Home > Gulf War Diary > "Change of Command"
August 1, 1990 was a typical sunny, muggy day at Fort Hood, located in the hill country of Central Texas. At 0900 hours, the sun was already beating oppressively down upon the soldiers of C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery, who stood in formation awaiting the ceremony during which Captain Joe E. Gallagher, the Battery Commander, would relinquish the battery guidon to me, a timeless Army ritual signifying the change of command from one officer to the next.
As I stood on the parade field in the battalion quadrangle awaiting to assume command of this outfit, I thought about the last five years of my life, all of which were essentially spent preparing me both personally and professionally for this day: to take command of a firing battery.
I was a typical field artillery captain in the United States Army, with a little more than five years of active service. Commissioned as a second lieutenant from the University of Virginia ROTC program on May 18, 1985, I attended the Field Artillery Officer Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Following successful completion of that school, I was posted to Schweinfurt, Germany, where I served three years in a self - propelled M109A3 howitzer battalion assigned to the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized).
After rotating back to the United States, I attended the Officer Advanced Course, and was subsequently assigned to Fort Hood, Texas, where I served as the Fire Direction Officer for the 3rd Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery prior to taking command of Battery C. While serving as FDO, I rotated twice to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, located deep in the Mojave desert, where I received realistic mechanized desert warfare training against an opposing force that was trained and equipped to replicate a typical Soviet motorized rifle regiment.
In summary, like many other officers of my rank and level of experience, I had been trained primarily to fight the Soviets in a European (or regional) Cold War scenario. I had a good deal of mechanized warfare experience, and a moderate amount of desert warfare experience.
C Battery, the unit that I was about to take command of that day, was a typical self - propelled howitzer battery assigned within the continental United States. With it's eight M109A3 howitzers, two fire direction centers, 114 soldiers, and enough ammunition and support vehicles to keep everybody shooting, fueled, and fed, C Battery stood ready to deploy to Europe along with the rest of the First Cavalry Division, and reinforce the forward - deployed forces in the Federal Republic of Germany against a Warsaw Pact invasion.
To facilitate its deployment to Europe, most of C Battery's "go to war" equipment was prepositioned in Germany. This was our primary mission, our raison d'etre; however, with the recent thawing of east - west relations and the impending reunification of Germany, the threat of war, while always a possibility, seemed remote.
Like many other CONUS -- based heavy units, C Battery was generally well trained, but was not at the peak of its readiness cycle. Its last rotation to the National Training Center had been eight months previous; its last Standard External Evaluation had been six months ago. Since then C Battery had undergone a 50 percent personnel turnover rate, and had spent one month in "red cycle", a term used in the military to indicate that a unit's primary function would be installation support, as opposed to training and maintenance.
August 1, 1990, in addition to my assumption of command, also marked the first day of an intensive six month training cycle for C Battery. This training cycle was designed to bring the outfit up to peak combat readiness, and would culminate in a rotation to the National Training Center in February 1991. Therefore, my biggest priority as new commander was to train my unit hard over the next several months so that we would be able to defeat the NTC opposing forces in the mock battles that we would have in the Mojave desert the following February.
However, on August 2, 1990, the "world turned upside down". Responding
to Iraq's lightning conquest of Kuwait, and under the direction of the National
Command Authority, C Battery, with the rest of the First Cavalry Division, was
able to shift gears from its REFORGER mission to respond to the current threat.
The battery deployed deliberately and efficiently to Southwest Asia, lived and
trained in the desert for five months under conditions that most Americans
would find intolerable, and finally, was a key participant in the liberation of
Kuwait. That they were able to do this is a tribute not only to the men of C
Battery, but also to the decade - long revolution in training and doctrine
within the U.S. Army, which sewed the seeds of excellence that enabled units
like C Battery, 3-82 FA to accomplish such a feat. Here is our story.
