'Munitions miracle' at North Wind exercise

TAKIZAWA, Japan — What if they waged a war, and nobody brought the bullets?

That’s what almost happened to 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment soldiers at North Wind 2003 bilateral exercises being played out on snow-covered vistas 83 miles south of Misawa Air Base.

“Because of real-world contingencies, the ammunition we needed is a short-stocked item,” said Maj. Terrence Redmann, chief of field training exercises for U.S. Army Japan.

He said 500 soldiers with the “Cold Steel” regiment from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, near Fairbanks, use the 5.56-caliber round for their M-4 carbines when platoons conduct live-fire suppression events during North Wind.

“It’s the basic ammo used by the infantry, but it wasn’t issued for the exercise,” he said. “If we didn’t get the ammo, live-fire training for two companies would have to be canceled.”

A senior U.S. Army Japan official said the ammo shortage appeared to be an oversight.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” Col. David Smith, the Army’s top communications officer from Camp Zama, said. “It just didn’t register on the planners’ scope.”

Redmann put together a logistics plan he dubbed “the munitions miracle.”

It would take days to secure permits from the Japanese government for trucks to haul the ammo from southern Japan to the Iwate Maneuvering Area, where North Wind soldiers are training. “Through some very intense and deliberate planning,” Redmann said, the command decided instead to helicopter the ammo to the soldiers at North Wind.

Twenty-four crates, totaling several hundred pounds, had to be brought from the Akizuki ammunition depot in Kure, Japan, a port near Hiroshima. Ammo for all U.S. Army units in Japan are stored in bunkers there by the 83rd Ordnance Battalion.

To complicate matters, the Presidents Day holiday happened to fall on the day Redmann decided the ammo shipment was necessary. Orders had to be published for an armed guard to accompany the shipment as Army regulations stipulated.

Crew rest requirements called for using several helos and fresh crews, Redmann said. After calls to appropriate agencies, the plan began to come together, he said.

Early Wednesday morning, a landing ship operated by the 83rd moved the ammo from the Akizuki depot to Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station, about two hours away. There it was loaded aboard a 78th Aviation Battalion UH-60 helicopter for transport to Kastner Army Airfield at Camp Zama near Tokyo, where another helicopter waited.

That helicopter flew north to Sendai, 200 miles north of Tokyo, where the ammo was loaded aboard a third UH-60 that finally delivered it to North Wind soldiers about 14 hours after the ammo left the bunkers.

“Once we started the process, no one was concerned with whose fault it was that soldiers didn’t have ammunition to fire in the first place,” Redmann said. “Everybody involved simply asked how they can make it happen.”

The soldiers loading the ammo into their weapons probably did not realize what it took to get the rounds into their hands.

“That’s OK, I always go for the moral victory,” Redmann said. “It blows my mind that we put this plan together in just six hours. It’s the stuff legends are made of.”