34. Weldonkrieg Daily Talking Point #34: Accountability We need to keep track of people during the event. Weldon Spring has a lot of cool old building foundations and structures which create a cool operational environment but it also creates danger as well. The site isn’t huge but it isn’t small either. For those of you at the Camp Clark event, Weldon is about 4 times larger than Clark. There is lots of brush and visibility can drop to 50 meters in many locations. This is why we need to keep track of people. If you have served in the military, especially the Army or USMC, you know all about accountability. There is no harder job in the service than being a squad leader and one of the reasons why is accountability. People can wander off and you lose track of them. Accountability starts at the lowest levels, and the higher up in the leadership structure it goes, the harder it gets to get it right. Here are some guidelines for accountability: 1. Stay in the cantonment area on Friday and Saturday after the battle. If someone goes wandering around the training areas on Friday and they don’t come back, we have to go find them. I have better things to do than putting everyone in one big line and walking the entire training area looking for them. This will be even more awesome of an experience for everyone if it happens at night. 2. Team leaders, squad leaders and platoon leadership needs a good and accurate count of who they have before they go to the field. On the allied side, if I happen to ask you what your count is, it isn’t that I am being a jerk. I am double checking that we have accountability. If a leader doesn’t know how many are in their unit, then there is no way they can have accountability for the rest of the day. 3. Tell your squad members to stay where they are assigned. Running to the sound of the guns may work at some tactical elsewhere, but this isn’t the case with ours. 4. If you lose someone, start looking for someone immediately and get your chain of command involved right away. 5. If someone leaves the field for the day, please make sure they tell the squad leader and the squad leader tells the platoon leadership. 6. When units return from the field, get a good accurate accounting of everyone in the cantonment area. This is one of the key tasks we have to do as event organizers, so please do you part as a member of a unit or a leader by keeping track of your fellow reenactors. If someone does get hurt in an isolate area and no one knows about it, we will have to go find them. That can shut down the event hours. I’ve been there and done that before, and I don’t want to do it again at Weldonkrieg.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:42:29 +0000