U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Ryan Salvato, a section leader with the Ground Combat Element, Marine Rotational Force – Darwin, participates in an interview during Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) in Indonesia, July 31 to August 5, 2019. CARAT is designed to promote regional security, maintain and strengthen maritime partnerships, and enhance interoperability among participating forces. (U.S. Marine Corps video by Cpl. Destiny Dempsey)
Transcript
My name is Sergeant Servado. I’m one of the section leaders with 1-1-Cat-1. CARAT is Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training. Basically, we play a very small part in a large scale exercise that gives us the opportunity to work with other nations within the Indo-Pacific area. So, we provide for them some mount training, so interior and exterior movement, as well as machine gun range, where we taught them how to employ our machine guns and they did the same for us with their machine guns. We also taught them combat marksmanship and then in return they were teaching us jungle warfare and general survival. Basically, what I’ve taken away from the Indonesians is that Marines pretty much across the board are, like, incredible war heroes no matter where you go. We all are, are very similar. How they train is definitely different from the way that we train, ’cause primarily they’ll do jungle type stuff, where we’re very proficient in, like, urban training. So, the biggest thing that I’ll take away from them is, is just the fact that knowing no matter what happens in the world, we can always count on the Indonesian Marines to be a very similar force to work with. So, I hope that we’ve taken away from the Indonesian Marines a little bit of survival skills that we don’t get to practice so much, training in Pendleton and areas similar. I think one of the biggest things, though, that me especially has taken away is learning how to work with a partner nation that doesn’t speak the same language.