Hungarian Company on Land Navigation Practice

Szöveg: Lt. Csaba Búz | 2014. december 18. 9:00

The Hungarian troops participating in Exercise “Baltic Training 2014” recently conducted health care, close quarters combat and land navigation practices.

On the third week of training, the soldiers of the Hungarian rifle company drawn from the HDF 5th “Bocskai István" Infantry Brigade covered three topics. Each day one platoon conducted one training session, so the whole company participated in all three training sessions in turns. A given platoon attended the two classroom sessions in the barracks, whereas the land navigation took place in a forested area near Rukla, with assistance from the mentors of the 3rd company of the Grand Duke Algirdas Mechanized Infantry Battalion of Motorized Infantry Brigade “Iron Wolf".

During the health care training event, the Lithuanian Combat Life Savers (CLS) introduced the items of their equipment and their use, and then discussed the Hungarian and Lithuanian protocols during the hands-on practice. The Lithuanian instructors of the close quarters combat (CQC) training session first demonstrated the drills and then the Hungarian soldiers learned them. This week’s training program focused on the land navigation skills, where the squads first had to execute an azimuth-check march instead of using pre-planned route sketches. On finding the first site, the squads received the coordinates of the next waypoint, or they had to determine the next breakpoint themselves by a given distance and azimuth. Three or four Lithuanian soldiers were attached to the Hungarian squads from the personnel of the “sister company".

Speaking about the training, Capt. Gábor Vastag, the company commander of the Hungarian forces participating in the exercise in Lithuania told us that so far the troops had as much experience of the terrain as they had gained during exercise “Iron Sword 2014". “Executed in dense forests, these training sessions required complex land navigation skills of the soldiers, so they acquired new knowledge", the captain added. Company 2IC 1st Lt. Sándor Jenei joined the land navigation training in person, because he thought he too had to complete this challenge. Going with the squad under him, the first lieutenant covered the close to 26km distance in 6.5 hours, during which they crossed a number of frozen streams several times. Nevertheless, it was the ground of the forest, frozen in most places, that presented them with the greatest challenge, and they often had to climb over fallen trees. On one occasion, they did not find a pre-calculated breakpoint, so they had to look for the designated site in the forest for a while.

“I liked this land navigation task very much. At first I thought the great cold would present us with the greatest challenge, because the ambient temperature was around minus 11 degrees Celsius when we set off. Still, it was not the cold but rather the forested terrain that caused difficulties. At the beginning, we were afraid of not having a map – as a last resort, every squad was supplied with a map without, of course, the route markings – and we had to cover the distance without knowing the location of the breakpoints in advance. While we were executing the task, we realized that this was not the kind of challenge that we used to take on, and that’s why this training was really useful for us", the first lieutenant said.

Next week the designated personnel of the company will relocate to another site, where they will conduct winter training.