bobdina
05-02-2010, 04:13 PM
Sappers run course to find best of the best
By Joe Gould - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday May 2, 2010 9:18:06 EDT
FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — The land mine was hidden a foot from 1st Lt. Mark Benning’s face. He lay on his belly in the sand, gently prodding the ground with a footlong rod until it struck something solid. He carefully scooped away the sand with both hands to reveal, two inches below the surface, a wicked-looking anti-personnel mine.
“It’s probably, like, a toe-popper,” said Benning, as his partner, 1st Lt. Dan Jenkins, stood nearby, sweeping the ground with a beeping metal detector.
“Right,” said an official scorer, making a mark on his clipboard. “Good job, soldier.”
The land mine was a fake, but the sweat on Benning’s forehead was real.
Benning and Jenkins, of 8th Engineer Battalion, Fort Hood, Texas, were one of 29 two-soldier teams competing in the pressure-packed 2010 Best Sapper competition here April 19-21. The punishing 53-hour, 42-mile, six-phase endurance challenge was built to test the elite of one of the Army’s most dangerous and least glamorous professions: combat engineer, or sapper.
“The Best Sapper competition is our way of bestowing on them that they are the best of this regiment,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Watson, commandant of the U.S. Army Engineer School based here.
Historically, sappers have always breached obstacles to allow armies to move, Watson said. In the Army, they used earth-shaking Bangalore torpedoes to clear hazards during World War II, navigated tunnels and booby-traps in the Vietnam War, and now work to clear routes of improvised explosive devices.
When there isn’t enough time to summon an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, sappers are often called on to demolish IEDs.
“These are the guys who are out there every day, literally hunting and seeking out IEDs through route clearance,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Todd M. Burnett, the senior enlisted adviser to the Joint IED Defeat Organization. “A lot of these guys are trained to do tactical site exploitation or blow an IED in place.”
The Best Sapper competition grew out of the Sapper Leader Course, a 28-day school that develops and hardens small-unit leaders to execute platoon-sized demolitions. The course’s top graduates earn the right to wear a special Sapper Tab.
While the 60-day, infantry-focused Army Ranger School has a reputation for testing physical and mental toughness, the Sapper Leader Course similarly teaches a mix of infantry and specialized technical skills.
“When you wear that Sapper Tab, you are looked to as someone who will get you through it, who is calm under pressure, who is tough as nails, with a mind,” said Watson. “We have Rangers who come through and say, ‘That’s a pretty tough course.’”
Students scale Fort Leonard Wood’s cliffs, ford its rivers, breach doors and build field-expedient demolitions made from C-4 plastic explosive and household items. The course, now in its 25th year and evolving to reflect the current wars, has also begun to add training to use robots and small unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Best Sapper planners put that course on steroids. Competitors were subjected to grueling physical events by night and a series of technical sapper tasks by day, physical and mental.
“It’s 53 continuous hours of 31 events, which are designed to test and torment sappers, and really put them through the ringer with skills that are unique to Army combat engineers,” said Capt. Douglas Solan, Sapper Leader Course company commander. “What makes these sappers unique is that they’re tough, but they’re also very technically proficient.”
Command Sgt. Maj. Henry Hart of the 326th Engineer Battalion, Fort Campbell, Ky., said that win or lose, simply training and competing for Best Sapper always helps his soldiers become better combat engineers.
“They may not make it, but they will still maintain the knowledge they learned during the train-up,” Hart said. “The skills they learn, they won’t forget them, and when they go out to Iraq or Afghanistan, they can fall back on those skills and continue to train the soldiers they have with them, build that sense of corps, and give them a sense of confidence and ‘hoo-ah.’”
Day 1
The contest began at 3 a.m. April 19 with a ramped-up physical fitness test that peaked before dawn with a chilly, three-mile run in full Army combat uniforms. “Embrace the suck,” one official scorer joked at the starting line. “We worked hard to find the toughest hills just for you.”
