Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tennessee) August 19, 2004

CAMP SHELBY, Miss. -- The Tennessee-based 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment will be replacing active Army troops from the 1st Infantry Division in Northern Iraq once the regiment reaches the Middle East sometime later this year, officials said.

Maj. David Willis, acting regimental operations officer for Tennessee's largest National Guard unit, said the many veterans in the 278th should pick up right where the battle-hardened regular Army soldiers leave off.

"We have a lot of people with prior combat experience from Desert Storm going back to the Vietnam era," Maj. Willis said. "We have some seasoned people who can make good decisions on the ground."

John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org, a Web site tracking the military, said the sector under the 1st Infantry Division control includes ousted dictator Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and portions of the Sunni triangle, an area of communities practicing the orthodox Sunni sect of Islam.

"This is an area where Saddam was pretty popular," he said. "It has a lot of his henchman who think that things were pretty good in the old days. The area along the banks of the Tigris River has been pretty nasty."

Mr. Pike said 1st Infantry Division soldiers, who are headquartered in Germany and started arriving in Iraq last February, have been fending off night base attacks and taking causalities from roadside bombs. The soldiers are scattered across the sector guarding facilities, keeping the roads open and tracking down the insurgents, Mr. Pike said.

But Mr. Pike said the fighting in the 1st Infantry Division's sector has been less fierce than the combat U.S. forces have experienced in the Anbar Province of Western Iraq and the southern city of Najaf.

"They are not being sent to the worse part of the country," he said.

Mr. Pike said the danger of the 278th's mission depends on what part of the large sector they will be assigned to. The mountainous northern area, around the town of Kirkuk, has seen less violence, he said.

NEW TACTICS

After more than a year in Iraq, the Army is depending on more National Guard units to take the lead in Middle East operations, according to Maj. Willis. He said the Army examined the recent training evaluations of the 278th before determining it was prepared to handle this assignment.

"We were easier to get combat ready than other units," he said.

At the end of two more months of training in Mississippi, the troops from 278th will go in late September to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., for desert training.

The 278th, preparing for combat for the first time since the Korean War, completed combat exercises at the National Training Center in 2002, Maj. Willis said.

Maj. Willis said about 15 percent of the troops in the 278th have come to the regiment from other units. These newer groups include a radar unit from Maryland, an engineer battalion from Texas, a New Jersey signal company and a platoon of military police from Vermont.

"These are specialties critical to the mission but hard to fill," he said.

Lt. James Elliott, 33, was given a command directive to take a vacant slot with the 278th by transferring from his Chattanooga-based 181st Field Artillery Battalion. The order came just a week after his wife, also in the Guard, returned from nine months in Afghanistan.

"We took a real quick vacation," he said.

Lt. Elliott said the unit must learn new tactics, such as manning checkpoints, just months before applying them in the field.

"I'm in artillery. I shoot rockets," he said. "These other guys shot with tanks, and now we are doing this. The Army has a crawl, walk, run training concept, and we are barely getting out of the crawling phase."

While the unit, which has five front-line squadrons each containing 400 to 700 soldiers, gets combat ready in California, its equipment and vehicles will be shipped to Iraq. The logistics of moving the troops one way and their gear in another direction will keep the leadership of the 278th busy for some time, Maj. Willis said.

"It is a lot of moving pieces, and it makes days go long into the night," he said.

STEEP LEARNING CURVE

As peacekeepers, the 278th troops primarily will use foot patrols and convoys of Humvees to reach out to Iraq citizens, Maj. Willis said. Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which the 278th normally uses, would be too cumbersome for most urban operations, he said.

The 278th, with units in about 30 armories, including Cleveland, Athens and Sweetwater, Tenn., was authorized to take 3,895 soldiers to Iraq, Maj. Willis said. Currently the regiment has about 3,650 soldiers training at Camp Shelby.

Lt. Col. Mick Sharp, commander of a field artillery battalion in charge of the Camp Shelby training, said 278th's training began on the individual level, slowly moved up to drills for squads and platoons and will end in a four-day, company-level exercise. The 278th troops are focusing on duties that military police usually conduct, including vehicle searches and the handling of prisoners.

"The guys have had to learn some nonstandard things," Lt. Col. Sharp said of the 278th. "It is a steep learning curve."

The 278th was operating at about 85 percent capacity when it first was alerted for mobilization last spring, and Maj. Willis said additional soldiers transferred from other Tennessee units to fill in the shortage.

© Copyright 2004, Chattanooga Publishing Company

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