Lets just take a breath

So for the past month or so I have been constantly on the move. To start out, I just joined a new company. In the Army this just happens, and it happens fast. One day I have one boss and I have this group of soldiers that I'm responsible for, and the next its all new. I just pack up my shit and then show up in a new place. What adds to it is the fact that your only told a short time before the transition happens. I was told about 2 weeks ahead of time that I was leaving and where I was going, but I've seen some soldiers get told and have to be somewhere else the next day. Its a trip.

I went from an infantry platoon where I had 34 soldiers and 4 vehicles, to an anti-tank platoon where I only had 10 soldiers, including myself, and 3 vehicles. The only cool part about my new vehicles is the fact that I have TOW missles under my control now. I can reach out 3,750 meters with a wire quided missle and touch someone. Haha. But there is a problem with that. There aren't too many tanks used by insurgents. As a matter of fact I'm pretty sure there aren't any. So what does an anti-tank platoon do in the current fight? Heres the answer. The entire company is manned by infantry soldiers, so we turn into an regular infantry fighting unit. Just with a lot less manpower than normal. A regular infantry platoon usually has give or take 40 soldiers if its manned properly. At most I will only have 12 soldiers, which includes myself. So before when I got off my trucks I would have 20+ dismounted soldiers to maneuver and fight with, I now have 6 max. This is good and bad. Its bad just becuase you have less people with less weapons to fight the fight, but its a smaller and tighter unit and I have more control over everything. So while its definately different, I'm liking it.

So a week after getting here we were heading out of a big field exercise. I was excited to get out there with my new boys and new equipment to see what all they could do. For the most part it was boring becuase the training event wasn't planned properly for my unit. We are small and we are whats called an attached unit, so we are often forgot about. But I'll tell you about one mission that we did. Out in the middle of nowhere Washington in a place called Yakima is where we do a lot of our training events. They has set up a little mock village with role players to simulate a town in Iraq. A company was planning to do a raid on this village and we got tasked with setting up security on the outside of town to make sure that people dont come in our out of the town. I was the lead vehicle and lead element for this entire mission becuase I had to push past and set up security on the far side of this town. As we were coming up on this town a snow storm hit. It was litterally out of a movie, the snow was just coming down to the point it was hard to see. As I was moving my vehicle kind of up the side of this little hill so that we could see better I noticed footprints in the snow that looked pretty fresh. These tracks were out of place becuase they were headed up the hillside away from the village. I also noticed a little berm about 50 meters up the hillside and had the thought that there might be someone up there. So I called it up that I was gonna go check it out. I got off with 3 other soldiers and headed up the hill. As we were coming around this hill I heard one of my soldiers start yelling, "Gets your hands up, don't move." At almost the exact same time I was coming around the other side of this berm and saw a sniper laying in the snow. We moved in fast enough that he didn't have a chance to get to his weapon and we captured him. We searched him and I did a little tactical questioning to figure out who he was and what he was doing up on this hill top. When all was said and done for the mission it turned out that the only thing that was on this objective was this one sniper and we captured him. It was pretty awesome becuase we were just supposed to be there for support and ended up taking the mission. I was happy during the whole exercise with my boys and my unit. You never know what to expect when you go to a new place with new people but it turned out alright.