Preparing to Answer Rumors of War
By Mike Siroky�Pilot News
CAMP ATTERBURY ��You drive down to Indianapolis, then drive some more.
A little more.
Even in the winter season on the Great Plains, it is an idyllic drive; tiny towns speed past, places with their names tacked onto utility poles. Family diners. Used car lots and the cars have never been much as out of the county.
You enter one of these towns, Edinburgh. The main drag is a windy road past rusty grain silos, more diners, homes with snow shovels resting comfortably against the front porch. But this town is different than all the rest, different than all the rest everywhere.
You are close to the destination of the day: Camp Atterbury, a formidable and famed outpost, the modern-day version of what you imagine forts were when Indians ruled these fields.
But this is no game of Cowboys and Indians. Barbed-wire fences, warning signs, distant rumbles of automatic weapons� fire break the frost of this January morning.
This is where you come to learn to kill.
This is where you learn your final stages of being a warrior.
Maybe, in The World (which is where we civilians live), the concept of war and the rumors of war are just that: Esoteric discussions with your workmates or housemates or teammates in a pickup game at the Y.
This is no game here.
Maybe, in The World, you were a Bourbon cop or a soccer mom or a teacher of mathematics or a mailman or someone good with his hands when the proper tool was available.
Maybe.
But now you all are good with your hands and the proper tools are available, the tools of war.
And your team is your country. You have been called to defend it. You wake up one morning and you are crawling on your belly in the pre-dawn darkness in the snow.
Never mind snow will be the least of your worries where you are going. The idea and concept is to adapt, do it now, do it yesterday, do it when you are asleep.
Because soon you will be in a war. And another guy in another meadow . . . or desert . . . wearing different clothes than your own, will have the idea it is his mission in life to kill you.
And, the thing is, you�ll not only be on his turf, but he will have been trained to truly believe that dying himself while killing you is the straight ticket punched to a glorious afterlife.
Buddy, keep your butt down and your eyes up: You are going to war, soldier. For the United States of America.
Plymouth is here. So is Etna Green. And Bourbon. Grovertown, too and all the other ever-expanding concentric circles that make up the training groups at Camp Atterbury.
They have hit the final stage training for wars from World War II through Desert Storm here, 1942 until now. All the modern machinery of the killing fields, from Korea to 'Nam, Navy Seals to the medics who put people back together again.
This was also once an official Prisoner of War camp in World War II.
They have to be somewhere and this one was here. Italian prisoners, mostly. Some others form central Europe. Artisans among them. They crafted the Little Chapel in the Meadow, all swirly frescoes. Starkly, lonely is this time of training, it stands still, a tribute to another war in another time. It is the only building left standing of the 145 buildings established during World War II. And it is the only one built by the prisoners, in the summer of 1943.
Wonder what they�ll build after this one.
This was also an official "Separation Camp" as men were separated from the service. After World War II, for instance, this was where they got released, more than half a million veterans, and this is where they said good-bye to their comrades in arms and headed back to their hometowns. To The World.
Stars visited here. Bob Hope and his traveling troupe to entertain recovering combat soldiers at the hospital. Joe Louis sparred a few rounds. Native son Dan Quayle trained with his Guard unit here.
Before this latest influx, 793,376 soldiers had already trained in the marshaling area. It is known world wide as a superior training facility, having just received an $8 million grant for the newest war simulator, ready for use by 2004.
The men here now are not here for a simulation.
They march everywhere, from training mission to training mission, roadwork to toughen them, prepare them.
The more than 600 soldiers of the 1st Battalion, of the 152 Infantry of the Indiana National Guard. First organized as a fighting unit in 1846.
This is called �mobilization� as opposed to training.
They have had their shots. Some guys took ill and were furloughed home to wait out a round of stomach flu sweeping the camp. Not out, just resting until they come back again.
They have trained with pistols, rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers. Some look more ready than others.
In the morning mists, the men in the field huddle around burn bins, open fires. There is plenty to burn.
On the drive out to the place where they have marched, a seamless backdrop of wooded forests, gentles slopes, all snow-covered, blurs past the van windows.
You get an impression.
Without any prompting, an intelligence officer, one of the division leaders, Capt. Jason Thornton, says he has seen it too.
