Outstanding! Someone had trained this lady right! Jessica Lynch was trained to drive a truck, look what happened to her! My own daughter was sent to Afghanistan for 30 days. Her Utah Air Natl Guard were the only full time "spooks" at that time ( 2004) they flew around listening in/locating bad guys all over SouthCom. My daughter was a Spanish Linguist but a Sgt in the ground crew, so she had to go. I was "miffed" when I found out the reason...the regular AF couldn't find the bad guys in Pakistan mnts. Before she deployed, I took her to the range to go over and "refresh" her small arms handling. Turns out that as an AF trainee in SanAntone, she had "zero" work with any handgun and fired "20 rds" of M16! She knew nothing about clearing stoppages, etc. I spent three hours with her and off she went. I prayed a lot. Thankfully, she stayed behind the wire while a Pashtu linguist went with the air crew. They found then often and the 10th Mountain went in and lit them up. Rumsfeld wanted to keep them indefinitely, but I assured her the AF General wouldn't stand for the Air "Guard" to beat his lazy guys, so he built a fire under them, and they started doing their job. She got rocketed, mortared and had "so called friendly" Afghans walk into their quarters all the time. Luckily, she had an M16 with her the whole time. Admittedly, I'm Old School, don't like women in combat, but if they are going to be there, my God, give them some training!!
That whole 507th fiasco was the result of the convoy commander reading a map staight up and down( basically 180° bassakwards)
Instead of having it orientated in direction of travel at all times.
What his bone head thought was a left turn per his fugged up map reading skills was in reality a right turn in the wrong direction.
Plus he also didnt know how to operate his plugger( gps) worth a fugg either and didnt want to ask to learn how to use it properly.
Simply putting that thing on continous and putting in way points in prior to the mission would have advoided his fugged up lack of land navigation skills in broad daylight.
That and poor weapons maintenance, wpns duck taped up in plastic
Behind seats and locked and frozen up from not having a daily 10 mins of dusting em off and lubing em for weeks on end.
A few of soldiers who did wpns maintenance on their own initiative
where able to fight back somewhat.
All jessica was able to do was hand her magizines to others whose weapons worked in the front seat.
At least 3/4ths of that convoys firepower was out of action to begin with.
All this led to them getting hammered hard.
The after action reveiw of that whole incident was pretty scathing on
the leadership officer and nco wise, whose failures to instill even the most basic standards amongst themselves and their soldiers led to a bad situation that got 10 times worse fast.
