Military Officer - February 2006 - (Page 56) With role players acting convincingly like agitated civilians on the battlefield, a soldier from 1st Battalion, 120th Field Artillery Regiment searches a mock village for suspected insurgents. later, after which weapons and other equipment must be cleaned. “Tonight we’ll be up all night shooting night fire,” says Boutott, “and we’ve been up since 4 a.m.” That’s not a complaint. Boutott says his best experience was stress-fire training: “We did a long road march to get us all tired out, and then we’d have to shoot at pop-up targets with live rounds. It was fun.” Of course, the targets at Camp Shelby don’t shoot back — but the troops do get to interact with real Iraqis. And that brings us to Trebil. “First Army Command wanted us to replicate, as closely as possible, the environment the soldiers would be injected into on deployment,” explains Shows. “Using information from overseas on how they should be configured and how they should look, we worked together and came up with a mock-up of the types of villages and activities they will run into and cobbled them together as a training aid. We now have five mock vil- lages for them to use.” To add to the realism, a few Iraqi nationals were hired as “townspeople,” along with some locals from Hattiesburg. On the way to Trebil one sweltering day, 2-127th public affairs officer Capt. Benjamin Buchholz, ARNG, a strapping, corn-fed young Wisconsin guardsman, explains what lies ahead. “There are two installations at this location: the village, which is on a crossroads, and the FOB just beyond that. So the two are in close proximity — probably a little closer than you’d want them to be in real life. Sometimes they have FOBs right downtown in Baghdad, but usually you want to have more standoff distance so you can tell if someone’s coming at you or just minding his own business.” Less than a half-mile from the town, Lt. Eric Schack, ARNG, energetic and radiating confidence, assembles a column of Humvees and personnel carriers for the cordonand-search operation and gives the word to advance. The convoy quickly seals off Trebil and begins a houseto-house search for insurgents after negotiating clearance from the town’s leaders. But as soldiers begin the hunt, some of the townspeople become irate, attempting to interfere with the operation. The guardmem- Camp Atterbury, Ind. Support Platform. It was Camp Shelby is a relative the facility’s first activation newcomer to the ranks of since the Korean War. National Guard and ReLike Shelby, Camp Atserve training sites for current overseas conflicts. The terbury served as a training site during World first to be set up, 33,000War II and also included acre Camp Atterbury in a POW internment area. Indiana, was mobilized in February 2002 as an Army From 1943 to 1945, more than 275,000 troops Forces L I T A R Y O F FPower F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 6 Command I C E R 56 MI were processed through the training center, and about 3,000 Italian POWs cooled their heels in the detention area. Today the camp prepares thousands of troops for the global war on terrorism, with more than 20,000 soldiers trained since the camp’s reactivation. New arrivals spend from six to eight weeks training for every pos- sible combat scenario, from how to avoid convoy ambushes to improvised explosive device (IED) recognition. The same kinds of theater-immersion tools are used as at Camp Shelby, including simulated Iraqi villages and townspeople. In May 2005, Camp Atterbury received the Army Chief of Staff’s Combined Logistics Deployment Excellence Award for its troop mobilization efforts.
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