Then competitors hiked six miles and covered several tasks: complex knot-tying, foreign weapons assembly, foreign mine detection, a physical endurance course and others.
In early afternoon at Training Area 190, Capt. David Vasquez and 1st Lt. Brett Fuller of the 54th Engineer Battalion, Bamberg, Germany, were using a remote-controlled robot called a Talon 3B to try to find a simulated IED. If it was found, they had to catalog the IED and “detonate” it in place from the cover of an M113 armored personnel carrier in under 15 minutes.
The robots were a first for the competition. Vasquez and Fuller struggled to find their simulated IED as they navigated the Talon down a woodsy path. Short on time, they settled on detonating a half-buried black disk that might have been the butt of an artillery shell. A boom echoed through the trees.
“Trying to locate it — driving the robot, and looking through the camera, and trying to distinguish shapes and patterns and rocks — is not the easiest thing in the world,” Vasquez said. “You see twigs that look like wires, wires that look like twigs. Nobody’s going to give you a nice painted target.”
Staff Sgt. Angel Oliveras, who ran the challenge, said it reflected both the proliferation of IED-hunting robots and real difficulties of finding IEDs: “It’s the No. 1 killer of soldiers, it’s not going to be easy to find these things, and the enemy is pretty creative.”
Known as the “Iraq Team,” Sgts. Wesley Shields and Joshua Hanks of the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, journeyed from Forward Operating Base Echo in Diwaniyah, Iraq, to compete for Best Sapper. They practiced for months, marching around the FOB in rucks as heavy as 90 pounds.
As veterans of route-clearance duty, on their current and 2007-2008 tours, they said they found similarities between their jobs and the Best Sapper competition. For example, Shields’ expertise in theater is using the Talon to find and classify IEDs.
“When we came to that lane, I was all over it,” Shields said of the Talon challenge. “In the [competition’s] land mine lane, we found similar mines in theater.”
Day 2
After an overnight monstrosity — a grinding four-hour ruck march that culled the herd down to 20 teams — the day dawned on a fog-shrouded lake where competitors’ friends and family gathered to watch a helocast and poncho-raft swimming race.
Soldiers made their rucks into rafts by packing them end-to-end in a double wrap of ponchos fastened shut with caribiners. They carried their rafts onto two CH-47 Chinook helicopters that flew about 500 meters from shore, lowered their ramps just above the water and let the sappers splash down, each team clothed in wet suits, ACUs and life vests. Each soldier clutched his raft and kicked his way to shore.
Capt. Joseph Byrnes and Capt. Jason Castro, both of the 544th Engineer Battalion, Fort Leonard Wood, arrived first. Ruck-march winners 2nd Lt. Jeffrey Laughlin of the 20th Engineer Brigade and 2nd Lt. Jonathan Kralick with the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, came in second.
“It was bad-ass; where else do you wake up, make a raft and jump from a helicopter?” said Byrnes, who won Best Sapper in 2006.
Later that morning, 1st Lt. Michael McLaughlin and 1st Lt. Garrett Haddad of 66th Engineer Company, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, were fighting the clock to build charges for a simulated breaching operation. The two soldiers scrambled to properly measure explosives and assemble a water impulse charge, used to knock down steel doors.
Tense, achy and sleep-deprived, Haddad struggled to calculate the charges’ net explosive weight, used to determine the minimum safe stand-off distance during detonation. He forgot to multiply by the det cord’s relative effectiveness, 1.66, and the numbers were out of whack.
“Being tired was getting to us, we got to step it up,” Haddad said.
By midafternoon, on the remote Range 38, Shields and Hanks were given C-4, a soap dish, a platter, nuts and bolts, ball bearings, and an empty can to build a series of shaped charges. They had to build and set up two anti-personnel and one vehicle-targeting charge to ambush arriving enemy troops.
