The Soldier's Load.

Hey - *this* soldier never walked to a fight he could ride to - and *never* walked *in* a fight he didn't *have* to! I should add - however sexy *arriving* at a fight under a bedsheet or hopping out of a helicopter is... you're still mounted in leather personnel carriers... and have to wait for a taxi.

Non grunts eh? There is a toast in the Army .... it goes like this. Gentlemen a toast, Field Artillery. Field Artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. Well in the Marines there is an answering toast. Gentlemen a toast, Infantry. Infantry lends a dash of vulgarity to what would otherwise be a very stuffy affair. Cheers.

If you are a grunt. Or even a higher life form such as an Arty FO, you are gonna wear everything you have. People have written so much about the load of the soldier, that if you printed it all out and stuffed it in some kinda super pack, the normal grunt could not pick it up. However the load has never decreased. The worst case is cold weather. A unit with no inherent Motor T either carries it or does without. I have mentioned it before but I think that the book, "Not a good day to die". is a classic example of lite infantry to the extreem. Carrying too much. Air lifted in. No Artyllery. No motor T. Winter, cold, and 10,000 feet up. Hell even the Taliban had artie and transport in places. Light Infantry is a contradiction of terms. It is a think tank concept. It does not exist. Reality will always interrupt it. Then we have all the over loaded problems, lack of mobility, exhaustion, hypothermia,spinal cord injuries etc due to carryin all that stuff. There is no light infantry. Unless adequate portage is present .. mules (yuck) jeeps hummers trucks etc to haul the stuff. Helos don't get it.

Helos obviously are required. Helos of all persuasion. What I should have said is that grunts need resupply. Most times helos are over tasked and tied up with priority missions. Yes they can resupply. They cannot carry equipment and supplies for grunts on the ground. Trucks, old time Marine Corps mules (mechanical) or real mules can work in mountains. A helo mission dumps supplies. Then what? Light Infantry has to hump that stuff too. It does not lighten their load. I totally sympathise with that grunt in the first photo. His ass is draggin. Look at that expanse behind him. Now mortars hit and a MG opens up. He has to move and move fast. Step one, dump the trash and dash. Mortars and MG's work over the troops and their dumped packs. Back to resupply, and hump.

Sometimes being requested by name was a real pain! Got us in trouble more than once. Seems if it was easy, any ole chopper will do. If it was gonna be a sh&tstorm call the Vultures! It did have some good moments, tho. The nurses at Naby Binh Thuy, could have gotten any form of transport they liked for their jaunts to Vung Tau, but they called for the Vultures. It wasn't the clean and well maintained Hueys tho. I'm convinced it was the dashing, debonair and extremely handsome Vulture peelots. :-)

Anybody notice that that poor bugger doesn't even have his IBA on? Can't tell if it's strapped somewhere on that big pile of equipment he's carrying or not. "You can tell an Airborne Ranger by his ruck...by his ruck, You can tell an Airborne Ranger by his ruck. It's as big as truck, And it's heavy as f**k, You can tell an Airborne Ranger by his ruck."

News update for John, the Merlot drinker This just stollen with out shame from www.mrcompletely.blogspot.com Customer surveys were conducted to determine the most attractive name for the Walmart brand. The top 10 surveyed names in order of popularity are: 10. Chateau Traileur Parc 9. White Trashfindel 8. Big Red Gulp 7. World Championship Riesling 6. NASCARbernet 5. Chef Boyardeaux 4. Peanut Noir 3. I Can't Believe It's Not Vinegar! 2. Grape Expectations 1. Nasti Spumante The beauty of Walmart wine is that it can be served with either white meat (possum) or red (squirrel).

Heartless Libertarian>> While i'm not belittling that mans workload at all, I would like to point out that the picture isn't quite what you think at first glance. There are THREE soldiers in that picture. Two in green, and the man in the foreground. Possibly a fourth fellow in sand camo in the background. I can't tell if that's a rock, or a leg. I'm pretty sure rocks don't wear boots, so yeah, four men in the picture.

Mmmm...peanut noir....

jim b looks at April, and March, then May, blinks three times and rigs April up an IV of peanut noir.

Another point that I think needs to be made: the guys in uniform that I work with in the 3rd Brigade of the 101st who were in Afghanistan in 2002 have nothing but nice things to say about the Princess Pats. No matter what people in the news media and the governments are snarling at each other across the border, the Canadian Forces still have some damned fine soldiers serving in 3 PPCLI. I've yet to find anyone who worked with them who doesn't admire and respect them, and the Rakkasans thought highly enough of them that they requested (and received,) permission to include the names of the Canadians' dead along with our own on our regimental war memorial.

