 Station is not, station is not, Alpha 08, radio check over. Station is not, station is not, Alpha 08, radio check over. Station is not, station is not, Alpha 08, radio check over. Bro. This is DCom. Where are we going? It's like five different places we're going. Either Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, or UAE. And you'll be training with other people, you think? Or you'll be actually... No, I think we'll be by ourselves. Yep. And someone mentioned that you decided to stick around a little bit longer just to go on this deployment, is that true? Yeah, I got 17 years in today. Congratulations. And I agree up for three more to do the deployment and get my 20 years and get done. Finally. Grand finale. Yes. Different like tables, like a table one. You have like table... We have like ASPT, we got to do a safety test. The whole crew's got to get certified to the live fire. So if you got like a new guy in. If you got a new gunner in, you got to re-certify. But if you got a new driver, you can keep this the regular... As long as the chief and the gunner are certified together and you can live fire. How many... So there's eight... We have eight launchers. So there's eight drivers. You've got eight chiefs and then eight gunners. Okay. It makes a lot of them. So yeah. Well, usually the gunners are E-5s and then the drivers are E-4s. And I was just doing it different angles of where you guys shoot. Like when we live fire, we usually shoot it off the side. Those are guided missiles. And if you shoot it overseas, it's ATACMS and it shoots right over the cab. Our job overseas is the long fire. So nobody knows where we are. We shoot and we stole the LM and leave. And go to a different spot so they don't know where it came from. And how much distance are you typically getting from shots? Miles. Yeah, I started here. Then I went to move to Littleton like right after the last deployment. So 2017, 16 around there. We got came to Littleton. Specialist, Eric Hilliard. I'm a 13 Mike here in the New Hampshire Guard. I'm a high marsh tech. And if you can just tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing today and the training that you're. Yeah. So we just came down here from Littleton. We're just going to be doing some training out in the field with high marsh. Things like battle drills, basically. So anything we need to do so we can get our crew certified. Can you talk to me a little bit about what high marsh is? Yeah, so high marsh is high mobility artillery rocket systems. It's the vehicles you see over there. They're some of what I think to be the coolest weapon systems in the Army. Capable of firing 500 kilometers, high range precision fires. What is your job specifically? Yeah, so I'm a driver of the high marsh. It's kind of the entry level position once you get put in the launcher. Basically I show up to the launcher before everybody else does. Make sure it's all good to go so that by the time the gunner and the chief show up, everything's up and running and we're ready to roll out and conduct the day tasks. So is this your first training with the high marsh in this environment with your team? No, I've been doing this with the unit for a little over two years. Yeah, it's been great. It's a really good group of guys and girls to work with. And can you talk a little bit about the deployment that's coming out? Yeah, so in 2023, I think it is. Yeah, because we're in 2022 now. In 2023, we're going to be going over to the Middle East just conducting more training like we are now. Just hopefully with some more real world applications, it's kind of hard to do something stateside as opposed to overseas. Can you talk a little bit about what your team would be doing in the field overseas? Right, so it's a lot of the stuff we're going to be doing today. A lot of dry fires, exercises. Basically there's an entire list of steps that we're going to go through when we get ready to do a live fire. And we have the launcher set up to kind of simulate the environment of a live fire. So we're going to be doing that today. And this weekend we're also going to be doing a lot of that overseas. Just making sure that our crews of three men or women are all certified to just be able to run this over and over so it becomes basic. What's your favorite part of the job? What excites you the most about doing this kind of stuff? Like I said, it's probably one of the coolest weapon systems I've seen in the Army. Just being able to see a round go down range is pretty cool. Where are you from? I'm from Hennaker, New Hampshire. Anything you want to add? You know, I'm a college student. I go to UNH just being able to do this part-time while being able to go to school. It's been a great time. Being a first responder for COVID was an awesome experience to just really be able to get into the community and work. No complaints so far. Christian McDermott, I'm a first lieutenant. I'm the battery operations officer at Alpha Battery. And can you tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing this weekend? What kind of training you're conducting? Yeah, so one of the big things that we're doing is we're doing tables two to five to make sure that we're ready for the live fire this summer. So we need to get the crews certified on that. Another thing we're doing is we're doing map safety and leader safety for leadership, so like the platoon sergeants and then the FDC as well to make sure that we're able to fire accurately and safely. And then one of the big reasons we came up here is Alpha Battery used to be up here. So a lot of the guys started in this unit. They started up here. So we wanted to kind of bring them back just for nostalgia before we get ready for deployment and all that stuff. Yeah, so tables is kind of a step-wise process of getting from the very basics of the launcher or any process up to qualification. So for us it starts with turning on the launcher, turning on the panels in there which would be table five, which is what we're doing. And then building up to this summer, which would be the live fire. How much of this do you think will be directly correlated to what you'd be doing overseas? Is it pretty accurate to what you guys will be doing during the deployment? It's essentially all we'd be doing overseas if we get the mission that our unit is designed for. So we're designed for long-range precision fires and that's what we're kind of practicing doing. So Convoy is getting into position, setting everything up and then making sure that we can shoot accurately. Are you episodes, sir? No, I'm the battery operations officer. So it's kind of like in the cannon world, it's kind of like the battery FDO. But it's that combined with the executive officer. So it's kind of a mix of both things. So I knew that I was coming to New Hampshire and it just seemed like one of the cooler things to do and it definitely turned out to be that. So I had a great time. What's the part of this job that gets you excited? What's the best part about it? The live fires definitely. Shooting rockets is always fun to watch but especially like playing a direct part in that. You said coming to New Hampshire, where'd you come from? So I'm from New Hampshire but I went to school in North Carolina. So when I did ROTC and decided I was going to go National Guard I decided I was going to come back up here. And you live in New Hampshire now? Yep, I live in Lebanon. I mean I'm definitely biased because I've been here the entire time but I like it. It's a great unit. Well thank you.