FORT GORDON, Ga. — Thirty-nine Army Reserve Soldiers of the Richmond, Virginia-based 7457th Medical Operational Readiness Unit collaborated alongside their active component counterparts during the Eastern Phoenix 2025 training exercise held in between the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Fort Gordon, Georgia, and Bush Field at the Augusta Regional Airport in Augusta, Georgia, from July 29, 2025, through August 9, 2025.
The annual training exercise is led by Medical Readiness Command, East in tandem with the 7457th MORU, and its brigade-level echelon, the Staten Island, New York-based Northeast Medical Area Readiness Support Group to prepare and train Soldiers in large-scale patient reception influxes, triage, medical care and hospital bed expansion in a simulated large-scale combat operations environment.
“Eastern Phoenix is a global training mission which we partner with the active-duty component to come and backfill the medical treatment facility here to augment the staff in the event of a LSCO mission in which we have an influx, then need to do a bed capacity expansion at Eisenhower and other MTFs,” said Army Reserve Lt. Col. Jason Williams, an emergency room nurse and deputy commander of nursing for the 7457th MORU. “We’re here to augment the staff to assist with the bed expansion.”
Williams said Eastern Phoenix 2025 is advantageous to readiness and interoperability due to the progressive shift in operating tempo. Moreover, he said it is imperative to train in alignment with the U.S. Army Medical Department’s third, fourth and fifth roles in the battlefield — respectively, combat support hospitals, general hospitals and Contiguous United States-based hospitals.
“Training at Eisenhower with the Eastern Phoenix mission is very important because with the op tempo change in the war as well as large-scale contingency operations, we need to be able to fight here on the ground and different levels: level three, level four and this level five,” Williams said. “We are actually CONUS in the fixed facility.”
Army Reserve Capt. Tina Figueroa, a critical care nurse for the 7457th MORU, said the Reserve Component integration provides better staffing and support to cover the AMEDD first role of point-of-injury care and the second role of battalion aid stations.
“We’re taking the MORU and putting us into a role three, freeing up the assets to then deploy to a role one and role two situation — treating patients and treating Soldiers,” Figueroa said. “And if they need more care, then they will be headed over to us.”
In addition to the facilitation and augmentation process in Eastern Phoenix 2025, a handful of Soldiers of the 7457th MORU took the initiative in improving certain processes of the Eisenhower MTF.
Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Andrew Lutz, an operating room specialist with the 7457th MORU, said he and his Soldiers established a precedent in operational flow while giving his team a clear sense of direction and purpose.
“I helped streamline the process here at the sterile processing department by giving some direction and insight through my experience,” said Lutz. “A lot of the Soldiers here didn’t have a full process of going from point A to point B to point C, and I worked at a couple of different facilities and kind of bringing the insight of ‘Hey, you should have a point here’ where someone can take on these specific roles, direction, the wealth of information and being able to direct it a little bit better.”
“What our juniors should take away from this is that when you go back to your unit and your regular civilian job, that we have a better understanding of how to facilitate larger casualty events,” Lutz said. “Most civilian medical centers don’t practice this or don’t have an understanding of it; it’s a unique experience to us in the military.”
“To bring that knowledge back to our civilian medical counterparts, we become a pretty big asset to them in those events because they never really experienced this,” he said.
Army Capt. Christopher Johns, the clinical nurse officer in charge of the intensive care unit for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center said the incorporation of reserve component Soldiers are drawn from lessons learned from prior Eastern Phoenix iterations.
“With this exercise, it’s been a lot smoother, especially in the setup. They were also an integral part in setting up and getting ready in receiving the patients.”
Johns said the 7457th MORU not only contributed to the overall exercise, but they were instrumental in the amplification of processes in routine hospital operations.
“Aside from helping to get ready to receiving a large number of patients for the exercise, they’ve actually been really helpful in our day-to-day patient care," said Johns. "They jumped in, helped out with taking care of our current patients, so we’re really appreciative to have them help out with that as well.”
Eastern Phoenix 2025 is supplemented this year with the Eastern Phoenix Emergency Operations Center, or EOC, exercise in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, supported and staffed by Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, NE-MARSG, from July 29, 2025, through August 10, 2025.
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