Dutch soldier killed in Germany was hit by combat vehicle while sleeping: report
The Dutch soldier who died on Wednesday night during a multi-national training exercise in Germany was hit by a combat vehicle, likely while he was sleeping, AD reports. The authorities are investigating how that happened.
The soldier, a 21-year-old private first class, was one of 4,000 soldiers participating in the Bastion Lion exercise in a replica village in Guz Altmark. They’re training to respond to drone attacks, like what’s happening in Ukraine, and facing more realistic and intensive war scenarios.
According to the newspaper, part of the training is testing the limits of the soldiers’ mental and physical exhaustion. In the past, training exercises had many rest points built in to evaluate how things are going. Now, the soldiers are “fighting” for three to four days in a row.
Fatal accidents in the armed forces can never be completely ruled out, Jan Kropf of the Acom trade union told AD. Soldiers work with heavy equipment, weapons, and explosives, often in very stressful situations. “An exercise with thousands of soldiers is simply not the safest workplace. We have to train and equip them as well as possible, but things can always go wrong.”
Lawyer Michael Ruperti, who has represented many soldiers who were involved in serious accidents and had to answer in court, added that the imitation of war conditions increases the chance of such accidents. He hardly ever sees soldiers who did something wrong deliberately. “I often see cases where it is a matter of lack of sleep, fatigue, and miscommunication. Then it can quickly end fatally. At the same time, it is also important to practice as realistically as possible. Soldiers must also realize that a small mistake can have fatal consequences. Of course not during an exercise. But you can never prevent it completely,” he told the newspaper.
