Mojave Desert

Somewhere in 2001 between late February and early April a few select teams were chosen to participate in an exercise at Fort Irwin in the Mojave desert. How lucky for me that I was chosen to be on one of the teams. The exercise lasted about a month and was supposed to train us for desert warfare. I was somewhat befuddled being stationed in Arizona, why did they need us to go from one desert to another desert to train for desert warfare, we could just set up in our own backyard. It turns out that it wasn't only to train us for desert warfare but we were replacing some other teams that didn't seem to be quite up to the task so for Huachuca had been asked to provide some fill-ins. When we first arrived we set up shelter-half tents (so called because you carry one half of the tent and another soldier carries another identical half) in a prepositioning area where the thousands of solders participating in the exercise would be living for the first week. During the first few days when we would wake up in the morning we would find ice on the outside of our tents but by 10:00am we would be soaked with sweat sitting in whatever shade we could find. After our fist week in the prepositioning area we moved into the high Mojave Desert to play war games. While much more work and much hotter the war games were much preferable to being confined along with thousands of others into a relatively small area and doing nothing. During our two weeks playing war games we were required to set up and tear down our communications system every day as we would move each day. Often we would be given little more than an hours notice and sometimes even less. We had always been pretty quick setting up and tearing down our systems but we managed to perfect our system getting our setup down to 15 minutes and set a record for 8 minutes up and running and passing communications. It was hot, tiring, dusty work but it was actually rather fun. After our two weeks of jumping around in the high desert it was decided that someone had won and someone had lost I was never told who did which but I guess we beat the bad guys. The war games were done and now we were supposed to role back out of the high desert to the prepositioning area for "recovery" which means anything except recovering for us. It was more about washing and scrubbing every speck of dust and dirt from our vehicles and preparing them for transport and other various ridiculous tasks designed to waste our time than recovering. After our prep for transporting our vehicles was complete we managed to get out a few days early and skip much of the forthcoming craziness which is part of the last week. I was glad to be done with the NTC (National Training Center) exercise but I'm not sure I was glad to be headed back to Ft. Huachuca, and yet more desert training.
M1 Abram Tank	Paladin Howitzer
Waiting in line for the gas station before heading out to the high desert.
Would you like your howitzer in green or tan? we also have a selection of Abrams your can choose from if you prefer tanks.	We would wake up in the mornings with ice on our tents but by mid morning we'd be jostling for the shade that the tin roofs provided. The tents are made from shelter halves where two people have identical halves of the tent which they put together to make a whole tent, with enough room for one person. As a team of 3 our lucky sergeant had to carry two halves.
The three satellite systems that Ft. Huachuca provided for the exercise.
	This was our sleeping quarters during the two weeks we spent in the high Mojave jumping around. It took to much time and effort to bother with setting up tents and such, and they would have taken far to much time to take down to make them practical; when you had to be able to break down and redeploy in less than 30 minutes. We constructed our shelter from 2 ponchos, one small tarp and 550 cord stretched between our satellite shelter and our HMMWV (Humvee). It took us 5 minutes to set up and 30 seconds to tear down. we did allow ourselves the luxury of setting up one cot which the three of us would share, working shift made that easy as there were always two of us awake while the third slept. The only problem was I got stuck working the night shift and was supposed to sleep during the day, the blaring heat made that all but impossible after about 10:00am and I would lay awake daydreaming of sleep until I couldn't take it any longer and get up.
I have no idea if they are shooting or what they are shooting at but it just warms the heart to see them all ready to ruin somebody's day.
To say that the desert swarmed with Dust Devils would have been an understatement, at any given time during the day you could look across endless miles of desert stretching away from you and easily count between 6 and 10 of these things. This one came at us as we were preparing to move out to another location. As we were all lined up it came traveling down the road as if the road were there just for it: giving it an ample extra supply of dust. Undaunted and un hindered by all the military vehicles and weaponry it charged the column of vehicles and personnel running them over one by one as it went along. Having no particular desire to be run over by a dust devil myself I jumped in my HMMWV and closed the cloth fabric doors as tight as; well its not possible to close them tight, but anyways. After watching the truck in front of me be rattled and shaken by the dust devil it was my turn next. It hit with all the force of a dust devil, not all that much really, but it did shake and rattle the HMMWV a bit, caused the fabric doors and roof to flap and go wild making a huge noisy ruckus, and poured sand in a torrent through every crack and hole in the vehicles cab as though it were a huge violent hourglass. After it had passed I and everything in the cab of the HMMWV was covered in a fine layer of sand and dust with piles of sand where it had been able to enter though cracks and holes. The danger of being run over now gone, not that it made any difference now I jumped out and took this lovely picture of my finger point at the dust devil.
	The term "Dust Off" takes on very literal meaning here.

	This is the satellite system I worked on for the exercise.