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Issue Date: June 07, 2004

Going grunt
To relieve busy units, artillery battalion trains for infantry duty

By C. Mark Brinkley
Times staff writer

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. ? At first it sounds like bad gouge, a rumor the general?s driver must?ve made up to get a laugh.
A provisional infantry battalion? An entire battalion? Artillerymen from the 10th Marine Regiment mothballing the big guns for a whole year and heading off to relieve an infantry battalion in Iraq?

Screen and slate Archibald Henderson?s ghost for battalion commander and you wouldn?t make the announcement any odder. At first glance, it?s like Dale Earnhardt Jr. borrowing Lance Armstrong?s bike to race the Tour de France.

It seems strange, sure. But the Marines don?t care. The demand for artillery is low and the demand for infantry is high. So it makes sense to plug artillerymen into a different role.

?Don?t be beguiled by those howitzers out there,? Col. Thomas J. Cariker, 10th Marines regimental commander, said in a May 10 interview. ?The skills are there. And they aren?t as far afield as people might think.?

The Marines in the provisional battalion ? built around the regiment?s 2nd Battalion, with augmentees from 1/10 and 3/10 ? seem eager to prove it. Re-enlistments haven?t fallen off, despite the new mission and pending deployment, and many have committed to extending their end-of-active-service dates just to be involved.

?The numbers were impressive,? Cariker said. ?They want to go.?

Every Marine is, after all, a rifleman, right?

Grunt work

They?re not the first artillerymen to step into a provisional infantry role.

A Marine artillery battery secured an airfield in Grenada more than 20 years ago. Another worked in Somalia without the big guns. A third guarded the airport in Liberia.

Most recently, cannon-cockers attached to the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit left all but two of their M198 howitzers on ship when they landed in Afghanistan in mid-March. Most of the Marines with Golf Battery, 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines, are pulling infantry duty during the MEU?s expected 90 days of combat operations there.

But these are short-term missions using company-sized elements for low-threat security operations. This new plan calls for 10th Marines? provisional rifle battalion to do the security and stability operations ? patrolling, vehicle checkpoint control, house and vehicle searches, prisoner detaining and the like ? that have taken center stage in recent months.

?These are Marines that are trained to be riflemen,? said Maj. Gen. Stephen Johnson, commanding general of 2nd Marine Division. ?They?ve been to Marine Combat Training and they?ve been to their post-MOS schools. They?ll get a mission that?s very similar to what infantry battalions are doing in Iraq.?

They?re preparing for it in exactly the same way, conducting infantry-style training at the company and battalion level that began in early January. One recent exercise brought the entire battalion together for the first time for SASO training at the urban-training range here.

It doesn?t resemble Iraq ? the terrain, at least ? but the Marines are making the best of it. Crowds of Marine role players wander the streets in robes and headgear, talking to the Marines at checkpoints in broken English, begging for food. Vehicles drive by honking, as more actors hang out of the windows, flashing the thumbs-up sign and chanting ?Bush, Bush, Bush.?

Interpreters act as go-betweens for platoon leaders and crowd members. Evaluators wander around with their clipboards, taking notes. The role players do not break character, and the Marines do not treat them like actors. They may know the streets of the training range inside and out, but the artillerymen are taking it as seriously as is possible.

?I?ve tried to get my Marines into a SASO mind-set,? said 2nd Lt. Ryan Leduc, 28, a platoon commander for Fox Company, 2/10, from Pana, Ill. ?We?re there to help. And they?re particularly motivated about it, because it?s something that they?re going to be doing soon.?

So they?re carrying gas masks and using hand-held radios, setting up machine-gun positions and conducting radio operations. Convoying and patrolling. Securing perimeters. Searching and seizing.

?We gotta watch our backs ? we don?t know what to expect,? said Pfc. Joshua Shultz, 19, a motor transport operator from Philo, Ohio, just as an explosion echoed in the distance, possibly from another training area or possibly part of the exercise. ?Like that. It could be headed toward us, we don?t know.?

From here, the group goes to the former March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif., in June, where a steady stream of Marine units have rotated through the old base-housing areas for pre-Iraq training. At the air base, everything is turned up a notch; the role players are more experienced and the Marines face a tougher scenario.

Regiment officials admit that the average artillery battery has little experience with such operations, but most don?t see it as a problem.

?My answer to that is ?so what??.? Cariker said, pointing out that even the grunts go through the training at March before they deploy. ?What?s the difference between a firing battery doing it and a grunt battalion doing it??

Artillery battalions are comfortable with convoy operations, for instance. And they go to the rifle range like everyone else, he said.

?It?s the same song, different words,? Cariker said. ?I don?t think going from our mission to SASO is that big a deal.?

He said the SASO mission is something for which most units ? infantry or otherwise ? don?t typically train. It?s more like law-enforcement work, one that requires extra training to beef up the basic infantry skills every Marine should possess.

