Deep in a sheer-walled canyon that slices miles into a range of arid mountains, a group of five U.S. Marines ascend a rickety staircase at the base of a small dam. Rounding a hairpin switchback, the Marines make eye contact with a group of men dressed in traditional Pashtun outfits. The two groups exchange salutations the Marines struggling to use the correct inflections in their broken Pashto then prepare some tea. The Marines are seeking to forge a lasting relationship with the locals to help nurture a burgeoning tide of security in the mountainous hinterlands, far from a centralized government.
But their work this day is cut short as a series of deafening explosions rocks the otherwise staid morning calm just as the tea is poured. Below them, along the meandering dirt road on the valley floor, bodies lie scattered in the wake of the blasts. Smoke rises as AK-47 shots ring out then the klack-klack-klack of PK light machinegun fire echoes through the canyon. With no good cover under the press of this coordinated attack, the Marines quickly reconnoiter their only possible avenue of egress straight into the heights above. They scramble up a vertical section of rock, taking turns providing covering fire, then maneuver onto a steep finger of loose scree and sharp, broken rocks. Soon, the clatter of gunfire ceases, but the Marines must continue higher thousands of feet higher and miles distant to a landing zone where a helicopter will lift them to safety. Their hearts still pounding from the upward sprint out of the kill zone, they realize their day has just barely begun.
"Lieutenant! See where you are in relation to the others? Why are you so far ahead of everyone else?" From behind a closet-sized boulder bounds Staff Sergeant Steve Comeau, intervening in the tactics chosen by the officer in charge of the Marines during their egress. "You can't see anyone else in your element and they can't see you! The next thing you know you'll all be scattered throughout this mountain!" A 6-foot-1, 220-pound veteran of three combat deployments, including two to Iraq, Comeau is not a member of the team of five, but rather a Mountain Leader Instructor, from the U.S. Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center (MWTC). And the peak up which the Marines are climbing does not lie in the vicinity of Asadabad in Afghanistan's Kunar Province, but outside Hawthorne, Nevada. Of course the "locals" aren't local to this place at all; they are Afghan-American role players brought in from places such as San Francisco, Atlanta, and Boston. The Marines (and an attached Navy corpsman) are taking part in Mountain Viper '07, a first-of-its-kind exercise developed specifically to train the latest breed of Marines who will soon deploy to Afghanistan in one of the most important billets in the Department of Defense, the ETT, or Embedded Training Team.
The Ultimate Goal
"The job of the ETT is to train, advise, and mentor Afghan forces so that they can provide a safe and secure environment in Afghanistan," states Colonel Jeff Haynes, the G-3 of the 3d Marine Division, from which all ETTs originate. "Marines are ideally suited for this kind of work due to our service ethos, we are expeditionary, we are combat oriented, innovative, and appreciate the cultural nuances when dealing with foreign armies and civilians," Haynes explains. The colonel summarizes the Marine Corps' deep-rooted lineage in this type of work: "Marines have deployed and trained with foreign forces since well before 11 September 2001, and we continue to train with them on an almost daily basis in the Pacific in support of Pacific Command's theater security strategy."
Embedded Training Teams stand at the tip of the Operation Enduring Freedom spear with respect to the ultimate goal of Coalition forces the complete turnover of security authority to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), comprised of the Afghan National Army (ANA), Afghan National Police (ANP), and the Afghan Border Police (ABP) at which point the campaign can draw to a close.
But preparing a foreign, newly stood-up force to take control of its country's security is far more easily stated than successfully undertaken especially when this country is physically defined by some of the most rugged mountain landscape on the globe and is culturally delineated by a complex social patchwork that is difficult to grasp, much less penetrate. In parts of Afghanistan, starkly dissimilar groups of people may lie within a mile of one another, separated by just a ridgeline. The success of the upcoming ETT mission depends in large part on thorough and comprehensive training training for all aspects of what the teams will face.
"The Mountain Warfare Training Center provides the venue, real-world expertise, and instructors to challenge and engage the ETTs in an environment similar to that in which they'll soon be deployed," says Major Matt Watt, the operations officer at the Mountain Warfare Training Center, explaining the role his base plays in preparing ETTs for Afghanistan. Watt lists the primary challenges of military operations in mountainous environments, including the effects of altitude, unpredictable and sometimes severe weather, and terrain often impassable for anything but boots or hooves. Since the teams will be operating where vehicles and heavy weapons may be left far in the rear, and helicopter support will likely be unavailable, every Marine must rely on only what he can carry or acquire during an operation.
