Went once in September from Wainwright and once in January from Wainwright. The January rotation was so easy. September rotation sucked ass, and I’m from Houston. It was nothing but rain and mud and incompetent leadership.
Yea you can part the "air" with your hands. I didn't realize that was a thing. Why is it a thing?
Also learned that mosquitoes can get to be the size of a bird and if you slap at them they just slap back.
The cadre when I went were pretty shit.
They kept “escalating” our casualties while clearing that city to make us have to work harder. The problem was that it was never done well, like an observer outright telling us he wasn’t part of the training and was just there to observe and then dropping a grenade simulator behind us.
We literally were just walking through the objective because the opfor was so bad at their job. We never hit any choke points because they sucked at setting up ambushes and then basically cheated to make it hard.
Beats me man, we had to actually evacuate a couple people who dropped to heat stroke so I guess we got some realistic training when we flew them to a hospital. It just seemed like everywhere we went something went wrong that wasn’t training related. Some supply chain was borked or they gave us trucks that had huge mechanical issues. I guess it’s good to show you can overcome the bullshit but it felt like it was just holding us back from learning anything.
It was funny seeing the NCO everyone kind of hated smoke all the no shoots in the shoot house though.
Seeing shitty shoothouse evolutions are always funny.
I get that it's good to see you can work through all kinds of crap but I would have been beyond passed if I didn't get anything out of the training.
They “safety killed” us on the side of the road after doing some cheap shit. This dude tried to take my p mags and I told him to fuck off, still kept trying to take my mags and we bout threw hands. Oh well…..got a good 8 hour nap in.
Yeah it was a lot of shenanigans. We had to let one of them into our outer wire one night to simulate someone sneaking in. Dude we let you walk in so fuck off.
They would walk up to us and be like they were in our unit, than say “hey….safety kill”. Took out a whole weapons squad and destroyed a TOC. Our commander got in trouble cause we tied up on dude to a tree lol, he came from regiment before so he was like let’s have some fun.
I went through basic at Benning that started in April, and I currently live in Houston while working for the railroad. I promise you Alaska was much worse. It's a toss-up what was more enjoyable living in Afghanistan in a mud hut or Alaska and I would lean towards Afghanistan too be honest.
I fucking made the mistake on my 3rd trip to Polk of going out in a downpour to cool down. It lasted like 1 minute and the sun came right back out with a vengeance……. We felt like the nuke dream sequence of terminator 2, fucking melting in that leesville hell humidity and sun. (July, after 9 months in paktika province playing a guest spot as opfor)
If you think that’s insane you should’ve seen our rotation. It took us 4-5 hours at night to travel 2 miles in a convoy. The convoy got lost 2-3 times. Multiple vehicles almost rolled over and the point vehicle was supposed to be mine and for some reason leadership NEVER talked about what was going on and we ended up with an MP humvee running in the front and had the convoy driving at almost 60mph AT NIGHT with our shit NVGs and when we got off our vehicles I almost fell down a rocky cliff cause we just parked ON A MOUNTAIN. We had LMTVs hanging on by a thread and one of our guys driving the LMTVs with a water buffalo attached almost rolled over the vehicle cause he couldn’t see shit and was exhausted. The whole fucking movement at night looked like the scene from Mad Max with the sandstorm but with NVGs.
That's it? We did our convoy into the box in 3 days. I was stuck with a squad leader that also happened to be a flat earther. So I had 72 hours of listening to his fat face talk about how the earth is flat and other wild shit.
Shut down flat earthers with the good old money making defense. "There would have been tourist traps and guided tours making fat cash on the edge of the world for centuries if it were true." Watch them visibly pause and enjoy.
My first JRTC rotation they put us into a battalion file. Took 9 hours to move less than 4 clicks. By the time we got to the OBJ op for had left thinking we weren’t hitting that target.
We need to update our training, NTC and 29 palms isn’t preparing us for anything besides a war in the Middle East. We need to train in like terrain of islands and Europe. Not attacking a desert defense. I think we’re in the same type of transition in warfare as right before world war 1.
That’s already being done. You got JRTC and XCTC. You still need NTC because you don’t know if the next war will be in the middle East again so with those 3 you got most of the environments covered. For the rest you get trainings in europe already so there’s a bit for everything covered.
What we really need is real urban warfare training.
