Cow Drowning

buff81

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What do you get when you combine a wave pool, with fog, rain, combat audio, strobe lights and darkness? Survival swimming - affectionately known by the cadets as Cow drowning.

This is designed to replicate going overboard at night off a landing craft in full gear (including boots and gun). Cadets must survive by swimming a certain number of yards, knowing how and when to ditch gear, and knowing how to use their uniform as a floatation devise. Taking off your boots in this environment and not drowning is no easy task!

We saw this demonstrated at PPW and the environment they were replicating was very realistic. We felt like we had front row seats to a real combat swimming survival situation. We were told that the reason for this exercise (required for all 3rd year cadets) is because on D-Day a lot of the deaths were from troops disembarking landing craft in full gear and drowning.

This video was posted by the BG Rapp today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoPKKqPFIGk
 
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Strong swimmers (i.e. swim/dive team members) took this class during grad week...even for them it was grueling!
 
Ah, it was known as plebe drowning once upon a time. We didn't have a wave pool though. Harsh!

Very similar to the 160th SOAR swim test. That's good training.
 
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