FORT DRUM, N.Y. (April 14, 2016) -- Some 100 Soldiers assigned to the 41st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, air-assaulted into Fort Drum's training areas to accomplish squad-level, basic Soldier skills training March 29-31.
To accommodate the large number of Soldiers attending the event, groups were divided into 12 squads, with four squads competing each day to simultaneously complete approximately 13 tasks at two different stations.
"What we have going on is two different events that the Soldiers go through," explained Sgt. 1st Class Jason Bullock, noncommissioned officer in charge. "There is a 'round robin' of Soldier tasks they'll be evaluated on. Then there is an enemy assault lane where they'll be ambushed, react to contact, take and treat a (simulated) casualty, and then they'll move to the objective (weapons cache) and assault (capture) it."
Round-robin testing stations included operating tactical radios; reacting to simulated chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks; assembling and disassembling weapons; emplacing an inert Claymore mine; medically treating and evacuating a casualty; constructing log obstacles and answering unit history questions.
The entire day of testing could be accomplished in roughly eight hours and ended with an eight-mile foot march.
At first glance, the operation might read like standard engineer or Soldier training, but it was unique in that no engineers were actually present for this particular event.
Bullock explained that the exercise was an unusual situation for the signal and support companies present for training, as they don't often receive the opportunity to conduct squad and individual movement tactics.
"This ties into the larger idea that every Soldier is a rifleman and that everyone should be able to operate on the battlefield," Bullock said.
The mission's unique composition can be explained by examining a common misconception that surrounds the "Sapper" Battalion, in that it's composed entirely of engineering Soldiers.
That is not true. Only two of the five companies are composed of engineers, both of which recently returned from a deployment to Afghanistan.
The other three companies contain intelligence and support Soldiers who have acted as the rear provincial element, spending the majority of their time preparing to deploy if needed.
More recently though, they have spent their weeks before this event identifying weakness within their sections and training to build them into strengths.
"For the past two weeks we have done a lot of classroom training on squad tasks and individual tasks," said Staff Sgt. Jamaal Flowers, a human intelligence collector with D Company.
Flowers said the biggest obstacle for his Soldiers to overcome was their own confidence and not the physical tasks.
"Going through the classroom portion, I noticed a lot of the new guys are not used to being graded," Flowers explained. "They know what to do, but under pressure is when they start to forget things and get irritated.
"That's one of the things I tried to explain to them -- that a lot of people are going to yell at you. If not, they are just going to be looking at you and applying pressure visually on you."
Flowers explained that the best way to overcome these nervous jitters is to relax and stay calm.
"You just have to relax and concentrate on the task at hand," Flowers said. "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I've heard that my whole Army career. If you do that, everything will be fine."
And for Spc. Douglas Looks, human intelligence collector, that advice proved to be correct.
Looks explained that at first there were communication issues, but as the day progressed, he and his teammates learned to work with each other's differences.
"We really got to see how we worked together as a team," he said. "You could see us get better throughout the day, especially on our last activity when we traversed on the enemy's weapons caches."
For the Soldiers, the importance of the event might have been more about what they learned from each other than from the physical exercises, but for the leadership, this was a stepping stone into the next round of training.
"This ties into further training," Bullock said. "This will move into company-level training and then ultimately culminating into Mountain Peak, combined-arms live-fire, and preparing for a possible rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La., next year."
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