| FORT MCCOY, Wis., July 19, 2006 -- Medical care in Operation Iraqi Freedom has progressed to the point that soldiers who are injured there are now surviving at the highest rate in U.S. military history. One of the units that will be responsible for keeping that record intact and trying to provide even better health care for America’s men and women in uniform is Task Force 3, made up primarily from personnel of the 3rd Medical Command out of Fort Gillem, Ga. The MEDCOM is the Army’s senior deployable theater medical command. “We are deploying to continue to provide world-class health care in that theater of war,” said Maj. Gen. Ronald D. Silverman, commander of 3rd MEDCOM and of Task Force 3, which will replace Task Force-30, an active duty unit from Heidelberg, Germany. “We will measure our success by the number of lives we save.”
Task Force 3 began its current mobilization in late May with the main body of the unit arriving at Fort McCoy during the second week of June to begin an arduous two-month training program that includes everything from language and customs training to kicking down doors during urban operations. One challenge facing the soldiers of this unit is the fact that active duty, Reserve and National Guard soldiers from 30 different states and the District of Columbia, including more than 20 percent who joined the unit just for the deployment, have had to mesh into a cohesive organization in a short period of time. “It is a challenge to bring in this many people from such diverse backgrounds and from so many different units and expect them to work together effectively,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Roger Schulz. “Fortunately we’ve had a solid core of key leaders from the 3rd MEDCOM which has helped us gel as a unit. I’ve been very impressed with the soldiers we have here. “Our morale and esprit de corps have been outstanding,” Schulz added. “Our success in coming together so quickly to form a cohesive unit is a testament to Army training. Training to Army standards provides us with a base and we’ve been able to build on that and adapt to the special requirements of Task Force 3.” Another challenge is getting medical personnel - soldiers who are not typically faced with much of the type of combat in which they’re being trained - to fully grasp the seriousness of the area they are going. “The skills we are learning here are absolutely critical for soldier survival,” said Col. Richard Gullickson, Task Force 3 chief of staff. “We have to remember the warrior ethos - that we are warriors first. Anything else is secondary. |
