FORT STEWART, Ga. — All day long Spc. Joseph Rappel and Spc. Maximo Perez had been in their ambulance at Gun Range Clifford listening to the sporadic crack-crack-crack of troops firing their M-16s.
There was really nothing for them to do. Soldiers can’t shoot on the gun ranges without a medical crew present, so the medics from the Florida National Guard’s 2nd Battalion of the 124th Infantry, based in Orlando, had been there since 6 a.m., nearly 10 hours.
“Ten hours?” Rappel said. “No wonder my butt’s numb.”
The ambulance is a Humvee with a big box on the back full of stretchers and medical gear — and too little padding in the seats.
But if Rappel and Perez got outside at the gun range, they’d have to wear their bulky Kevlar helmets, which aren’t very comfortable, either.
So the two men mostly stayed in the truck, playing a handheld electronic game of Scrabble and talking about the only two things that soldiers here seem interested in — food and when they can get closer to the looming war in Iraq.
“I just want to go, get the job done and go home,” said Perez, a Haines City police officer who lives in Kissimmee. “The sooner we go, the better.”
‘LET’S GET IT OVER’
The game wasn’t doing much to pass the time.
“I hate all this waiting,” said Rappel, who works at a photo sales and service business in Rockledge. “That’s the worst thing. You’re just like, ‘Let’s go, let’s get it over with.’ “
After a month here, the 1,200 soldiers of the Guard’s 2nd and 3rd Battalions have seen more than enough of the seemingly endless flat pinewoods and Spartan barracks that make up Fort Stewart.
It’s not as if their departure is overdue: Just after they arrived last month, Maj. Gen. Douglas Burnett, adjutant general of the Florida National Guard, said they would head to somewhere in Southwest Asia by mid-February, or maybe a little sooner.
But with their required training completed more than a week ago, with the prospect of war spiraling and after repeated goodbyes to families and friends, the soldiers are eager to go. Most don’t seem nearly as interested in where they’re going or what they’ll do as they are in when they will leave.
In some ways, it might seem surprising that they want so badly to leave for a place that will hold all the uncertainties and dangers of war and the threat of chemical or biological weapons.
And it might not sound as if life at Fort Stewart is so intolerable. In fact, life is almost certainly more comfortable in every regard than what is in store for them overseas.
While they’re still mostly confined to the base, once the soldiers’ training ended many were given two-day passes that allowed them to go home or spend time with family members who came to visit.
The barracks at Fort Stewart are concrete-block dormitories with bunk beds and gear sprawled everywhere. They’re crowded, gloomy and old, but they have heat. There’s none of the boot camp spit-and-polish pressure because there are no foot lockers for storing gear. Besides, the soldiers here have more important things to worry about.
Extra minutes are not spent picking up cigarette butts and polishing latrines, but squeezing in more of the training that may save their lives: practicing with chemical-weapons gear, rehearsing combat maneuvers or checking and rechecking their weapons and equipment.
GAS MASKS AND JUMPING JACKS
Walking around the barracks, you may see a platoon of soldiers wearing gas masks while they do jumping jacks, or a sergeant schooling his men in combat tactics using little plastic soldiers he bought from the PX. But you’re not likely to see a soldier sitting around doing nothing.
Bathrooms and showers are in separate buildings from the soldiers’ sleeping quarters. But during their field training, the soldiers went a week or more without showers as they lived and slept, living and sleeping outdoors.
In the field, they usually ate MREs out foil-and-plastic packets. Now they eat on china in the base mess halls, where the food — free for enlisted soldiers — is hot, plentiful and mostly good, especially the pie.
And there’s always fast food: The base boasts a Burger King and a Popeyes that will deliver fried chicken to the barracks from 5 to 9 p.m. The soldiers can get pizza delivered, even Chinese food.
They can get their uniforms laundered, and name tags and insignia sewn on the new desert-camouflage uniforms that still haven’t been worn.
The base also has a bowling alley and a movie theater, where admission is $3 — except on Friday nights, when it’s free. Last week’s shows were Solaris, Drumline and Star Trek: Nemesis.