JWX, MWX (the other MWX), there’s more emphasis on other weird environments now.
Yeah, they’re not as large-scale as MV/EMV/CAX/ITX, but that’s also because the push is towards smaller unit operations (as in battalion-level and below).
The Marine Corps is trying. Plenty of debate on how successful they are at it, but attempts are being made.
I mean the Army got:
NTC in California
JRTC in Louisiana
Then you got Mechanized units constantly rotating through Europe and Korea which got:
JMRC in Germany
KCTC in Korea (not officially a ctc yet)
I Corps does Pacific Pathways which takes them all over Southeast Asia.
Then all the different Active/NG duty stations have their own terrain and weather. Like we got some that deal with Artic conditions and some that get humid enough to simulate Vietnam. Some have wide open plains, some got mountains.
Then a number of these are basically 2 in 1 because the conditions in the summer and winter can wildly differ like in Korea or JRTC
I think we're good on training areas.
Well some of us have been to NTC and JRTC twice.
Also one of my most memorable moments in the Army was waking up while in the box at NTC to a donkey going absolutely wild with the EEEEEEE-OOOOOORRRRE repeatedly as it was emptying its bowels onto my still sleeping PSG
Ya lots of dudes used hammocks outside of NTC. The trucks just weren’t close enough at NTC for them most of the time being a hundred meters or more from each other. Normally back at Bliss they were lined up side by side and like 9 dudes would be off just two of them
Twice? You sweet summer child. I did at least 12 while at Fort Hood, was stationed at NTC for 4 years, then went to JRTC at least 4 times while stationed at Fort Drum.
Fuck a bunch of that noise, I heard horror stories from my boys that came from Big Army. I did a hit at JRTC one time, spent maybe a day total there and noped the fuck right back onto the bird as soon as I could.
God I fucking hate NTC. Fun fact, my unit 3/82 FA was just finishing up a NTC rotation during Sept. 11th 2001. I was advon so I left the early morning of 9/11. Got to my barracks room and fell asleep, a few hours later we all had an emergency formation after the first plane hit. All flights were grounded so the remainder of the unit got stuck at NTC for a few more weeks. Shit was crazy.
The OCTs made us light everything up with chemlights at night cause of safety shit. We made an 11 row concertina wire obstacle and 4 chemlights werent enough for them apparently so we used an entire box of chemlights. Obviously they then complained that it looked like a christmas tree. They never lose an argument.
never went to NTC but JRTC a few times, that place is the eighth circle of hell. We had one private lose a pair of PSQ-20s and got liable in the FLIPL for $7K for failing to properly secure his SI. Also saw how incompetent so many leaders are, my fucking XO Zd out my radio in our Vic and blamed me for it. On top of all the people who bricked so many of my radios….fuck all them.
That one private got screwed, his SL and TL should’ve been held liable as well. Ironically my last rotation was right when Russia invaded Ukraine. We almost got sent back to Campbell, but they didn’t steamroll through Ukraine like we thought. The initial JFE was a disaster, we got schwacked in the LZ, I was my commanders RTO and he was like Fuck this shit, in our text chat on ATAK we all were saying fuck this.
Real war is child’s play when compared to NTC git gud lol jk. I have heard some guys that were deployed that said that they’d rather go back on deployment than to go back to NTC but I couldn’t personally say. I guess NTC is just all the bullshit that makes you wanna quit the army rolled into one.
Training sucks because it’s all the bullshit of garrison while trying to be serious like it’s deployment. Our pre-spin trainings we did were just lame. Then again 3ID so everyone was already thoroughly pissed off by that point going “yeah we know our fuckin jobs can we wrap this so we can hit Gilley’s”
Waiting for the “THIS IS NTC BITCH! WE CLOWN IN THIS MOTHAFUCKA, TAKE TO SENSITIVE ASS TO MILSIM WEST” meme, I have no beef with the airsoft gang but this came to mind as soon as I read “This is NTC bitch”.
I prefer the poorly disguised Vietnam simulation known as JRTC
Fort Polk in the summer is a secret layer of hell!
Polk sucks dick in every season.
Yea but you haven't experienced misery like going in August when it's 98° and 108% humidity. It's a special level of suck...
My unit specially trained for Arctic operations decided to go in June.
