Word: platooning
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...Tomb Raiders are now stretched thin. With Beverly likely to remain outside of Iraq for the rest of the deployment and Whiteside preparing for reassignment to another unit, only six soldiers who were part of the platoon when it was constituted in Kuwait will still be in country in 2004. For missions outside the wire, the Tomb Raiders borrow soldiers from other platoons, but they have to carry out their routine duties--monitoring the radio, maintaining vehicles, staffing the battalion's Internet cafe, manning guard positions on the roof--with fewer soldiers, straining their combat effectiveness. "Maybe...
...fortitude. "We're trying something different," Van Engelen tells the Tomb Raiders as they gather around a gray satellite map of Adhamiya, preparing for their first patrol since the grenade attack. "So far our footprint has been big. This has gotten us into trouble." Van Engelen believes that the platoon will draw less attention without the humvees. The soldiers can hardly remember when they last did a foot patrol of any kind, and this will be the first one they have ever done at night. Van Engelen wants the soldiers to walk in a cigar-shaped formation, rather than...
...Like all the other american soldiers in Iraq, the members of the platoon have been tempered by the fires of the occupation, the raw emotions of war now forged into something harder and more durable. The news of Saddam's capture on this day is a jolt of euphoria for the Tomb Raiders, but it does little to alter their cool assessment of the perils ahead. "This country is still up for grabs, as far as these people are concerned," says Schermerhorn. "It's still going to be crazy around here...
This is not the war this Army unit--officially known as the Survey Platoon, Headquarters Battery, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment of the 1st Armored Division--was trained to fight. On a traditional battlefield, field-artillery survey units stay behind the front lines and use gyroscopic devices to measure the distance to enemy positions so the Army's big guns can hit their targets. That was the job this platoon, based in Giessen, Germany, pictured for itself when it received deployment orders in March, before the start of the war with Iraq. The group, now nicknamed the "Tomb Raiders...
Drawn from disparate backgrounds, the platoon's members provide a portrait of the military's diversity as well as insight into the motivations--and fears--of America's fighting forces. Its soldiers include Sergeant Marquette Whiteside, 24, an African-American gunner who pines for his 6year-old daughter; Specialist Sky Schermerhorn, 29, an idealist now gnawed by doubt about what he is fighting for; and Buxton, 32, a brainy Gulf War I veteran who since being deployed has taught himself Arabic and missed the birth of a son. Specialist Bernard Talimeliyor, 24, a native of the U.S. protectorate...