Let Extreme NH Army National Guard Training
Test Your
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t was mid-March, the coldest month of the year in the Arctic Circle, when New Hampshire Army National Guard Capt. Robert Matzelle and Staff Sgt. Michael Avard and 35 other U.S. and Canadian soldiers started Guerrier Nordique 23.
U.S. Army and Canadian soldiers secure an insertion area after disembarking an LC-130 Hercules skiplane from the 109th Airlift Wing, New York Air National Guard on March 15 near Cornwallis Island, Nunavut. The aircraft delivered the soldiers on frozen oceanic Arctic ice. Photo: NH Army National Guard
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For the next three weeks, Matzelle, Avard and their fellow soldiers would engage in a grueling training exercise that emphasizes survival just as much as combat readiness. “It was like nothing like I had experienced before,” recalls Matzelle, who is also a Manchester police officer. “It got down to 50 below zero. We were navigating on snowmobiles across the Arctic Sea ice.” Matzelle said his years of active duty in the Army and his cold weather training at the Army Mountaineering Warfare Center in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom definitely helped him complete this training. Resolute Bay is one of the few places that is located above the 60th parallel or the Arctic Circle, according to a U.S. Army press release. The 37 soldiers boarded an LC-130 plane at the Canadian Armed Forces Arctic Training Center in Resolute Bay. They were flown northwest to a location just east of Little Cornwallis Island in Nunavut. Airmen from the 109th had groomed a ski landing area on the Arctic ice, which is where the aircraft landed. The location was previously secured by a small section of U.S. Soldiers, Canadian Rangers and a Canadian Pathfinder. After landing, Army officials reported that soldiers disembarked and set a security perimeter 100 meters from the landing zone. Dressed in overwhite camouflage, soldiers established their security positions. Soldiers were equipped with individual weapons, machine guns and everything they needed to sustain themselves for up to three days in the Arctic.
