Page 68 - Wish Stream 2023 CREST

Exercise DYNAMIC VICTORY
OCdt Gommo – Gaza Company
This was it; we had made it to Germany for the legendary final exercise of the Commissioning Course. What would it entail? Blackhawks? Challenger 2s? Doctrinally pure combined arms manoeuvre? OCdt Flack drinking all the soup in Europe? Wait out...
was the culmination of a year of hard work and the pinnacle of an OCdt’s timetable. For others, this was the daunting final hurdle between Sandhurst and the Field Army; one final week in the wet and the cold before a career sitting in a warm vehicle, a
warm workshop, a warm office or even a warm shell scrape on the side of a mountain in Wales. Luckily for us, it only seems to rain at night-time in Ger- many, with wet socks being acquired heroically, for King and Country. Nerves and apprehension filled the air as we disembarked at the Assembly Area, with OCdt Graham even getting
back on the bus, but that was just because he for- got his helmet.
I was handed a vital piece of military hardware, a ladder, and immediately tripped over it. Gaza Com- pany was set, and advanced on the urban centre of Kittensee to liberate it. DISASTER! Much to eve- ryone’s surprise (it would seem), the Company size formation snaking its way through the countryside
After a few days of live-fire tac-
tical training, in which we pro-
gressed from individual to platoon
level actions, with grenades and
machine-gun fire overhead, it was
time for CC231 to embark on the
field phase of Ex DV, against an
agile and aggressive American OpFor, on a train- ing area that was strikingly similar to Barossa. Thus far we had escaped death and serious injury, or even worse, a backterm, but the prospect of battle- hardened US soldiers playing the enemy was not one taken lightly, so we bombed up our magazines and zeroed the laser attachments on our rifles for what would become an intense and casualty- heavy few days of urban laser-tag. For some, this
The prospect of battle-hardened US soldiers playing the enemy was not one taken lightly
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