AAR for the 12-09 fieldcraft weekend at Paddy Creek Wilderness

“Official” AAR for the 12-09 NATO field craft weekend at Paddy Creek

The Plan:

Warnick, Cox, Jackson, Clasen, and Fitzgerald were to rendezvous with me at my place at 18:00 hours on Friday evening. Ration packs were to be issued, along with squad gear. Equipment was to be checked then loaded into Hoobers T-100 and Warnick’s explorer then we were to carpool down planning to arrive at appox 23:00 or so. Stagg was to depart from Lawrence at about 21:00 hours and would catch up with or rendezvous with the main body upon his arrival.

Upon arrival, we would gear up and move along the south loop of the Big Piney trail a distance of appox 8.8 miles to our lay up point for the day.

At the lay up point, we would rest in rotations then move the remaining 8.4 miles back to the trailhead after dusk on Saturday night arriving appox 0:00 hours Sunday morning.

Once back, we would camp at the staging area for the night then haul gear to Springfield for MadDog, visit with Ben Mercer (on Christmas break from Boot camp) then go up to Tent Dave’s surplus jubilee and shop like a pack drunk valley girls.

The Performance:

Rendezvous – start off timing went pretty well according to plan other than Stagg having to drop due to getting out of work late and being behind on too many things in his life

Once we geared up and started for the trail head we found a sign explaining that the trail was impassable due to ice storm damage. We pushed past the sign and went several miles on NODS dealing with fairly considerable downed and damaged trees. Cox referred to it as “Bastogne like”. The place looked like it had been shelled. With the pace considerably lower than 1 MPH and a lot of skittering and crawling going on I decided to omit the nod use for the time being both as a safety issue and also from an equipment preservation measure; smacking a NOD off of a helmet while crawling through a downed tree was just not a particularly viable option.

We transitioned over to limited white light use so that we could keep track of where the trail went and proceeded on a death march to attempt to get to the layup sight before dawn. Warnick and I were tasked with the mapping and we were both being fairly lax with our terrain association. This resulted in us encountering a trail junction that we assumed to be another junction further along the way and we made a wrong turn heading down into the Little Paddy Creek valley a little early.

That got us to a valid lay up point at just about civil twilight and we set up camp for the day. We had packed along a squad stove and a large kettle that we used to make up hot water for everyone and once we got camp set for the day. Watch rotations were set up and everyone got some much needed rest. (Between 3-6 hours each)

During the afternoon, Warnick and Jackson took off to recon the area and get a solid fix on our position. In addition to the position data, they also reported that the little Paddy Creek valley was a pretty neat place loaded with caves and other fun stuff.

At dusk, we packed up and left out of the lay up point at about 18:00. Knowing the woods conditions, we planned on running on lights unless we found that the north loop was in better condition than the south one. We also planned in a lot more rest stops and were much more fastidious about keeping track of where we were and how we were progressing.

Saturday nights walk was a lot colder resulting in less muck, mud, and humidity. As a result, we all stayed quite a bit warmer and rest breaks worked out pretty well. It also did not hurt that we had plenty of time to get where we needed to go this time.
Hydration was much better and we arrived at the staging area in very good condition unlike the night before when we were all pretty beat up and pooped. At most of the rest breaks we heated up water on the canteen cup stoves and all had coffee, cocoa, cider etc. That went a long way to encourage some hydration and keep spirits up.

The issues/fixes:

IMPROVE: Not everyone had a helmet that was 100% ready to go for NODs. As such it was quite a Chinese fire drill when it came time to rotate nods around. We probably could have employed and put away nods at a few spots if it had been easier to set the helmets up. In the future, I need to have a larger quantity of NOD plates on hand and make sure that we fit everyone’s helmet with the required gear and make all adjustments before setting out.

IMPROVE: Trail was impassable. Nothing much we can do about that but in retrospect, we could have adapted what we were doing a bit and just traveled cross country moving a shorter distance rather than trying to fight the trail. A lot of time was spent trying to pick up the trail again at the end of some of the more sizable obstacles, we would have probably been better off just skipping it all together.

IMPROVE: Warnick and I got lazy the first night and did not do a very good job keeping track of our position. Night 2 we did a lot better job and pretty much always knew where we were. We should ALWAYS be keeping track.

