It’s a cold and windy day in Gibbons on Oct. 5 as 1 Service Battalion rumbles into action.
Minutes earlier, headquarters had received a call from troops in the field about a jeep stuck in a forested area on the town’s west side. Six members of 1 Service Battalion had arrived with a jeep and a tow truck to haul the vehicle out, to the amusement of some soccer-playing kids.
Just as the troops pull the jeep free and start to leave, the air crackles with the pop-pop of automatic fire. Eight men with assault rifles rise from the tall grass and let loose with simulated bullets. The kids scatter, some filming the shootout as they do so. The tow truck flees, imaginary projectiles pinging off its hull, as the troops return fire.
One minute and thirty seconds later, and it’s all over. The troops lie dead, as do three of the attackers. Two vehicles lie abandoned. The headlines the next day, had this been a real firefight, would have read, “Four Canadian troops killed in ambush.”
In-town training
The shootout was one of many militaristic events that happened in Gibbons in the last week and a half as part of Exercise Rough Rider — 1 Service Battalion’s annual training exercise. About 130 troops took part in various activities in Gibbons and at CFB Edmonton to sharpen their soldiering skills, which sometimes meant shooting at each other with blanks.
1 Service Battalion is the army’s logistics unit, responsible for keeping troops supplied and vehicles up and running, said Capt. Ryan Bartlette of 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group. The battalion typically holds Rough Rider at CFB Wainwright, but sometimes moves it to Gibbons for the sake of variety. Gibbons was home to many area soldiers and offered troops a chance to practice in an urban environment.
This year’s Rough Rider was smaller than most as many members of the battalion were on overseas missions, said Capt. Dane Findlay, who helped plan and supervise the exercise. This year’s training scenario was based on a hypothetical Canadian mission in Ukraine circa March 2022, with Edmonton standing in for Kyiv, Gibbons acting as a recently occupied village, Edmonton-area army cadets serving as civilians (specifically those soccer-playing kids), and Capt. Ryan Butyniec and members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry serving as the enemy.
Findlay said Gibbons residents may have seen troops set up and tear down a decontamination tent earlier this month, within which troops would get hosed down with soap and water following a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack. Residents who stayed up late on Oct. 5 may have spied soldiers practicing a resupply mission, during which they shunted pallets of food and ammunition between trucks in complete darkness.
The Oct. 5 ambush, which the troops were not warned about, was the cumulation of the exercise, designed to test if the soldiers could do their logistics duties during a combat situation, Findlay said.
In their after-action debrief, Findlay and Butyniec told the troops they did a good job of extracting the jeep, and made the right choice in having the tow truck flee the fight, at the truck was a valuable, limited asset in the field.
Where they fell short was security, they continued. The troops didn’t watch their east flank, and didn’t thoroughly search their west flank — if they had, they might have spotted Butyniec’s team behind the ridge just five metres away. They were also slow to react to incoming fire, taking about five seconds to take cover and shoot back.
“They absolutely overran you,” Findlay said of the enemy force.
Sometime these exercises go well, and other times they’re a complete failure, Findlay said in an interview. In this case, the bad guys won.
“What we walk away with here is a whole lot of learning opportunities,” Findlay said.