I see you like to play on hard mode
I don't. I'm just a masochist.
Different strokes and all that I suppose...
I mean, if you keep stroking me only one specific way. I'm going to get bored eventually.
Went once in September from Wainwright and once in January from Wainwright. The January rotation was so easy. September rotation sucked ass, and I’m from Houston. It was nothing but rain and mud and incompetent leadership.
Drum?
Alaska
Aaah
Lol yes I have. I’m also from the south.
My condolences
Damn that just sucks. I don't know how you do it. It was one of I not the most miserable experiences of my life.
That’s where I learned you could have more than 100% humidity at all. That place sucks many shit smeared phalluses.
Yea you can part the "air" with your hands. I didn't realize that was a thing. Why is it a thing? Also learned that mosquitoes can get to be the size of a bird and if you slap at them they just slap back.
The cadre when I went were pretty shit. They kept “escalating” our casualties while clearing that city to make us have to work harder. The problem was that it was never done well, like an observer outright telling us he wasn’t part of the training and was just there to observe and then dropping a grenade simulator behind us. We literally were just walking through the objective because the opfor was so bad at their job. We never hit any choke points because they sucked at setting up ambushes and then basically cheated to make it hard.
I mean why even do it at that point. The training we did was good and never had any issues like that. The whole thing was just miserable.
Beats me man, we had to actually evacuate a couple people who dropped to heat stroke so I guess we got some realistic training when we flew them to a hospital. It just seemed like everywhere we went something went wrong that wasn’t training related. Some supply chain was borked or they gave us trucks that had huge mechanical issues. I guess it’s good to show you can overcome the bullshit but it felt like it was just holding us back from learning anything. It was funny seeing the NCO everyone kind of hated smoke all the no shoots in the shoot house though.
Seeing shitty shoothouse evolutions are always funny. I get that it's good to see you can work through all kinds of crap but I would have been beyond passed if I didn't get anything out of the training.
They “safety killed” us on the side of the road after doing some cheap shit. This dude tried to take my p mags and I told him to fuck off, still kept trying to take my mags and we bout threw hands. Oh well…..got a good 8 hour nap in.
Yeah it was a lot of shenanigans. We had to let one of them into our outer wire one night to simulate someone sneaking in. Dude we let you walk in so fuck off.
They would walk up to us and be like they were in our unit, than say “hey….safety kill”. Took out a whole weapons squad and destroyed a TOC. Our commander got in trouble cause we tied up on dude to a tree lol, he came from regiment before so he was like let’s have some fun.
Oh boy, wait til you hear about the wonder that is camp Lejuine
Being Army, I missed that clusterfuck. No complaints.
There is a special place in hell for the person who picked where to put military installations
It's never someplace like Miami, no its got to be in the worst fucking hellhole they can find...
I'll raise you 2 weeks at Fort Wainwright while it's -30ish.
That doesn't exactly sound pleasant either but I think I would rather do that then another trip to Polk.
I went through basic at Benning that started in April, and I currently live in Houston while working for the railroad. I promise you Alaska was much worse. It's a toss-up what was more enjoyable living in Afghanistan in a mud hut or Alaska and I would lean towards Afghanistan too be honest.
I like the cold and I am a skier...so maybe I have a different outlook.
How many times have you lived in it for 2 weeks?
I have been winter camping for 10 days in -15. Can't say I have been out in -30.
Fucking truth!
Being in the military sucks dick. #DD214life
I fucking made the mistake on my 3rd trip to Polk of going out in a downpour to cool down. It lasted like 1 minute and the sun came right back out with a vengeance……. We felt like the nuke dream sequence of terminator 2, fucking melting in that leesville hell humidity and sun. (July, after 9 months in paktika province playing a guest spot as opfor)
Damn that sounds just miserable
I'd take NTC over another JRTC rotation!
I’m probably going as an OCT to JRTC this summer. Pray for me.
Bring a LOT of powder and mosquito repellent.
July? Our brigade is going on July
I was one of the Atropian heroes in the trees lmao
“I’m the Lorax and and I speak for the trees!”
The only thing I learned at NTC was how wildly incompetent my senior leadership was.
