101st Airborne Division Starts to Head Home
By U.S. Army Pfc. Thomas Day
40th Public Affairs Detachment
CAMP DOHA, Kuwait, Jan. 16, 2004 — The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), which landed in theatre in February of 2003, is beginning its 10,500 mile, three-month odyssey back home to Fort Campbell, Ky., with a massive transfer of troops and equipment by air and land.
Brig. Gen. Jeffery Schloesser, 101st Airborne Division assistant division commander (support), has overseen the division’s redeployment operations in Kuwait, which serves as the primary staging area for all equipment and personnel returning to the U.S. The 101st Airborne Division’s first redeployment convoys arrived shortly after the beginning of the new year and are currently washing their equipment, vehicles and just a few of the division’s 200-plus aircrafts that will be shrink-wrapped and sent back to Fort Campbell.
“This is the largest operational move of soldiers, Marines and Coalition forces that anyone really remembers, and that goes all the way back to Normandy in World War II,” said Schloesser, who arrived in Kuwait from Iraq in late December.
Roughly 20,000 soldiers with or attached to the 101st Airborne Division are scheduled to be sent home by early March. Approximately 4,000 “Screaming Eagles” who aren’t essential to the redeployment of equipment through Kuwait will fly directly back to the United States from Iraq, with a stop in Incirlik, Turkey.
The next homes for the majority of the 101st Airborne, albeit briefly, will be Camps Doha, Udairi and Arifjan in Kuwait.
Around 6,000 vehicles and 1,600 containers will pass through the bases from the division. There the battle-tested soldiers are readying their vehicles and equipment for U.S. Customs inspections.
“If anybody could be prepared, we are prepared,” Schloesser remarked. “The Kuwaitis on post have bent over backwards for this. They have allowed us to reopen camps that were only open for the first part of the war back in the March-April time frame.
“They have allowed us to take a good amount of the commercial shipping port facilities that they have and dedicated them for our military and the same thing goes for their airports.”
Soldiers who think they are approaching the finish line will find one last steep mountain to climb. No vehicle can board the ship destined for Fort Campbell via Jacksonville, Fla., without having been thoroughly washed, a process that can take around six hours a vehicle.
“I’ve spent a lot of time on wash racks, on aircraft parking positions as well as on the base camps and there is not a Screaming Eagle down here who is not motivated,” Schloesser said. “Its natural as you come down and start washing things and cleaning up that actually you would start to lose a little bit of motivation. I have not yet seen that.”
In addition to washing out all foreign soil from U.S. equipment, helicopters must undergo a special “shrink wrap” process to protect their sensitive equipment from the ocean environment.
“The aircraft that are going to go home through the port on the ships can be exposed to salt water.” The division’s aviation units wrap their aircraft in the cocoon-like plastic wrap and suck the air out, giving the helicopters a protective plastic covering.
“It goes all around the aircraft, protects it from the salt water which could cause corrosion. If it’s going home via the ship - and a large number of our aircraft are, some two hundred - they’re going to be shrink-wrapped,” Schloesser said.
Aircrafts severely damaged in combat, considered a bio hazard, will be properly disposed of in theatre and will not go back to Fort Campbell, according to Schloesser.
One issue that has been resolved is what the division will do with the makeshift armor and “Dohuk” weapon mounts the 101st soldiers have utilized to reinforce their vehicles in Iraq. The “Dohuk” mounts, named after the Iraqi town the division had contracted to manufacture the M249 stands, will be staying in theatre to support the next rotation of Operation Iraqi Freedom units. Any protective armor welded onto the vehicles will go back to Fort Campbell, otherwise it will stay in Iraq.
fold back and secure the rotor blades on a UH-60 Black Hawk
helicopter from the 6th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment so that
it can be loaded onto a ship for the voyage back to the U.S..
A plastic "shrink wrap" coating will also be applied to protect
the helicopter from the sea environment while it is transported home aboard ship. U.S. Army photo by SSG Mark W. Swart, Jr.
installs padding on a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter from the 6th
Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment. The padding is applied prior
to a plastic "shrink wrap" coating which protects the helicopter
from the sea environment while it is transported home aboard
ship. U.S. Army photo by SSG Mark W. Swart, Jr.