PETAWAWA, Ontario -- Engineers with 1st and 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (LI) traveled Oct. 18 to the training area of Garrison Peta-wawa, Ontario, to participate in "Spartan Sapper," a two-week partnered training exercise with members of the Canadian army's 2 Combat Engineer Regiment.
Throughout the first week of Spartan Sapper, Soldiers trained for the culminating event, "Sapper Stakes," which started Oct. 25. The 32-hour competition consisted of seven events the participants had to overcome in an attempt to claim first place.
"I'm definitely ready. I think it's going to be a good challenge, and it is going to be a lot of fun," said Canadian Sapper Eric Hughson, an engineer with 1 Section, 2 CER, 24 Field Squadron, 4th Group. "It's good to push yourself every once in a while."
During the trainup, participants had an opportunity to improve their weaknesses before the Sapper Stakes began.
"We recently received new combat engineer mine detectors that are significantly improved (over) what we had before, so it's good to get the chance to utilize and train with them," Hughson said.
Once the participants received their final briefing for Sapper Stakes, they had 12 hours to finalize and prepare themselves for what they had in store for them.
The stations included navigating and clearing simulated mine fields, searching rooms for hidden caches of weapons, designing field machinery capable of lifting hundreds of pounds, conducting dismounted reconnaissance, completing a multi-weapon live-fire range, constructing a bridge to cross a river and overcoming their roleplaying captors during an escape-and-evasion drill.
The participants have their own specialty that made some of the events easier for their teams than the others.
"I am looking forward to the small-arms lane and the high-line rope crossing," Hughson said. "The troop I'm in, we're the Mountain (operations) Troop, so we're pretty stacked for that because we have all the guys who are qualified and trained on that already. We already have our game plan for that, so it should be pretty easy."
The competition was a team effort. Each of the 13 participating teams had seven to eight soldiers; some teams consisted of all Canadians, while other teams consisted of Americans and Canadians.
"It's been a lot of depending on each other to get through each tasking," said U.S. Army Sgt. Choi Peterson, a team leader with 41st Engineer Battalion, 2nd BCT. "A lot of it we had to use Canadian experiences to understand the mission and to help us understand what the overall mission was for some of the tasks. It's been quite an experience. The way they train and the way we train is slightly different, but it all has the same purpose in line for what the mission entails. Just understanding that the end state is the same is critical."
Sapper Stakes was a round-robin competition with each of the groups starting at a different station to maximize effectiveness. Each team had four hours to navigate to the next event and complete the challenge before moving on to the next station.
"It's been challenging," Peterson said. "The marksmanship event was the biggest challenge for me so far, because weapons like the shotgun and pistol aren't weapons that I've been trained completely on, but I had the opportunity to get hands on today. Trying to manipulate the weapons in the cold weather was also a challenge."
The morale and camaraderie was high for the participants going into the exercise, as the prize for the first-place team was an all-expenses-paid trip to visit the battlefields of World War II in Europe.
In addition, at the beginning of the training, each of the participants had the option of donating $20 toward a local charity in exchange for not shaving throughout the exercise.
"The fact that we went through every challenge together ... will be the big accomplishment," Peterson added.
"For this exercise, it's almost entirely direct action so it's all obstacle emplacement, so I feel that we are going to take away a lot of knowledge from this training event," said U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Scott Luis, platoon leader with 630th Clearance Company, 7th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 1st BCT and an observer / controller for Sapper Stakes. "It's going to be a tough event and a huge learning point for the engineers."
Luis went on to talk about the difference in the ways American and Canadian engineers conduct business on a daily basis.
"In general, just the two countries working together has helped a lot with them seeing how they aren't so different on a day-to-day basis and in the way they handle things has helped a lot. All the Soldiers melded together really well right from the get-go."
Tired, sore and cold, each of the teams finished strong and gained stronger partnerships and experiences from the challenge.
"This is my second time coming up here," Luis added. "We came up here a couple weeks ago just to see some of the obstacles they had in place, but I would 100 percent come back up here to train in the future. I think we can definitely try to make this a regular thing, and I have no doubt people will volunteer."
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