under cover. When they exploded, they created a small black mushroom cloud and a gigantic circular brown cloud beneath them as the pressure wave hit the ground.

We watched as the battery shot off all the rounds it was carrying and then told our EXFOR that the target had been destroyed and the exercise was over. We waited as they double-checked that all their weapons were unloaded, then gathered back at the rally point to debrief and get ready for the next run.