Reception centers first stop for
Ulchi Focus Lens exercise participants
By Franklin Fisher, Taegu
bureau chief
Franklin Fisher / Stars and Stripes
Military personnel taking part in the annual Ulchi Focus Lens exercise claim their duffel
bags at Camp Henry after a briefing at a joint reception center nearby. |
TAEGU, South Korea — When the military flies people to South Korea for a training
exercise, someone has to get them to the right place and tell them things they’ll
need to know.
For an annual exercise such as this month’s Ulchi Focus Lens, taking care of those
details is the job of joint reception centers such as the one at Camp Henry in Taegu.
The exercise started Monday, and involves more than 10,000 U.S. troops, along with
South Korean forces. It ends Friday.
In Taegu, the center is set up in a dining room and bar at Henry’s Place, a small
club on Camp Henry. It’s staffed by Army, Marine and Air Force personnel.
They’ve set up a long table, a slide projector and a screen, and a seating area.
Their job is to process the thousands of personnel — active duty servicemembers,
members of the Reserves and National Guard, and civilians. They’re called augmentees.
"Our mission is to receive augmentees for the exercise, to give them a basic
orientation of the basic ground rules, the buddy system, the off-limits area, black market
information, pretty much the things they need to know to function in Korea without getting
into trouble," said Air Force Maj. Mark Gisi, officer-in-charge of the joint
reception center in Taegu.
Arriving there by bus are newly arrived augmentees headed for locations around southern
South Korea, called Area IV. Within it are installations in Taegu, Waegwan, Pohang and
Pusan, among other locales.
But the center also makes sure the new arrivals’ whereabouts are entered on a
computer, which helps track them during their South Korea stay.
The center arranges transport for anyone whose final stop is not Taegu, but another
place, such as Pohang on South Korea’s east coast.
And for those who’ll stay in Taegu, the center gets them and their duffle bags to
those places on post where they’ll live while in the country.
Many arrived tired after several days of plane connections, airport waits and bus
rides. They’re in civilian clothes, jeans, polo shirts, sneakers.
"For those of you just getting here, there’s juice, coffee and bagels,"
one Marine sergeant told about 40 augmentees who had just gotten off a bus from Osan Air
Base.
They flew in from the States around 7:40 a.m. It’s a hot, sunny day. Most look
tired. Some need a shave.
The briefings are short and to the point. They had an initial briefing at Osan, but the
one in Taegu is geared to the specifics of Area IV.
They’re shown slides and given a "Welcome Packet" folder. Together, they
spell out key points the augmentees need to know.
They’re told about getting their orders stamped, about keeping their ID cards with
them, about not going off-post alone, about wearing a reflective vest if they go running,
about where the shower and laundry points are.
Capt. Jim Hornung is with a National Guard unit out of California. He’s from
Anaheim, Calif., and works for the California Highway Patrol. He was one of 300 augmentees
who flew in to Osan that morning.
"Actually I was surprised at how decent the people we were working with were, and
how fast it was," he said of the reception process at Osan and Taegu. He’s a
unit environmental compliance officer with the Army National Guard’s 1106th Aviation
Classification Repair Activity Depot, part of the Army Material Command.
"It’s been a long ride out here," Hornung said. "When we got our
first briefing at Osan and our briefing here, they were pretty quick and to the point. Not
a lot of wasted time."
The second briefing at Taegu was helpful, Hornung said, because he was so tired when he
reached Osan that parts of that briefing went by him a little too fast.
In the same Guard unit is Master Sgt. David McFerrin, a powertrain technician. He works
on helicopters — Black Hawks, Apaches, Chinooks, Kiowas. He, too, had a good
impression of the reception process.
"So far, everything fit kind of smooth. Square peg, square hole," McFerrin
said.
The center will pack up the first week of September.
RELATED STORY:
North Korea
calls exercise "threat to peace and stability"
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