Courtesy Photo | Spc. Jeffery MacGruder, a forklift operator in the Mobile Redistribution Team yard...... read more read more
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By Sgt. Gaelen Lowers
JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq— The responsible drawdown of forces was a two-fold mission. One aspect was reducing the number of soldiers in Iraq to 50,000 by Sept. 1. The second was removing the mountain of equipment left over from seven years of war. That job falls onto the Mobile Redistribution Team.
The MRT is responsible for cleaning up excess equipment from outlying forward operating bases and camps, and into yards for distribution out of the country, said 1st Lt. Kyle Sissom, MRT yard officer-in-charge with 289th Quartermaster Company, 13th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, 3rd Sustainment Brigade, 103rd Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), and a Merriam, Kan., native.
“This yard is essential to moving equipment efficiently and effectively out of Iraq,” he said. “It is definitely an astonishing process. We are facilitating a process that is essential to Operation Clean Sweep. The soldiers’ morale and productivity are extremely high. They know that what they are doing out here is making history.”
Operation Clean Sweep was established in October 2009, said Capt. Keith Stutts, Operation Clean Sweep OIC for the 13th CSSB, and a Mobile, Ala., native. The intent is for all units to identify their excess equipment and supplies, clear the waste from their area of occupation, and to reduce their operational footprint.
“We’re the heartbeat of Operation Clean Sweep,” said Stutts. “We receive all of the retrograde from 58 of the 98 outlying FOBs here in Iraq. The MRT yards expedite the process of moving equipment…saving the Army more than $7 million per week.”
The eight-soldier mobile distribution teams are sent out to the outlying FOBs and camps, he said. They coordinate with the units there to collect excess equipment, spare parts and scrap materials. The excess is then packed neatly and sent off to the Joint Base Balad MRT yard. Once the materials reach JBB, a separate team re-sorts the items and puts them into shipping containers to head off to Kuwait, the United States, Afghanistan or other destinations.
“If it’s serviceable or unserviceable, we ship it down to Kuwait so the team down there can decide whether they want to fix it and put it back into the Army supply lines or scrap it and use it for spare parts,” said Sissom. “If it is brand new equipment, we ship it back to the states to be repackaged and put back into the Army supply lines. Sometimes we get bigger items like vehicles, and we give them to the Redistribution Processing Assessment Team, and they can put them back into the Army supply system that way.
“We get scrap metal and wood sometimes too,” he continued. “That is dispositioned by the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office. We have access to the incinerator yard or the refuge agency here on JBB to dispose of the waste.”
The 47 soldiers and 21 civilian augmentees assigned to the yard sort 50 connex shipment boxes a week on average, and frequently meet their monthly quota by midmonth, said Spc. Eric Duddy, an MRT yard container tracker with the 298th QM Company, and a Shreveport, La., native.
“It feels good,” said Duddy. “I never thought I would be a part of something this big. It feels good to know that that I am helping to give back to the Army here in Iraq.”
Sissom said he is proud of all the hard work that his soldiers put in every day to make things run smoothly and get the mission accomplished. He said that the work that his soldiers did on a daily basis was the lynchpin for making Operation Clean Sweep a success.
“All things that we are bringing into the yard here is stuff that has been accumulating over the past seven years during Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he said. “Now we are trying to hand the country back over to Iraq and we need to lessen our footprint as much as possible. We can’t just leave it all lying around for the Iraqis to take care of, because it’s our responsibility, not theirs.”
| Date Taken: | 09.21.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 10.11.2010 09:15 |
| Story ID: | 57881 |
| Location: | JOINT BASE BALAD, IQ |
| Web Views: | 272 |
| Downloads: | 3 |
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