IMPROVE: Night 1 involved basically the entire movement without any breaks of any consequence. This really beat the hell out of everyone and we were getting sloppy by the end; lots of falling down, tripping etc. We should have tempered our pace a bit, in the end it probably would not have cost us that much time.

IMPROVE: My LCS-84 pack sucks. I wanted to try it out as it is both period correct and much smaller than the CFP-90. I do not know how it is possible to make a pack suck worse than the Alice pack but they certainly did with the LCS-84. The aluminum stays kept popping out of the keepers on the bottom and the waist belt kept coming unattached. Without stays and load lifters, it basically carried directly on the shoulders just like the Alice but had the added disadvantage of also poofing up like a duffle bag and poking me in the back at every possible location. Not amused with this pack… not at all… Back to the medium Alice pack for me.

IMPROVE: Site selection for NOD training classes. The condition of Paddy Creek was not conducive to the sort of training we had planned. We adapted by shifting our focus and still had a great event but were not able to get the original lessons taught. Realistically, a better place to teach this lesson plan next time around would probably be the KATY trail. More walking, less stuff to smash $3000 nods into.

IMPROVE: Reduce weight carried by participants. This was sort of the master plan as far as the longer distance trip. By getting people actually humping their rucks a bit they get a little more critical about what exactly they bring along next time. Everyone out there would have been happier with less weight and I am quite certain that if we were to repeat this course in a week NOBODY would be carrying as much stuff. From the planning perspective, I could have also issued fewer MRE meals. Participants were issued 3 meals to cover Friday night, all day and all night Saturday. In the end most of us had just eaten one and picked the particularly yummy bits out of a second one.

SUSTAIN: Resupply of water in the field. This time around, we did not carry an extensive amount of water on hand instead just resuppling from streams and springs along the route. We already knew their were plenty of places to reload at and the water in the Paddy Creek area was pretty decent. Many of the attendees had never used water treatment tablets before and were pleasantly surprised at how well they worked out. I personally consider local resupply of water to be a key field craft skill not just from a gaming standpoint but for general outdoor activities as a whole.

SUSTAIN: Supplemental winter rations. I had hoped to land some of the winter ration packs but could not track any down in time. In lieu of them everyone was issued 3 MREs and 1 supplemental pack consisting of soup mix and several renditions of hot drink mixes. These proved to be quite popular. At the end of the trip most of us had gone through just 1 MRE and the supplemental pack.

SUSTAIN: Giving weird ration packs to Warnick. Warnick chose the mystery box and got a Spanish ration in lieu of one of his MREs. The Spanish ration was the equivalent of a 6 hour long Monte Python marathon entertainment value wise and was actually a fairly practical ration. Pretty much everyone got a chance to try some of it and while not always a positive experience, it was at least interesting. As far as I can remember it contained: 1 can of Octupus in olive oil (kind of over the top for even me), 1 can of Pate (always popular) 1 can of sausages in tomato sauce (pretty good), 2 “energy pills” (Warnick and I took them), 1 soup mix packet, 3 fuel tablets, 1 folding stove, 3 water purification tablets, 4 “Hydration tablets”, and some other stuff I do not remember. For a single meal (and it claimed to be a single meal) it had a LOT of food in it.

SUSTAIN: Use of the squad stove system. I carried the stove itself. Fitzgerald carried the fuel and the pot went with Classen. Nobody had too much weight overall and we could quickly make up hot water for everyone in one shot. This was a big help. Technically the Squad stove is supposed to be an M1950 squad stove but given that I sold all of my decent M1950 stoves off to all of you guys leaving me with just the kaboom-o-matic one that always catches me on fire, I opted to bring along my old Svea-123. I’ll have to carefully shop for a few (non-exploding) M1950 stoves so we can have the proper gear next time.

SUSTAIN: Use of Paddy Creek. This is a pretty nice place. You can tell that even at night. I am going to make a run down there over the new years break I think and take a look at it in the daytime. (without the LCS-84)

Summary:

As you guys well know we do East Wind not be cause it is easy but because it is hard. This event was hard and as is usually the case, it was equally rewarding. Morale was very high and everyone seemed to really thrive on the challenges. We had three attendees along who came to us from the One Shepherd SLP program that did very well too. Hopefully, we can rook them into wearing some NATO uniforms and we will see them at East Wind III.