What's This Aboot, Eh?
I like our Canadian allies. I really do. Therefore, I link to this story about the difficulties they had during a recent exercise designed to demonstrate their ability to operate in their Arctic regions without comment, and only this brief excerpt:
As part of “Operation Lancaster,” the largest naval operation in the Northwest Passage in a generation, soldiers from the Quebec-based Van Doo regiment were to be deployed from the frigate HMCS Montreal.
They were to set up an observation post on the Borden Peninsula on the south shore of the eastern gate of the passage.
However, getting the soldiers onto a small Zodiac by dangling them from a rope ladder over the side of the ship took hours longer than scheduled.
As well, heavy surf swamped the small boat when it landed on a steep, rocky coastline.
The soldiers were forced to bail out with their helmets and stand waist- and chest-deep in the freezing water to push the craft back out to sea and cut loose ropes that had become entangled in the propeller.
“It was very, very cold,” recalled Capt. Jonathan Hubble.
After climbing up a 20-metre headwall, the soldiers then were forced to set up their post kilometres from where they had planned.
They were moved to the original post by Twin Otter, but the plane’s landing gear got stuck nearly half a metre deep in unexpected mud.
The Twin Otter remains at the observation post and won’t be able to move for weeks until the ground freezes up.
A helicopter finally picked up the soldiers from the peninsula.
4 Comments:
What they were doing takes practice, practice, practice, and a wee bit of luck. I remember this one time on San Fran where the recon Marines who thought they were going to be inserted on the North Shore didn't realize that winter weather means 20+ foot waves. The CO recognized the right answer and scrubbed the insert, and the Marines--who didn't like being on a submarine much and didn't even pack toothbrushes--had a miserable couple of weeks hanging with the bubbleheads.
Sounds, from just the info in the article, like the root problem here is trying to run without getting the crawling done.
8/23/2006 12:25 AM
Good Training; Log it!
RM1/SS
8/23/2006 11:39 AM
The difficulty that was experienced is greatly exagerrated in the articles. As a soldier, the Lancaster landing was no colder or tougher than a lot of other training exercices. The difference is, on most exercices when we get cold and wet, nobody gives a shit. This time, it happened to be national news.
The fact is that in the infantry, operating in austere environments, getting cold and wet, being junked around by the weather, and adapting to the circumstances is all par for the course.
As a member of the team that did the landing, I have to disagree with Chap... I'd love to do it all over again. When we're not in the shit, we don't know where we are.
Jonathan Hubble
2/25/2007 3:55 PM
In my view everybody must go through it.
9/22/2012 2:11 PM
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