Staff Sgt. Jose Casillas, who was running the challenge, said that during his deployment to Afghanistan in 2003 he used his sapper training to prepare similar charges to defend a small forward operating base.
While some teams were standouts, most of the competitors, Shields and Hanks included, failed to make time. They also got the proportion of buffering materials wrong during assembly. The charges were placed anyway and detonated with a cry of “Fire in the hole!” The boom was deafening, but the paper targets remained intact.
Day 3
After a nighttime land-navigation challenge, the top 10 teams started from a football field at 4 a.m. on a nine-mile, 10-part relay that could only be described as hell on Earth after two full days of physical and mental challenges.
“It’s absolute madness,” said Staff Sgt. Corey Wilkens, the noncommissioned officer-in-charge of Best Sapper. “It’s a 100 percent gut-check event, something normal human beings cannot do without the events leading up to today, and it takes an enormous amount of adrenaline and physical conditioning.”
The tasks:
• Half-mile run in gas masks.
• Saw a 24-inch log, and half-mile log carry.
• Carry a 100-pound Bangalore crate a half-mile.
• Carry a series of mines through an obstacle course relay.
• Pound a fence post 18 inches into the ground.
• Flip a 380-pound tire up a 45-degree angled ramp and over a three-foot wall.
• Lay a stack of 13 planks, 75-pounds each, across a Bailey bridge, then restack them.
• Carry a 180-pound dummy a half-mile.
• Carry four 40-pound “sand babies” about three-quarters of a mile.
• Breach steel doors with a hand-held ram.
The finish line was the threshold to a big red wooden castle, the Engineers’ symbol, at the far end of a football field. Byrnes and Castro clattered their way to the finish line, triumphant. Hundreds of soldiers in PT gear, colleagues, senior leaders, friends and family cheered as all the sappers finished.
“When we were running up here, you can be so exhausted, and you have soldiers lining up here and cheering, I turned to Joe and said, ‘God bless America,’ ” Castro said. “It just makes you feel like an American, it’s such a great experience.”
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/05/army_best_sapper_050210w/
By Joe Gould - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday May 2, 2010 9:18:06 EDT
FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — The land mine was hidden a foot from 1st Lt. Mark Benning’s face. He lay on his belly in the sand, gently prodding the ground with a footlong rod until it struck something solid. He carefully scooped away the sand with both hands to reveal, two inches below the surface, a wicked-looking anti-personnel mine.
“It’s probably, like, a toe-popper,” said Benning, as his partner, 1st Lt. Dan Jenkins, stood nearby, sweeping the ground with a beeping metal detector.
“Right,” said an official scorer, making a mark on his clipboard. “Good job, soldier.”
The land mine was a fake, but the sweat on Benning’s forehead was real.
Benning and Jenkins, of 8th Engineer Battalion, Fort Hood, Texas, were one of 29 two-soldier teams competing in the pressure-packed 2010 Best Sapper competition here April 19-21. The punishing 53-hour, 42-mile, six-phase endurance challenge was built to test the elite of one of the Army’s most dangerous and least glamorous professions: combat engineer, or sapper.
“The Best Sapper competition is our way of bestowing on them that they are the best of this regiment,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Watson, commandant of the U.S. Army Engineer School based here.
Historically, sappers have always breached obstacles to allow armies to move, Watson said. In the Army, they used earth-shaking Bangalore torpedoes to clear hazards during World War II, navigated tunnels and booby-traps in the Vietnam War, and now work to clear routes of improvised explosive devices.
When there isn’t enough time to summon an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, sappers are often called on to demolish IEDs.
“These are the guys who are out there every day, literally hunting and seeking out IEDs through route clearance,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Todd M. Burnett, the senior enlisted adviser to the Joint IED Defeat Organization. “A lot of these guys are trained to do tactical site exploitation or blow an IED in place.”
The Best Sapper competition grew out of the Sapper Leader Course, a 28-day school that develops and hardens small-unit leaders to execute platoon-sized demolitions. The course’s top graduates earn the right to wear a special Sapper Tab.
