Today Fort Hood hosted a combat engineering course for the 3rd Calvary Regiment where soldiers were able to train for their upcoming deployment to Afghanistan.
This particular training group is the first of its kind considering women are now officially able to hold the title as combat engineers.
Staff Sgt.Brian Welsh said having females as part of the group has been a great addition to the training.
“Overall having women it doesn't make any difference if anything our performance has gotten better, currently in my squad I have one female attached and she's made our squad ten times better than it was,” Sgt. Welsh said.
Officials say there are four newly integrated females out of 79 combat engineers that are a part of this group, 3 of which hold combat roles and one female mechanic.
This particular training course consists of three phases the crawl, walk and run phase that lasts five days. It is also the first training the group has had since returning from the National Training Center Rotation 16-04.
Their next training session will be the R2C2 training held in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. This will be more in depth training on a larger scale where they will get specific training on route reconnaissance clearance courses.
Captain Ben Cox Commander of 3rd Combat Engineer Company said these particular training sessions are vital before deployment.
“Being a combat engineer in Afghanistan is extremely important. Our route clearance operations, we clear route for somebody, we're not just out there. The logistic patrols that come out after us provide life support for the different bases in Afghanistan. We clear the route for them, along with the infantry to have safe passage so they can conduct their key-leader engagements and complete their missions” Cox said.
There are over 1,000 soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan in early June and the group has been training for the last seven months.
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