In South Korea, Warrior Strike adds tension to relations with North

Staff Sgt. Phil Sharrock, 29, is on a gunnery range here firing his M4 carbine under stress conditions.

For this training session, the instructors demand pushups, squats and stair climbs to pump up heart rates, then shout at the soldiers as they fire at pop-up targets as far as 300 yards up range.

“Why didn’t you fire?” one shouts. “Let’s go!” shouts another. “Are you stressed out? Go! Go!” shouts a third. “Lucky shot.”

The stress gets to some and they miss the targets. But the stress doesn’t seem to faze Sharrock, a Louisiana native who’s been to Sniper School and faced combat in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011.

Expert-qualified soldiers can miss as many as four of the 40 targets.

Sharrock misses two.

•••

Camp Casey is one of the U.S. Army’s last permanent forward operating bases in the world. North Korea is 17 miles from here, within the range of North Korea’s artillery. Camp Casey sits on 3,500 acres. It is a no-nonsense, efficient post, yet with amenities suited to the soldiers who serve here, all without family: barracks, dining halls, gyms, chapels, a 3-D theater.

Dozens of uniform, 70’s-era, tan-painted buildings sit along well-marked, paved roads, brightened by hundreds of Korean azaleas in full, spring bloom. A few Quonset huts are left over from the Korean War, still in use.

This is part of the Uijeongbu Corridor, a narrow passage between two mountains through which North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, and which today is defended by the Army’s 2^nd Infantry Division.

The 2ID’s mission is two-fold: it’s to deter aggression and maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula or, failing that, to fight. “We keep an eye on,” one officer told me, “but we’re ready to fight tonight.”

I spent some days in late April with the division’s 1^st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1^st Cavalry Division, known by the nickname of Ironhorse. My visit coincided with Warrior Strike, the largest-ever joint exercise with the South Korea military.

We drove north from Camp Casey toward the Rodriguez Live Fire Range, where a South Korean army unit was to assault a mock town defended by U.S. soldiers. The platoon-size unit of South Koreans decided to approach the town through a hilly wooded area. They asked for artillery fire, hoping to soften the ground ahead of them, but none was available.

As the South Korean unit moved into the woods, maneuvering up and down steep hills, laden with heavy sacks of gear, we positioned ourselves in the town, hoping to observe the assault from there. For some minutes, we saw nothing, we heard nothing. Then, a furious exchange of small-arms fire erupted in the woods. Turns out the defending force of U.S. soldiers anticipated the point of the assault and positioned themselves on the ridgeline above.

The South Korean unit? “They were smoked,” an observer accompanying the Koreans told us.

Minutes later, the small defending force of U.S. soldiers emerged from the woods to reposition in the mock town for a further assault. It never came.

North Korea doesn’t like exercises like Warrior Strike, at sites like the Rodriguez Range, so close to its border. Nor do the locals. Residents of the neighboring village of Pocheon have complained for years that the noise keeps them awake and disrupts their livestock.

Army Captain Peter Bogart, who accompanied me to the exercise, said protestors often impede exercises by positioning themselves in the impact areas, preventing live fire. None were there the day we visited.

•••

I also wanted to come to Camp Casey because of its connection with Fort Benning. Most of the officers and enlisted stationed here trained at Fort Benning: basic and advanced training for enlisted, Ranger School and other courses for officers. I met, for example, Capt. James Teskey, who was just back at Fort Benning for the Best Ranger competition. He and his partner, 1st Lt. Nicholas Kiser, placed sixth. Another captain, Scott Flynn, was last at Fort Benning as a company commander, training mortar men. And, I met 1st Lt. Thomas Rielly, who’s soon to be back to Fort Benning for the captain’s career course.

And, I wanted to come here for a third reason: With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominating the news the last 15 years, some of us have forgotten that the U.S. military is deployed elsewhere, including Korea, now for 65 years, since war erupted in 1950. The Korean War is often referred to as the Forgotten War. In a small, personal way, I wanted to be sure soldiers here today are not forgotten.

•••

Warrior Strike is occurring at one of the tensest times in North-South relations. So far in 2016: North Korea detonated a nuclear device, its fourth. The United Nations imposed “swift and tough” economic sanctions. North Korea launched a submarine-based ballistic missile, despite a U.N. ban on such weapons. South Korea ramped up its rhetorical battle against the North, for the first time publicly deriding the regime’s instability. And, then, North Korea deployed 300 new, multiple-launch rocket systems along its border with the South.

Warrior Strike, North Korea says, only adds to the tension.

Some of the soldiers I met feel the tension.

The tension is “noticeable,” says Maj. Ed Arntson, the 1^st brigade’s chief operations officer. A captain in Arntson’s department, Trevor Sparkes, sensed the tension as soon as he arrived at Camp Casey. But, it “gives purpose to the reason we’re here,” Sparkes says. And, the tension contributes to “heightened alert,” especially when you’re so close to the border, says 1st Lt. Rielly, also an assistant operations officer.

Others don’t feel the tension. “Doesn’t bother us,” Capt. Bogart says. “We’re ready to do the job.”

How ready? Readiness, Bogart says, means being ready to move out on two hours’ notice. Gear is packed, vehicles loaded and lined up in motor pools. They test the system weekly. It’s called “Motor Pool Monday.”

Testing is common; alerts are rare. The last alert Bogart recalls was in August 2015, when the two Koreas exchanged rocket and artillery fire, in what the New York Times called “the first major armed clash across their border in five years.”

•••

Some of the soldiers here are new to the Army, in uniform just over a year. And they are a leadership challenge, officers told me.

“Soldiers ask me, ‘Why are we over here?’” said Capt. Teskey. The challenge is communicating the message on the mission “down to the lowest man.” The solution, Teskey and others said, is exposing junior soldiers to senior leaders.

They talk, senior to junior, about the threat, about the mission. A lot.

Doing this “gets that common understanding,” Teskey said.

Senior soldiers like Staff Sgt. Sharrock don’t need much talking with. Perhaps it was his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, Sharrock has a keen sense of his role in Korea. And the threat.

“You’re always looking over the mountain with hope or dread,” Sharrock says, “depending on who you are.”

Who are you, I ask, hope or dread?

Sharrock smiles.

“No comment.”

This story was originally published May 15, 2016 at 9:28 PM with the headline "In South Korea, Warrior Strike adds tension to relations with North."