By MSgt. Bob Haskell, National Guard Bureau
FORT POLK, La.-- Generals bid Godspeed to nearly 1,000 Army citizen-soldiers, including 147 Virginia Army National Guard infantrymen, embarking on an historic mission to Bosnia at Fort Polk's field of honored ghosts in central Louisiana on a postcard-perfect Sunday in mid-October.
"You are about to embark on one of life's great adventures. You are going to another country to allow its people to taste the fruits of liberty," Brig. Gen. Samuel Thompson III told the Guardsmen and 800 Army Reserve military police people during the Oct. 19 deployment ceremony at Honor Field.
Thompson commands Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Center where the mobilized men and women underwent some intense training, including 36 live fire exercises, for their winter's work as peacekeepers in war-torn Eastern Europe.
"The success of your mission will be directly related to your units' discipline," Thompson cautioned his audience. "Never let your guard down, for it will be at that moment that you will be tested."
The troops were expected to fly to Europe on Oct. 21-22 and be at their duty stations by Nov. 1. Then they will claim their slices of history.
The Virginia Guardsmen out of Leesburg, from Charlie Company of the 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry, will replace active duty soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division guarding the Sava River bridge. That is the first reserve component infantry company mobilized for foreign duty since 1968 when Indiana Army Guard Rangers were sent to Vietnam.
The Reserve MPs from Florida, New York and North Carolina will replace active Army MP companies in Bosnia. That is the first time that has happened since NATO assumed the peacekeeping mission from the United Nations in December 1995. National Guard MPs, however, have been rotated to Europe to replace active Army units deployed to Bosnia from the beginning.
Maj. Gen. Carroll Childers, commander of the Army Guard's 29th Infantry Division that includes Charlie Company, and Maj. Gen. Thomas Plewes, a Virginia native and deputy commander of the U.S. Army Reserve Command from Atlanta, Ga., also addressed the troops where some of the Army's heroes are honored.
One plaque pays tribute to PFC Milton Olive III who won the Medal of Honor after falling on a live grenade and sacrificing his life to protect four of his buddies in Vietnam in October 1965. Another plaque is dedicated "to all American prisoners of war and missing in action, both living and deceased."
There is also the ghost of Leonidas Polk for whom the fort is named. He became the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana in 1841, and he was a Confederate lieutenant general when he was killed at Pine Mountain, Ga., in June 1864.
That setting made it easy to be serious about soldiering. His Guardsmen have lived up to the image, insisted Childers, a former Ranger.
The ceremony's four-man color guard consisted of former soldiers in "The Old Guard," the 3rd Infantry at Fort Myer, Va., who now belong to Charlie Company. And Childers found plenty of satisfaction in calling Spc. Peter Bowden "the most famous solider in the U.S. Army these days." because Bowden is pictured on the cover of Army magazine's 1997-98 Green Book, its institutional yearbook.
Childers also made it clear he believes this company is primed to do its bit in guarding the Sava River bridge that is a vital military lifeline between Bosnia and Hungary.
"The fact that no one has dropped out, that all 147 men are deploying, speaks highly of this company," observed Childers. "The fact they were all validated without having to be replaced by anyone else is a real testimony to the National Guard."