MARINE AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER, TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. -- Marines with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment executed a
tactical recovery of aircraft and personnel scenario as part of Integrated
Training Exercise 1-16 at Marine Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms,
California, Nov. 5, 2015.
“The purpose of this exercise is to get some
repetitions practicing for a tactical recovery of aircraft and personnel,” said
1st Lt. Micheal Boyle, team commander of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/8.
“[TRAP] is something that we’ll be covering down on for this next deployment and
it’s something we could foreseeably be executing in the real world.”
The
platoon split up into three teams in order to recover the aircraft personnel, a
landing zone element, recovery element and site security element. The landing
zone element will be the first team off the aircraft and responsible for
securing the landing zone. The recovery element is made up of a search team
responsible for locating the aircraft personnel. The site security element will
move forward with the search team to provide additional security during the
recovery efforts.
“Once we get the receipt of mission that there is a
down pilot or aircraft that we need to recover, we’ll get the boys briefed up
and get on the bird,” said Boyle. “We’ll land in the vicinity of the isolated
personnel. We will authenticate their identity and then we’ll pick them up and
bring them back here.”
Marines with 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment
are participating in a wide variety of exercises throughout ITX to prepare for
their upcoming deployment as part of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task
Force Crisis Response-Africa and the Black Sea Rotational Force.
“There
are a lot of different operations happening [in our area of operations] so
having our company as a crisis response is kind of a backstop for anybody that’s
out forward operating in aircraft or on the ground,” said Boyle. “We’re there as
a quick response force in case they get themselves in trouble, they know that
we’ll be on the ground ready to pick them up.”