FORT POLK, La. — Every evening around 6 p.m., U.S. soldiers have been taking mortar rounds from Iraqi insurgents.
Capt. Sean Moser quietly told soldiers who stood around him in his company’s headquarters that their mission was to locate the resistance and to show good faith by making a food drop in the town of Jabar Nahr.
“This is our chance to draw first blood,” said Moser, a Clayton resident with a 9mm pistol strapped to his right thigh. “This is nothing fancy or sexy, but we must destroy the threat.”
And so about a dozen soldiers from the N.C. Army National Guard’s 30th Heavy Separate Brigade set out to prepare themselves for a year of fighting insurgents in Iraq. Three Humvees with .50-caliber guns slowly made their way to Jabar Nahr, a disheveled Iraqi hamlet re-created in the Louisiana scrubland.
The brigade patrolled a make-believe Iraq during its last two weeks at Fort Polk’s Joint Readiness Training Center. Soldiers faced crowds yelling at them in Arabic, hostile town officials, car bombs and overturned buses with dead or injured Iraqis.
“We don’t duplicate, but we try to replicate as much as possible,” said Maj. Ron Elliot, a center spokesman. “The sounds, explosives, the language — we replicate everything that a soldier is going to come in contact with.”
The training ended Friday. A massive troop rotation between late February and early March will send the brigade to Iraq for a year. The 30th will replace the 4th Infantry Division, headquartered in Tikrit.
About 3,900 of the 4,800 soldiers in the Clinton-based brigade’s battalions and companies are from North Carolina. Many joined the Guard expecting part-time service, but now find themselves on one- to two-year call-ups in the brigade’s largest deployment since World War II.
Spc. Akitola Stokes, 28, of Burlington, sold her house because she was going to be away for two years. Stokes’ parents are caring for her son, 7-month-old Ezekiel Williamson.
The single mother said being activated is part of her duty. “I wanted the money for school, so I had to make a sacrifice,” said Stokes, who cries on her pillow at night, but never in front of other soldiers. “I had to leave my baby when he was 4 months old, and it was hard. When I left, he was just beginning to realize he was in this world.”
Pfc. Thomas Brian Burke, 24, of Durham, is a kicker for N.C. Central University’s football team. He expected to give a few weekends a month and several weeks during the summer to the Guard. Leaving the team and losing his scholarship have been tough.
“I don’t know which is tougher, missing the game-winning field goal last season against [N.C. A&T] or leaving my wife,” said Burke, who was activated in October. He deliberated. “Leaving my wife is tougher.”
Burke is one of 10,000 Army Guardsmen in North Carolina, 6,500 of whom are on active duty. About 28 percent of the nation’s 350,000-member Army Guard is on active duty in the United States or overseas, according to USA Today. By May, nearly 40 percent of the more than 100,000 U.S. troops will consist of Guard or Reserve units.
The strain is beginning to tell.
According to a Guard survey of 5,000 soldiers from 15 states, Army Guardsmen could leave the military at a 20 percent to 22 percent rate, compared with 16 percent last year, USA Today reported.
Peace Is Hard Part
North Carolina’s citizen-soldiers are readying themselves for a task that has stymied the regular Army: suppressing the Iraqi insurgency.
Last summer, at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center in the California desert, the brigade prepared to fight battles using its heavy tanks, howitzers and Bradley fighting vehicles. At Fort Polk, the soldiers were learning a more intimate battle.
The 252nd Armor Regiment’s 1st battalion, a Fayetteville-based unit that has companies in Sanford, Southern Pines and Parkton, usually patrols in M1 tanks that weigh 67 tons and can hit targets miles away. In Louisiana, they were mounting Humvees equipped only with .50-caliber machine guns and other automatic weapons. The soldiers must interact with townspeople, and are being taught to negotiate, to hold their fire until absolutely necessary.
