How One Soldier’s E-Mail Changed Troops Equipment explains how one soldier’s e-mail got passed up the ladder to the top brass, because it contained pages of useful hints from the front lines:
Last July, a few weeks after he got back from Afghanistan, Master Sgt. Rudy Romero wrote a quick e-mail to one of his old commanding officers. “How’s everything going sir? Let’s get together for lunch. I know a pretty good place if you like Mexican,” he began.He followed that with three pages of advice from his tour in Afghanistan with the Army’s 101st Airborne division — everything from the best gloves to take (fleece from AutoZone) to the best socks (Gore-Tex, available in camping stores). He also told his former boss to ditch the Army-issue ammunition sacks and instead buy bags from London Bridge Trading Co.
Some of my favorite tidbits:
Although the boots worked just fine on the soft sands of Iraq, they fell to pieces after a couple of months in Afghanistan, where the ground is rocky. The engineers took note, and the Army is buying new boots with special composite soles that should stand up better in Central Asia.His biggest complaint was that Army gear weighs too much. “We were easily carrying 80 lbs. Throw on the ruck [Army backpack] and you’re sucking,” he wrote.
Master Sgt. Rudy Romero shows Army nutritionists how he stripped a prepackaged Army meal to make it lighter.
To make their point, the three men explained how soldiers in Afghanistan consumed their Meals Ready to Eat, the plastic-wrapped all-in-one food packets that weigh about two pounds and last around three years. Before going into battle they “field stripped” the meals to cut down on their carrying weight. “We kept the high carb stuff for energy and threw out everything else,” Sgt. Romero told the nutritionist responsible for developing the meals.
Based in part on his suggestions, the Army is designing a lightweight Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol Ration.
The three raised another practical concern: Too many of the Army’s new gadgets use different kinds of batteries, further increasing the load. Some soldiers, Sgt. Romero explained, buy commercial GPS locators from camping stores and discard their military-issue devices simply because the civilian ones use the same batteries as their night-vision goggles.
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For example, Sgt. Romero tells his former commander not to bother with Army-issue winter gloves. They are warm and waterproof, but soldiers can’t pull a rifle trigger when wearing them, which is a big problem in combat. Aviator gloves are good, he writes. Even better are the fleece gloves sold at AutoZone.
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Finally, he advises his colleagues to bring iodine tablets to purify water — something U.S. soldiers did for decades, but his unit, unaccustomed to the rigors of war, left behind at Fort Campbell. “We’ve lost a lot of our needed field craft,” he laments in the e-mail.