At Camp Shelby is where we transitioned from State owned National Guard Soldiers to Active Duty Federal Army Status. At this point the focus was on preparing us to perform as deployed soldiers and validating that we were trained and capable. The Active Duty Army component had lots of personnel there to facilitate and provide training and separate personnel to observe and validate the training. (Kind of a checks and balances system) The first effort was Soldier Readiness Processing (SRP). SRP has a medical portion with many stations and lines at each one, (Medical screening, vital signs, optometry, dental exam, hearing test, family and personal medical history questionnaire, labs for blood draw HIV testing & pap/pregnancy test for females, immunizations (to include Anthrax and smallpox inoculation), Mental Health screening, and finally meet with a case manager for review. Before we even went to Mississippi we conducted Height/weight assessment and Physical Fitness test to evaluate strength endurance and over all fitness. However passing this evaluation is not a requirement for deployment.
Then In a separate building that afternoon, (still part of the SRP) was Finance station (to sort out pay and money matters), Legal assistance (for wills, power of attorneys and family care plans for single parents or dual military couples, any outstanding legal actions or police interests and to check if any domestic violence convictions as this affects citizen’s right and also soldier’s ability to bear arms), Chaplin for Religious support, supply, Veterans Affairs, education benefits, review of personal information and next of kin contact information and training validation.
On a different day we took the Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics (ANAM). It is to get a base line of current Neuropsychological level and the test will be taken again after the deployment to see if there is any change. This is in response to many cases of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) amongst deployed soldiers due to explosions. There was a Urinalysis test screening for illegal drugs, many power point briefings on a variety of topics: Law of Armed Conflict, Law of War, Geneva convention, Rules of Engagement, Escalation of Force, Ethics, Communication and many more. This is base Theater were we got most of the briefings and it is also where I went to church on Sundays.
Other things that kept us busy was new uniform and equipment issuing. But mostly there was lots of training at Camp Shelby. We got training on military vehicles such as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protection (MRAP) vehicle. It is the Army’s answer to the road side bombs that have been the most effective weapon of the insurgency. Part of that training included a roll over simulator that we all got in and were turned upside down and then had to get out. This was done in full body armor and is excellent training because it is no easy task and is good to have experience in doing it just in case we ever have to do it for real. We did Short Range Marksmanship (SRM) which is engaging targets at distances between 25 to 5 meters. This is in addition to the normal marksmanship training where the targets are from 50 to 300 meters away. The SRM is more for an urban conflict environment. There was training with our protective masks (gas masks) and even a machine to validate that they worked properly.
There was Urban Operation training and also base defense training in which we learned about and used Biometric (retinal scanners, finger print) devises that are being used to allow access on the bases in Iraq. There was even a crash course on how to analyze a crater caused by a mortar or rocket after an indirect fire attack. The purpose is to determine the direction the attack came from. Like I said that class was really just a crash course and definitely a task I will leave up to an expert.
As part of the Squadron Headquarters Operations section, I was involved in the planning of our mission and the production of the Operations Order to describe how we would execute the mission once deployed. This entire procedure is known as the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) and was a task that we had to be validated on by the observers.
Once the order was published and individual and collective unit level training was complete, we put it all together as an entire squadron in a culminating exercise called the CTE (Combined training exercise) In this exercise the three Force protection companies and the squadron headquarters company conducted six days of around the clock operations to execute the plan we created. This exercise was to mirror, as best it could, the actual scenarios that we could and would encounter over the next year while deployed. To really test and prepare us, we got just about everything imaginable thrown at us and many were “worst case” type scenarios. (The kind of catastrophic situations that would accompany the end of the world) We prevailed, got certified and blessed off to move to the next step Kuwait. Before we went thought we took a four day pass.
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