Brigade ready to take the next step

It was such a civilian thing to say.

“You guys are pretty much done here, huh?” a visitor to Fort Bliss, Texas, asked a group of Idaho National Guard soldiers a couple of weeks ago.

The soldiers, gathered under a small canopy where they are allowed to smoke, froze with cigarettes in mid-arc.

“We’re not even at the beginning yet,” one said.

No. In a world where they face the potential of firefights and suicide bombers, it is not possible yet to think of a finish line. Such a moment will come sometime in December when the Idaho National Guard’s 116th Brigade Combat Team heads to the far side of the globe to spend a year in Iraq.

The 4,300 citizen-soldiers – plucked out of civilian life in Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Pennsylvania – took a step closer to “the beginning” this week when they completed combat infantry training at Fort Bliss. By Monday or Tuesday the 116th will have moved to Fort Polk in west-central Louisiana where they will spend most of October being tested for their readiness to go overseas.

All the training that individual units performed at Fort Bliss will be graded on a brigade level at Fort Polk – the headquarters and supply companies, the infantry, scouts and artillery acting in concert.

“We will get our mission the night before and prepare how to accomplish it,” Lt. Col. Steve Knutzen, commander of the 116th’s Combat Engineer Battalion, said Thursday. “And then there will be some off-the-cuff things. For instance, they may say a helicopter just went down at this grid location: React.”

The Idaho soldiers will be “in the box,” a section of Fort Polk filled with fake Iraqi villages and civilians and insurgents, for testing from Oct. 10 to Oct.19, said Lt. Col. Gordon Petrie, public affairs officer for the Idaho Guard.

“There was great training here,” Maj. Gene Gussenhoven, operations officer for the combat engineers, said. “I think the soldiers and the leadership learned a great deal of new skills and we are looking forward to applying them.”

The 400-strong combat engineers include nearly 300 Guard soldiers from North Idaho armories. The engineers faced a monumental task to learn combat infantry skills from scratch.

After the “final exams” at Fort Polk, the Idaho soldiers will be allowed 14 days of leave between Oct. 26 and Nov. 20, Gussenhoven said. It is the first significant leave for the soldiers, who have been away from home and family since the beginning of July.

The brigade combat team will gather in late November in preparation for flying to Kuwait and then driving their assembled Humvees and trucks all the way through Iraq to the northern city of Kirkuk.

And so, step-by-step, the beginning becomes real.

Thursday, Knutzen said he and his troops were packing up their gear, planning a thank you party for the staffers at the mess tent and enjoying a little free time.

“It wasn’t too bad today,” Knutzen said from the forward operations base at Dona Ana, N.M. “There’s a little town near here – Chaparral – that has a great mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant. I just ducked out there for lunch. I had steak tacos.”

Knutzen is among the 116th’s officers who have flown to Kirkuk to see the places where the Idaho soldiers will be deployed when they replace the Army’s 25th Infantry Division, based at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.

Kirkuk, a city of nearly 1 million well north of Baghdad, is dominated by Kurds rather than Arabs. Saddam Hussein employed a policy of salting the city with Arabs and chasing away Kurds, a process now in reverse as thousands of refugee Kurds show up to reclaim houses and land.

“Right now, because of upcoming elections, there are a bunch of Kurdish refugees moving back into the area and trying to bring up the percentage of the Kurdish population,” to gain more clout in the upcoming elections, Knutzen said.

Knutzen said the Idaho soldiers – especially the engineers – will likely be involved in construction projects to help locals rebuild schools and sewage and water systems. He said he hopes to overcome the stigma of American soldiers being seen as occupiers who stay behind razor wire.

“We will do a lot of patrolling,” Knutzen said. “A lot of the patrols will be on foot in order to foster more” interaction with civilians, he said. “We will walk through towns and talk to people and talk to kids. About all you can do is treat people with respect and try to improve their living conditions.”

Knutzen said morale remains strong in the 116th, adding he is looking forward to Fort Polk “to move onto the next step of – how did my daughter put it? – our unorthodox educational experience.”

And he already had a plan for his block leave, riding a motorcycle around central Idaho.

“Somewhere in that period I will end up in Elk City to do karaoke at the Reno Club,” Knutzen said. “The main thing I will not have is a schedule.”

What a civilian thing to say.