livefreeordie
August 19th, 2009, 11:37 am
Just got done reading "Inside Jihad" about a young Moroccan who spys for the French inside an AQ training camp. One thing that really struck me about his descriptions of the camps is that without the crappy food, crappy conditions, constant fear of death and insane religion, this camp sounded like the middle class American man's wet dream.
The training was largely based on captured US military manuals on everything from tactics to repel the reds from West Germany using guerrilla warfare to the Soviet T-55. Safety was by far the biggest concern, before the trainees were ever allowed to touch a weapon they had to be able to clean it, strip it, handle it and even name the inventor. After they were issued their very own AK they had to give it a woman's name and were even encouraged to sleep with it. Everyone was given duties around the camp and they even had to do night watch. There was TONS and TONS of PT starting very early in the morning and often including barefoot runs up the mountains for up to 4 hours.
At the first camp the author was at he mostly had small arms and explosives. He trained on basic explosives, being able to tell the difference by sight, smell and taste. They taught which was best for specific application and even the math to calculate blast damage. They trained on Russian small arms up to the DshK 12.7 mm and then had to just study pictures for American weapons.
The second camp (Darunta), the author was pretty much just there for advanced explosives training but his trainer had been injured the day he got there. For a month he was allowed to train on any and all equipment at the camp and was told that their ammunition supply was limitless. At this camp they had quite a bit of Russian armor (BMPs, Shilkas (ZSU), T-55s, and T-62s) as well as mortars and rockets. Needless to say he learned pretty much all the armor and had a great month there.
If you couldn't tell I was joking about the title, but the idea of a camp I could go to for a few months out in the sticks, hang out with my buddies and shoot every Russian weapon ever made sounds like a blast to me. Again, not saying I agree with the ideology, I just had no idea what these camps were like before reading this book.
The training was largely based on captured US military manuals on everything from tactics to repel the reds from West Germany using guerrilla warfare to the Soviet T-55. Safety was by far the biggest concern, before the trainees were ever allowed to touch a weapon they had to be able to clean it, strip it, handle it and even name the inventor. After they were issued their very own AK they had to give it a woman's name and were even encouraged to sleep with it. Everyone was given duties around the camp and they even had to do night watch. There was TONS and TONS of PT starting very early in the morning and often including barefoot runs up the mountains for up to 4 hours.
At the first camp the author was at he mostly had small arms and explosives. He trained on basic explosives, being able to tell the difference by sight, smell and taste. They taught which was best for specific application and even the math to calculate blast damage. They trained on Russian small arms up to the DshK 12.7 mm and then had to just study pictures for American weapons.
The second camp (Darunta), the author was pretty much just there for advanced explosives training but his trainer had been injured the day he got there. For a month he was allowed to train on any and all equipment at the camp and was told that their ammunition supply was limitless. At this camp they had quite a bit of Russian armor (BMPs, Shilkas (ZSU), T-55s, and T-62s) as well as mortars and rockets. Needless to say he learned pretty much all the armor and had a great month there.
If you couldn't tell I was joking about the title, but the idea of a camp I could go to for a few months out in the sticks, hang out with my buddies and shoot every Russian weapon ever made sounds like a blast to me. Again, not saying I agree with the ideology, I just had no idea what these camps were like before reading this book.