thedrifter
08-21-07, 03:28 PM
Hanover Guard trains for combat
By JEFF FRANTZ
For The Evening Sun
Evening Sun
Article Launched:08/21/2007 03:05:07 PM EDT
FORT A.P. HILL, Va. -- After chow, the crew on gun two walked up the sloped parking lot to the burnt-out patch of grass, where a 12-foot by 12-foot map had been laid out in white and black engineering tape.
Staff Sgt. Sean Geiter took long pulls from his cigarette. Tall and lean, he wore a black wedding band and a rag knotted around his neck like a scarf.
"This should be pretty simple," he said, a fog of smoke following each word.
His six-man crew stood on the other side of the map in the thick Southern air Aug. 2. It was after 6 p.m., but sweat rolled out from under their helmets and slid through the 12-hour stubble on their cheeks.
"Rohrbaugh's on KP so make sure he knows what's going on," Geiter said.
He pointed at the corner of the map. "We are here."
The gun chief spent the next 10 minutes giving details.
Battery A of the 1st Battalion, 108th Field Artillery -- based in Hanover -- would leave Camp Longstreet at 1230 hours the next day and move to its assigned firing point as part of its annual training.
Turn here. Pass under Route 301 here. They haven't announced radio checkpoints yet, Geiter said, so I'm going to assume they're going to be at every intersection: here, here and here.
The men looked down at Geiter's shoes, planted on a tape road. They nodded their heads, each giving a little bob at the detail that mattered to them.
The instructions seemed so easy.
How could an 11-vehicle convoy, traveling eight miles at 20 mph, on a secured military base, making a total of three turns, driven by trained members of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, possibly get lost?
The night before, Geiter stood through a similar presentation on the movements of the entire battalion. After gun two left the map, called a sand table, the other three guns in the battery took their turns.
The commanders left the heavy things unsaid.
One day, these men might not be moving equipment in the humid heat of Virginia, but in the dry, convection oven of an Iraqi summer or the long, frigid Afghan winter. Instead of scanning the road for turtles, drivers might have to watch for the tripwires to homemade bombs.
Of 16,000 Pennsylvania Army National Guard troops, the men of Battery A are among 3,000 that have not been deployed overseas since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Most of the men in Battery A grew up in the Hanover area, but a few come from the Midwest or New England. Some now live and work in Lancaster or outside Harrisburg.
A handful have served active duty in the Army, Navy or Marines.
The men have heard they will likely be sent to one of the theatres of war, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, in the fall of 2008 or winter of 2009.
This year, they had three weeks of annual training at Fort A.P Hill just south of Fredericksburg, instead of two.
Next year, it will be four weeks.
Aug. 3, 8:28 a.m.
Pvt. Dan Heuer sat on his bottom bunk, talking into his cell phone.
Men shuffled around the 22-year-old, stuffing rucksacks and footlockers with clothes and gear. After three days in the barracks, Battery A was moving out to the field, where it would spend six days firing its four 155 mm howitzer guns.
"Can you help me with a cooler?" Pfc. Brock Markle asked Heuer.
"Right now?" Heuer replied, pointing at his phone.
Markle nodded, saying, "Tell her I said hi."
Then Heuer - a big man with a soft, boyish face, tattoos up his right biceps and a tongue ring -- turned back to his phone, and his wife, Krissy. They met two years earlier at a party hosted by another guardsman.
Their first child was due Aug. 20, the day after Heuer was scheduled to return from training. But Krissy had started having sporadic contractions.
He was fidgety. Once Krissy said the word "contractions," he wanted to do something. Contractions, even sporadic ones, mean the baby is coming soon, right?
If she went into labor, Krissy was going to call the Red Cross, which would then notify the Army that Heuer needed to head home.
As Heuer spoke, he looked at his fingers, then up the ceiling. He smiled. Krissy didn't like the idea of another very pregnant day waiting on customers at Famous Hot Weiner.
"How is she?" Markle asked after Heuer hung up.
"She's fine," Heuer said. "She's got to go to work in half an hour. I told her she's got to make it happen."
Aug. 3, 10:26 a.m.
The trucks carrying gun two's supplies to the field were loaded, and grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns were mounted above the drivers.
