Photo By Master Sgt. Jerry Saslav | GUARDIAN CENTER, Perry, Ga., March 29, 2017- Videographers and photographers from the...... read more read more
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“You tell the story of the Soldier…. It’s about them. It’s about what the Soldiers on the ground are doing. It’s about their mission,” said Tripp, a 124th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment team leader. “Our job is to tell it.”
The mission that Tripp, Brown (a broadcast journalist) and Matthews (a public affairs specialist) and their fellow Guardsmen in the 124th MPAD were covering was Vigilant Guard 17. This eight-day exercise was designed to test how the Georgia Department of Defense and their local, state and federal partners would respond to the devastation of a Category 3 hurricane making landfall in the state. Nearly 9,000 personnel took part in the scenario which began on March 23. Over the course of the exercise, the Soldiers of the 124th MPAD covered events at over 15 different sites spread out across 650 miles and stretching from Marietta to Augusta, down to Brunswick and east to Savannah.
Tripp and her team’s mission was simple; drive east to Columbia County, where the local highway department was providing training on how to properly and safely operate chainsaws to Guardsmen from the 165th Quartermaster Company. In the event of a natural disaster, the chainsaws would be used to clear trees that had fallen and blocked the roads.
Tim Holloway, the Columbia County Roads and Bridges manager, had never asked for the National Guard’s assistance before.
In early 2014, a series of winter storms had brought down numerous trees and severely taxed the county’s 50-person staff.
In a situation like this the Guard could provide manpower.
“It’s great knowing …that during a large event; in a time of need that we could have that back-up,” said Holloway.
Therefore, Holloway arranged for experienced forestry members to provide the training.
This was the story Tripp and her Soldiers would capture on video and with still images.
They documented the four hours of classroom training before everyone headed to an offsite area where trees had been dropped across the road. For approximately three hours, the Guardsmen from the 165th QM Company. were able to practice what they had been taught.
When the training ended, Tripp drove the group’s Humvee while Brown edited the video footage and interviews on her laptop computer and Matthews processed his images and wrote captions on his laptop computer. They then sent their products back, via MiFi’s hubs, to the unit’s Joint Information Center at JFHQ for approval.
“My job was communicating between the JIC and our Soldiers out in the field,” said Sgt. James Braswell, 124th MPAD JIC operations noncommissioned officer in charge, “and making sure that we had a streamlined process of getting product up from the field … for publishing.”
At the JIC, the 124th MPAD had a team of officers, NCOs and civilian public affairs professionals who reviewed the products and then posted them on a variety of Department of Defense and civilian social media sites as well as made them available for the civilian media to use.
In the field, the 124th MPAD deployed three teams of four Soldiers, led by either a first lieutenant or a staff sergeant; who besides leading the team of print and broadcast journalists also acted as a liaison when local media outlets arrived to cover the training.
“Whenever we had issues out in the field, we were able to problem solve and get those issues resolved quickly,” said Braswell.
The issues varied from weak MiFi coverage (the solution was to find the nearest truck stop where there was MiFi), to the changing schedules of high-level federal and foreign military officials who were observing the exercise.
Besides the chainsaw training; other photo and video teams covered hazardous materials and decontamination exercises at Fort Stewart, before moving on to cover the weapons of mass destruction-civil support teams partnering with U.S. Coast Guard and Georgia Department of Natural Resources personnel in the greater Savannah region. The third and final team of public affairs Guardsman covered National Guard Search and Extraction teams from various states training to rescue people from a destroyed urban environment at the Guardian Centers in Perry, Georgia.
While there had been intensive planning and preparation for Vigilant Guard 17, there were last minute changes which forced the teams to improvise in order to accomplish the mission.
When the provided work space was not close to the exercise locations, the Soldiers turned their Humvees or government vehicles into mobile offices; parking as close to the training site as possible and attaching power converters to the vehicle’s batteries so that they could plug in their computers and MiFi hotspots. At another site, when technical issues rendered a video camera inoperable, a still camera was substituted to shoot video.
The mission of any public affairs Soldier, officer or enlisted, is to inform the American people of what their military personnel are doing. In a situation, such as Vigilant Guard 17, an officer’s on-site duties, besides leading the mission, will be to interact with any media present. Taking pictures or video and writing stories in the military is traditionally an enlisted soldier’s job. These Soldiers usually operate independently or in teams of three or four personnel. This autonomy can lead to a large amount of responsibility placed on junior Soldiers.
Staff Sgt. Thomas Thornton, a 124th MPAD broadcast journalist and former medic, was leading a team of three other Guardsmen; two specialists and a private first class.
“You brief the mission, you prepare the mission,” said Thornton, “but when it comes down to execution, you have to let it go.”
These four Guardsman were responsible for covering the events at the Guardian Centers. Thornton, as the team leader, stayed with the two government vehicles parked on the side of the road. This was the group’s worksite. He provided command, control and communications between the JIC and his troops in the field. This allowed his two photographers, a specialist and the private first class, and one videographer, a specialist, to act independently.
“It puts you in a very scary place,” said Thornton. “Once you let them go, you can’t control {them}. You can’t be with them every second. You have to trust them … trust what you’ve taught them … trust them to make those decisions of what to do next, what to capture next.”
Over the course of the exercise, the 124th MPAD told the Soldier’s story by assisting national and local media crews in covering the training at all locations as well as releasing 543 photos, videos, interviews and print products for publication which reached over 110,571 people.
The majority of this work was done by either junior noncommissioned officers or junior enlisted soldiers working on their own.
“You give them the freedom to move, to do as they see fit and make those important micro-decisions,” said Thornton. “You step back and allow the magic to happen.”
| Date Taken: | 04.03.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 04.05.2017 13:20 |
| Story ID: | 229270 |
| Location: | MARIETTA, GA, US |
| Web Views: | 51 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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