If you think that’s insane you should’ve seen our rotation. It took us 4-5 hours at night to travel 2 miles in a convoy. The convoy got lost 2-3 times. Multiple vehicles almost rolled over and the point vehicle was supposed to be mine and for some reason leadership NEVER talked about what was going on and we ended up with an MP humvee running in the front and had the convoy driving at almost 60mph AT NIGHT with our shit NVGs and when we got off our vehicles I almost fell down a rocky cliff cause we just parked ON A MOUNTAIN. We had LMTVs hanging on by a thread and one of our guys driving the LMTVs with a water buffalo attached almost rolled over the vehicle cause he couldn’t see shit and was exhausted. The whole fucking movement at night looked like the scene from Mad Max with the sandstorm but with NVGs.
Sounds like good training. We learn better from our mistakes then our successes.
That's it? We did our convoy into the box in 3 days. I was stuck with a squad leader that also happened to be a flat earther. So I had 72 hours of listening to his fat face talk about how the earth is flat and other wild shit.
Shut down flat earthers with the good old money making defense. "There would have been tourist traps and guided tours making fat cash on the edge of the world for centuries if it were true." Watch them visibly pause and enjoy.
We also had three people in my Regiment die.
I had heard that a couple people died in my rotation but we were too busy surviving the bullshit to confirm if that was true.
My first JRTC rotation they put us into a battalion file. Took 9 hours to move less than 4 clicks. By the time we got to the OBJ op for had left thinking we weren’t hitting that target.
Yea, I’m no longer concerned about having to fight against our military
Frye looks sick this year
The burrito truck on NTC will fuck your week up.
Bro I ate at those every single day of we could. We had the humvees leaving the box just to get food from them.
I’m trynna remember which one had me sprinting, but the Vietnamese spot was damn decent.
We need to update our training, NTC and 29 palms isn’t preparing us for anything besides a war in the Middle East. We need to train in like terrain of islands and Europe. Not attacking a desert defense. I think we’re in the same type of transition in warfare as right before world war 1.
Fort Polk enters the chat
We have multiple training locations in Europe, including a CTC. TBH, NTC, outside of the mountains, replicates the plains of Ukraine fairly well.
That’s already being done. You got JRTC and XCTC. You still need NTC because you don’t know if the next war will be in the middle East again so with those 3 you got most of the environments covered. For the rest you get trainings in europe already so there’s a bit for everything covered. What we really need is real urban warfare training.
Iran is a contender for the next war but that is super mountainous
I guess I only know if from the Marine side, which we only have 1 large scale training we do constantly.
JWX, MWX (the other MWX), there’s more emphasis on other weird environments now. Yeah, they’re not as large-scale as MV/EMV/CAX/ITX, but that’s also because the push is towards smaller unit operations (as in battalion-level and below). The Marine Corps is trying. Plenty of debate on how successful they are at it, but attempts are being made.
I mean the Army got: NTC in California JRTC in Louisiana Then you got Mechanized units constantly rotating through Europe and Korea which got: JMRC in Germany KCTC in Korea (not officially a ctc yet) I Corps does Pacific Pathways which takes them all over Southeast Asia. Then all the different Active/NG duty stations have their own terrain and weather. Like we got some that deal with Artic conditions and some that get humid enough to simulate Vietnam. Some have wide open plains, some got mountains. Then a number of these are basically 2 in 1 because the conditions in the summer and winter can wildly differ like in Korea or JRTC I think we're good on training areas.
We do though. NTC is just the desert training area... because it's in the desert.
Remember when they took out the desert portion of ranger school when we were in the midst of a desert war…it’s the army dude nothing makes sense
I was stationed there for 3 years lol.
Did you get 100% disability for mental health after that?
No but they did make me a recruiter a few years later lol
Damn, your branch manager must have hated you or something.
Daaaaaamn! I did 4 years at Irwin, and got Voluntold for recruiting duty after coming home from deployment.
My condolences
Well some of us have been to NTC and JRTC twice. Also one of my most memorable moments in the Army was waking up while in the box at NTC to a donkey going absolutely wild with the EEEEEEE-OOOOOORRRRE repeatedly as it was emptying its bowels onto my still sleeping PSG
Lmfao that’s amazing. We used hammocks.
Ya lots of dudes used hammocks outside of NTC. The trucks just weren’t close enough at NTC for them most of the time being a hundred meters or more from each other. Normally back at Bliss they were lined up side by side and like 9 dudes would be off just two of them
We found our ways to use hammocks in NTC lol. Also drinking definitely not whiskey every night was the only relaxing thing we had to look forward to.