Marius' Mules. Oh, Jim B., see my new (temporary) name. Gotta love them Hun wines, even when they bad. Snork.

Gen Marshall derived much of his data in "A Soldier's Load" from a monograph "The Load of a Soldier", written by Maj N.V. Lothian of the Royal Army Medical Corps, published in 1922. The monograph discusses the probable loads carried by foot soldiers from antiquity (the Roman Army) to the present (1WW). His finding was that, while the soldier may have carried heavy loads on an approach march (c.60lbs), these were rapidly reduced to the minimum for battle. As for Marius's Mules, the Romans stopped short of overloading their soldier, the massive loads often quoted being based on mis-translations. His major discussion is based on studies performed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute following the Franco-Prussian War. Basically, the rule-of-thumb of "one third of the soldier's weight" as the maximum load can be traced to these studies. More importantly, the studies pointed out that training does not increase the load a soldier can comfortably carry beyond c.40% of body weight. Having checked, I have just repeated my remarks from 11 Mar 04. Also, that Gen Marshall was led to this study via correspondance with Capt B.H. Liddell-Hart in 1949. Cheers JMH

Raymond B asked "Is there a regulation stipulating how much weight load a soldier in a combat area can carry?" Nope. I've been hanging round the Army since 1978, and I've yet to see one. It's entirely a unit leadership issue: the unit's leaders decide what their soldiers will have to carry. Under the new force structure, in theory there shouldn't be a problem. The standard "light" infantry battalion MTOE now includes a transportation platoon with 20 M1078 2 1/2 ton trucks in the Forward Support Company. If and when the Army gets around to issuing all those vehicles to the FSC's, hauling the sustainment loads for the rifle companies isn't going to present too much of a difficulty. It's when the units get sent forward 60km by helo, and the trucks CAN'T reach them, that load problems surface. And let's face it, it's ALWAYS easier to get lift assets to assault into an area than it is to get lift assets to resupply the troops once they are on the ground. Not that we have that much lift to go around anymore. Under the old MTOE, the 101st had 3 infantry brigades plus division artillery and division troops, (a total of 19 non-aviation battalions,) which were supported by 9 UH-60 lift companies and 3 CH-47 lift companies. Now, under the new force structure, we have 4 infantry brigades, (and a total of 25 battalions,) which are supported by 8 UH-60 companies and 2 CH 47 companies. That's a bunch less lift, spread across more units. When I was in the 82nd, we routinely jumped 80-100 lb rucks into training exercises, and assumed that we'd be jumping 120-150 lbs into combat, because we knew from experience that we'd likely never see our "sustainment" package in any reasonable amount of time. When I went to Grenada in 1983 my company packed up all of our "sustainment load" in duffel bags and built a 463L pallet load out of them. 2nd Brigade was on the island for 10 days before we were relieved by 3rd Brigade and returned to Fort Bragg. Our duffel bags were eventually delivered to us in our unit area about three weeks after we got back. That was the first time we'd seen them since we left the unit area for the airfield at the start of the whole operation. In all of the years I've been in the Army I've seen one serious attempt to relieve soldiers in the field of the necessity of humping a rucksack. It failed miserably. This was a battalion ARTEP evaluation at Fort Campbell in the fall of 1984. The scenario involved locating, fixing, and destroying a number of insurgent groups. The plan was that the battalion reconnaisance platoon and each of the 9 rifle platoons in the battion would load all of their rucksacks into a cargo net which would be stored at the battalion field trains. The soldiers would then be able to maneuver easily and quickly carrying only their fighting load. Each evening the nets would be delivered to the platoons by helicopter, along with rations and water resupply and a hot meal. The platoons would then bivouac using the gear in their rucks, which would then be bundled back up the next morning and carted back to the rear, leaving the troops again in just their fighting load. Unfortunately, the first evening of the exercise, it began to rain, the temeperatures dropped into the mid-40's, the ceiling closed down to less than 100 feet AGL, and the choppers couldn't fly. And with the exception of one four-hour break midway through the eight-day exercise, it stayed that way the entire time we were out. And the unit had no contingency plan for getting the rucks forward to the troops. About the second or third time we had to ground-medevac a hypothermia case the brigade commander went ballistic and damned near cancelled the ARTEP and failed the battalion commander and S3. That unit never again went to the field without soldiers humping their own rucks.