?It?s a whole different mission for them,? Cariker said of the infantry units headed to similar roles overseas. ?They?ve actually had to train away from that ?close-with-and-destroy mission.? Neither of us are as far afield as it appears at first blush.?

Adjusting fire

Some things are different, though, such as the way the units are organized. The new role has meant restructuring the artillery battalion to make it more closely resemble an infantry battalion.

Cariker said adding batteries from other battalions beefed up 2/10 from 600 to about 850 Marines. Those units then were restructured from gun sections into fire teams and platoons to mirror how their grunt counterparts operate.

Such a change can be tough for artillerymen to master.

?At first it is,? said Pfc. Allen Hart, 19, an artilleryman from Brooklyn, N.Y., assigned to Fox Company. ?Now, you?re running in the urban environment, seeking cover. I was trying to master my [military occupational specialty], now we?re pulling away. In the future, we might be doing something else.?

Others who have been in the adopted infantry role before agree. For Capt. Chris Whitley, an artillery officer whose unit was pressed into service as a provisional rifle company in late 2001 when the 15th MEU landed in Afghanistan, the difficulty didn?t lie in switching from the skills of a cannon cocker to those of a rifle-wielding grunt.

The Marines all knew how to do the infantry jobs they needed to do and had the weapons skills to defend themselves if things got hot.

?The main problem was the task organization,? said Whitley, now an instructor with the Infantry Officer Course at Quantico, Va. ?You?d have a sergeant who was in charge of a [howitzer], let?s say, and that was his world. Then we?d put him in charge of a .50-caliber [machine gun] team and he?d have to figure out how to deploy his men.?

Whitley?s battery commander came up with an ad hoc template the men could use to organize into infantry units. The Marines had to do their planning on the fly, but in the end it worked out well, he said.

For an artillery battery, not firing any rounds or doing any howitzer training for a year or more means serious schooling on the back end, however.

?It?s a decision we made,? said Johnson, the division commander. ?He doesn?t lose the fundamentals, but he loses the expertise. But we don?t think it will take very long to get them back.?

The solution will be to send the firing units to the in-house artillery training school when they return from Iraq, so they can focus on nothing but the artillery skills that atrophied while they were away.

?This is something that has obviously concerned me,? Cariker said. ?I?m a lot more confident than some people in the fact that these skills will come back pretty quickly.?

At least one top leader at Marine Corps headquarters shares Cariker?s confidence. Lt. Gen. Jan Huly, the deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, expects that the unit?s artillery skills will suffer, but not to a point where refresher training won?t do the trick.

?Let?s face it, they?re not going to get better at it certainly,? Huly said. ?But will their skills degrade enough that they?ll no longer be effective cannoneers? I don?t think so. Do you forget how to ride a bike if you stop riding??

Filling a void

At a time when the need for boots on the ground in Iraq already has the Corps providing 25,000 Marines for occupation duty to relieve pressure on the Army, many see the plan as simple math.

?If there are no targets to shoot at ? to have an artillery battery or an artillery battalion sit around on the trails of their howitzers and wait for someone to find a target for them to shoot at and shoot at something once a month, that?s silly,? said retired Maj. Gen. Leslie Palm, a longtime artillery officer who now heads the Marine Corps Association at Quantico.

?Why waste that manpower?? said Palm, a veteran of Vietnam and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. ?Because I?ve been on that side of it ? that?s very demotivating for a cannoneer, to be sitting on his howitzer and not shoot at anything.

?You use Marines where they?re most likely to be deployed,? Palm said. ?And if you need manpower and there?s no artillery targets, why have men sitting on trails? I would question the guy that had guys sit on trails. That?s narrow-minded.?

And just because the artillery battalion is filling a traditional infantry role, don?t expect to see them out on the open battlefield ? locating, closing with and destroying the enemy by means of fire and maneuver. That?s not the goal here, Marine officials said.

?I?m prepared to do a SASO mission,? said Lt. Col. Terence Brennan, 2/10 commanding officer. ?Nobody?s asking me to take a battalion and reinforce an infantry battalion.?

No one wants to create a new infantry battalion for every ground operation that comes up, leaders said.

?I would never do that,? Cariker said. ?I?d be the first to go to my commanding general and say ?this isn?t a job for us.?.?

For their part, the Marines aren?t complaining. Most are eager to deploy and realize that Iraq isn?t really an artilleryman?s fight anymore.

?I think it?s cool to see artillery doing grunt stuff,? said Pfc. Hart, standing with his M16 at the ready as he guarded his company?s base during the recent battalion exercise at Lejeune. ?It shows the rest of the Marine Corps that we are the true kings of battle.?

Christian Lowe and Laura Bailey contributed to this report from Washington.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/sto...PER-2933416.php

Ellie

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