Photo By Master Sgt. Matthew Keeler | KING ABDULLAH II SPECIAL OPERATIONS TRAINING CENTER, Jordan — Struggling to the...... read more read more
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By Staff Sgt. Matthew Keeler
28th Infantry Division, Task Force Spartan Public Affairs
KING ABDULLAH II SPECIAL OPERATIONS TRAINING CENTER, Jordan – Eight Soldiers with 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, Task Force Spartan, competed against 39 other teams of the best paramilitary and Special Forces in the world during the 10th Annual Warrior Competition April 30 through May 4, 2018.
“Overall, as our first time here, and coming in as strong as we did, it was great,” said Sgt. Gage Young, team leader for security forces, 1-184th, a unit from the California National Guard. “We really were the true underdogs. Not only another U.S. team, and a non-special forces team, but a National Guard team – and we placed right outside the ‘King’s Challenge’.”
The 10th Annual Warrior Competition was comprised of a series of events to test the participants’ endurance, patience, teamwork, and ability to display martial prowess. The events included: Top Shot, Gut Check, Pipe Hitters, McQuade, The Great Escape, Time’s Up, House of Terror and the King’s Challenge.
“My favorite event was ‘The Great Escape’; the driving and the shooting is everything that you want in an action movie that we all grew up imagining that we wanted to be a part of, and now we had a chance to do it.”
The Great Escape was a timed driving event where one Soldier would navigate a series of obstacles while under the clock. Drivers would then have to deliver their teammates, in the vehicle, to a series of points for them to engage targets and then jump back into the vehicle. The entire movement of driving, deploying, shooting, jumping back into the car and driving off was also pressured by a time limit.
As Young notes, the Great Escape was like something out of a movie, but the preparation for such an event was much more important. Staff Sgt. Leif Devemark, the team leader for the team from the 184th, used the competition as a learning opportunity for the Soldiers within his team. He designated that each member would take charge of an event and designate the team and the coordination for the plan.
“I was in charge of The Great Escape. So the biggest thing about it — looking at it, at the diagrams, the OP order, everything that you would use for a normal mission but now we have it in the competition setting — it really helps reinforce, at least for me, the NCO values needed to utilize the guys under me for the better goal,” said Young.
Only the top 15 teams qualified for the final event, the King’s Challenge: a combination of the other events within the contest: Sniping, moving and shooting, rappelling from a tower, carrying a casualty, and more. The competitors were dressed in their protective plate carriers, helmets, proper protective gear and their weapons.
The 184th qualified 16 and didn’t make it into the event, but their California brethren did. The Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department SWAT placed in the top five, going into the final event, and finished with one of the top times in the competition.
The several days of intense training came to an end with an award ceremony that honored all the competitors and individuals who helped make the 10th Annual Warrior event the spectacle that it was. For Young, his biggest takeaways were some of the lessons that he learned from his team leader.
“The biggest thing is, thank you to our team leader, he allowed each one of us to take control of one of the events,” Young said. “So the big thing that we did, especially as an NCO and as leadership, was knowing how and where to use strengths of the guys under you to better utilize them for the overall goal. It was something that will last me for the rest of my career.”
| Date Taken: | 05.07.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 05.25.2018 09:14 |
| Story ID: | 278442 |
| Location: | JO |
| Web Views: | 332 |
| Downloads: | 2 |
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