Category: OIF

A Team Above all Others: Story 2

I was both disappointed and happy with the decision. It was my first time being assigned to a Mechanized Combat Engineer Battalion. I wasn’t as familiar with the equipment, and time would fix that. I was a construction equipment repairer. My previous assignment was in a construction battalion in Alaska. Before that was a waterborne transportation battalion. Unknowingly, that decision placed me on a trajectory for success.

I finally became a maintenance chief in mid-November 2002 for A company. Leadership removed the Staff Sergeant in charge from the position due to his failures. I had been Motor Sergeant before, and lead large maintenance sections, but I had never taken over a team that was in such chaos. I remember walking in the first day and asking what was wrong with the three or four vehicles in the bays. Not one mechanic could tell me what was wrong.

Equipment breaks down, that is inevitable. For the military though, nonoperational equipment is bad for potential war. We must report our operational rate daily. The expectation is to maintain a 90% or better operational rate. Anything below the and you must explain why. Maybe you’re waiting on parts, which is acceptable. What leadership does not want to hear is, “we are still trying to figure out the problem,” especially after many days.

A company’s operational rate was around 50% when I walked into that maintenance shop. The mechanics were still trying to figure out what was wrong with equipment, days, even weeks later. Mechanics ordered a driveshaft for a dump truck incorrectly three times. Management, mentor-ship, and leadership at its worst, and I was tasked with turning this shop around.

The Maintenance Struggle

As I laid out my plan to turn the team around and quickly improve the operational rate, we took time off for Thanksgiving. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, not much else occurred, it never does. Mechanics took leave and other delays occurred. Bad timing was part of my struggle. I wasn’t making any headway. On January 2nd, 2003, another blow to my ability to raise the operational rate occurred. A company tasked as the pusher unit for the Deployment Processing Center (DPC) at Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany. The mission grew from needing just a plused-up platoon to 90% of the company. Left behind were a few mechanics with me and an expectation to improve the operation rate. I just could not get ahead.

Due to the rising conflict in Iraq, C company got called up to deploy. Told to give them anything and everything they needed, we did just that. They took any repair parts we might have had stored away that they needed. The even took a pack (engine and transmission combination) out of our Commander’s M113 Personnel Carrier to put in one of theirs. The thought was: we had time to get a new pack for our vehicle since we were not deploying.

Shockingly, two weeks after we loaded C company’s equipment on a train bound for the port, the they told the rest of 54th Engineer Battalion to deploy. We had two weeks to get everything ready and loaded on to trains. There was just two problems. First the company was still at Ramstein as the pusher unit. Second, I was unable to get much of the equipment repaired by then. We dragged a lot of equipment onto the trains; repairs would have to take place in Kuwait.

Our deployment to Kuwait and our enviable invasion of Iraq, would start with a struggle due to a failed maintenance program. Like a phoenix rising again, my team would step up. They repaired every piece of broken equipment before we rolled across the border in to Iraq.

Read my story, “The miracle workers,” part of the A Team Above all Others series, to get a glimpse of how we overcame our struggles.

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A Team Above All Others: Story 1

The Story

No support, no supplies, a need to be ready for war, and a new maintenance team put together only weeks prior to deploying, is how Alpha Company 54th Engineer Battalion found itself in February of 2003.  At Camp Virginia, Kuwait we did not know who was to be our direct support unit, or even where our Class 9 parts were going to come from.  We were the soldiers in green, that no one wanted to help.  For weeks, we made do with the fast dwindling repair parts we brought, and pleading other units for help.  With vehicles broken before they shipped, we had to perform miracles.  Maintenance, the miracle workers. Put to the test, and expected to maintain the momentum of the company’s combat maneuverability. And, my mechanics proved their abilities.

The cards were stacked against us, from the beginning.  Three out of four Armored Vehicle Launch Bridges (AVLBs) were in bad shape, even before leaving Germany.  Two are M48 chassis, which were built for the Korean War. The other two, are standard M60 chassis used in Vietnam.  With well over 30 to 40 years of age, it has always been a challenge to keep these monsters of track vehicles rolling.  Both M48 chassis were scheduled to be replaced with newer M60s, but that never happened, because of our deployment to South East Asia.  Now, we are faced with these beasts, that we stopped maintaining, and have been salvaging repair parts to keep the other M60s, mission capable.  Why not! when we’re getting replacements.  We will overcome though – we are the miracle workers – if it breaks, we will fix it.  In one week, three engines and one transmission were replaced, with no support from a direct support unit.  The only company to have all four AVLBs ready for combat, we had overcome one obstacle only to find another. 

With our Prescribed Load List (PLL) almost depleted, bench stock gone, and every part we packed, hid, or acquired installed, it looked like Alpha Company was not going to be ready to cross into Iraq.  With makeshift repairs, ingenuity, and fast thinking we developed repairs by, “Thinking Out of the Box.”  We worked in the harshest of conditions never to lose sight of the bigger picture.  On the eve of crossing into Iraq and during a voracious, blinding sand storm, mechanics put back together Alpha-66, a M113 Personnel Carrier, that had its pack taken in Germany to push out another company.  Committed to ensuring Alpha Company had its full combat power the mechanics remained dedicated during even the roughest work conditions.  With no real time to verify any problems that may have occurred in the repairs to Alpha-66, it made its trip into Iraq with two mechanics, SPC Tieman, as its Tank Commander, and SPC Kubasak, the assistant operator. 

Every wheeled and track vehicle crossed into Iraq, under its own power.  A major win on the part of the mechanics.  Two engineer vehicles limped across the border requiring repairs for which we had no parts, or just unable to make repairs to keep them going.  We had already been asking a lot of this equipment and now we were pushing them nearly 500 kilometers through the Iraqi desert.  One by one vehicles began to fall-out of the high-speed race to Baghdad.  First an AVLB, then Alpha-66, with complications to the repairs made earlier.  Two ACEs went down and were left on the side of the road, never to be the same again.  The wheeled vehicles were rolling tough; repairs like MRE bags as CV boots kept them up. Fast repairs, were made at each objective. Brake chambers were repaired with inner tube repair kits, 550 cord replaced throttle linkages. “Out of the box” repairs at its finest.

The momentum of combat kept up its pace, and maintenance never once flinched when something new was thrown at them.  They embraced their training and knowledge to come up with new and effective repairs. 

Is Maintenance the heroes of the war? No, but they are the miracle workers that kept us moving despite the enemy they faced – no parts.

The Team

• SSG Jason Clemens (62B)
• SGT Michael Martinez (62B)
• SGT Liam Diezsi (62Y)
• SGT Ryan Emerick (62Y)
• SGT Thomas Carbaugh (62Y)
• SGT Tyler Treumann (62Y)
• SGT Ray Polk (missing from image) (91A)
• SPC Jared Apilado (62Y)
• SPC Brown (91A)
• SPC Gary Carlson (63B)
• SPC Mark Barron (63B)
• SPC Bryan Pszybranowski (63Y)
• SPC Jared Kubasak (63Y) (Fallen 2005 – OIF)
• SPC Richard Tieman (62B) (Fallen 2010 – OIF)
• PFC Lavar Jackson (62B)

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