Spcs. Ryan Smith, William Rider and Thomas Johnsen took turns checking radios and leaning against their howitzer.
Battery A is a field artillery unit. In theatre, its traditional role would be firing at enemy positions and infrastructure five miles away.
The BOOM excited them. Even in training, there was a rush in sending a 90-pound shell downrange.
If Battery A goes overseas next year, its role will likely be different, and the men know it. You don't fight an insurgency with howitzers. You patrol streets, clear houses, detain possible insurgents.
Earlier in the week, they sat in tented classrooms discussing when it is legal to shoot a small boy pointing an AK-47 at your vehicle.
Because, according to the Army, there are times when these men could, and should, shoot the boy, with intent to kill.
Johnsen had spent the previous two months at Fort Indiantown Gap, working with Army experts and Iraqi exiles, teaching American soldiers the most effective methods of urban fighting. Battery A was scheduled to end its annual training with a few days at the Gap, doing the same drills.
It's hard, Johnsen said. You have to think fast, and even then the right answer isn't always obvious.
He's seen guys lose their cool at Americans pretending to be Iraqis. The first time through the simulations, Johnsen said, almost every unit does something wrong.
In real life, Johnsen said, that's how people get killed.
Aug. 3, 1:27 p.m.
The crew hoisted gun two off the truck that carried it to the firing point, a cut-down meadow the size of about four football fields.
Geiter's phone rang.
"It better be someone in the military," he said, before answering.
"I don't mean to cut you off," Geiter said, "but I'm in the middle of unloading my howitzer."
After spreading the gun's legs, they used hydraulic jacks to lift the tires off the ground for added stability.
Rider checked the guns' alignment.
He joined the Guard in 2001 and was at basic training at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, on Sept. 11. He was working in the kitchen and listening to the radio when the news cut in.
"It was weird because if you ever stop during basic training, the drill sergeants are all over you," Rider said. "But the whole chow hall came to a standstill."
When he returned home, the South Western High School graduate volunteered to help guard Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station, where he was assigned until the start of the Iraq war.
His original enlistment ended last year.
The 24-year-old re-upped because the men in Battery A are his friends. He wouldn't feel comfortable, he said, if he was sitting at home drinking a beer and they were on a military transport to Baghdad.
Rider was missing his first anniversary and his wife's birthday because of annual training. They rarely talk about Iraq, Rider said.
"It's not that you want to go to war, but you want to do your job in a real-life scenario," Rider said. "It's almost like the man thing, where you want to know that you were capable of doing it, and you don't have that opportunity unless there is a conflict.
"You can say to yourself I'm the best guy here, but you just never know."
Aug. 3, 2:40 p.m.
With the four howitzers unloaded, Battery A huddled in the shade behind the tree line.
For the first time in nine hours, the men stopped moving.
Lt. Todd Hinkle, the battery commander, started his after-action review. He wanted to know how the convoy could have been better. He expected every driver to have an answer.
In civilian life, Hinkle works as a contractor. He moves in the same social circles as his men. He listens to the same bands.
When in command, he makes his men follow Army protocol but asks how they could be more efficient.
He wants things done.
Spc. Nicholas Sauble spoke up.
He rode in the gunner's spot during the convoy, standing to man a .50-caliber machine gun. Several times, he had to duck into the cab to avoid low tree limbs or power lines.
His LBV, load bearing vest, got caught on the machine gun. If that happened in combat, the LBV -- which looks like a mesh fishing vest where soldiers keep tools like flashlights -- could become a problem.
Would it be possible, Sauble asked, for gunners to wear their interceptor body armor, the thick pad meant to stop bullets, but not their LBV during convoys?
Hinkle said he would recommend it up the chain of command.
Sauble, 27, joined the Guard in 2005. He was in the Marines from 1998 until fall 2002 and served overseas, including at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"I think most of the guys in the unit want to get deployed," Sauble said. "If they didn't get deployed, a lot of the guys in the unit would feel like they got cheated, I guess you could say.
"It would be like going to Hersheypark and not riding the roller coasters. You know what I mean?"
Aug. 3, 3:10 p.m.
"Rohrbaugh, your job is to guard the collimator," Sgt. Craig Swanecamp barked in a thick Massachusetts accent.
