Don’t believe everything you see in the movies

Civilians who have never served often overestimate the intensity and impact of military training. Possibly the phrase itself evokes a montage of movie memories: scenes of grueling obstacle courses, brutal hand-to-hand combat sparring, or intense weapons qualifications. While military training sometimes doesn’t live up to pop-culture imagery in real life, the results can be dangerous when it fails to take hold.I recently heard a story about Marine Gunnery Sergeant Black, who was reminded of this in a dramatic way at Kandahar Airfield in the Afghanistan War. It was one of those situations most service members and veterans would have trouble believing actually happened, but this story is true.One dumb aspect of the Afghanistan War was the clearing barrel, an open 50-gallon fuel drum tilted 45 degrees and half-filled with sand. Clearing barrels were placed outside many buildings, especially dining facilities. Soldiers had to spend way too much time practicing the use of something so simple. Place the muzzle of the weapon down in the barrel. Drop the magazine. Pull the charging handle or slide to eject a round from the chamber. Pull the trigger. Nothing happens. Go eat.A soldier uses a clearing barrel, a security check for soldiers to place their weapon inside the barrel and clear the weapon of any hidden rounds. (Photo by U.S. Army) We trained so much for clearing barrels that I thought they’d be a big part of my time in the war. But deployed to our forward area, we never used them. When our convoys rolled out of our compound, we’d quickly pull our M16 charging handles to chamber a round. When we returned from our mission, we’d pause before entering the base to clear our weapons. We’d just aim at the ground, remove the magazines, and pull the charging handle to eject the chambered rounds, clearing our weapons. We wondered why the military had invented clearing barrels at all.Gunnery Sergeant Black discovered the reason. Far before him in the long Kandahar Airfield chow line, Army Sergeant Lenzo drew his 9 mm handgun and aimed it into the clearing barrel. He pulled the slide to eject a round. He fired.Boom!Everybody in the line and inside the chow hall jumped at the sound of gunfire. Sergeant Lenzo was the most surprised of all. He pulled the slide to eject another round. He must have thought he had it right, because he fired again.Boom!Faithful reader, do you understand what Lenzo was doing wrong? Lenzo didn’t. He pulled the slide, ejected another round, and fired again. With the magazine still in the weapon, he was chambering a new round every time he pulled the slide to eject a bullet. His strategy would finally clear his weapon, but only after he’d fired half of his rounds! This was not complex. A rifle-qualified basic training private should have understood the stupidity of Lenzo’s method.After Lenzo’s fifth shot, Gunnery Sergeant Black decided he had seen enough. Lenzo was going to end up killing someone! Black ran way up to the front of the line and put his hand on Lenzo’s sidearm. “What the f*** are you doing? What don’t you understand about a f***ing clearing barrel? Did you ever operate that f***ing weapon?”Black took the sidearm, dropped its magazine, ejected the round from the chamber, and pulled the trigger. Click. Done. He slapped the weapon to Lenzo’s chest. “You’re supposed to be a sergeant, but you act like it’s your first f***ing day in the f***ing Army! Don’t ever do anything that f***ing stupid again!”WHEN A SUNKEN HUMVEE BECOMES A SUCCESSFUL FAILURE I hope Lenzo felt bad. It’s hard to believe he could have continued doing something so dumb and dangerous. Someone should have stopped him long before Gunnery Sergeant Black took action.Real military training doesn’t often resemble the movies, and the difference between training and real operations can be profound. Many of us soldiers asked why we had to spend so much time practicing something so simple and seemingly pointless as a clearing barrel. Sergeant Lenzo was a living, idiotic example of why such training was necessary.Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan. *Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.