Tomorrow, the Exercise Director will call EndEx or End of Exercise for this portion of the mission, known as VR 13 – DCRF 1 – Vibrant Response 13 for Defense Consequence Response Force 1. Basically, the training and evaluation of the JTF-CS (see previous posts). The daily missions continued with water purification, mass casualty decontamination, chemical detection and identification, search and rescue, search and extraction from rubble piles and collapsed buildings, transportation of supplies via ground and air and the creation of a civilian relief center. In total over 250 missions will have been completed in about 7 days. A lot was learned by the training audience has occurred which is what we came here to do. Sometime tomorrow, we will start to shift to VR 13 – C2CRE A&B or Vibrant Response 13 for Command and Control for the CBRN Response Elements A and B (yes, an acronym within an acronym). The mission will continue with a new training audience and a new command staff.

I thought a little insight into military speak would be fun – alphabet soup as I call it. Here it is as it sounds with the acronyms attached: ” We need a R-FF (RFF) sent through Jiff-flick(JFLCC) to NorthCom for the crest(CREST) to report to the fob (FOB) in the Joe ah (JOA). They will be establishing a dee see r see(DCRC) as requested in the may toe(MATO) and for an e-med(EMEDS) unit. They however, must wait for the frag-go(FRAGO) to be cut.

In english, this reads like: We need a request for forces(RFF) through the joint forces land component command(JFLCC) to Northern Command for the contingency real estate support team(CREST) to report to the forward operating base(FOB) in the joint operations area(JOA). They will be establishing a displaced civilians relief center(DCRC) as requested in the military assignment task order(MATO) and for an expeditionary medical support unit(EMEDS). They however must wait for the fragmented order(FRAGO) to be cut.

One of our new guys has been compiling a list of these and so far has encountered over 150 of the ones that didn’t make sense to him. The scary thing is that I knew most of them when he asked me. I hope that after 21 days of this two things don’t happen 1) I start talking like this 2) My writing is effected because everything I write now is a lot of alphabet soup.

TTFN

Tata for now…