The crew on gun two was hanging its shade tent over the truck and howitzer, and if anyone nudged the collimator, the guns' primary aiming device, the crew would have start all over again.
"If somebody tells you to move, you just say, 'No, I'm guarding the collimator.'"
Spc. Neil Rohrbaugh, 29, took his post under the sun. He wore thick glasses and had the small belly of expired youth. During the week, he builds tanks for BAE Systems.
"This heat is nothing like you get overseas," he said. "But the humidity is just killing me."
Rohrbaugh joined Battery A in January, but he's spent his adult life in the military: Five years in the Marines, followed by six in the Army Reserves.
When the Americans invaded Iraq, he was there, working MP duty. He arrived in Baqubah, a town in the Sunni Triangle, in April 2003.
He showered with baby wipes for six weeks because the men were rationed two 20-oz. bottles of water a day.
Conditions were raw.
One day, his convoy was ambushed in a one-way street during a routine patrol.
Rohrbaugh was standing in the gunner's position, firing a mounted M249 light machine gun, when the weapon jammed, leaving him with only his less powerful M16 rifle.
They made it out of the street, but command ordered the convoy to turn around and go back, returning fire. Rohrbaugh's driver steered with one hand and shot his 9 mm pistol with the other.
They reached the end of the street and command said go through again and take out any shooters who might be left.
He left Iraq in December 2003, as did every other member of his unit. He came home with his Combat Action Badge, which he wore over his heart at A.P. Hill.
Rohrbaugh has heard a lot of men in Battery A say they'd like to use their training in a combat setting.
"If they're saying they want to go over," he said, trailing off. He brought his hands to his head. He squinted behind his glasses as he wondered how much to reveal.
"I wanted to go over at first, too."
Another pause.
"Now, I could go either way."
Aug. 3, 9:34 p.m.
Pvt. Heuer slumped in a chair, talking on his cell phone in the dark.
Outside his gun one tent, Battery A finished breaking down ammunition for the live fire drills.
"We just got a little spritz of rain," he told his wife. "Just a little. Other than that, it's been hot. But we've got this nice tent."
Krissy was still waiting.
When they're home, they don't talk about the war. Krissy doesn't even like to think about it.
Heuer, like many of the men in Battery A, shrug off the question of combat. It's part of his job. If he has to go, he has to go.
Markle came in from unloading the shells. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.
"So what's his first onesie going to be?" he asked.
"Probably Guns N' Roses," Heuer said. "He's going to look sweet when he's got his Sweet Child of Mine onesie on with his Appetite for Destruction bib."
Aug. 4, 7:45 a.m.
Heuer, Markle and Spc. Mike Gjerde finished a breakfast of eggs, damp toast and corned beef hash as Fergie played on Markle's XM radio.
Staff Sgt. Dennis Zinn, the gun one chief, walked over.
"My suggestion - and by suggestion, I mean do it - is to get your fighting positions now before the sun comes up and burns your ass," Zinn said.
Gun one was next to the access road. Portable toilets were on the other side of the gate. In Iraq, it might be car bombers.
In that case, the crew would be responsible for monitoring the road and tree line with machine guns at all times.
In previous years, Battery A would mark out its positions in tape to preserve the training grounds.
"Are we digging foxholes?" Gjerde asked.
"Not full foxholes, but you know, scratch a couple inches in the dirt," Zinn said.
"What about engineering tape?" Gjerde said, drawing a box in the air with his fingers.
"Does engineering tape stop bullets?" Zinn asked.
"That's what we always did in the past," Gjerde replied.
"Things are different now," Zinn said. "Trust me."
Aug. 4, 2:12 p.m.
Communication problems cost gun two the morning.
The GDU, the computer mounted on the howitzer that allows command to dictate target positions to guns in the field, wasn't working.
Geiter and Swanecamp tried changing wires, changing lines, changing parts and cursing as the rest of the crew re-arranged the tent to make room for the ammunition trucks.
Frustration grew when the batteries on their hand-held radios stopped working.
Early in the afternoon, the men lounged in collapsible chairs and started guessing.
They wouldn't be shooting live fire, they said to one another. Not today. Dry fire practice maybe, but no actual shelling.
They ate lunch from their sealed plastic MRE packages and made fun of one another.
