Sailors prepare for ground combat at Fort Jackson’s Task Force Marshall

Editor’s note: Hidden Military is an occasional series on military missions and installations in the Palmetto State often overlooked by the public.

Lt. Cmdr. Michelle Sanabia hunkered down in a firing pit at Fort Jackson’s Bastogne gun range and kicked her boots up on the tripod of an imposing 50-caliber machine gun – a stalwart of the U.S. military since World War II.

She pulled back on the dual trigger with both hands and sent a stream of bullets down range in a series of deafening, chest-thumping bursts. Bullets bounced off the red clay hills a few hundred yards away, tracers arcing toward metal cutouts of enemy soldiers and gutted armored vehicles.

Not many rounds hit their mark. But the slight, 53-year-old Navy emergency room nurse from Millington, Tenn., has had her first experience with an Army automatic weapon.

The training – which occurred in September – might be useful now that she has deployed to a NATO forward base hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

“I don’t use weapons at all,” said Sanabia, who was a Navy corpsman in the 1980s and rejoined the service after her children were grown. “I have a dog. A German shepherd dog. That’s my weapon of choice.”

Sanabia is one of about 1,600 sailors a year who train at Fort Jackson’s Camp McCrady as part of a program called Task Force Marshall. They are medical personnel, military police, fuel handlers, engineers and intelligence officers, among others, who augment the Army and Marine troops on the ground in the world’s hottest spots – Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa.

They train for three weeks at Fort Jackson, then immediately board transport planes at Columbia Metropolitan Airport, often in the middle of the night, for their distant posts.

There are usually no families present to send them off. So dozens of Columbia volunteers gather at Eagle Aviation, providing the sailors with a departing meal of pizza and fried chicken, travel gifts such as books and stuffed animals, and lots of hugs and thanks.

“They are deploying without having an opportunity to go back home and see their families,” said retired Maj. Gen George Goldsmith, who chairs the Columbia Chamber’s military affairs committee. “We felt like it was important that if the they were training here at Fort Jackson and leaving from Columbia, somebody should go out and say goodbye to them. We just wanted to spend time with them so they know the people of Columbia appreciate what they are doing and support what they are doing.”

Teaching basic skills

Task Force Marshall was named in honor of Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff during World War II who would go on to become secretary of state and secretary of defense.

The task force was originally formed with the mission of providing refresher training to mobilized Army Reserve soldiers. In December 2005 – with more ground support troops needed because of the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the mission was expanded to also train Navy personnel in basic combat skills.

Navy officers may receive some training in the use of 9 mm sidearms, which some occasionally carry. Otherwise, most sailors, aside from special forces and military police, have no use for personal weapons.

“They have Marines for that,” said Fort Jackson spokesman Pat Jones, a retired Army sergeant major. “Sailors just push a button to launch a cruise missile.”

The initial concept involved a two-week training period that subsequently evolved into a three-week cycle. Army reservists from the Charlotte-based 108th Training Command oversee the regimen, which is conducted mostly by drill sergeants and private contractors.

Lt. Col. Timothy Forrest, the commanding officer of the 108th, called it the “soldierization” of Navy sailors.

“They’ve been in the military,” he said. “We just have to teach them the basic combat skills they need.”

‘It’s important to go’

The sailors learn radio communications, roadside bomb awareness, basic marksmanship of a variety of small arms, convoy operations and first aid, among other skills. All of the training is done in a remote area on the east side of Fort Jackson at the S.C. National Guard-run Camp McCrady. It is far from the post’s main campus.

“People on Fort Jackson don’t even know we’re here,” said Lt. David Cline, spokesman for the 108th Training Command.

Many of the sailors trained for combat service are volunteers, like 28-year-old Lt. Elisa Menck of Bowling Green, Ky. She has been in the Navy for three years, with her last deployment to Okinawa, Japan.

She thought it was important for her to experience service “in country,” as military personnel call being in a combat theater, to improve at her job.

“I’m a physical therapist,” Menck said. “It’s important for me to go to understand what my patients have been through.”

Task Force Marshall trains about 55 percent of the Navy’s deploying ground support troops. Menck said the training had been fun.

Firing the .50-caliber machine gun “was exhilarating ,” she said. “You can feel it in your chest.”

‘Good medicine in bad places’

The training involves a lot of simulation of encounters the sailors might experience when deployed.

They learn how to conduct checkpoints. They practice tactics for handling potential car bombers. They undergo a simulated chemical attack.

But the most dramatic is riding in and defending a convoy moving down remote roads fraught with simulated roadside bombs, ambushes and a massacre in a village.

“We just blast everything we’ve got at them,” said Cline, the 108th spokesman.

It was nothing new for Lt. Cmdr. Lou Moyer, an intensive care physician from Jim Thorpe, Penn. He had been deployed four times in Iraq and was heading to Afghanistan.

“I like doing good medicine in bad places,” the 44-year-old said. “I get to do things most physicians won’t get to do.”

Discussing the training, Moyer said the odds of him getting a weapon in his hands are slim. “But you never know.”

For Menck, the young physical therapist, heading into combat is part of the job.

“I’ve been pretty calm about the whole thing,” she said. “It’s part of being in the military.”

If she likes being in a combat zone, why didn’t she join the Army?

“Because the Navy is better,” she said, not missing a beat.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Sailors prepare for ground combat at Fort Jackson’s Task Force Marshall."