A New Relevance
The Mountain Warfare Training Center was established in 1953 in the wake of the Chosin campaign of the Korean War. The Marine Corps picked the center's location Pickel Meadows, near the town of Bridgeport in California's eastern Sierra Nevada based on its geographic and meteorological similarity to the Chosin Reservoir. While perceptions of the base's relevancy ebbed and flowed during the years following the Korean War, the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent need for large-scale training in mountain warfare tactics turned Marine Corps and Department of Defense attention firmly on the base. Today, with many MWTC personnel having been deployed to Afghanistan in a variety of missions, including Embedded Training Team deployments, the center can work with units of all sizes and types (including foreign military forces) to develop custom-tailored training packages like Mountain Viper. In addition to a large training ground on the base itself, the MWTC coordinates exercises in the nearby desert mountains outside of Hawthorne.
Through the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Mountain Warfare Training Center and the 3d Marine Division have developed a strong working relationship, initially through battalion OEF predeployment training (all three battalions of the 3d Marine Regiment have deployed to Afghanistan in support of OEF, consecutively), and now with ETT training. This unit focus has yielded a wide range of training benefits, for both the division as well as the center, as knowledge gleaned from real-world deployments has been freely passed to the next training cycle. During Mountain Viper '07, a number of former ETT leaders from the 3d Marine Division traveled to the center to help evaluate current training practices continuing this important information cycle.
Each of the seven embedded training teams that comprise a Marine ETT deployment will operate at different locations within an area that covers 11 provinces from the treacherous Nuristan and Kunar Provinces on the Pakistani border, west to Bamiyan Province. Veterans of the deployment often hail the ETT billet as one of the best in the Marine Corps. "I was living on the top of a mountain in Nuristan, in a mud hut as far away from any built-up forward operating base as you can get," Staff Sergeant Marcus Hernandez, an MWTC Mountain Leader, recalls. "There was a high level of autonomy, and we got to see our work transform those we were training before our eyes and we pushed into new territory," he adds.
Resilience Is Key
As can be gleaned from Hernandez's brief description, ETTs need to be prepared for the most austere conditions, be able to improvise, and be extremely resourceful.
"I can't remember having an MRE. It was local food every day and night. Goats. Chickens. It was good living, operating side by side with the Afghans," notes Staff Sergeant Brandon Scott with a nostalgic laugh. "We were out for 45 days straight, once." Scott, another MWTC Mountain Leader who served a tour as an ETT member, emphasized the need to understand local customs and have a comprehensive understanding of the weapons used by the Afghans.
Colonel Haynes gave an overview of the work this current group of teams will be undertaking, "We're sending six battalion-level teams [each team to attach to one ANA battalion] and one regional security assistance command, or RSAC, team." The RSAC acts as a command for the six Marine teams as well as about a dozen National Guard teams within their area of operations. "The Marine teams are made up of a variety of MOSs [Military Occupational Specialty, e.g. infantry, administration, logistics, etc.]. Because of the expeditionary and remote nature of the mission, the Marine teams must possess a certain level of self reliance. For example, some battalion teams will operate on a four-man company level, and within these small teams they'll have to repair their own vehicles or troubleshoot their own communications gear," Haynes notes.
Once Headquarters Marine Corps directed that all Embedded Training Teams would come from the 3d Marine Division (they were previously pulled from throughout the Fleet), the division staff, led by Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wilcox, who had recently completed a tour as a Provincial Reconstruction Team commander in Afghanistan, closely analyzed the mission, including current goals, progress made, and all ETT after-action reports written to that point. Most important, division staff contacted teams that were currently deployed to gain the most recent insights into how future training should proceed. "We determined the best way to prepare our teams was to model our training after the Mojave Viper construct, and we developed Mountain Viper '07 in conjunction with the Mountain Warfare Training Center, Training and Education Command, and Marine Air Ground Combat Center," states Wilcox.
Train Like You Fight
Mojave Viper, the final predeployment stop for battalions heading to Iraq (and Afghanistan, when Marine Corps battalions deployed there), is one of the most successful combat training regimens ever developed. Run in various ranges at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, Mojave Viper exercises typically span 28 days and recreate conditions remarkably similar to those of Iraq. At the heart of all Mojave Viper exercises (more than 30 in some years), stand the "Coyotes" of the Tactical Training and Exercise Control Group, each an expert in his respective field with recent in-theater experience, be that in close air support, fire support control, or infantry maneuver. Coyotes carefully supervise training units, giving instant feedback and directing exercise augment to best serve deploying units. Like the Coyotes in Mojave Viper, Mountain Leaders and other personnel of the MWTC would be integrated into the Mountain Viper '07 training regimen.