Smith, a senior at Shippensburg University, rolled off lines from "Saturday Night Live."
"'Who wins in a hurricane verses Ditka?' and they all go, 'Ditka.' ," Smith said. "'No, no. The hurricane's name is Ditka.'"
They broke up laughing, like they had never heard it before.
A high tone came across the radio, followed by a voice: "Gun two, fire mission."
They jumped from their chairs and ran into position.
"Fire mission!"
A dry fire mission. A pantomime of what a field artillery unit has done in a war zone for more than a century. It's the type of assignment that Battery A might never be asked to do, even if it does see combat.
This was the training the men talked about, the skill set they want to use.
Swanecamp and Rider adjusted the howitzer's trajectory and aim. Geiter called out for a pretend shell and powder. Smith, now scrambling, rammed the invisible shell into the breach.
After a check of the numbers, Geiter gave permission to fire.
Smith pulled the cord, and the primer made a tiny click, like a gas stove struggling to light.
"BOOM," they yelled.
The imaginary projectile sailed off into the distance.
CHAIN OF COMMAND:
Battery A - a Hanover-based unit of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard - is a small part of the 28th Infantry Division.
The chain of command follows:
28th Infantry Division
56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team
1st Battalion, 108th Field Artillery
Battery A (Lt. Todd Hinkle)
Platoon 1
Gun 1 (Staff Sgt. Dennis Zinn)
Gun 2 (Staff Sgt. Sean Geiter)
Platoon 2
Gun 3 (Staff Sgt. Dustin Wolfgang)
Gun 4 (Staff Sgt. Ronald Stuber)
THE HISTORY:
The 1st Battalion 108th Field Artillery - including Hanover-based Battery A - traces its history to 1840.
The unit began as an infantry regiment in the Pennsylvania militia, which became the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.
In 1917, the unit was reorganized as an artillery battalion and assigned to the Army's 28th Division.
The battalion served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and both World Wars.
In 2004, the battalion became part of the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a quick-striking unit created by the Army to be ready for action within 96 hours of receiving orders.
A year later, the battalion was mobilized to aid the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts in Louisiana.
Source: Pennsylvania Army National Guard
Ellie
By JEFF FRANTZ
For The Evening Sun
Evening Sun
Article Launched:08/21/2007 03:05:07 PM EDT
FORT A.P. HILL, Va. -- After chow, the crew on gun two walked up the sloped parking lot to the burnt-out patch of grass, where a 12-foot by 12-foot map had been laid out in white and black engineering tape.
Staff Sgt. Sean Geiter took long pulls from his cigarette. Tall and lean, he wore a black wedding band and a rag knotted around his neck like a scarf.
"This should be pretty simple," he said, a fog of smoke following each word.
His six-man crew stood on the other side of the map in the thick Southern air Aug. 2. It was after 6 p.m., but sweat rolled out from under their helmets and slid through the 12-hour stubble on their cheeks.
"Rohrbaugh's on KP so make sure he knows what's going on," Geiter said.
He pointed at the corner of the map. "We are here."
The gun chief spent the next 10 minutes giving details.
Battery A of the 1st Battalion, 108th Field Artillery -- based in Hanover -- would leave Camp Longstreet at 1230 hours the next day and move to its assigned firing point as part of its annual training.
Turn here. Pass under Route 301 here. They haven't announced radio checkpoints yet, Geiter said, so I'm going to assume they're going to be at every intersection: here, here and here.
The men looked down at Geiter's shoes, planted on a tape road. They nodded their heads, each giving a little bob at the detail that mattered to them.
The instructions seemed so easy.
How could an 11-vehicle convoy, traveling eight miles at 20 mph, on a secured military base, making a total of three turns, driven by trained members of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, possibly get lost?
The night before, Geiter stood through a similar presentation on the movements of the entire battalion. After gun two left the map, called a sand table, the other three guns in the battery took their turns.
The commanders left the heavy things unsaid.
One day, these men might not be moving equipment in the humid heat of Virginia, but in the dry, convection oven of an Iraqi summer or the long, frigid Afghan winter. Instead of scanning the road for turtles, drivers might have to watch for the tripwires to homemade bombs.