“The war is the easy part,” said Lt. David Dickerson, peering through night-vision goggles from a Humvee. “The bad guys shoot at you and you shoot back. Keeping the peace, that’s the hard part.”
With 11 villages denoted by signs in Arabic, the 100,000-acre training ground at Polk is made as much like Iraq as possible, despite the wide swaths of pine trees.
More than 2,000 role players, including nearly 300 native Iraqis, were scattered throughout the towns, which have no water, sewers or electricity. Lurking on the perimeter of each town are Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda operatives.
“We try to stress them as much as possible,” said Elliot, the center spokesman. “We want them to sweat here rather than bleed on the battlefield. If we can save one soldier’s life, we’ve been successful.”
There’s a governing council, with a person playing chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. There’s a daily newspaper, the Talatha Times, to detail coalition actions to the Iraqis. There’s an Arabic-language radio station; U.S. commanders appear daily and explain the military’s mission. Using a translator, the commanders take Iraqis’ questions.
Make It Like Iraq
About 600 observers, many of whom have been in Iraq, watch soldiers confront each situation. More than 1,000 cameras record the training for later evaluations.
Wearing harnesses that emit an irritating sound if struck by lasers attached to training weapons, soldiers must remain watchful. Laser boxes are placed on tanks, Humvees, five-ton trucks, aircraft, soldiers, the play-acting Iraqi citizens and the enemy.
“Every time you roll out that gate, you have to be ready because you never know what you are going to face,” said Col. John Frank of Wake Forest, who is battalion commander for Goldsboro’s 230th Support Battalion.
Idil Alhassan, 34, an Iraqi role player from Atlanta, said that’s where he comes in.
“I try to make it like Iraq,” said Alhassan, who is often nose-to-nose with soldiers and yelling in Arabic. “When they go over, they will not be scared. They will say, ‘I’ve seen this before.’ “
The training doesn’t stop once a soldier is killed. The “dead” soldier is taken out of action for several days and must go to a morgue, where paperwork is completed to ensure he gets his proper awards and his body is processed to ensure it gets properly back to the States.
“Unfortunately, this process may be a part of the mission,” said Holly Springs resident Capt. Eric Gray, of the 230th.
‘We Are Here to Help’
Moser had gotten little sleep during the training, like other soldiers in his Company B of the 1st Battalion, 252nd Armor Regiment. For the duration of the exercise, his goal was to ensure that the mock Iraqi town of Jabar Nahr remained coalition friendly.
U.S. forces had promised the leaders of the town that they would bring food, help with security and, most crucially, remove explosives from beneath Shiite and Sunni mosques. Surrounded by a group of townspeople demanding answers and a tent as a temporary mosque, Moser kept his composure, and, with an Iraqi translator, navigated the confusion.
In a meeting with town leaders, Moser apologized for being late and for U.S. tanks having come through the town. But he asked the leaders to make sure that the road was not blocked to soldiers. Moser said a tent wasn’t an option. But he brought lumber and money for a new mosque.
“We meant no disrespect,” Moser said through a translator. “We are here to help.”
At the request of the town’s mayor, Moser and his troops remained overnight. An ordnance team arrived and removed explosives from under the two buildings. And the unorthodox mission’s success was celebrated in unorthodox style, at least by National Guard standards: Clasping arms with town leaders, Moser joined in a brief celebratory dance.
“One, two, three, one, two, three,” the locals shouted and clapped as Moser shuffled his feet in a circle and dipped to the music with the leaders.
The dance was one small part of the military’s larger dance. Moser, his superiors said, executed both well.
“They are constantly negotiating, and how quick they respond and how fast they come through with the promised support is critical to ensuring a town remains on the coalition’s side,” said Maj. John Garland, an observer.
Moser said that he gets e-mail guidance from soldiers already in Iraq. “We are applying those lessons here within 24 hours of a situation,” he said. “The training is real-time. What I just accomplished is likely to have been accomplished in Iraq a short time ago.”
