August 16, 2009

Bosses on Guard
Northwest employers find out what its like in the National Guard

By Rodger Nichols
of The Chronicle

      “Yesterday it was 105 degrees here. Find a bottle buddy and each of you make sure the other stays hydrated. That’s the way the Army does it, that’s the way you’re going to do it. Hooah?”
      “Hooah!” we reply, in approved Army fashion. It’s not yet 100 degrees in the desert near Boise, but it feels as if that’s just a matter of time. It’s July 23, and 44 of us are standing in our civvies, paying close attention to an Army National Guard captain.
      That morning we had arrived at Gowen Air National Guard base, next to the Boise Airport, as part of a program called Boss Lift.
      It’s an activity coordinated by ESGR, the Employer Support of Guard and Reserve. ESGR was set up in 1972, when the national draft ended, as a way to smooth relations and resolve conflicts between employers and the obligations of their employees to be away from their jobs at times for Guard and Reserve training.
      By showing employers and community leaders how Guard and Reserve employees train during sessions away from work, Boss Lift organizers aim at creating better understanding of the impact of service and the demands it makes on those employees.
      The program brings employers — and a few reporters —into the complex for a day and a half in late July, to get an inside look at how Guard and Reserve troops are trained.
      This session, there are 185 of us. Some were from the local Boise area, others were flown in from distant parts of Idaho, and a group of us came from Oregon on a C-23 Sherpa transport.
      Over the course of our carefully-organized stay, we’ll have two rides in a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, spend time in a $3 million A-10A Thunderbolt II flight simulator, clamber on an M1-A1 Abrams tank, and have a chance to fire laser-rigged machine guns at a whole wall of computer-generated targets.
      We’ll also get close to Apache attack helicopters, F-15 fighters, armored Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other hardware.
      To handle this many people at this many activities, we’re divided into four groups that move through the different rotations.
      The Oregon group includes four from The Dalles: Dan Manciu, owner of Y-102 radio, Mary Stocks of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce, Jim Wilbern, owner of Don’s Cleaners, and this reporter. The plane picked up more in Pendleton and La Grande, including Bob Davies, the new president of Eastern Oregon University. He becomes my bottle buddy.
      We’re in the desert because we’ve just flown there in the Black Hawk. Our group got the first ride, and we feel lucky.
      We’ve each been issued a pair of earplugs and a sick sack for the trip. Everybody needs the earplugs. No one, thankfully, needs the sick sack.
      Four Black Hawks, each carrying 11 of us, ferry us out to Range Three. The 10-minute ride is exhilarating, a high point of our stay.
      There’s a lot to see. The Orchard Training Area is approximately 138,050 acres, which includes a pop-up target range for tanks that is one of only six in the world.
      On the ground, we step down carefully and are warned about badger holes, which seem to punctuate the flat desert every few feet.
      “They’re leg-breakers,” says one of the soldiers. “Now you understand what it’s like walking around here at night trying to find the porta-potty. That’s what your employees are going through.”
      Though tanks have plenty of room to move in this big stretch of desert, that’s not what we’re here to see. After pairing off as bottle buddies, we string out along a narrow airstrip to watch an unmanned aerial vehicle land itself
      What we see is an RQ-7 Shadow 200. It has a 14-foot wingspan and a 15,000-foot ceiling, but the resolution of the onboard camera is still classified.
It’s not armed. That’s reserved for the larger-sized Predator, which has a 48-foot wingspan and can carry two Hellfire missiles.
      As bottle buddies, Bob Davies and I grab a fresh bottle of cold water from an ice chest.
      Davies, who started his job as Eastern Oregon University president just 24 days before, is pumped about his new post. He’s also enthusiastic about Boss Lift.
      “This is an important trip for Eastern Oregon,” he said. “We have a very long tradition of working with and supporting the Guard,” he says. Currently, 11 students at the EOU campus are in the National Guard. “To be part of this to see what our students are going through I think is very important,” he said.
      There’s an historic connection as well. During World War II, some Army pilots were trained at EOU’s campus in La Grande.
      A similar program was re-introduced in 1991. Unlike regular campus ROTC programs, it’s designed for people who have already spent time as enlisted soldiers, and have a sufficient amount of college work completed. It’s one of only two such programs in the U.S.
      Back at Gowen Field, we enter our second rotation. Half of us crowd into the A-10 simulator room, while the other half head outdoors to a static display of aircraft, including an Apache attack helicopter, an A-10, and an F-15.
      The simulator room has a door with a keypad lock, and the simulator itself is one of the two places where we are not allowed to take pictures. The other is the interior of an Abrams tank.
      The simulator cockpit is surrounded by screens at various angles. When you sit in the cockpit, the screens completely fill your field of vision, and when you push the stick to one side, the horizon tilts to match as you speed by the terrain. It’s a convincing experience.
      “It’s real enough that people watching can get airsick,” says the instructor.