Of 16,000 Pennsylvania Army National Guard troops, the men of Battery A are among 3,000 that have not been deployed overseas since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Most of the men in Battery A grew up in the Hanover area, but a few come from the Midwest or New England. Some now live and work in Lancaster or outside Harrisburg.
A handful have served active duty in the Army, Navy or Marines.
The men have heard they will likely be sent to one of the theatres of war, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, in the fall of 2008 or winter of 2009.
This year, they had three weeks of annual training at Fort A.P Hill just south of Fredericksburg, instead of two.
Next year, it will be four weeks.
Aug. 3, 8:28 a.m.
Pvt. Dan Heuer sat on his bottom bunk, talking into his cell phone.
Men shuffled around the 22-year-old, stuffing rucksacks and footlockers with clothes and gear. After three days in the barracks, Battery A was moving out to the field, where it would spend six days firing its four 155 mm howitzer guns.
"Can you help me with a cooler?" Pfc. Brock Markle asked Heuer.
"Right now?" Heuer replied, pointing at his phone.
Markle nodded, saying, "Tell her I said hi."
Then Heuer - a big man with a soft, boyish face, tattoos up his right biceps and a tongue ring -- turned back to his phone, and his wife, Krissy. They met two years earlier at a party hosted by another guardsman.
Their first child was due Aug. 20, the day after Heuer was scheduled to return from training. But Krissy had started having sporadic contractions.
He was fidgety. Once Krissy said the word "contractions," he wanted to do something. Contractions, even sporadic ones, mean the baby is coming soon, right?
If she went into labor, Krissy was going to call the Red Cross, which would then notify the Army that Heuer needed to head home.
As Heuer spoke, he looked at his fingers, then up the ceiling. He smiled. Krissy didn't like the idea of another very pregnant day waiting on customers at Famous Hot Weiner.
"How is she?" Markle asked after Heuer hung up.
"She's fine," Heuer said. "She's got to go to work in half an hour. I told her she's got to make it happen."
Aug. 3, 10:26 a.m.
The trucks carrying gun two's supplies to the field were loaded, and grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns were mounted above the drivers.
Spcs. Ryan Smith, William Rider and Thomas Johnsen took turns checking radios and leaning against their howitzer.
Battery A is a field artillery unit. In theatre, its traditional role would be firing at enemy positions and infrastructure five miles away.
The BOOM excited them. Even in training, there was a rush in sending a 90-pound shell downrange.
If Battery A goes overseas next year, its role will likely be different, and the men know it. You don't fight an insurgency with howitzers. You patrol streets, clear houses, detain possible insurgents.
Earlier in the week, they sat in tented classrooms discussing when it is legal to shoot a small boy pointing an AK-47 at your vehicle.
Because, according to the Army, there are times when these men could, and should, shoot the boy, with intent to kill.
Johnsen had spent the previous two months at Fort Indiantown Gap, working with Army experts and Iraqi exiles, teaching American soldiers the most effective methods of urban fighting. Battery A was scheduled to end its annual training with a few days at the Gap, doing the same drills.
It's hard, Johnsen said. You have to think fast, and even then the right answer isn't always obvious.
He's seen guys lose their cool at Americans pretending to be Iraqis. The first time through the simulations, Johnsen said, almost every unit does something wrong.
In real life, Johnsen said, that's how people get killed.
Aug. 3, 1:27 p.m.
The crew hoisted gun two off the truck that carried it to the firing point, a cut-down meadow the size of about four football fields.
Geiter's phone rang.
"It better be someone in the military," he said, before answering.
"I don't mean to cut you off," Geiter said, "but I'm in the middle of unloading my howitzer."
After spreading the gun's legs, they used hydraulic jacks to lift the tires off the ground for added stability.
Rider checked the guns' alignment.
He joined the Guard in 2001 and was at basic training at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, on Sept. 11. He was working in the kitchen and listening to the radio when the news cut in.
"It was weird because if you ever stop during basic training, the drill sergeants are all over you," Rider said. "But the whole chow hall came to a standstill."
When he returned home, the South Western High School graduate volunteered to help guard Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station, where he was assigned until the start of the Iraq war.
His original enlistment ended last year.
The 24-year-old re-upped because the men in Battery A are his friends. He wouldn't feel comfortable, he said, if he was sitting at home drinking a beer and they were on a military transport to Baghdad.
