CMTC Site Visit
December 2000

As part of Roger's job as Program Manager of the Army Battle Command Systems Integration project, "site visits" to each of the locations where ABCSI will be fielded are required. One of the benefits of this is that one site, the Combat Maneuver Training Center (CMTC), is in Germany!

In December 2000, Roger and several members of his team (and a few representatives from our STRICOM sponsor) went to CMTC. This was the first of two site visits, intended to provide a solid overview of the center and allow us to make sure that ABCSI would meet CMTC's requirements for digital training.

CMTC is located near Hohenfels, a small town about 1.5 hours north of Munich, Germany. The weather during our trip was fairly typical for December in Germany... It was cold, foggy, and bleak!

We stayed at a small "Gasthaus" run by a wonderful family, the Scholls. Herr and Frau Scholl have not only a very nice guesthouse, but a top-notch restaraunt and bar! The meals we enjoyed there (and the beer!) were memorable.

This is a small country lane nearby the Scholl's. As you can tell (hopefully, from the small picture), it was quite foggy this day. A few of us decided that we needed a brief walk outside to shake off the jet lag before we had to start working!

The Scholl Gasthaus is located in the very small village of Hörmannsdorf. A small church, directly across the narrow street, chimed the quarter-hours throughout the night. Some of our party didn't like that, but I found it very soothing.

Working at CMTC consisted of a lot of stuff that I won't spend a lot of time discussing here (cool to me... probably boring to you!). My direct counterpart with the Army, Terry, is shown in the image at right with one of our military escorts at CMTC.

The Training Analysis and Feedback (TAF) Analysts (see left) will be using ABCSI to provide high-quality digital training feedback to our country's armed forces. ABCSI is an extremely valuable project to the Army... now, let's hope they realize that!

It wasn't all work... we had several opportunities to sight-see. We spent one evening going back down to Munich, including being able to see the world-famous Hofbrauhaus! It was extremely crowded and the cigarette smoke was so thick you could have set your beer on it... so, we decided to go elsewhere! But... we saw it! :)

Several other areas awaited us, including the nifty little village of Berlengenfeld.

At the center, a statue/fountain of St. George slaying the dragon provided a good photo-op or two... or five.

We had a lot of fun, even though it was very cold. In this picture, even though you can't really tell, we were showing it was so cold our breath was visible.

I think it just looks like we were at singing practice for our barbershop quartet!

<snicker>

Food and beer (bier!!) seemed to consume (no pun intended!) a lot of our time. It's no wonder... it was all so great!

In the disgusting picture to the left, I'm trying to finish a "schweineshaxen", or leg-of-pork. It tasted really good, but it was huge!

I'm happy to report, though, that I triumphed and am now an official "Knight of the Pork Shoulder"!

Three cheers for me!

"Prost!"

Our last night before departure had (guess what!) one last big meal.

We were ready to come home after a long week's work, but we all had a really great time!

We would be coming back, as a larger group (!), in August of 2001. That made the departure less of a sad occasion and more of a celebration of a "job well done"!!

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