PORT DICKSON, Malaysia, -- A multinational training team facilitated by the Malaysian Armed Forces shared their checkpoint rules of engagement procedures with U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 728th Military Police Battalion, 8th Military Police Brigade, U.S. Army Pacific, as part of Exercise Keris Aman 2015.

Although the U.S. platoon isn’t scheduled to deploy in a United Nations peacekeeping capacity the training provided an opportunity to share experiences, techniques and build relationships.

U.S. Army Sgt. Eric Earley finds the training realistic and beneficial for building interoperability with partner nations.

“It’s good to see these different types of training because we aren’t the only country out there,” Earley said. “Today’s event really impressed me with the fact that everything was really realistic in how detailed it was. The Malaysians are putting on an extremely realistic training for us.”

The Soldiers practiced rules of engagement and code of conduct procedures when operating a checkpoint in a peacekeeping environment and within the notional host nation’s area of responsibility.

New Zealand Defence Force Sgt. Marcus Good, Exercise Keris Aman 2015 subject matter expert, explained what the training lane is designed to teach.

“There are three things we want them to take away from this,” Good said. “Rules of engagement are probably the most critical one when it comes to UN missions, when they can and they can’t act to someone that’s being hostile towards them. The second one is the code of conduct. The UN peacekeeping forces have a code of ten things that blue helmets can do on what and how they report. The third things we want them to learn are the importance of protecting civilians, which is quite high on the UN mandate.”

The multinational team of cadre designed a scenario to enable the U.S. platoon to practice what they learned in a realistic training environment.

“What they’re trying to do is stop the illegal movement of weapons, that’s what this checkpoint is simulating,” Good said. “When the illegal arms are coming through, if they can shut that down during the mission they are essentially taking away the weapons of the bad guys.”

The shift from training in a combat environment to a peacekeeping operation proved a very different experience for Earley.

“It’s good to see a different type of mission and learn that there’s different tasks that we can handle that’s not combat oriented,” Earley said.

Keris Aman is the largest multinational peacekeeping training event this year and is co-hosted by the Malaysian Armed Forces and U.S. Pacific Command with representatives from 29 nations participating.

According to the United Nations official website the United States currently has 80 personnel operating in seven different UN peacekeeping missions.