Rider was missing his first anniversary and his wife's birthday because of annual training. They rarely talk about Iraq, Rider said.
"It's not that you want to go to war, but you want to do your job in a real-life scenario," Rider said. "It's almost like the man thing, where you want to know that you were capable of doing it, and you don't have that opportunity unless there is a conflict.
"You can say to yourself I'm the best guy here, but you just never know."
Aug. 3, 2:40 p.m.
With the four howitzers unloaded, Battery A huddled in the shade behind the tree line.
For the first time in nine hours, the men stopped moving.
Lt. Todd Hinkle, the battery commander, started his after-action review. He wanted to know how the convoy could have been better. He expected every driver to have an answer.
In civilian life, Hinkle works as a contractor. He moves in the same social circles as his men. He listens to the same bands.
When in command, he makes his men follow Army protocol but asks how they could be more efficient.
He wants things done.
Spc. Nicholas Sauble spoke up.
He rode in the gunner's spot during the convoy, standing to man a .50-caliber machine gun. Several times, he had to duck into the cab to avoid low tree limbs or power lines.
His LBV, load bearing vest, got caught on the machine gun. If that happened in combat, the LBV -- which looks like a mesh fishing vest where soldiers keep tools like flashlights -- could become a problem.
Would it be possible, Sauble asked, for gunners to wear their interceptor body armor, the thick pad meant to stop bullets, but not their LBV during convoys?
Hinkle said he would recommend it up the chain of command.
Sauble, 27, joined the Guard in 2005. He was in the Marines from 1998 until fall 2002 and served overseas, including at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"I think most of the guys in the unit want to get deployed," Sauble said. "If they didn't get deployed, a lot of the guys in the unit would feel like they got cheated, I guess you could say.
"It would be like going to Hersheypark and not riding the roller coasters. You know what I mean?"
Aug. 3, 3:10 p.m.
"Rohrbaugh, your job is to guard the collimator," Sgt. Craig Swanecamp barked in a thick Massachusetts accent.
The crew on gun two was hanging its shade tent over the truck and howitzer, and if anyone nudged the collimator, the guns' primary aiming device, the crew would have start all over again.
"If somebody tells you to move, you just say, 'No, I'm guarding the collimator.'"
Spc. Neil Rohrbaugh, 29, took his post under the sun. He wore thick glasses and had the small belly of expired youth. During the week, he builds tanks for BAE Systems.
"This heat is nothing like you get overseas," he said. "But the humidity is just killing me."
Rohrbaugh joined Battery A in January, but he's spent his adult life in the military: Five years in the Marines, followed by six in the Army Reserves.
When the Americans invaded Iraq, he was there, working MP duty. He arrived in Baqubah, a town in the Sunni Triangle, in April 2003.
He showered with baby wipes for six weeks because the men were rationed two 20-oz. bottles of water a day.
Conditions were raw.
One day, his convoy was ambushed in a one-way street during a routine patrol.
Rohrbaugh was standing in the gunner's position, firing a mounted M249 light machine gun, when the weapon jammed, leaving him with only his less powerful M16 rifle.
They made it out of the street, but command ordered the convoy to turn around and go back, returning fire. Rohrbaugh's driver steered with one hand and shot his 9 mm pistol with the other.
They reached the end of the street and command said go through again and take out any shooters who might be left.
He left Iraq in December 2003, as did every other member of his unit. He came home with his Combat Action Badge, which he wore over his heart at A.P. Hill.
Rohrbaugh has heard a lot of men in Battery A say they'd like to use their training in a combat setting.
"If they're saying they want to go over," he said, trailing off. He brought his hands to his head. He squinted behind his glasses as he wondered how much to reveal.
"I wanted to go over at first, too."
Another pause.
"Now, I could go either way."
Aug. 3, 9:34 p.m.
Pvt. Heuer slumped in a chair, talking on his cell phone in the dark.
Outside his gun one tent, Battery A finished breaking down ammunition for the live fire drills.
"We just got a little spritz of rain," he told his wife. "Just a little. Other than that, it's been hot. But we've got this nice tent."
Krissy was still waiting.
When they're home, they don't talk about the war. Krissy doesn't even like to think about it.
