Following agreements with the Tyrolean military command over the past two weeks, soldiers from Staff Battalion 6 were given the opportunity to use a building in the Conrad barracks that had been cleared for demolition for training purposes. The NBC defense company in particular took advantage of this and was able to refresh its training content in the former command building.
Other units of Staff Battalion 6 were trained in house-to-house combat – prepared and led by the training company. Tyrol’s military commander, Brigadier Ingo Gstrein, explained that the building was being newly constructed and that the units would have optimum training facilities until then. The NBC defense company’s exercise scenario: an explosion has damaged the building. The specialists’ first task was to enter the building via the roof and using sledgehammers and chainsaws to determine whether there were any injured persons inside. An injured person was located using sound detection and a “search cam”.
In order to reach the injured person quickly, the commander decided to carry out a rescue operation. This was a difficult procedure due to the fact that the injured person had to be protected on the one hand and the statics of the building must not be impaired on the other. The wall was “blasted” using plastic explosives; a breach was then made in the wall in order to rescue the person. “Blasting is one of those experiences that make the job so ‘cool’,” said Corporal Matteo S., who was carrying out such a blast for the first time. In addition to training the NBC defense soldiers, the training company of Staff Battalion 6 from Absam was tasked with training other units of the staff battalion in the field of urban warfare. Due to the fact that the soldiers in the companies of the staff battalion are specialists in their fields and are generally not trained in house-to-house combat, this was not an everyday task.
