I'm getting some Air Advisor training and thought some of you guys might be interested in a couple of observations and snippets from 2 war stories.
Lots of people get a bad opinion of the various security contracting groups based on a handful of incidents, but I have to say that my experience with a handful of contractors has been almost 100% positive. The course I'm taking now used to be taught in part by the Army, but almost all of the course, both combat skills and academics, has been taken over by contractors. A person who went through the Army version and the current contractor taught course says that the current course is significantly better. Interestingly, many of our instructors are teaching both classroom academics on technical advisor stuff, and combat skills such as high risk driving and weapons tactics. These guys are almost all highly experienced spooks or special forces (Seals, etc) guys, some of whom saw over a decade of almost continuous deployments to very hot regions. 2 stories from an ex-seal, sanitized and told to the best of my recollection. I'll re-tell them as I heard them.
During vehicle roll-over training:
I rolled our vehicle under fire in the middle of Falluja, but we were wearing our seatbelts so we shot out the windows and got out ok. We'd have been mangled if we didn't have our seatbelts on. We fought to cover and got picked up 3 days later.
3 days in the middle of Falluja after he and 3 other dudes rolled their SUV in the middle of a firefight? Damn.
Then during discussion about self-aid battlefield medicine while we were going through vehicle "bail" drills:
I took an IED fragment to the stomach during a fight. We were on the move so I couldn't take any medication for 90 hours since I had to keep alert. I managed to keep moving for 48 hours before my legs stopped working, paralyzed from the waist down, but we were still fighting and moving, so my buddy strapped me to his ruck facing backwards and carried me like a backpack. I just hung there firing backwards and he carried me like that for 2 days. After 90 hrs we broke contact and I could pop some percocet, but I was sort of numb by then.
Double-damn. Gut shot, stopped the bleeding by stuffing quik-clot gauze into the hole in his belly until he quit bleeding, then kept fighting without any medication until his legs were paralyzed, then kept fighting (tail gunner?) as his buddies carried him out. Damn.
Anyhow, these guys are the "real deal" and we're learning a lot. Not only that, they are extremely good instructors and as long as we're not clowning around, they are very polite and humble, willing to go beyond their minimum contract to make sure we learn as much as possible before we deploy. I've only identified one "cowboy" in the lot, but even he has a lot to teach and has offered after-hours training in knife fighting, something not covered by the syllabus. I won't call them "nice guys", but they've been great instructors, patiently but firmly trying to teach a bunch of USAF goofballs some combat skills. Certainly nothing like the whacko out of control contractors that get highlighted in the news.
