Back in the 1980s, commercials tended to portray the military as one gigantic trade school. These days, most new recruits know better. With the nation at war, anyone could be sent to the battlefield.
That said, the commercials did have it half right. For soldiers to survive in Iraq or Kosovo or anywhere else, they have to learn constantly.
“You’re always learning,” said Sgt. Terry Basler, a combat-wounded guardsman presently working as part of Emporia’s Army National Guard unit. “From the time you’re in basic training and you’re taught to march and handle weapons, you’re always learning. There’s always room for it.”
And there’s always time to keep it fresh. That’s the challenge of Emporia’s Army Reserve and National Guard units — to help their citizen soldiers keep their edge until it’s time to focus on a mission.
“Here, we don’t train them for a specific mission,” said Sgt. 1st Class Gerald Kehres of Emporia’s Guard unit. “We train them in the individual and collective soldier skills that every soldier is required to know.”
Some basic skills are obvious. Everyone knows about the marching and the shooting and the survival skills that are taught in basic training. But those first nine weeks in the military also include things like the military code of conduct, the Geneva Convention’s rules of war and how the chain of command works.
“The list goes on and on,” said Richard Houk, who retired from the Army Reserve near the end of 2005 after 28 years of military service, but still works for Emporia’s unit as a civilian administrator.
Once out of basic, it’s time to learn your specific job, whether it’s radiologist or truck driver. Then it’s into the unit, with periodic refresher training to keep up your proficiency.
“It’s like anything,” Houk said. “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
The most important skills don’t have anything to do with guns or drill formations, men from both units agreed. They have to do with things such as discipline, leadership and flexibility.
“When you’re in charge, you need to know your job, down to what the individual soldiers do and the lowest guy needs to know what the highest guy is doing,” said Staff Sgt. Terry Rhoads, who oversees a lot of the training for Emporia’s National Guard troops. “That gives the American army an advantage. If something’s going on and I’m the lowest guy, I can make that decision and not have anyone chew my head off because I made a decision.”
For the Guard and the reserves, that flexibility is compounded by the sheer variety of skills that the troops bring in from their civilian life.
“They’re not just soldiers,” Kehres said, discussing his National Guardsmen. “Usually they’re something else 29 days out of the month — doctors, lawyers, factory workers, accountants.”
The rules change a bit once a unit gets deployed. Then it’s time for mission-specific training. A unit going to Kosovo needs to know how to be a souped-up police force, keeping the peace in an area where active fighting has subsided. A unit going to Iraq needs to know convoy tactics, urban warfare and how to deal with the possibility of an improvised explosive device, or IED.
But perhaps the most valuable lesson goes back to what they learned from the sergeants back home: Pay attention.
“You have to learn to be alert, to notice things that are out of place,” Rhoads said. “Are people avoiding an area that they were in yesterday or last week? Attention to detail is critical.”
When you head for the battlefield can make as much difference as where you’re going. Houk remembered that, when action began in Iraq, a number of troops were taught what to do if chemical, biological or nuclear weapons came into play.
“By the second rotation, the emphasis was on identifying IEDs and convoy defense,” he said.
That includes passive defense, the art of avoiding trouble. One example, Houk said, might have a truck driver spotting an enemy aircraft overhead. Rather than running for it and drawing the plane’s attention, a trained Army trucker will usually head for a tree or some other cover that shields the truck from sight.
Even the best training can’t cover everything. Rhoads remembered being told to be careful on the roads in Kosovo — the quality wasn’t good and the terrain was tricky, so go slow to avoid an accident.
“What they didn’t tell us was that the rest of the world would still be going 90 mph,” Rhoads said. “And that’s a bigger situation if you’re on a six-foot mountain road with a 300-foot drop on one side.”
“You’re never really prepared until you get over there,” agreed Basler. “They train you in what to do. They try to prepare you as best they can. But you get right there ... and it’s so different.”
Basler got his wound while at an Army PX in Iraq — a stark reminder of the lesson that, in this kind of warfare, the battlefield is everywhere.
“I was walking out and mortar fire opened up on the camp,” Basler said. “One of them hit as I was walking out of the PX. It busted my bottom tibia on my right leg from the shrapnel.”
Basler soon found himself in a different sort of training, learning to walk again. He’s still in physical therapy, though he moves around much easier than he did.
The soldiers aren’t the only ones who get trained, particularly when it’s time for a unit to return home. Then it’s time for family members to be briefed on what their loved ones have gone through and how to help them adjust to life at home again.
Maybe the lessons never do stop. But in Houk’s eyes, many of the men and women who served overseas have graduated to a new level.
“I have an even deeper respect for our soldiers,” he said. “Just watching the personal hardships they go through and being able to see them go through it with pride.
“You just see the pride glowing off of them.”