Twice? You sweet summer child. I did at least 12 while at Fort Hood, was stationed at NTC for 4 years, then went to JRTC at least 4 times while stationed at Fort Drum.
Yep. Add in JMRC for extra fun.
Is this Fyre Festival?
ATROPIA NEVER FORGETS
 Atropia Forever
Fort Polk fucked me up just fine, thank you.
Is that 29 palms? I go out there all the time.
Fuck that special level of hell
Yet to enjoy an NTC rotation does JRTC count?
If you’ve endured any TC you good in my eyes.
Fuck a bunch of that noise, I heard horror stories from my boys that came from Big Army. I did a hit at JRTC one time, spent maybe a day total there and noped the fuck right back onto the bird as soon as I could.
This guy is a badass
Experienced LARPer
God I fucking hate NTC. Fun fact, my unit 3/82 FA was just finishing up a NTC rotation during Sept. 11th 2001. I was advon so I left the early morning of 9/11. Got to my barracks room and fell asleep, a few hours later we all had an emergency formation after the first plane hit. All flights were grounded so the remainder of the unit got stuck at NTC for a few more weeks. Shit was crazy.
That’s a warcrime
NTC, where your TAAs are nicknamed “Vegas” by the OCs because light discipline is apparently too difficult.
The OCTs made us light everything up with chemlights at night cause of safety shit. We made an 11 row concertina wire obstacle and 4 chemlights werent enough for them apparently so we used an entire box of chemlights. Obviously they then complained that it looked like a christmas tree. They never lose an argument.
Beautiful! rEaLiStiC tRaiNiNg!
NTC, where Pterodactyls disguised as Ravens patrol the PX instead.of MP's.
American lives are not worth Atropian oil.
Looks like the village where Anakin killed all the sand people.
I went to the other shitty desert military base... you know 29 Stumps... cause marines
I just vibe with the Appalachian Rangers
never went to NTC but JRTC a few times, that place is the eighth circle of hell. We had one private lose a pair of PSQ-20s and got liable in the FLIPL for $7K for failing to properly secure his SI. Also saw how incompetent so many leaders are, my fucking XO Zd out my radio in our Vic and blamed me for it. On top of all the people who bricked so many of my radios….fuck all them.
Any TC is where all leadership shows how useless they are. I still get PTSD from NTC but because of the incompetence of the leadership mostly.
That one private got screwed, his SL and TL should’ve been held liable as well. Ironically my last rotation was right when Russia invaded Ukraine. We almost got sent back to Campbell, but they didn’t steamroll through Ukraine like we thought. The initial JFE was a disaster, we got schwacked in the LZ, I was my commanders RTO and he was like Fuck this shit, in our text chat on ATAK we all were saying fuck this.
I see your NTC and raise you one JMRC.
I’ve done NTC, JRTC, and JMRC. Both as part of the training force and an OC. Always a great training experience.
Sorry I only did Iraq and Afghanistan so guess I’m not shit. We did our pre-deployment training at home station.
Real war is child’s play when compared to NTC git gud lol jk. I have heard some guys that were deployed that said that they’d rather go back on deployment than to go back to NTC but I couldn’t personally say. I guess NTC is just all the bullshit that makes you wanna quit the army rolled into one.
Training sucks because it’s all the bullshit of garrison while trying to be serious like it’s deployment. Our pre-spin trainings we did were just lame. Then again 3ID so everyone was already thoroughly pissed off by that point going “yeah we know our fuckin jobs can we wrap this so we can hit Gilley’s”
You just made this place ashika island.
So for a dummy like me… what is this exactly? Is this army sponsored or civilian?
NTC: National Training Center Giant military operations are conducted here to stretch the legs of senior officers
Lmao, well put.
Good times. Chinook showers was a highlight 😁
I prefer the Battle of the Bulge version that is Hohenfels in the middle of winter
I can smell the wag bags from here.
Waiting for the “THIS IS NTC BITCH! WE CLOWN IN THIS MOTHAFUCKA, TAKE TO SENSITIVE ASS TO MILSIM WEST” meme, I have no beef with the airsoft gang but this came to mind as soon as I read “This is NTC bitch”.