While the 60-day, infantry-focused Army Ranger School has a reputation for testing physical and mental toughness, the Sapper Leader Course similarly teaches a mix of infantry and specialized technical skills.
“When you wear that Sapper Tab, you are looked to as someone who will get you through it, who is calm under pressure, who is tough as nails, with a mind,” said Watson. “We have Rangers who come through and say, ‘That’s a pretty tough course.’”
Students scale Fort Leonard Wood’s cliffs, ford its rivers, breach doors and build field-expedient demolitions made from C-4 plastic explosive and household items. The course, now in its 25th year and evolving to reflect the current wars, has also begun to add training to use robots and small unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Best Sapper planners put that course on steroids. Competitors were subjected to grueling physical events by night and a series of technical sapper tasks by day, physical and mental.
“It’s 53 continuous hours of 31 events, which are designed to test and torment sappers, and really put them through the ringer with skills that are unique to Army combat engineers,” said Capt. Douglas Solan, Sapper Leader Course company commander. “What makes these sappers unique is that they’re tough, but they’re also very technically proficient.”
Command Sgt. Maj. Henry Hart of the 326th Engineer Battalion, Fort Campbell, Ky., said that win or lose, simply training and competing for Best Sapper always helps his soldiers become better combat engineers.
“They may not make it, but they will still maintain the knowledge they learned during the train-up,” Hart said. “The skills they learn, they won’t forget them, and when they go out to Iraq or Afghanistan, they can fall back on those skills and continue to train the soldiers they have with them, build that sense of corps, and give them a sense of confidence and ‘hoo-ah.’”
Day 1
The contest began at 3 a.m. April 19 with a ramped-up physical fitness test that peaked before dawn with a chilly, three-mile run in full Army combat uniforms. “Embrace the suck,” one official scorer joked at the starting line. “We worked hard to find the toughest hills just for you.”
Then competitors hiked six miles and covered several tasks: complex knot-tying, foreign weapons assembly, foreign mine detection, a physical endurance course and others.
In early afternoon at Training Area 190, Capt. David Vasquez and 1st Lt. Brett Fuller of the 54th Engineer Battalion, Bamberg, Germany, were using a remote-controlled robot called a Talon 3B to try to find a simulated IED. If it was found, they had to catalog the IED and “detonate” it in place from the cover of an M113 armored personnel carrier in under 15 minutes.
The robots were a first for the competition. Vasquez and Fuller struggled to find their simulated IED as they navigated the Talon down a woodsy path. Short on time, they settled on detonating a half-buried black disk that might have been the butt of an artillery shell. A boom echoed through the trees.
“Trying to locate it — driving the robot, and looking through the camera, and trying to distinguish shapes and patterns and rocks — is not the easiest thing in the world,” Vasquez said. “You see twigs that look like wires, wires that look like twigs. Nobody’s going to give you a nice painted target.”
Staff Sgt. Angel Oliveras, who ran the challenge, said it reflected both the proliferation of IED-hunting robots and real difficulties of finding IEDs: “It’s the No. 1 killer of soldiers, it’s not going to be easy to find these things, and the enemy is pretty creative.”
Known as the “Iraq Team,” Sgts. Wesley Shields and Joshua Hanks of the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, journeyed from Forward Operating Base Echo in Diwaniyah, Iraq, to compete for Best Sapper. They practiced for months, marching around the FOB in rucks as heavy as 90 pounds.
As veterans of route-clearance duty, on their current and 2007-2008 tours, they said they found similarities between their jobs and the Best Sapper competition. For example, Shields’ expertise in theater is using the Talon to find and classify IEDs.
“When we came to that lane, I was all over it,” Shields said of the Talon challenge. “In the [competition’s] land mine lane, we found similar mines in theater.”
