Spc. Brandon Anderson prepares an anchor plate to be secured flush to the ground as part of his unit’s construction of a large area maintenance shelter along the helicopter runway at Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. Anderson is a member of the 4th Battalion, 123rd Aviation Regiment from Fort Wainwright, Alaska. (Charlie Coon / S&S)
LOGISTICS SUPPORT AREA ANACONDA, IRAQ — They left the endless Alaska winter for the sunburn of an Iraqi airstrip.
The soldiers of 4th Battalion, 123rd Aviation Regiment, are currently building their workplace, a 200,000-square-foot maintenance shelter. After that, the soldiers will go about their business of tearing apart and putting together helicopters.
“We came to the desert to show them how to do aircraft maintenance,” said Staff Sgt. Joel Greene, one of 115 members of Company C, part of the first large unit to deploy from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, since World War II.
For about a week the soldiers have been clearing equipment and leveling an area next to the helicopter landing zone at Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Balad. The shelter they are building will be big enough to break down a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter and do the necessary work on its sheet metal, rotor, hydraulics and so on.
Building the shelter was a whatever-it-takes assignment. The company didn’t want to wait for a contractor to be found to do the job.
“We took the book and went through it, asked some people their experience with it, and put it up,” 1st Sgt. Jason Werner said.
“So sometimes you have to work outside your box, outside your expertise,” said Capt. Steven Injasoulian, a Michigan Army National Guardsman borrowed from another unit down the flight line to help supervise.
The trip from Fort Wainwright, near Fairbanks, halfway up Alaska’s west coast, took from two to five days depending on each particular trip. The soldiers said it was 50 degrees below zero when they left Alaska.
“We had 4 feet [of snow] in my front yard when I left,” Sgt. Travis Ceniti said.
Some of the battalion traveled from Alaska to New York, then to Ireland and Kuwait; others went through South Carolina and Germany.
Two of the battalion’s four companies stayed in Kuwait at Camp Udari; the other two — Company C to fix helicopters and Company B to fly them — came north to Balad.
Their equipment was transported south by train to Anchorage, then by ship to Kuwait. The truckloads and shop sets that Company C needed to do its helicopter work were transported by convoy from Kuwait north into Iraq.
