As they stepped off the buses and cleared their weapons before entering Camp Buehring, they weren’t moving at the speed of the running Soldiers who are portrayed in National Guard recruiting commercials. After 26 hours of traveling from Fort Lewis, Wa.; through a taunting stop in Minneapolis, in which the Soldiers were so proverbially close to their families, yet so far away; an hour layover in Shannon Ireland; to the temporary training area of Camp Buehring, Kuwait, the Soldiers were understandably exhausted.
Camp Buehring, with its continuous slabs of cement walls, constant flying dust and ubiquitous port-o-johns, indeed resembles a large construction site where nothing is actually being constructed.
The Soldiers were welcomed with a briefing from a fellow Red Bull who arrived at Camp Buehring before them. Following the brief, in a matter of moments, the grand command and control outlooks of the officers who will be commanding a 16,000 person multi-national force were supplemented by the most basic forms of military accountability. Everyone was broken down into platoons, and then squads, and required to submit their presence and weapon serial numbers to their squad leaders, who, in most cases was no more high-ranking than a sergeant.
After the higher-ranking officers submitted their information to the junior-ranking sergeants, the scramble for duffel bags ensued. Searching with flashlights in the dark, the Soldiers stepped around each other and helped each other as best they could to locate their A duffel bag, their D duffel bag, and their ruck-sacks, which had been shipped by supply trucks and unloaded by a baggage detail before they arrived.
Though the time in Kuwait was past 10 p.m., the Soldiers were still operating on Fort Lewis time, which made it feel like 12 p.m. Nonetheless, the Soldiers filed into their tents filled with three rows of cots, and approximately 40 cots-per-row, and did what they could to get some shut-eye. The shut eye was much needed for what lies ahead of the Soldiers.
In the following days to come, the Soldiers underwent their final training before moving north, into the Southern Sector of Iraq. A favorite training exercise of the Soldiers is always the rifle range.
“It’s awesome training,” said Staff Sgt. Julie Mason, a native of Mankato, Minn., and a combat medic in the Special Troops Battalion. “It’s always a good day when you get to shoot at the range.”
As the Soldiers go through their final training and briefing strides, two things are undeniable to them. The first is that they certainly aren’t in Washington anymore. The second is that this is the next important step in their historic deployment to Iraq.