And that regimen would consist of weeks of intense exercises, beginning in Okinawa for basic training in communication and small unit tactics, then progressing to Twentynine Palms for training focusing on specific ETT tasks to be undertaken once in-country, including convoy simulations. Mountain Viper '07 would then progress to field exercises and a final mission rehearsal exercise in the mountains of Hawthorne (adjacent to the Mountain Warfare Training Center) where altitudes range to more than 10,000 feet above sea level providing an ideal training ground for an upcoming deployment to Afghanistan.
The field exercise would focus on live-fire convoy operations, rough terrain driving, and mountain mobility, including patrolling, land navigation, mountain medicine and casualty evacuation, as well as troop inserts and exfils. The mission rehearsal exercise would be the last stop for deploying ETTs, presenting the Marines with five situations, including a mounted patrol, cordon and search of a small mock village during a humanitarian assistance mission, a Shura meeting where the ETTs would interact with local village elders, a combat outpost and vehicle checkpoint, and a civil-military operation, like the mission at the dam cut short by an ambush. Additionally, the ETTs have trained to provide logistical support through an unfamiliar method, by mule and donkey often the only heavy-lift capability available in Afghanistan.
Realistic Scenarios
Drawing on the resources of civilian contractors to help craft authentic scenarios (for role players and construction of mock Afghan villages), the exercise coordinators developed a stunningly realistic situation for the Shura meeting portion of the training. As Marines drank tea with a village elder, the ANA they accompanied stood watch over the valley in which the small settlement lay. Discovering that a weapons cache may lie somewhere in a nearby house, the ANA and Marines moved to encircle the dwelling in a cordon. Shots rang out and chaos briefly ensued as the Marines worked to control some trigger-happy Afghan soldiers. Exercise coordinators even threw in a role-playing independent journalist who barked questions at the team leader during the height of the activity. The suspected al Qaeda terrorist sympathizer bolted, sprinting down the valley. The ANA trailed him closely. But before he could be captured, one of the Afghan soldiers shot and wounded the terrorist, necessitating medical aid and casualty evacuation skills from the ETTs as well as the Afghan soldiers they are training in these techniques. A Coyote visiting from Twentynine Palms took notes along with MWTC Mountain Leaders on the scene; the group discussed debrief points to help the teams learn both from their mistakes as well as their successes in the scenario.
A few canyons distant, another team descended a winding canyon road in a convoy of Humvees during a mounted patrol. Rounding a corner, the driver of the lead vehicle was temporarily blinded by a flash an IED ambush. Rocket-propelled grenades zipped over the convoy, barely missing turret gunners in two of the vehicles as sporadic small arms fire popped through the air. While Marine machine gunners laid down suppressive fire along the slope above them, dismounted ETTs and ANA readied themselves to sweep the region for the insurgents. Drawing on basic skills learned in their earliest Marine Corps training, the ETTs and ANA immediately gained fire supremacy, then pushed patrols onto the forested mountainside. One insurgent was found to be mortally wounded and another captured. The patrol continued.
But this type of kinetic training, while vital for the skills gleaned, is hopefully never used. The Embedded Training Teams are working on the nation building phase of Operation Enduring Freedom. While they have to be prepared for ambushes and IED hits as well as working with ANA to interdict potential security threats, the group never loses sight of the overall mission purpose: aiding the government of Afghanistan to maintain stability and nurture a political atmosphere of development and growth into modernity. Once in-country, the teams will be helping to develop logistical networks, aid in the construction of infrastructure, and one of the most important missions, undertaking medical civil action programs, in which the ETTs and Afghans bring medical and other humanitarian supplies into villages in the farthest reaches of the country. As Major Watt summarizes, "Our hope is that just by the presence of professionally trained Afghan National Security Forces, now and in the future, that not another shot gets fired that people are free to live their lives in safety. That's the true measure of success of a military campaign, and helping to facilitate that through this training is our ultimate goal and greatest reward."
Author's Note: In mid-October Colonel Haynes returned from the Predeployment Site Survey for the forthcoming ETT deployment (early 2008) that he will be leading. He said that the ETTs currently in Afghanistan are doing very well and report that the training they received at Mountain Viper '07 fully prepared them for their deployment. Colonel Haynes also notes that the Afghans with whom he spoke were highly impressed with the teams' historical and cultural knowledge, as well as their overall understanding of the people of Afghanistan. He believes that this is a real compliment to the Marine Corps' Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning that provided the culture and language training.