Marine Corps News Room

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2007/05/marine_mountain_viper_070526/

By John Hoellwarth - Staff writer
Posted : Monday May 28, 2007 9:56:06 EDT

Enter Mountain Viper, a new 30-day pre-deployment package that trains Afghanistan-bound Marines in California and Nevada.

The training begins at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms; moves to classroom instruction at the Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Calif.; and culminates at the Army’s ammunition depot in Hawthorne, Nev., where the climate, altitude and terrain match Afghanistan’s.

On May 25, a group of more than 140 Marines — seven teams of 21 leathernecks each slated for a nine-month tour in Afghanistan to train the national army there — completed Mountain Viper’s first-ever iteration under the watchful eye of evaluators from the Corps’ Security Cooperation Education and Training Center.

Those evaluators must now report back to Training and Education Command in Quantico, Va., and III Marine Expeditionary Force on Okinawa, Japan — the “force provider” for all Marines headed to Afghanistan — about Mountain Viper’s efficacy, said Maj. Matt Watt, Bridgeport’s operations officer.

Watt said the Army, which has about 50 training teams in Afghanistan, is keeping a close eye on Mountain Viper, too, and is holding “discussions on the road ahead for potentially conducting joint training for all the Afghan-bound training teams at Hawthorne and Bridgeport,” he said.

With the first iteration complete, every indication is that the “ad hoc” Afghanistan prep Marines have been receiving in recent years “wasn’t nearly as robust as the one we’re putting together here,” Watt said. “The Marines are tearing it up, doing extremely well. All the feedback has been positive.”

Of the seven teams involved in Mountain Viper’s first training cycle, six will embed with Afghan army battalions and the other will embed with Afghan National Army staff officers two echelons above the battalion level, Watt said.

The teams are made up of Marines from Okinawa and Hawaii with a wide range of military occupational specialties. The “vast majority are staff noncommissioned officers and field grades,” but there are a handful of junior Marines working as drivers and gunners, Watt said.

Lt. Col. Andrew Wilcox, 3rd Marine Division deputy operations officer, said Mountain Viper “is the same thing as Mojave Viper, essentially, but tailored for Afghanistan.”

Both training packages start in Twentynine Palms, where Mountain Viper Marines “use some of the facilities and structures that can’t be exported to Bridgeport or Hawthorne,” Watt said.

The highlights from Twentynine Palms include foreign weapons training, a virtual-reality combat convoy simulator and a Humvee egress trainer, along with lessons on what to do if captured by the enemy or caring for combat casualties, Watt said.

He said the foreign weapons training includes familiarization with weapons such as the AK47 assault rifle, which is used by friend and foe in Iraq and Afghanistan. The convoy trainer is a collection of “four mocked-up Humvees, each with a 360-degree screen that projects a simulated image of Iraq.”

“The guys get in and drive around. They can see the other three vehicles in their convoy. It’s like a big video game” that allows Marines to practice communication procedures and roadside bomb drills, Watt said.

The Humvee egress trainer is the result of a study that “found we might not have had so many casualties if the Marine knew how to escape,” Watt said.

Capture training familiarizes Marines with the military resources that will come looking for them if they’re ever captured, and the casualty care goes a little further than basic first aid.

“You’re under fire, your buddy has a gunshot wound, how do you take care of him and not get shot in the process?” Watt explained.

Once the Marines get to Bridgeport, there are “a couple days” of mountain skills training dealing with the impact of mountainous terrain and high-altitude weather on personnel and equipment, “then we roll into a three-day cultural course,” Watt said.

He said there are several different ethnic groups in Afghanistan, and Marines need to learn “how to react to each of them so we don’t offend them in the process of working with them.”

With the help of roughly 80 Afghan role players, Marines in Bridgeport participate in a “shura” — a common social event in Afghanistan — where their training includes “breaking bread, drinking chai tea, eating goat meat, going over the basics,” Watt said.

From Bridgeport, Mountain Viper moves to Hawthorne Army Ammunition Depot in a remote section of Nevada, where “the terrain we are operating in is almost an exact replica of what we’re in in Afghanistan,” said Gunnery Sgt. Shawn Workman, training team staff noncommissioned officer in charge.

Third Marine Division’s assistant chief of staff for operations, Col. Jeff Haynes, said each Afghanistan veteran who has arrived in Hawthorne has remarked that “this is just like Kabul.”

“They both have the same elevations in the basins and elevations in the heights and about the same weather patterns,” he said. “The remoteness and ruggedness of the terrain is also extremely similar.”

Haynes rattled off a lengthy list of reasons that Hawthorne is the ideal Afghanistan training facility — a live-fire range at 6,000 feet, a 737-capable airstrip, a supportive local community, urban training facilities, a naval air station close enough to provide casualty evacuation assistance, and access to Army CH-47 Chinook helicopters exactly like the ones Marines will rely on in Afghanistan.

There are two phases to the training at Hawthorne: a 12-day field exercise and a six-day mission rehearsal exercise, Watt said.

He said the field exercise focuses on “mountain mobility,” with instruction on land navigation, survival skills, short- and long-range foot patrols, and helicopter insertion and extraction. The mission rehearsal exercise involves long-range mounted patrols, establishing and defending a combat outpost, civil-military operations, cordon-and-search practice and a “sure-up event with Afghan role players” that puts all the skills Marines learn during Mountain Viper to the test, Watt said.

The Corps has brought in a civilian contractor, Back Country Driving School of Roanoke, Va., to teach Marines how to traverse rough terrain in a Humvee during the field training exercise.

Will Leaman, the school’s president, said one of his biggest concerns is teaching Marines to prevent rollovers.

“A lot of people get nervous their first time when all they can see is hood and sky in front of them,” he said. “We are mostly hoping to give them familiarity behind the wheel to learn the hands-on characteristics, to learn the capabilities and limitations of the vehicles, and the mechanical limitations to avoid breakdowns.”

School vice president James Asti said, “With the armor, there is 13,000 pounds on a chassis designed for 5,000 pounds. The words ‘gentle’ and ‘fragile’ are not typically in a Marine’s vocabulary, but these trucks are fragile because they weigh so much and you have to be gentle with them or you can break them. And if you break them, you’re a target.”

After taking the class, training team Hospitalman Ernesto Cano concluded that keeping the Humvees in working order wasn’t as difficult as driving them in the dark with night-vision goggles, when “your vision is reduced to a pinhole, depth perception goes out the window and you have to be much more prepared mentally.”

Watt said the impetus for Mountain Viper came from the MEF after it was officially designated as the force provider for all Marines headed to Afghanistan. Right now, that means providing training teams sent to work alongside the Afghan National Army, but the need to send more teams to train the Afghan police force is an “emerging requirement,” Watt said.

The Corps hasn’t sent leathernecks to Afghanistan in a specific combat role since 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, returned last summer. There are no plans to send combat troops back in the near future, and there are issues with the availability of equipment that make the prospect difficult, Commandant Gen. James Conway told reporters during a May 17 Pentagon briefing.

“The paradigm shift is we’re training people to train, not to fight,” Watt said.