Gateway

Issue date: 4/18/08 Section: Features

Bell was treated as a fellow cadet as he spent a day training with future officers at Camp Ashland, which is located approximately 30 miles west of Omaha. (Mike Bell) [Click to enlarge]

Cadets set off early in the morning to participate in a long day of training regardless of the weather. (Mike Bell) [Click to enlarge]

Contributor Mike Bell was embedded with the UNO/Creighton Army Reserve Officers Training Corps program during a training session at Camp Ashland.

While most people get to sleep off hangovers Saturday mornings, I took a day to join Major Dennis Murphy and 125 officers-in-training out at Camp Ashland, where 75 come from the Omaha area.

At 5:30 a.m., I was pulling on camouflage fatigues and tying my boots as I was told the importance of today's training.

"As bad as the weather is, we need to get them out here for simulated mission training," Murphy told me. "Today is a tough day. It's the kind of exercise that makes people realize that they may not be cut out for this line of work."

I was handed a rifle and told to join a group that was already packing and getting ready to march. I clumsily shouldered the gun and fell in with a squad of kids all within two years of my age.

Though the bullets in the magazines were blanks and the opposition forces were really just instructors in different sets of fatigues, everything was to be taken as seriously as possible. This day served as a dose of reality that no text book or Hollywood film could convey.

We were told to 'ruck-up' in two minutes. I looked around to see everyone quickly packing their equipment away, all 40 pounds of it, into their backpacks and then lay them down, propping their rifles at the ready in front of them.

They formed a circle, squad leaders in the center, and faced the wilderness. I sat on a log and looked out to see other squads of cadets that were marching into the woods on other missions. It was snowing now and the sun still hadn't warmed the horizon.

I asked the soldier next to me what was going on.

"Right now we're setting up a perimeter while the squad leaders get our mission orders. In a few minutes we'll be on our way. And you really should get down from there," said MS4 Hernandez, a fourth year cadet and international studies major at UNO.

I got off the log and settled behind it, pointing my gun towards the grass.

"Are we actually expecting people to come running towards us?" I asked him, more as a joke than a serious question.

"Not right now, but later on we will, sure," he replied.

The team leaders called us forward to a small, crude terrain model in the dirt constructed of colored rocks and string.

The group brought out pens and little notebooks and wrote down what the squad leader told them. I didn't make sense of much that was said, with the exception that the enemies were described as "well-armed and have high-morale."

Before setting off, Murphy told the squad, "This weather is pretty crappy, I know, but it doesn't even rank in the top 50 of the worst conditions I've had to work in. No matter how cold it is, you have to do the job."

We trudged through the woods, single file, until we came upon a path we had been told that the enemy patrols. We waited, laying in the grass and brush, until two enemy soldiers walked in front of us, looking around as though they couldn't see us.

I heard yelling as the soldiers turned and raised their rifles, but by then, shots rang out around me, and I recklessly pulled the trigger without even thinking. Smoke filled the air and the men on the path collapsed.

Until that point, my feelings towards this day had been an odd mixture of sitting in a boring math class and a dull family camping trip.

After the rounds of shooting and running across the road to secure the area, I could not have been more awake. Hell, I had never fired a gun before and had only held a few antiques in my life.

There was no sense of fear, just a reverse to a more instinctual mind-set. But I knew that the circumstances could be different. I knew that those could be live rounds I was shooting, and that the soldiers could have been trying to kill me.

Crawling on my belly through the mud with a gun in front of me, finger on the trigger, I knew I would have to shoot someone before they shot me; it was basic and primal, something I don't feel in my day-to-day life. Nothing compares to that; not drinking, not working out at the gym and definitely not "Halo."

The mission was deemed completed after checking on the "corpses," and we walked back to where we had dropped off our bags. The troops sat down and talked about what had happened, reviewed the mistakes they made and what needed improvement. Everyone took responsibility for their actions and didn't mince words when describing their errors.

"You guys need to spread out more. If I had been a sniper, I could've picked all of you off one-by-one like ducks at the carnival," said one of the instructors.

The grim message was taken to heart, and everyone picked up and marched towards the next objective. All missions went extremely well, the cadets' training paid off and even though I personally did little, I felt like I helped to achieve whatever our goal was.

I walked away with a new understanding and respect for the people who go and do this stuff for real.

Though the missions I took part in were very simple and straight forward to everyone else present, to me they were confusing and seemingly obtuse. The terms and strategies seemed unclear to me until they were explained and only afterwards, when I had time to think, did everything make sense.

So I'd like to extend my gratitude to everyone in the armed forces for doing a job that, frankly, I cannot do, and wish them good luck wherever their duties take them.

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