Stardate 20020224.2040

(On Screen): Military training is inherently dangerous. If it is sufficiently benign so that no-one ever gets hurt, it won't be sufficiently rigorous to actually prepare soldiers for real combat. In World War II, soldiers going through basic training invariably thought that it was being made tougher than it needed to be, but after actually going to the front and fighting, most expressed the opinion that they wish that it had actually been even tougher, so as to better prepare them.

Military aircraft are high performance and in training it's necessary to push them. So it's sad, but not surprising, to read occasionally about one of them going down in training, and men dying as a result.

But some training accidents make me shake my head and start cursing. Two soldiers at Fort Bragg were on an exercise dressed in civilian clothes and got pulled over by a sheriff. The soldiers thought that the sheriff was part of the training exercise and attempted to disarm him; the sheriff thought that they were resisting arrest and opened fire with live ammunition.

One of the soldiers is now dead; the other is badly wounded. This was completely unnecessary; it was simply the result of bad communications. You can be certain that from now on the local law enforcement authorities will be carefully and fully apprised of such training exercises, but that doesn't bring that man back to life. What a waste.