�This morning, the guys were huddled around the fires, warming their hands and the snow was lightly falling and it looked as it must have looked in World War II, soldiers getting ready,� he said. �A flashback of history.�
He says it with a smile. There are a lot of smiles. All-American grins. Kodak moments.
A group breaks from the huddled khaki mass and, of course, grins at you.
�Grovertown, Argos, Ply-mouth, Bremen, Bourbon,� they tell you their hometowns.
Sound off: �Shawn Gibbs, Jason Doll, Jesse Hardin, Wil-liam Michaels, Daniel Kribs.�
There are more Marshall County names. The ink in your fourth pen has just frozen.
�Single-digits this morning, 5 degrees,� says Thornton with a smile.
Ben McIntire is a policeman from Bourbon. Was a policeman from Bourbon. �This is all stuff we knew before,� he tells you. �And yet every day is something new. Every mission we learn something. We are becoming a team.
�We know we are going.�
But not where. A savvy escort tells you that the orders are �Believe nothing you hear and half of what you see written down.� She and the information specialists spend most of their time stifling rumors, because, really, no one knows.
�You can leave with orders and they change in the air,� said Capt. Thornton. Not that he would tell you if he knew now, anyway.
Among the things the men must learn is to stay hydrated. The previous major conflict was in The Saudi. The next one may be as well. Not that they�d tell you.
�But you forget to drink,� says Capt. Thornton. He breaks out his canteen for emphasis. �Cool water,� he says. �It�d be hot water in the summer.� Or the desert.
One of the young men shows you he has a drinking straw which runs up his side and comes out near his mouth. The straw is frozen solid. Another shows you he is carrying �two ice packs� on his hip. Canteens, really.
�You get to marching and you work up a sweat and you need to hydrate,� emphasizes the intelligence officer. Obviously, this needs to become something not to be reminded of.
�We are mobilizing citizen soldiers to become One Big Green Army,� he says. And there again is the posteriffic smile.
�This is squad validation,� says McIntire. �We�ll be good to go. Everyone is really motivated to be an American fighting force.�
One of the younger guys says, �We all miss our families, but everyone pitches in to make you feel like this is your family.�
An older soldier picks it up, �The thing I am most proud of is that: Everyone is coming together so quickly.�
Today, they will shoot some more.
�It depends on the task, the mission of the day,� said Thornton. �There are no short days.�
You ride in the toasty van while they march.
You are on the firing range. That movie sound:Whump!
Whump! Whump!
echoes from the valley below.
Capt. Mike Drum-man is in charge of the range. Another great smile. Another group comes toward the burn barrels. One soldier stumbles on the stacked firewood and, for a moment, you think of a live rifle in the hands of a falling man. One of your escorts picks up on the thought, �As long as they have that plug in, in can�t go off,� he says, as the now-embarassed soldier regains his balance and marches on.
Every rifle has what looks like a cork on a string on every barrel. Orange for the regular assault rifles; blue for the machine guns. The machine gunners look a little more confident, for some reason.
�Road work,� picks up Drumman. �Lots of road work. They�ve had their shots, had the personnel files updated. They come here for qualifying.�
And they go there to pitch grenades into the hills, blasting earth as the thousands before them have done. Ear plugs help.
Eye plugs don�t exist.
You know you are witnessing men training for war. When it comes, some of them will not return. Smiles do not cover that. Nor do they intend to.
Elsewhere in camp, life hurries to catch up. They had four marriages on Friday, another scheduled today. Some baptisms, too.
Marriages will help the family get a higher pay rate, more insurance. There is a Protestant chaplain permanently assigned. A Catholic one has just arrived. They want all religions, Muslim and Wiccan, included. No one will be denied his personal prayer in the conflicts ahead.
Doctors are mobilizing, too. There are medics at every mission stop. In fact, the word on base is, to find a specific group, all you need to do is stop by one of the trucks with the big red
cross and ask. They have to be wherever men are training. They know where everyone is at all times.
A real top guy, General Larry Ellis, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Forces command, will be here next Thursday. He will give his blessing in a special ceremony for the departing troops. Wherever they are going. Not that anyone knows.
This all jumbles into your mental notebook as you head out of the gates. You think of it all as you chase the full moon home, northward, away.
The men are still there, still getting ready. The rumbles of war grow. The heartbeat is getting louder. The pulse of it is still taken at Camp Atterbury.
You are back in The World.
Part of you is back there, with those waiting to defend America.
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