MOUT

One of the things we had to train on out at Hunter Liggett was military operations in urban terrain or MOUT. This is basically interacting with the local people and attempting to do our job, while wining the hearts and minds. We did several days of classes on various subjects from clearing buildings, setting up cordons, using interpreters and negotiating. The training center at Hunter Ligget has hired a Hollywood production crew to use some of the same things they do for the movies to make our experience more life like. The culmination of our MOUT training was a graded practical exercise where we were to enter an Iraqi village that is suspected to have a weapons cache, locate and negotiate with the Sheik and hopefully find the weapons without too much trouble. Our commander asked me to be in charge of this operation as the Platoon Leader, which meant I had to plan the mission, assign the personnel and lead it the following day. I came up with a good plan, which called four our 4 HUMVEEs and one LMTV to roll into the village and three of us would get out and negotiate with the Shiek. For this task, I chose my good friend and battle buddy Captain Shea, our clinical psychologist from up state New York to do the talking with the villages top religious leader. So our HUMVEE stops, Captain Shea and I get out accompanied by SSG Kolar, our detachment SGT who is going to pull security for us and operate our radio. We left our gunner in the HUMVEE on the 240 B and I asked "Stress Four" (the next closest HUMVEE) to send one of their soldiers up to help our gunner with the vehicle as there were a lot of real Iraqi civilians, whose job it was to distract us wandering around; and oh by the way, they had the Mosq music playing from the loud speakers just like it is in country. Anyway, there is a saying in the Army that no plan survives initial contact and ours came fast. No sooner than Captain Shea, SSG Kolar and I get inside the Sheik's house our HUMVEE is destroyed by an IED and our gunner is killed. I left Captain Shea and SSG Kolar to do their thing and I went outside to try to coordinate the chaos. To make a long story short, the Sheik gave us permission to search some of the houses and I ordered my two search teams out of the LMTV and directed them to the house the Sheik had identified. All hell seemed to then break loose and were were shortly in a fire fight with really cool special effects. My teams ended up finding the weapons cache as well as the booby trap and we got most of our people out alive. Boy was this a stressful day for me. Not likely that I will actually be doing this for real but having practiced it gives me some confidence.