1-14 soldiers test Strykers before deployment
Posted : Monday May 7, 2007 19:47:36 EDT
POHAKULOA TRAINING AREA, Hawaii — Three years ago, the “Golden Dragons” of the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry conducted a near-battalion-sized raid in northern Iraq — swarming 500 soldiers into Amadiyah from Humvees, open-backed trucks and helicopters in search of insurgents.
At a 133,000-acre Hawaii training range recently, the 4,000 members of the Schofield Barracks unit were preparing for an expected return to Iraq — this time protected by a whole lot more armor.
Fifty-nine Stryker vehicles, their high-pitched signature engines announcing their arrival, crossed scrub-lined Saddle Road in waves to attack a mock enemy hidden throughout the Pohakuloa Training Area’s network of old Quonset huts and buildings.
Video:
Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Brigade train in Hawaii
The shift to Stryker technology has bought a new dynamic: Instead of looking out Humvee windows, up to nine infantry soldiers now can watch from inside the 19-ton armored vehicles, seeing on a small monitor what’s being picked up on a topside weapon system’s powerful optics.
“The Strykers are awesome. The Strykers are where it’s at,” said Staff Sgt. Christopher Wessling, 31, from Guam.
Strykers, although far from invincible, are safer than Humvees. Wessling was with the 1-14 Golden Dragons in Iraq in 2004.
“I rode in a Humvee with no doors,” he said. “So from a Humvee with no doors to a Stryker is 10 times better.”
The recent battalion-size deployments to the Big Island by the entire brigade, which has received about 300 of the 328 expected Stryker vehicles, is ratcheting up the realism for what’s ahead.
“The brigade is going to deploy [to Iraq], there’s no doubt about it,” said its commander, Col. Stefan Banach. He expects the deployment to occur later this year.
The Stryker’s armor can stop a 14.5 mm heavy machine gun round, but protection from rocket-propelled grenades has come from 5,000 pounds of additional birdcage-like “slat” armor fitted on the vehicles.
The Strykers in Hawaii haven’t trained at Pohakuloa with the slat armor, and Banach said that’s partly for practical reasons. Driving with the extra girth would make highway driving more dangerous in convoys, he said. The armor would be added in the Middle East.
Banach said the decision not to drive Strykers on public highways with the extra-wide slat armor also involves being good neighbors.
“We understand the environment,” he said. “We’re here in Hawaii. We also understand in balance what our training requirements are, and I think we can attain both objectives.”
Maj. Michael Adelberg, the Stryker brigade’s fire support officer, said the exercise was meant to replicate an attack on a city like Fallujah in late 2004, where the military broadcast its plans and warned civilians to leave the city.
First Lt. Daniel Laakso, 25, who’s with 1st Platoon, Company C, said, “there’s a nervous feeling every time we work up to doing things like this,” and the realism comes with the blank-firing and opposing-force role players.
For some of the soldiers, the only thing new is the Stryker training; they’ve been to Iraq once or twice before. The soldiers know Strykers aren’t invincible, but many believe in the added protection, improved communications and ability to see more of the battlefield from the safety of the vehicles.
On the first day of a new mission last month to Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, two Stryker vehicles were destroyed, one soldier was killed and 12 wounded.
“You can’t stop everything, but I tell you what, these things stop most,” Wessling said. “Better than me running down the street catching” a rocket-propelled grenade with his body armor.
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