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U.S. Army Europe’s Patriot missile unit, the 5th Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery, has sent Soldiers to Poland to begin the initial phases of a long-term agreement between the two countries.
The mission will ultimately improve the global missile defense program, said 1st Lt. William Green, Alpha Battery’s fire control platoon leader.
Alpha Battery started off the mission, and each battery will execute rotations in a plan that calls for each battery to have participated in at least two exercises by 2012, Lieutenant Green said.
“We are familiarizing them with the Patriot system: our equipment, our procedures and how we do things. It’s not detailed in terms of our capabilities but it’s familiarizing them with the equipment and how we operate,” said 1st Lt. John O’Brien.
“We are showing them how we find sites suitable to lay (the equipment) in and how to set it in place. When our equipment arrived, they watched us perform these tasks. We taught them how to lay it in just the right location so that the setup would be effective for a Patriot unit,” said 1st Lt. Lois Perez-Jara.
The troops were given the opportunity to take MWR trips and explore the sights of Poland during their rotation, but the mission was always first priority.
“It wasn’t always work but we got a lot of work done. We had a lot of time to train as a battery and to get things done beforehand. There’s constant training. With the patriot system, you have to stay on top of your training to maintain your proficiency, and we continued with it while we were there as well,” Lieutenant Perez-Jara said.
The trip is rewarding to the Soldiers as not only a mission experience, but on a personal level as well.
“It’s kind of two-fold, versus the technical aspect that we improved ourselves. The best way to learn something is to have to teach it. By having to go through certifications to be an instructor, I think it increased our Soldiers’ knowledge in the system. By looking at a NATO ally’s equipment, we got to increase our Soldiers’ awareness of how we fit into the bigger missile defense picture. The other side is on a more personal level as far as building relationships Soldier to Soldier.
We had Soldiers that would meet up with their counterparts after hours and play cards in the barracks and some traded little pieces of uniform and played on the Wii that we have over there. It goes beyond the job that we actually get to sit and talk,” Lieutenant Green said.
To Lieutenant Perez-Jara, one of the 11 female Soldiers on the mission, one of the most noticeable differences in the two militaries was the role and presence of women.
“The Polish military had one female in all of the people that we were training. We were familiarizing the Polish military, not just the army or the air force; it was a conglomerate of the country’s different forces. We had 11 females in just the amount of people we took. It was an experience for them to see how women operate in our military because it’s not a common thing for them,” she said.
The enlisted Soldiers of Alpha Battery were given the opportunity to teach Polish officers how to use the equipment so they could relay the information back to their troops. Lieutenants Perez-Jara and Green said it was an exciting experience for the Soldiers to realize how much their military trusts them to go out and be able to perform their assigned tasks.
“These guys know their job well enough that we don’t need a specialized team of Soldiers that are trained to train other people. Our Soldiers know their jobs well enough where they can go one on one with a foreign military and teach them their job,” Lieutenant Green said.