      As the simulator shows a view of Boise from the air, he tells us our targets are a series of radar domes that we are supposed take out with the A-10’s 30mm cannon. For every hit, the computer generates a fireball on the target.
      The trainer’s setup is designed to match as close as possible to the actual performance of real A-10s, which is built to provide close air support of ground forces. If you overfly the targets, you’re soon far past, and have to bring the craft around quickly in a tight turn. It’s a powerful experience to stand the plane on one wing and watch the horizon tilt at right angles. So powerful, that when I line up for my strafing run, I only hit one target. For my single satisfying plume of flame, others are able to light up seven or eight.
      Though the simulator is fun, it has a serious training purpose. As the instructor points out, there’s only one seat in the A-10. “You’ve got to know what you’re doing when you do that first landing,” he says. “If you haven’t learned it by the time you take off, it’s too late, because you have to land it yourself.”
      At dinner, the main speaker is General Craig R McKinley, the first four-star general to head the Guard
      He thanks employers and notes the change in training brought about by the events of 9/11. Guard and Reserve members are now giving up 21 days each summer.
      “This is their summer vacation,” he says. “They stay out in the field the entire three weeks. The weekends and summer camps that many of us remember when we joined the Guard have been replaced by persistent conflict, persistent training, persistent preparation for the next deployment.”
      He advises everyone to be prepared for what Gen. George Casey, the Army Chief of Staff has called a decade or more of persistent conflict.
      “General Casey believes we’ll have 10 to 15 brigade combat teams in a theater for the next decade or more,” McKinley says. “Admiral Mike Mullen [Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] thinks this military will be fully employed in not only the war on terror overseas, but domestic defense and response to natural disasters for a long time. It means we have to stay strong, we have to persevere. We have to gird ourselves and we have to know that what we’ve been through the last eight years is going to continue, and if we’re going to prevent our sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters from having to fight this thing, we have to get it done on our watch. This is our generation’s challenge.”
      He suggests there ought to be tax breaks or other financial incentives to reward employers who continue to provide benefits to employees who have been deployed
      “We’ve been at this eight years.” McKinley added. “There’s never been an all-volunteer force that’s been in conflict this long. Nobody knows when it’s going to end. We don’t really know what the long-term effects are going to be. But this nation has never shirked from its responsibilities, and for the less than one percent of us who get to wear the cloth of our nation, and for those of you who support us, I’d just like to stand up here tonight and say ‘Thanks.’”
      A static display allows us to climb on a Marine M1-A1 Abrams tank.
      There we learn why so much tank training is on simulators. It costs $1,000 each time an Abrams fires a practice shell, and the 1,500 horsepower engine that hauls the 70-ton tank around burns eight tenths of a gallon per minute.
      On the other hand, the engine and transmission, which form a single unit, can be swapped out and completely replaced by a team of skilled mechanics in one hour. Detroit could learn from that.
      After meeting the real tank, we visit several stations to watch computer simulation tank firing drills.
      Then it’s a visit to the HEAT trainer. The military acronym stands for Humvee Egress Assistance Trainer. It’s essentially a Humvee mounted on front-and-aft gimbals. Troops load up, then the unit rotates so the passenger compartment tips on its side or upside down, and troops can learn to get out safely in different conditions.
      As Staff Sgt. Mort tells us, “They look low to the ground with a wide wheelbase, but they are very top heavy. They weigh 12,000 pounds and they have a very high center of gravity.”
      Our final activity takes us to target practice. It’s a big room with a raised platform facing a big blank wall. The platform has 10 nests of sandbags with real machine guns sitting on them: M-4’s and M-16s. The guns have been converted to fire laser bursts instead of bullets, and each has an air hose attached to give us the kick of a real weapon. The entire blank wall becomes a computer-projected urban warfare situation, and we’re told to fire on the bad guys, who duck in and out of cover. Our group of ten has the highest score of the day, no thanks to me. I fail to hit a single enemy, unlike one lady, who accounts for 35 of them.
      A final muster, and we are dispersed to head home.
      That would the end of the story, but for an ironic coda. The plane taking us home stops in Pendleton for refueling, and we have a few minutes to wander over to the National Guard hangar where crews are making major upgrades to a group of Chinook helicopters. Dan Manciu, who piloted a Chinook for a year’s tour in Afghanistan in 2005-2006, and was shot down three times, was one of our Boss Lift group from The Dalles. He looks up and spots the tail number 232. “Hey, that’s my Chinook,’ he says. Of the several he flew in Afghanistan that was the airframe he flew the most.
      When he learns that part of the retrofit is installing some armor on the previously-unarmored craft, he says it’s a long-overdue upgrade.
      “We could have used it over there,” he says.