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With my brother (now Second Lieutenant Reaves, USMC) in town, I get to hear all sorts of interesting tales about the kind of training he got at the Academy. Especially the combat training exercises. Especially the early combat training exercises, where inexperience was constantly allowing the entire team to die in a blaze of glorious stupidity.
Combat training used real M-16s loaded with 9 mm chalk bullets, which leave welts and lots of chalk dust but aren't going to do any permanent damage. A good thing, because the midshipmen were constantly doing things like charging up stairs against two or more instructors, or failing to check windows as they advanced through the streets (instructors just loved to sit in said windows and snipe the entire team as they passed). But the mids got wiser as training progressed (thankfully).
Both sides were also equipped with chalk grenades, which counted down and then expelled a cloud of chalk dust. If you get dust on you, you're down; in real life you would have been hit with shrapnel. Anyway, a common early mistake was to roll a grenade into a room. You want to clear a room with a grenade, you chuck it as hard as possible, so it bounces around and no one inside has a chance to react to it. But whenever an instructor saw a grenade gently roll into the room, he just kicked it back out, and the team outside got to face it just as it went off. This must have slaughtered almost every mid in training at one point of another. But my favorite instance was the time where, after making the same mistake AGAIN, a young mid tries to correct his error by jumping on the grenade, saving the rest of the team in a brave sacrifice.
He missed.
Combat training used real M-16s loaded with 9 mm chalk bullets, which leave welts and lots of chalk dust but aren't going to do any permanent damage. A good thing, because the midshipmen were constantly doing things like charging up stairs against two or more instructors, or failing to check windows as they advanced through the streets (instructors just loved to sit in said windows and snipe the entire team as they passed). But the mids got wiser as training progressed (thankfully).
Both sides were also equipped with chalk grenades, which counted down and then expelled a cloud of chalk dust. If you get dust on you, you're down; in real life you would have been hit with shrapnel. Anyway, a common early mistake was to roll a grenade into a room. You want to clear a room with a grenade, you chuck it as hard as possible, so it bounces around and no one inside has a chance to react to it. But whenever an instructor saw a grenade gently roll into the room, he just kicked it back out, and the team outside got to face it just as it went off. This must have slaughtered almost every mid in training at one point of another. But my favorite instance was the time where, after making the same mistake AGAIN, a young mid tries to correct his error by jumping on the grenade, saving the rest of the team in a brave sacrifice.
He missed.
