By Sgt. Ashley Smith and Trish Pinczes
Public Affair Specialists
197th Public Affairs Detachment
CAMP GUERNSEY, Wyo. - For more than a decade, the Wyoming Army National Guard Recruit Sustainment Program has evolved and unified the training efforts to develop initial training soldiers.
The purpose of RSP is to prepare new soldiers for basic training.
“We start training them immediately,” said Master Sgt. Joseph Toohey, Wyoming Army National Guard Southern Area non-commissioned officer in charge. “We’re different than active duty and reserves in that point, they don’t do as much training with them immediately. We teach them all the basic soldiering skills, and they come back ready to go in with the unit.”
Units have started stepping in and talking to their service members before they leave for training, said Staff Sgt. Glenn Worley, senior RSP non-commissioned officer. It’s making a bigger impact on the individual and letting them know they care, he added.
Toohey said one challenge with RSP is a constant flow of new recruits coming. Every month there are new soldiers who have to be taught from the beginning, and there are soldiers who have been in the program for four or five months. RSP also includes basic training graduates, he said. Therefore the program has recruits with a wide variety of skill sets and knowledge.
“That’s one big challenge for us,” said Toohey. “We get one weekend where we get drill and ceremony down for the whole group and then we get 15 brand new recruits in the next weekend, we have to start all over.”
Challenges some new soldiers face is meeting new people in a new environment, said Worley.
“We are a little bit tougher here,” Worley said. “With them being so far apart from each other before they come down here, it’s hard for them to keep up on their own physical training and tasks. We PT here a little more versus the training bases, so it becomes a struggle for some of them.”
“We’ve been doing RSP since around 2004-05 time frame,” Toohey said. “We haven’t actually changed a whole lot because it’s been a very successful program.”
There were two sites when the program first started. Since then the number of site locations has varied. At the present moment, all recruits report to Camp Guernsey for weekend training.
“The more soldiers you have together the easier it is to train,” said Toohey. “It’s more like basic training. We aren’t doing things three different ways, we are doing it the same way.”
The benefit of RSP to the soldiers is being trained and familiarized with skill level one tasks before they go to basic training and advanced individual training. Therefore it’s fresh in their mind, and they are aware of what is going on when they get there, said Worley.
In September, recruits were able to sit in a Humvee and practiced communicating with the pilots flying Black Hawk helicopters to call in a 9-line medical evacuation. They also learned about the aircraft, how to load a litter and had the opportunity to experience a flight.
“So we get to do more adventure training here,” Toohey said. “It’s better than being in Casper doing squad tactics in the parking lot. We’ve had a lot of good feedback.”
By slowly bringing recruits into the Army environment, the program promotes retention, said Worley. They experience the family side of the National Guard before they go off to training.
“It’s really a team effort from all the units from around the state because we can’t do this by ourselves as a single unit,” Worley said. “It’s bringing the state together as a team.”
| Date Taken: | 04.10.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 04.10.2015 12:13 |
| Story ID: | 159634 |
| Location: | CAMP GUERNSEY, WY, US |
| Web Views: | 34 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Recruit sustainment program gets recruits ready for basic training, by SFC Ashley Motley, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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