My dear grandson, just out of a 15 monther in Afghanistan (second Vanity Fair Article in this issue (Oct) by Sebastian Junger on them - BATTLE CO., is headed for that training in Nov.
It puzzles me why they are still going through the jungle warfare training of the Vietnam era - when we are fighting in deserts and mountains?
To me, it's an unnecessary risk...not to mention training for the wrong kind of terrain...
SF train for ALL conflicts, not just the headline grabbing ones. Had a compatriot just complete SF Q course and is sporting the Green Beret now. He was violently ill for almost three weeks because of e-coli poisoning and still had events to complete. He managed to complete it while losing about 30 pounds.
Tell her this: And it is very, very important that she knows:
Where we are fighting right NOW has nothing to do with where we WILL BE fighting in the future. We won’t always deploy into deserts in a MidEast area.
Making it worse, since we’ve fought several times in the desert (recently! Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq (twice), Kuwait, and Saudi deployments) there is LOTS of experience about how to do that. That keeps everybody and safer and better prepared - but ONLY for that kind of desert environment.
Older skills (like fighting in jungles and the European area and extremely cold winter areas) are very easy to get lost, and stay lost, if you don’t re-train regularly. Re-learning those lessons is one of the most costly, most wasteful cause of deaths early in every war.