Urban Operations Training

Yesterday we did phase two of urban operations. We had a two hour class on how room to room searches were conducted. After that we went out outside to practice clearing rooms with our four man team. SFC Bernier, CW4 Sample, MAJ Buck and myself must have done at least 15 of these iterations each time learning from our previous mistakes and rotating positions 1-4. After lunch we went out to the urban ops location and maneuvered our way down the street crossing dangerous intersections and spaces, what you could normally cover in about one minute walking took us a lot longer and by the time we finished we were drenched in sweat. Later that afternoon after some additional glasshouse scenarios (chalked exterior room lines on the ground) we finally got to clear out some rooms and totally screwed it up the first time! SSG Flowers one of our OC's who was observing our room clearing basically chewed up our behinds pretty damn good, but for the right reasons. He had been doing this his last tour in Iraq and had seen these room and building clearings go south in a heartbeat and just wanted to make sure we didn't do some of the same mistakes he saw fellow soldiers do over there.