'Bury Them:' Alaska Army Guard's Avalanche Company hones lethality

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska - Soldiers from the Alaska Army National Guard's Avalanche Company, 1st Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment, honed their lethality and live-fire skills March 20-22 during the unit's annual training.

Capt. Andrew Viray, Avalanche Company commander, maneuvered the company through the Infantry Platoon Battle Course, IPBC, one squad at a time. The company, used to dealing with avalanches in Alaska's mountains, wore snowshoes to stay aloft and overwhite pants to conceal their movement along the blanketed boreal floor. Squads infiltrated through thick forest on their way to successive assaults upon groups of pop-up targets defending a frozen complex of berms.

Viray said the exercise was the culmination of months of foundational training, including individual movement techniques, marksmanship and team and squad infantry battle drills.

"The purpose of the squad live fire is to train and evaluate a squad's ability to effectively fight, move and communicate under realistic combat conditions using live ammunition and ensure confidence in our leaders that they can control their squads and teams, and that we can keep building our lethality," Viray said.

The IPBC is part of the U.S. military's vast portfolio of range complexes and capabilities designed to offer troops unparalleled realism and instrumented data collection to hone formations to a fine edge, capabilities not afforded to adversaries.

Squads rehearsed the attack lane with dry and blank-fire iterations to get a sense of the mission and to work out kinks in their final execution. Locking and loading live ammunition, the units marched through the wood line and set up an objective rally point that the squad leader then temporarily left behind to recon the objective.

Coming back to rally their unit, the leader tactically marched the squad toward a position overlooking the objective with good fields of fire, leaving a support-by-fire, or SBF, element to concentrate fire on enemy targets to keep their heads down.

The squad leader then took the remainder of the element to flank the objective, signaling the SBF element to shift fires off the objective before lifting fires entirely as the assault element plowed through enemy positions.

There is no margin for error when it comes to safety, and there is a marked difference between marginally achieving the mission and aggressively assaulting the bunker line with overwhelming speed and violence of action.

Though other squads employed an assault element and an SBF element, the Soldiers of the weapons squad from both 1st and 2nd Platoon composed a dedicated support by fire using their M-240L 7.62mm machine guns.

The M-240L is a lighter version of the legacy M-240G, used by combat support units, shedding 5 pounds through a collapsible stock, a 4-inch-shorter barrel, a titanium receiver and a polymer trigger frame, resulting in a more agile and lethal gun.

Weapons squad leader Staff Sgt. Brendan White used a "talking guns" dialogue to ensure optimum suppression while preventing the guns from prematurely exhausting ammunition and overheating the barrels.

"The goal and purpose of talking guns is to make it seem like only one machine gun is in the position to mask our numbers," White explained. "So, we have rates of fire that we choose, and each gun fires in sequence to mask our numbers."

Viray said the weekend's work was indicative of the company's fighting spirit.

"Carrying through the objective, reaching the limit of advance, everybody fights in the Avalanche Company," Viray said before invoking Avalanche Company's motto: "Bury them."