They’ve seen little television and few newspapers. They’re aware of news such as the shuttle Columbia disaster and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations, but they usually discuss it with only passing interest.
Their concerns about the imminent war aren’t the kind of issues hashed out on the all-news networks, such as our allies’ approval of a war or whether Iraq has ties to terrorist networks. The soldiers mainly want to know what part they will personally play in the war.
While only a few have access to e-mail, every squad has a soldier or two with a cell phone with unlimited night and weekend minutes, and they pass them around from soldier to soldier so that most have no trouble staying in almost daily contact with their families.
BOREDOM ERODES MORALE
All those amenities will vanish the day the soldiers take buses to nearby Hunter Army Airfield outside Savannah and climb aboard the planes that will take them overseas for a stay that could last months, even a year.
But among the soldiers there’s a sense that if they stay here too much longer, they’ll miss the action — and that the sooner they go overseas, the sooner they can return home.
The officers, who themselves aren’t sure when they will leave, have tried to keep the soldiers busy and involved in some kind of daily training, partly so they don’t lose the edge they’ve gained during weeks of training here, and partly because they know boredom erodes morale.
Last week on the parade ground, the 2nd Battalion staged its annual games called the Seminole Stakes, so named because the unit is known as the Seminole Battalion.
The soldiers competed in small squads to make the best time through a course that starts with the “low crawl,” lugging their weapons, gas masks and other gear beneath a long web of ropes tied just above the ground. Then they ran to a sandbagged bunker where they had to heave simulated grenades 30 yards to a target. After that, they disassembled their weapons and put them back together, donned their chemical-weapons suits and carried their biggest soldier on a stretcher, stopping to treat his simulated wounds.
It was about 30 minutes of hard work from beginning to end. A drizzly rain made the low crawl a muddy slog, and when a soldier’s grenade toss — which had to be made from a kneeling position — fell short, the sergeants yelled at him that he threw like a girl.
But the event tugged at the soldiers’ competitive nature. Sweating and out of breath, they alternately encouraged or swore at the soldiers who held their squad up, and most seemed glad to have something to do.
Leaning on the front of an ambulance, Spc. Randy Cole and Staff Sgt. Sanford Dixson of the battalion’s headquarters company watched the action. Cole’s job was to man the ambulance, where he had one soldier resting after getting short of breath; Dixson’s was to keep competing squads from getting bunched up. Both wondered out loud the same thing everyone wants to know: When will they leave?
“To me, it doesn’t really matter where we go,” said Dixson, who works in real-estate maintenance in Orlando. “I just want to go.”
“We’re really tired of Georgia,” said Cole, who lives in Orlando and works as an emergency medical technician at Florida Hospital in Orange City. “This place is getting old.”
“Everyone is really ready to go,” said Capt. Tony Clark, the battalion’s chaplain for the past 2 1/2 years. “The longer we stay here, the more it will strain morale.”
But while shipping out may be a relief to the boredom, it also will mean an end of the contact the men have had with their families.
FAMILY EMERGENCIES
During their training here, as during their regular two-week annual training, there have been the usual number of family emergencies to deal with, a half-dozen or so a week, Clark said.
“They range from Johnny has a broken arm to a death in the family to the apartment upstairs sprung a leak and flooded the bathroom,” Clark said. In an extreme case, they might be able to spring a soldier to return home or arrange some kind of help.
And, Clark said, despite the impatience to get overseas, once they arrive, the soldiers’ talk and thoughts will almost certainly revolve around when they’re coming home. But the chaplain, just like the everyone else, wants to get moving.
Even some of the best things about being at Fort Stewart can be bittersweet.
At the weekend, Clark’s wife, Laurie, daughter Rebecca, 10, and son Patrick, 8, traveled from their home in Longwood to visit when he had a two-day pass. The day they went sightseeing in Savannah was a welcome reunion and a pleasant break from the monotony of camp.
But it also meant another emotional goodbye, no less painful than those when the soldiers first reported to their armories in December. Or the family parties they held the weekend before they left home. Or the Sunday morning they pulled out.
“Some of these men have had four goodbyes,” Clark said. “As wonderful as it is to see your family, it’s another emotional goodbye, and that’s hard.”
