Forging a Tanker: Episode 3 | U.S. Army

If I could speak to the sheer power of a tank round, it's literally like thunder and lightning. It's a 19 kilo. You're going through basic training, AIT, what we call one-station unit training here. Armor O sits fundamentally broken down into four phases. The first three phases are known as red, white, and blue. That's where we take a citizen off the streets of the United States and we bring them in and we show them what it's like to be a soldier in the United States Army. So in basic combat training, we take civilians and we turn them into soldiers. We teach them how to march, how to wear the uniform, how to operate a rifle and a M17 pistol, and just basic soldiering skills. The red phase, we go through the basics of foot marches. We go through drill and ceremony. You're being taught how to be a soldier, you know, from marching, going from point A to point B. During white phase, that's where we introduce them to the basic skills that any soldier needs to learn to survive on the battlefield. Land navigation, combatives, how to talk on a radio. That's what they learn during white phase. And then we progress on to what we call the black phase. That's the second half of this one-station unit training that we do here, and that's where we bring them onto the vehicles. Once you get to your line unit, you get assigned to a crew, you train with that crew and shoot a gunnery and you guys qualify together. That's when you become a tanker. My name's Dominic Williams. I'm a specialist. Right now, I'm in AIT training as a 19-kilo. My first name's Adan, and I am a PV-2 in the United States Army. My name is Jacob House, and I am a PV-2. We work our way into black phase, where we start learning about tanks, doing things like a VID, learning other countries' vehicles, making sure that we don't accidentally shoot friendlies, making sure that we can positively identify those. On the AIT side for OSUT, we have a black and gold phase. They learn all the basic tasks to be a tanker. Operating the driver's station, operating the loader's station, operating the gunner's station. All the steps it takes to get those stations ready. I think one of the major evolutions in terms of training that we've made and the ability to train armor formations, the introduction of simulations into the force. So the trainings we have today are from Fury Company 181. We are the first step in what is considered their AIT, the second half of their training of their technical job. They have to learn how to drive the tank here before they go drive the real-life M1A2. Over time what happened is it became more and more expensive to train these type of operations in a live environment. The introduction of simulations allows us to train them to a high level and then go out in the field and refine that training over time. They understand how to properly employ the equipment on the battlefield and if something goes wrong, they know how to troubleshoot it, they know how to fix it. We teach the trainees how to conduct maintenance on the tank. We teach them how to drive the tank. And then the big one is we teach them how to shoot and reload the main gun on the tank. So they're in black phase right now, which means they have about four weeks left before they graduate. So just somewhere around three to four weeks left. They have gold phase left, which is a little bit kind of a more formal kind of ending of basic training. But right now gunnery is like the big thing that they've been waiting on, the big culminating event that they've been waiting on. They get to shoot tanks for the first time. Next week we're going to be in gold phase. We are about to be a real tanker. You finally get to shoot the tanks. It's super cool. Reloading those main gun rounds. I love seeing that breech just go back forward, staying up, hanging here on the way and just hear that cane just boom. We have a saying here at Fort Moore, people come here to be more. At the end of the day, if you want to be part of something greater than yourself, if you want to be part of something that matters, learning how to work as a team, this is the place to be. That's it. That's the end of the video. But don't worry, there's more just like it. Do yourself a favor, hit that subscribe button below to watch more U.S. Army content. And when you're done with that, drop and give me 20.