Day 2
After an overnight monstrosity — a grinding four-hour ruck march that culled the herd down to 20 teams — the day dawned on a fog-shrouded lake where competitors’ friends and family gathered to watch a helocast and poncho-raft swimming race.
Soldiers made their rucks into rafts by packing them end-to-end in a double wrap of ponchos fastened shut with caribiners. They carried their rafts onto two CH-47 Chinook helicopters that flew about 500 meters from shore, lowered their ramps just above the water and let the sappers splash down, each team clothed in wet suits, ACUs and life vests. Each soldier clutched his raft and kicked his way to shore.
Capt. Joseph Byrnes and Capt. Jason Castro, both of the 544th Engineer Battalion, Fort Leonard Wood, arrived first. Ruck-march winners 2nd Lt. Jeffrey Laughlin of the 20th Engineer Brigade and 2nd Lt. Jonathan Kralick with the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, came in second.
“It was bad-ass; where else do you wake up, make a raft and jump from a helicopter?” said Byrnes, who won Best Sapper in 2006.
Later that morning, 1st Lt. Michael McLaughlin and 1st Lt. Garrett Haddad of 66th Engineer Company, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, were fighting the clock to build charges for a simulated breaching operation. The two soldiers scrambled to properly measure explosives and assemble a water impulse charge, used to knock down steel doors.
Tense, achy and sleep-deprived, Haddad struggled to calculate the charges’ net explosive weight, used to determine the minimum safe stand-off distance during detonation. He forgot to multiply by the det cord’s relative effectiveness, 1.66, and the numbers were out of whack.
“Being tired was getting to us, we got to step it up,” Haddad said.
By midafternoon, on the remote Range 38, Shields and Hanks were given C-4, a soap dish, a platter, nuts and bolts, ball bearings, and an empty can to build a series of shaped charges. They had to build and set up two anti-personnel and one vehicle-targeting charge to ambush arriving enemy troops.
Staff Sgt. Jose Casillas, who was running the challenge, said that during his deployment to Afghanistan in 2003 he used his sapper training to prepare similar charges to defend a small forward operating base.
While some teams were standouts, most of the competitors, Shields and Hanks included, failed to make time. They also got the proportion of buffering materials wrong during assembly. The charges were placed anyway and detonated with a cry of “Fire in the hole!” The boom was deafening, but the paper targets remained intact.
Day 3
After a nighttime land-navigation challenge, the top 10 teams started from a football field at 4 a.m. on a nine-mile, 10-part relay that could only be described as hell on Earth after two full days of physical and mental challenges.
“It’s absolute madness,” said Staff Sgt. Corey Wilkens, the noncommissioned officer-in-charge of Best Sapper. “It’s a 100 percent gut-check event, something normal human beings cannot do without the events leading up to today, and it takes an enormous amount of adrenaline and physical conditioning.”
The tasks:
• Half-mile run in gas masks.
• Saw a 24-inch log, and half-mile log carry.
• Carry a 100-pound Bangalore crate a half-mile.
• Carry a series of mines through an obstacle course relay.
• Pound a fence post 18 inches into the ground.
• Flip a 380-pound tire up a 45-degree angled ramp and over a three-foot wall.
• Lay a stack of 13 planks, 75-pounds each, across a Bailey bridge, then restack them.
• Carry a 180-pound dummy a half-mile.
• Carry four 40-pound “sand babies” about three-quarters of a mile.
• Breach steel doors with a hand-held ram.
The finish line was the threshold to a big red wooden castle, the Engineers’ symbol, at the far end of a football field. Byrnes and Castro clattered their way to the finish line, triumphant. Hundreds of soldiers in PT gear, colleagues, senior leaders, friends and family cheered as all the sappers finished.
“When we were running up here, you can be so exhausted, and you have soldiers lining up here and cheering, I turned to Joe and said, ‘God bless America,’ ” Castro said. “It just makes you feel like an American, it’s such a great experience.”
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/05/army_best_sapper_050210w/