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Return to First Friday Briefing From Atlanta Journal Constitution Their living area will be surrounded by concertina wire with guard towers on each corner and the soldiers are likely to be ambushed whenever they leave the safety of the compound. "They are going to have to learn to react to all that immediately," Brig. Gen. Stewart Rodeheaver, the 48th's commander, said Wednesday of the training plan. While the explosions will be small and weapons will use blanks, the Iraqis will be real. They are expatriate Iraqis now living in the United States who have been hired to replicate their former countrymen's behavior in training situations for troops headed to Iraq. This relatively new Army regimen is known as "Theater Immersion Training" and the 48th Brigade will be among the first units to go through it. Its purpose, Rodeheaver said, is to replicate immediately in training what the soldiers will face when they hit the ground in a combat zone. Georgia Guard officials learned this week that 1,500 members of the 48th Brigade will be called up Dec. 6 for a year's duty in Iraq. Another 3,000 are expected to be notified within a week that they will be mobilized by Dec. 15. Rodeheaver said that in addition to soldiers from 31 Georgia communities, the brigade will add several hundred National Guard soldiers from Alabama, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Rhode Island. They will join the Georgia unit at Fort Stewart for three months of training before the brigade goes to the Army's desert training center at Fort Irwin, Calif., in April. Rodeheaver said the brigade has anticipated getting called up for several months and spent its annual summer training at Camp Blanding in Florida reconfiguring the unit to duplicate what it might look like in Iraq. "We did not take a tank or a Bradley [fighting vehicle]. We put everybody on the ground with a rifle. Every soldier was a rifleman first," he said. Although the brigade does not yet have a specific mission in Iraq and does not know where it will serve, Rodeheaver said it will be a much lighter force, patrolling more in armored Humvees than in M-1A1 Abrams tanks or Bradleys. Rodeheaver said he and some of his staff will go to Iraq in December for the first of what is expected to be a series of reconnaissance trips to get a better sense of where they will be operating and what they will be doing. He spent Wednesday in Atlanta, Macon, Savannah and Albany talking to local media outlets and soldiers about the mobilization and what it might mean to their communities. Rodeheaver said one of his biggest challenges is ensuring there is a strong family support system in place before the brigade leaves for Iraq. A stay-behind unit, called the Rear Detachment, will be based in Macon to deal with issues that arise for soldiers that cannot be handled in
Iraq and for their families at home.
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