From MemoryArchive
Who: Anonymous
What: Operation Bright Star
When: October 1999
Where: Egypt
When I was in the military in 1999 my unit went to
Egypt for
Operation Bright Star. The operation was a joint training mission every few years in which the militaries of 13 countries trained with one another. None of the training exercises were of any importance, it was a symbol of international cooperation. Countries such as
France,
Egypt,
United Arab Emirates,
Jordan and others took part in this. The staging base was somewhere in the middle of the desert in Egypt.
It was quite an experience to work with other militaries, especially
militaries of Arab descent. The first exercise that we engaged in was a close quarters combat operation. Egypt did not have a proper shoot house for us to train in so we had to build one. The United States forces were responsible for building one. I was not on the building detail for I was busy training foreign troops on our American weapons. I saw the site and was pretty impressed. It was a one-story building with long hallways and many small rooms all made out of wood. The plan was come to the site the next morning and engage in close quarters operations at the new site. Well when we came to the site in the morning there were several Egyptian soldiers waiting for us. We got out of our vehicles to look at the map because we thought we were in the wrong place since there was no building. However, there were small pieces of wood lying all over the place with tire tracks scattered around the area. The Arabic speaker in our group asked the soldiers what was the problem and where did our building go? The soldiers smirked and said that their commander stole the wood. We were all taken back by this and did not know what to do. They told that we were irresponsible Americans for we did not put a guard on the site. It was pretty funny actually and what was even funnier was the response that we received from out commander. When our commander went to the Egyptian liaison for the group, he told us that we could have the wood back but only for a higher price then the Egyptian commander was ready to sell it for. In order to avoid international embarrassment with the other member nations we said that we would purchase the wood back only if they kept their mouths shut. They agreed and we paid for the wood and rebuilt the site and put guards on it this time. However, by the time the 3 week exercise was over, everybody knew of how the clever Egyptian soldiers were able to outsmart the mighty American military. Now that I look back at it, it was quite funny.
External Links
Special Operations Command
';
