Since 2019, a handful of soldiers and airmen from the New York National Guard have traveled deep into Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to take on a jungle warfare course widely viewed as among the world’s toughest military schools.
Two airmen from the New York Air Guard’s 105th Airlift Wing’s Base Defense Group completed the course in November, the fifth set of New York Guardsmen to graduate since 2019. Though other U.S. units, including Army Special Forces, also send students to the Centro de Instrução de Guerra na Selva course, or CIGS, less than 60 Americans from any branch have ever graduated. Among the New Yorkers who have made it are infantry soldiers, combat medics, Tactical Air Control Party or TACP airmen, and even an intelligence analyst who traded his desk-duty position for six weeks in the unforgiving jungle.
Run by specially trained Brazilian army instructors, the CIGS course runs one course per year for foreign students, with the New Yorkers invited through a training partnership between the Guard and the Brazilian military.
Just to start the course requires a day-one fitness test tougher than nearly any in the U.S. military. Students must swim 400 meters and tread water in full uniform with a rifle, run five miles in boots and climb a 20-foot rope with just their arms, among other tests. Those who advance spend a week on jungle basics like fire and shelter building before the course rapidly dials up to long river swims and 20-kilometer patrols to ambush sites.
But while the daily schedule changes constantly, the New Yorkers said, the weather never does.
“The rain is not like the rain here,” said New York National Guard Master Sgt. Thomas Carpenter, a U.S. Ranger School graduate who became the first New Yorker to finish the course in 2019. “It is like monsoon rain. We were wet 24/7. If we weren’t in the water it was raining every day. If it wasn’t raining you were sweating through your uniform.”
“Once we got into the jungle, it was a whole other level of heat,” said New York Air National Guard Tech Sgt. Jeremy Miter, a TACP and civilian firefighter who graduated in 2021. “The triple canopy rain forest keeps the heat in and all around you. It creates a pressure cooker.”
From the Arctic to the Amazon
Most of the New Yorkers who have attended the course come from combat arms jobs, like Carpenter and Miter, or combat arms-adjacent jobs like combat medics or security forces.
Senior Airman Caleb Lapinel was none of those when he signed up. In fact, he might have been the least likely “jungle warrior” in CIGS history.
An Air National Guard intelligence specialist in the 109th Airlift Wing, Lapinel was more used to building PowerPoint presentations on laptops than making jungle shelters out of bamboo, he said in a press release. And his unit did him no favors: the 109th’s primary mission is flying LC-130 cargo planes modified with huge landing skis in order to land at remote, snow-covered bases in Antarctica and Greenland — a difficult and vital mission, but as distant from Amazonian jungle warfare as any job in the U.S. military.
Lapnel went to the course in 2020, the year after Carpenter, who told him that a key skill at CIGS was swimming. Taking that advice, Lapnel started swimming laps and treading water in full uniform in his girlfriend’s pool.
Once he arrived in Manaus, Brazil — a swampy inland port city at the confluence of the Rio Negro and Amazon rivers — he found that his classmates were mostly hardened special forces soldiers from around the world. The class included commandos from Spain, Egypt, and Indonesia, paratroopers from Paraguay and amphibious infantry from Nigeria. Perhaps most intimidating was a Guatemalan soldier from a unit whose motto was “If I advance follow me, if I stop urge me on, if I retreat, kill me.”
“I was worried about that in the beginning,” Lapinel said.
Welcome to the jungle
The connection between the New York National Guard and the Brazilian jungle warfare school comes from the Guard’s pairing with Brazil under a Guard State Partnership Program. Under an SPP agreement, a state’s National Guard pairs with an allied nation’s armed forces for formal and ongoing training and exchanges. For example, California Air National Guard pilots spent years training with Ukrainian counterparts as part of the program.
Brazilian troops, a New York Guard spokesperson told Task & Purpose, have regularly traveled to New York for infantry exercises and other training. The rescue teams in New York’s Air Guard have gone to Brazil for its annual Tapio search and rescue exercises.
But the jungle course represents a unique connection. About 6,000 Brazilians have graduated from CIGS’ full 10-week course since it was launched in 1964. The international class, which is a few weeks shorter, draws troops from around the world, with the largest number coming from France and Spain. U.S. Army Special Forces and infantry soldiers from the 101st Airborne have also attended the course alongside the New Yorkers.
