Let Extreme NH Army National Guard Training Test Your Mettle

It 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.

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.

Matzelle is the commander of a 152-man infantry mountain unit based in Milford that is part of the Vermont and New Hampshire Army National Guard. The New Hampshire Charlie Company is part of the Vermont Infantry Battalion, the 3rd of the 172nd Infantry. His unit’s headquarters in located at the Camp Ethan Allen Training Site in Vermont. If the New Hampshire Charlie Company is deployed, it would fall under the Vermont Infantry Battalion, Matzelle says.

Members of Matzelle’s unit have access to extreme training opportunities if they want to pursue them. “My policy as the unit’s commander is I will never ask soldiers to do more than their annual basic requirement. But if they want to pursue different opportunities and do different things, the world is their oyster.”

This fall Matzelle says he sent Avard to Croatia to go to a NATO mountaineering training school.

“If you’re an outdoorsy person, Charlie Company is definitely the place to be,” Matzelle adds.

For young people who are recent high school graduates, college students or post-college students who are searching for those kinds of experiences, the New Hampshire Army National Guard has a great deal to offer.

“It is really a unique, amazing opportunity,” Matzelle says. “People pay tens of thousands of dollars to go up with guide expeditions, and you are getting paid for it in the Guard.”

“Army years are like dog years, where every human year is seven dog years. It will take you one year to do these opportunities instead of seven years for someone else,” Matzelle says.

Soldiers who go through this training are transformed in ways they cannot imagine.

“They are thrust in positions of leadership and responsibility where you not only have to worry about yourself but other soldiers,” he says. “That is a pretty heavy weight to put on the soldiers of Guard members.”

When soldiers complete the training offered by Matzelle’s mountain infantry unit, they are transformed into confident, capable leaders who are poised to succeed in any career they choose.

“Specifically, we are looking for soldiers with experience. Part of being a mountain infantry company is the skills and abilities that each member has. We are specifically training to fight in mountainous terrain,” Matzelle says. “There are several courses taught to members of the unit in the summer and winter time. They give you a lot of tools in your tool box on how to handle soldiering in extreme terrain and weather.”

That specialized training has definitely helped Matzelle navigate military and civilian life much easier than if he had not served in the Army or the National Guard.

“I think I was able to learn and grow and develop as a police officer, because I had all of these different experiences, and I was only 26 years old at the time. I was living life in fast forward,” says Matzelle, who is now 31. He and his wife, Kathryn, and their two boys live in the Concord area.

“The most valuable lessons you are will learn is you will fail the first time. But that’s why we train, so we can be successful when it counts,” Matzelle says.

One of the main reasons that U.S. and Canadian soldiers engage in the Arctic Circle training exercises is because of a changing world influenced by global warming, Matzelle says.

“Shipping lanes that were once inaccessible are now open. It is open to Russia, China, Norway and other Nordic countries,” Matzelle says.

Matzelle’s journey to becoming a Manchester police officer and a New Hampshire Army National Guard Mountain Infantry unit commander began in New York City.

“I am from Brooklyn and grew up in Queens and Long Island,” Matzelle says. He joined the Army in 2011, and his first posting was in Anchorage, Alaska. As much as he and his wife loved Alaska, he missed his extended family in the New York City area.

During his active duty, Matzelle served two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq and Syria. He also worked at the Army’s Mountain Warfare Center in Vermont as a member of the Vermont Army National Guard for four years after he left active duty in 2018.

But he and his wife wanted to be closer to his family. One day a friend of Matzelle’s father who had served as a New York City police officer for 24 years and later became a New Hampshire state trooper, told Matzelle he should consider the Granite State.

“My wife and I really loved it. It is a day’s drive back to the city to see family,” Matzelle says.

Matzelle believes that service in the New Hampshire Army National Guard can serve as a gateway for young people to find out who they are and what they want to be.

“When people think of the military, there are people that are good for the Army, and there are people the Army is good for,” Matzelle says. “Intangible factors like maturity and leadership and responsibility and confidence and competence; all of these things you can’t tough or feel, but are absolutely real.”

Matzelle says some soldiers will come into the Guard and say, “What’s in it for me?” Then they will be put in a position of leadership, and they will think, “Man, I hope I don’t let these guys down, and I hope I will do my best for them.”

“You get more satisfaction to see your men succeed than anything. Nothing makes me prouder and happier then when my soldiers go out and do something good,” Matzelle says. “It is a true reflection of your abilities as a leader.”