Posted on 01/25/2004 10:44:20 AM PST by BenLurkin
FORT POLK, La. (AP) - Men in Arab headdress detonate a homemade bomb along a roadway used by U.S. convoys. A suicide truck bomb rips through a troop encampment, killing dozens. An insult triggers fighting between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs. These events, staged at Fort Polk to replicate the dangers facing U.S. forces in Iraq, made clear to the 4,800 National Guardsmen training at this remote Army base that preparing for a postwar tour of duty is unlike anything they have done before.
"We got a very big wake-up jolt" when the training kicked off in mid-January, said Brig. Gen. Dan H. Hickman, commander of the 30th Brigade Combat Team of the North Carolina National Guard. The team heads to Iraq several weeks from now, after winding up a $10 million training session at Fort Polk. In civilian life, Hickman is a vice president at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, N.C.
After initial stumbling, "We've come a light year," said Lt. Col. Greg Wilcoxon, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 150th Armor, a West Virginia National Guard unit that is part of Hickman's 30th.
"We got past shock and started producing," Hickman said.
Tens of thousands of National Guard and Reserve troops are gearing up for duty in Iraq, knowing that although the number of attacks by insurgents has been declining, American soldiers are still dying at a rate of more than one a day.
The guardsmen are training for a much different kind of war than the one they were organized for during the Cold War. They will rely less on tanks and artillery and more on foot patrols, face-to-face dialogue with Iraqis and fast-changing intelligence.
In fact, the brigade left its M1 Abrams tanks at home.
Among the early surprises in the Fort Polk training:
-The complexity of the "political morass," as Hickman put it, that the guardsmen learned they will face in Iraq. Maneuvering, infighting and violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as among Kurds, Turkmen and other ethnic groups, is a serious threat.
"This is going to be more difficult than we thought," Hickman said his staff came to believe after they arrived at the base, located among the towering pines and reddish clay of central Louisiana.
-The new technologies the soldiers will rely on. That includes a computer-based system, called "Blue Force Tracking," for pinpointing friendly forces using a satellite-linked communications device. Soldiers of the 30th had never used it before; they said they had no problem learning.
-And, of course, the lack of tanks.
"I like to say the Army is giving us a tank-less job," Hickman quipped to Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief, who flew to Fort Polk last week to observe the 30th's training and offer some advice. Meeting with Hickman and his subordinate commanders in a field tent, Schoomaker wanted to know how soldiers used to operating with heavy armor had reacted to parting with their tanks.
"There was some angst about leaving our tanks," Hickman said. He said soldiers now accept the logic of trading firepower for agility. His brigade is likely to be responsible for an area around the northern oil center of Kirkuk, now patrolled by the 173rd Airborne Brigade, an active-duty unit.
Schoomaker told the guardsmen not to underestimate the dangers of Iraq.
"You're going into one of the most complicated environments you'll ever be in in your life," he said.
Maj. Gen. Dennis E. Hardy, commander of the 24th Infantry Division, the active-duty unit that oversees the 30th's training, said he is confident the guardsmen will do well, calling them "one of the more ready brigades" in the entire National Guard system.
Still, they face the uncertainties that all citizen soldiers must cope with when called to active duty. Lt. Col. Allen Boyette, a civil affairs specialist with the 30th, was asked by Schoomaker what he does in civilian life.
"Sir, I run the facilities department at North Carolina State University," he replied, then quickly added with a smile, "Correction: I used to run the facilities department at North Carolina State University. We just hope we have a job when we get back."
At Fort Polk, the Army has hired hundreds of people, including Iraqis, to play insurgents who move about the "battlefield" in an effort to disrupt the Americans.
Schoomaker was introduced to a few of the Iraqis, dressed in authentic clothes: bearded men in red-and-white Arab headdress and white robes; women in black abayas, or full-length robes; others in Kurdish military uniforms; and Fedayeen militiamen in dark clothes and black masks.
One actor described himself to Schoomaker as a Baathist. "I actively recruit suicide bombers," he said.
Using high-tech devices that determine which soldiers are "killed" or "wounded," the Fort Polk exercise is meant to replicate not only insurgents' attacks but also such complicated tasks as avoiding shooting civilians.
Using Arabic-speaking translators, the guardsmen are required to work with the "locals," including actors playing policemen and political powerbrokers.
The 30th, nicknamed the "Old Hickory" brigade and headquartered at Clinton, N.C., will be the first of three Guard combat brigades to join a wholesale rotation of U.S. forces in Iraq, switching out for troops who have been there since the war began in March, or shortly after.
The head of the North Carolina National Guard, Maj. Gen. William E. Ingram, Jr., said in a telephone interview that the Iraq deployment is the largest for his state's Guard since World War II.
"The team's being called," he said.
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