For the 218th Brigade Combat Team, the last three weeks in July have been crucial. The soldiers have spent two years preparing for their unit's first full-scale training rotation in southern California. He delivered that message to members of the Texas Army Guard's 49th Armored Division last November at Fort Polk, La., as they were preparing for this year's command and control mission in Bosnia. His trip to the National Training Center in California reinforced his support for giving the Guard tough, realistic training. Batts is a special operations police lieutenant in Charleston.
Units leave here ready to train.
The brigade, supported by nearly 2,000 more citizen-soldiers in the Palmetto State Task Force, has already trained in many ways to pull off what is said to be the largest peacetime deployment of National Guard forces in history. More than 1,800 tanks, armored fighting vehicles and other pieces of equipment were hauled from South Carolina to California on railroad cars and trucks. Seven Apache attack helicopters were flown down from Idaho to beef up the brigade's 373-soldier aviation task force. Still other helicopters were flown from the East Coast on C-5 cargo planes. The vast array of ground vehicles were unloaded in Yermo, Calif., and convoyed across the desert to Fort Irwin for two weeks.