CONTINGENCY OPERATING SITE WARRIOR, Iraq " Task Force “Devil” Soldiers with Company B, 101st Brigade Support Battalion, 1st Advise and Assist Task Force, 1st Infantry Division, maintain readiness for the unit at the Basic Load Ammunition Holding Area on Contingency Operating Site Warrior, Iraq.
Soldiers who man the BLAHA on a daily basis maintain the readiness of Task Force Devil by inspecting and cleaning ammunition so that it may be redistributed to other units or redeployed back home.
“We provide support to 19 units,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Gina Spivey, officer in charge of the BLAHA, Company B, 101st BSB. “We ensure safe storage and safe shipment of all ammunition that we handle.”
While only a handful of Devil Soldiers are responsible for manning the BLAHA at a given time, each one of them bears the responsibility maintaining the workload required to support all 19 units.
“It’s a fairly repetitive process, but there has to be an unwavering attention to detail that goes into each load of ammunition that is sorted,” said Staff Sgt. Douglass Smith, an ammunition-handling specialist with Company B, 101st BSB. “When we receive a shipment of an ammunition turn-in, we start by sorting the live ammunition from the residue.”
Residue is classified as any by-product of the live ammunition being fired, such as the brass casing of the round, the pin of a grenade, or the detached links of a belt of ammunition.
“The residue has to be sorted and packaged together while the live ammunition, whether it is rounds or grenades, needs to be laid out, meticulously inspected for damages or faults of any kind, and then cleaned,” said Smith. “It’s important that we inspect and package all of the ammunition properly, because we know that a lot of what we handle will be reallocated to either another part of the Iraq theater or to Afghanistan. The Soldiers that receive it are counting on us to give them reliable, stable ammunition.”
The bottom line, Spivey said, is the Soldiers that work at the BLAHA have a two-part mission, and they carry it out each day: they package and ship ammunition.
“Our Soldiers here diligently work at sorting, screening, and cleaning our ammunition so that it can be either retrograded down south to be redeployed, or packaged up and placed back into the supply system to be redistributed to Soldiers throughout theater that need it,” Spivey said. “It’s an important task and we are proud to do it.”
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