War Time Urban Warfare

Last week we practiced urban warfare in a war time setting. In the past all of our urban warfare training had been focused on missions in the West Bank, which is a different style of urban warfare.

In the West Bank we are usually going into someone's house in the middle of the night to arrest them. They don't know you are coming and they usually aren't ready for it. During war time that is not the case. You are going into a home that you have made it clear that there should not be anyone inside. If there is someone inside they probably mean you harm.

For that reason every room that you enter, you enter shooting. Any room that you come to that you are fired at you throw a grenade in. So this is what we practiced this week. It was pretty interesting, except that once again the army finds a way to take the fun out of the things that sound like they might be fun.

I heard throwing grenades into a room...sounds kinda fun. The truth...not so much. For safety reasons the rooms that we throw the grenades into are covered with sand on the floor (so that someone doesn't throw a grenade and have it bounce back out, which apparently happened during a previous training drill pre-sand). What I didn't consider was that entering a room with a dirt floor after a grenade has gone off makes it kinda hard to see, and even harder to breath.

I have a video of it, but I am having trouble loading it. I might try later to see if I can get it to work.

Ok, it took a little while but I got it to upload. You don't get a real feeling for what it is like when the grenade goes off (I stood in the corner and rocks from the roof flew off on to me), but it is still kinda fun to see).