The CIGS’ international course is divided into phases, with the first week covering fitness tests and equipment issue as students shakedown and waterproof the gear that will see them through the course. They learn navigation, how to avoid dangerous insects and animals, and how to find food and water.
Lapinel said one source of calories was the coconut grub, the larvae of the red palm weevil which burrows into coconuts.
“The hardest part is mental, “Lapinel said. “Once you are chewing it is not too bad.”
Next comes a three-day survival phase, where students set up a camp and survive on whatever they can find.
“I don’t think anybody ate for the entirety of the survival event,” Miter said. “Luckily, it rained at the end.”
On Lapinel’s last day, the Indonesian Special Forces soldier caught a snake.
“We boiled it up and split it 10 ways. It was the best and the only snake I ever had,” Lapinel recalled.
After the survival phase, the course transitions to military skills, moving and fighting in the jungle — which includes moving along rivers. Classes make rafts out of their gear but the water, said Lapinel were full of sediments, which quickly clogged their rifles.
“We were constantly cleaning sand and dirt and dust out of the weapon and then to keep them from rusting we used massive amounts of WD-40 and covered it in gun oil,” he added.
The final tactical training, said Carpenter, the Ranger School grad, is on par with similar U.S. courses but made more difficult by the Amazon’s terrain, which he said was multiple times denser than the woods and Florida swamps Rangers train in.
Students rappel into the jungle from helicopters, navigate up rivers and patrol to a final ambush. The terrain is so thick that — counter to most tactical training in the U.S. — students stick to elevated ridges to navigate, avoiding impassable ravines and low areas.
Lapinel said the toughest exercise was a 3.5-kilometer swim down the Puraquequara River, a tributary to the Amazon, with their gear and all students in formation.
“We started at maybe midnight or 10 p.m. and we just swam for four or five hours in the middle of the night,” Lapinel said. “Two fish actually jumped and smacked me in the face during the swim. But we were so fatigued that nobody was caring.”
“It’s a place where you quickly learn that the jungle doesn’t conform to you, you conform to the jungle,” said Cozart, the Air Guard security forces airman who completed the course in November. “If you know how to operate there, the jungle becomes a neutral place. If not, it can quickly become your greatest enemy.”
During the final swim, Lapinel said, Brazilian instructors in boats shined flashlights along the river bank where eyes would stare back at the students. They were Black Caiman, a Brazilian alligator.
The final phase of training put everything together in a series of patrols and tactical exercises.
Lapinel had no experience in patrol tactics.
“I was lucky enough to have a lot of people around me who were able to give me the advice I needed,” he said.
“We all helped each other out,” he added. “If I needed help on shooting or had a question on tactics they helped me. If they needed help carrying the radio or something, I could help them.”
Lapinel’s turn to lead came during a mission to set up an ambush. The team infiltrated into the target zone and surprised a simulated enemy force.
He also got plenty of experience carrying the team radio during a two-day, 20-kilometer patrol, he said.
At the end of the course, the intel analyst had proved himself to his commando teammates, who awarded him the class flag, given to the student considered the best teammate.
New York Air National Guard Tech. Sgt. Paul Cange, a TACP, graduated from the course in 2021, along with Cpl. Dakoatah Miller, an infantryman in New York’s 42nd Infantry Division. Their class’ final event, he said, was a four-day movement to a crash site deep in the jungle.
The site is where a Panair Brasil flight crashed as it neared Manaus in 1962, killing 50. Rescue teams, who had little or no jungle training. took a week to reach the site and struggled to recover the bodies of the passengers. The episode inspired the founding of CIGS two years later in the same region.
“It is more of a heritage walk to them. To bring us there as a group was very important, and only jungle warriors who complete the walk get to see it,” he said.
Seeing the decades-old crash site sitting in a remote part of the jungle marked the end of the course, where each graduate receives a jaguar badge and a machete.
“The graduation portion of it is not for the individual; it is for the greater good of the Amazon,” Cange said. “When you receive the machete during the ceremony, you know you’re part of something much bigger than you.”
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