Travis moves Army Soldiers

Published Nov. 14, 2012
By Staff Sgt. Patrick Harrower
60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- Roughly 550 Soldiers from the 1-294th Infantry Regiment, Guam Army National Guard travelled through Travis on their way back to Guam Wednesday. They spent the last few weeks at Camp Roberts, California performing critical pre-mobilization training before travelling here via bus.

"We are in the mid-stage of our deployment process," said Army Maj. Christopher Camacho, planning officer. "We will continue to go through a series of briefings and training tasks to maintain our proficiency as we lead up to our turn to deploy."

Next in their training are briefings for their families to get them on board with the deployment, followed by advanced combat lifesaver training, Camacho said.

For this particular trip to California, the training was standard, but the movement of the troops was anything but that, he said.

"To move this many Soldiers in this long of a distance in only a handful of hours, took a lot of planning and coordination with the Air National Guard," Camacho said. "So many states contributed their planes to support the ground troops, it really made the planning go smoothly."

Fourteen Air National Guard aircraft were generated, loaded and took off from Travis in just one day to get the Soldiers back to Guam. Soon they will be back in the states to continue training before their deployment, he said.

"All the training that we perform helps us get to the point where we have 'all systems running,'" Camacho said. "Along the way, we really build unit and team cohesion, which pays off in adverse combat scenarios."