Heuer, like many of the men in Battery A, shrug off the question of combat. It's part of his job. If he has to go, he has to go.
Markle came in from unloading the shells. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.
"So what's his first onesie going to be?" he asked.
"Probably Guns N' Roses," Heuer said. "He's going to look sweet when he's got his Sweet Child of Mine onesie on with his Appetite for Destruction bib."
Aug. 4, 7:45 a.m.
Heuer, Markle and Spc. Mike Gjerde finished a breakfast of eggs, damp toast and corned beef hash as Fergie played on Markle's XM radio.
Staff Sgt. Dennis Zinn, the gun one chief, walked over.
"My suggestion - and by suggestion, I mean do it - is to get your fighting positions now before the sun comes up and burns your ass," Zinn said.
Gun one was next to the access road. Portable toilets were on the other side of the gate. In Iraq, it might be car bombers.
In that case, the crew would be responsible for monitoring the road and tree line with machine guns at all times.
In previous years, Battery A would mark out its positions in tape to preserve the training grounds.
"Are we digging foxholes?" Gjerde asked.
"Not full foxholes, but you know, scratch a couple inches in the dirt," Zinn said.
"What about engineering tape?" Gjerde said, drawing a box in the air with his fingers.
"Does engineering tape stop bullets?" Zinn asked.
"That's what we always did in the past," Gjerde replied.
"Things are different now," Zinn said. "Trust me."
Aug. 4, 2:12 p.m.
Communication problems cost gun two the morning.
The GDU, the computer mounted on the howitzer that allows command to dictate target positions to guns in the field, wasn't working.
Geiter and Swanecamp tried changing wires, changing lines, changing parts and cursing as the rest of the crew re-arranged the tent to make room for the ammunition trucks.
Frustration grew when the batteries on their hand-held radios stopped working.
Early in the afternoon, the men lounged in collapsible chairs and started guessing.
They wouldn't be shooting live fire, they said to one another. Not today. Dry fire practice maybe, but no actual shelling.
They ate lunch from their sealed plastic MRE packages and made fun of one another.
Smith, a senior at Shippensburg University, rolled off lines from "Saturday Night Live."
"'Who wins in a hurricane verses Ditka?' and they all go, 'Ditka.' ," Smith said. "'No, no. The hurricane's name is Ditka.'"
They broke up laughing, like they had never heard it before.
A high tone came across the radio, followed by a voice: "Gun two, fire mission."
They jumped from their chairs and ran into position.
"Fire mission!"
A dry fire mission. A pantomime of what a field artillery unit has done in a war zone for more than a century. It's the type of assignment that Battery A might never be asked to do, even if it does see combat.
This was the training the men talked about, the skill set they want to use.
Swanecamp and Rider adjusted the howitzer's trajectory and aim. Geiter called out for a pretend shell and powder. Smith, now scrambling, rammed the invisible shell into the breach.
After a check of the numbers, Geiter gave permission to fire.
Smith pulled the cord, and the primer made a tiny click, like a gas stove struggling to light.
"BOOM," they yelled.
The imaginary projectile sailed off into the distance.
CHAIN OF COMMAND:
Battery A - a Hanover-based unit of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard - is a small part of the 28th Infantry Division.
The chain of command follows:
28th Infantry Division
56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team
1st Battalion, 108th Field Artillery
Battery A (Lt. Todd Hinkle)
Platoon 1
Gun 1 (Staff Sgt. Dennis Zinn)
Gun 2 (Staff Sgt. Sean Geiter)
Platoon 2
Gun 3 (Staff Sgt. Dustin Wolfgang)
Gun 4 (Staff Sgt. Ronald Stuber)
THE HISTORY:
The 1st Battalion 108th Field Artillery - including Hanover-based Battery A - traces its history to 1840.
The unit began as an infantry regiment in the Pennsylvania militia, which became the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.
In 1917, the unit was reorganized as an artillery battalion and assigned to the Army's 28th Division.
The battalion served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and both World Wars.
In 2004, the battalion became part of the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a quick-striking unit created by the Army to be ready for action within 96 hours of receiving orders.
A year later, the battalion was mobilized to aid the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts in Louisiana.
Source: Pennsylvania Army National Guard
Ellie