Escape from Camp Rogers: Tactical Precision, Balls, & Pure Stupidity

  • Thread starter Boondocksaint375
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Boondocksaint375

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As most of you know, I spent much of my Army career in Ranger School. I was recycled twice (6 months total); once in Darby, and once in Mountains. Lucky for me, my first recycle took place during the Best Ranger Competition (sarcasm). So obviously there was a urgency for RTB to plus up the holdover/recycle pool, in order to complete the many details involved with getting the competition off without a hitch. Obviously many of us were pretty annoyed with that. I really don't see how I recycled Darby, as I thought my patrols went well. My mountains recycle I accepted, since as a platoon Sergeant, I failed to recognize the fact that one of my squad leaders set the claymore out facing our patrol base..... On top of that, I was just a PV2 that got promoted just to go to Ranger School, I literally had only 2 months in Ranger Battalion, so I knew jack.

Anyways, we were doing the slave labo...err details, working our asses off to get the competition underway. Myself, along with a couple of other guys (not like I'm going to dime them out ;) ), decided we were going to break out of Alcatraz. Okay... it wasn't exactly Alcatraz, but our vehicles were imprisoned in a secure compound, surrounded by a fence, wire, sandbags, and a few rolls of Constantino wire.


How were we going to get the vehicle out...undetected? We first began to recon our objective while we were taking buckets of rocks and stone blocks, and dumping them in the wood line behind the the secure lot. We were moving the stones with a standard mop bucket. We decided that we would have to:
  1. Breach all the wire- so we would need cutters, and gloves
  2. Move the sandbags
  3. Somehow get my vehicle out of the lot without being seen.
There were a few problems obviously. One of the major ones was that my vehicle had day time running lights. It was also parked up against the fence, facing the Ranger Instructor's barracks. So the second I turned the vehicle on, the lights would pop turn on. Second issue...this was a visible area, people walked around there all the time. Not to mention it was across from the RI barracks.

I devised the final plan. During the rock moving detail, we moved our gear inside the mop buckets under the rocks. We acquired a set of bolt cutters to clip through all the wire, and the fence. It actually worked out so well, that we just had to clip the "clips" on the fence and the entire row slid back over. Perfecto.

Night time fell, and we turn a long route to get to the objective. Those two red lines on the chart below is the breach point. The red dot is my vehicle location. Two guys pulled the layers of clipped wire away, then slid the chain link fence over. I snuck to my ride...careful not to set off any car alarms. We fashioned a set of cardboard blinders to sit over my head lights, but there was a last minute issue with them, so I couldn't use them.

rogersfv9.png


I hopped in, started it up, my head lights (actually my high beams....) lit up the RI barracks, and I drove as fast and carefully as I could to the breach point (there was a little more space than what my artistic drawing displays lol). I got through, and hauled ass out of there. The other team members closed the fence back up, put the sand bags back in place, dragged the layers of wire back into place, and exfil'd. We then had a vehicle for our after hours (we weren't allowed to leave obviously).

No, we never got caught. The funny thing is that one time we almost did. Our class was pretty tight, so someone would always cover for the other person. Apparently one night, an RI came into the barracks wanted a formation! Well, before we left, we stuffed our bunks to make it appear we were all sound asleep. The RI came in, and everyone got up (almost everyone lol..) and he said "get those guys up and get out to formation." Well, the other guys got us up...and tossed us in our wall lockers. They went out to formation...but didn't do a check luckily. It was just him giving us the details for tomorrow. So yeah....I was a dumb and lucky Private. The other ones....well I won't mention their ranks here lol.....
 
Im hearing the mission impossible music in my head! Brilliant!
A prodigy on his way one day to world domination!:cool:
 
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