New Fort Benning commander takes aggressive approach to battling COVID-19
Fort Benning’s new commander knows the Army can’t afford a COVID-19 outbreak at the post that trains 35% of the branch’s fighting force, so he’s mounting an aggressive defense against the spreading pandemic.
Taking command Friday from Lt. Gen. Gary Brito, who’s now serving the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe immediately issued an order tightening restrictions on both soldiers and civilian workers.
He ordered them to wear face masks whenever they can’t stay six feet from others, on post and off; to limit gatherings to no more than 15 people, with social distancing; and to avoid indoor dining and gym workouts.
With coronavirus cases spiking across the South, this is not the time to ease up on precautions, and risk bringing the virus onto post, Donahoe said in an interview Tuesday with the Ledger-Enquirer.
“We are at record numbers of cases. Now is not the time to talk about ramping down out measures, being less vigilant. Now’s the time of saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to maintain our discipline,” he said.
Active on Twitter at @PatDonahoeArmy, he reminds followers that “COVID is not tired,” and the military has to remain on guard against the epidemic, and not tire of taking steps to stop it.
Fort Benning’s mission is too critical to be risked by individual recklessness, whether the individual is a soldier, a civilian worker or a post contractor, he said.
He said that means anyone who comes onto the post has to get up every morning thinking, “My responsibility is to make sure I remain COVID-free, which means I’m not going downtown and eating in a sit-in restaurant in close proximity to folks that I don’t know if they’ve got COVID or not.”
Soldiers who violate the order can be disciplined; civilian employees can face administrative punishment; and contractors can be banned from post, he said.
“Whether you believe in wearing a mask or not – not really open to debate, right?” he added. “Do what you can to protect yourself.”
When the outbreak began, Donahoe was stationed at Camp Humphries in South Korea, about 40 miles south of Seoul, near the seaport city of Pyeongtaek. He saw the disease spread as authorities tried to stop it.
He was confined to post like everyone else.
“I didn’t leave Camp Humphries from Feb. 6 to June 6,” he said.
South Korea took stringent measures early on, and today the country of 51 million still requires masks, though its rate of new infections has dropped to about 50 a day, Donahoe said.
“What we learned in Korea was that what is deemed sufficient today, as we were ramping into the disease, will be insufficient tomorrow,” he said. “You’ve got to make very, very hard decisions very early on.”
18th station
Donahoe is 53 now, with three daughters – one who’s in college in Kentucky, one who will be in middle school on post, and one who’ll be going to high school in Columbus. He married wife Theresa in 1994, while he was stationed in Kentucky.
He’s now on his 18th assignment. He went through Airborne School at Benning in 1989, and in 2013-2014 served as director of the Directorate of Training and Doctrine and then as chief of staff.
His service has taken him all over the world, and he relished the experience, even in places others found dull.
“The next thing was always exciting,” he said. “I’ve never had a bad assignment in the Army.”
Some soldiers found Fort Irwin, Calif., to be monotonous, isolated in the middle of the desert. He did not: “The desert has a beauty all its own…. Everywhere you go, you just need to be a tourist.”
It was not what he envisioned his life would be, when he was a college kid majoring in accounting at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. He had made other plans.
“I didn’t become a soldier,” he recalled. “I became a sailor.”
He joined the Navy ROTC, but soon found he was suited neither to the Navy nor to accounting.
“Man, I hated it,” he said. The math, including physics and calculus, was overwhelming: “I was getting crushed.”
He changed his major to history. In 1985, he was learning about the cycles of a ship’s steam engine when a friend in Army ROTC sent him a selfie, in a helmet and full tactical gear, holding a weapon.
“They had just spent the weekend kicking in doors at an old National Guard base in Maryland, and firing blanks,” he said. He saw that and wondered, “What am I doing?”
So on Ash Wednesday, he called his father from a hallway pay phone at the private Catholic university and said he was switching to the Army ROTC.
“What that means is I gave up the Navy for Lent,” he said.
Asked whether he took to the Army life, Donahoe replied by leaning back in his chair Tuesday and pointing to his uniform, bearing the stars of a major general in command of a premier training post.
He first came to Benning as a 22-year-old lieutenant in jump school. One of his favorite memories is his fourth parachute jump, over the landing fields across the Chattahoochee River in Alabama, where his helmet came off in midair.
It reminded him that he had not landed well, on earlier jumps.
“The first three, I had smacked my head as hard as I could, but I had my helmet on,” he said.
Now he had to execute a “parachute landing fall” bareheaded. On the ground, trainers who found his helmet got on their megaphones and told him, “You’d better stick your PLF.”
He did, and after a fifth jump, he was done with Airborne School, and never jumped from a plane again: “I went off to do tanks.”
He did his armor training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, years before the Army combined infantry, armor and cavalry training in the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Benning.
‘Center of gravity’
That Benning carries on hazardous training such as parachute jumps and tank practice with so few mishaps is a testament to its safety standards, he said.
About 14,000 soldiers go through jump school each year, as armor training annually fires off around 10,000 tank rounds.
“That’s a pretty hazardous line of work, if you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said.
Ranger training also begins and ends at Benning, he noted, calling it “the envy of armies around the world.”
Coaching the Army’s next leaders is another crucial mission: “The other thing we do here is, every future leader of the armor, infantry and cavalry is going to train here,” he said. “We are a crucible of leader development.”
All that combined makes Benning a critical component in overall U.S. military operations, he emphasized.
“When you think about the center of gravity for the tactical Army, it sits right here at Benning.”
That’s why he aims to keep COVID-19 well beyond the gates.
“The challenge is the disease can shut us down,” he said.
That could cut short the supply of around 60,000 fresh troops that Benning trains annually.
“We can’t do that if our cadre are all on sick call,” he said. “We’ve got to ensure that we protect the force.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.