FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. —Fort Leonard Wood Soldiers with the 763rd Ordnance Company (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) trained with local law enforcement professionals Aug. 5 to hone their skills and share their expertise during a homeland defense response exercise.
“This training gave my Soldiers an opportunity to get real face-to-face training with the sheriff’s department and other first responders in a chaotic mass casualty event with the presence of improvised explosive devices,” said Sgt. 1st Class William Washbourne, 763rd EOD platoon sergeant.
“I want my Soldiers to train as hard as possible like their lives depend on it, because it does.”
As part of the exercise, first responders from Waynesville and St. Robert police departments, Pulaski County Sheriff’s department and other emergency services personnel answered a call at a community building where a team of actors were roleplaying an active-shooter scenario, complete with planted improvised explosive hazards.
That’s when local law enforcement officials called in the 763rd.
“It was exciting to see the local law enforcement officers execute training and rewarding to see my Soldiers training seriously with them,” Washbourne said.
According to Washbourne, part of the Fort Leonard Wood based EOD unit’s mission is to share its expertise with the public by responding to explosive hazards or bomb threats in Missouri communities.
“We are the ones who support local law enforcement,” he said.
And joint training opportunities like this exercise allow Soldiers a chance to “refine our interoperability with our law enforcement partners during a realistic training scenario in an environment that we are not used to,” Washbourne added.
When an EOD team is called to a real-world emergency similar to this, Washbourne said it is a “high-stress event that takes a lot of effort to try to control the scene when there are IEDs involved and there are first responders still trying to evacuate casualties and secure a scene with an active shooter.”
According to Washbourne, this was the first time his unit has trained with local law enforcement.
“We want to build a relationship for future training events, so when there is a real-world emergency, it’s not the first time we have worked with each other, and we can complete the mission as smooth as possible,” Washbourne said.
Staff Sgt. Joshua Luebke, 763rd EOD team sergeant, agreed and said he learned a lot from the experience.
“I think it’s very important to build those relationships so we can respond not only faster but also have practice working together so as to better understand each other’s roles and responsibilities on scene,” Luebke said. “I learned that scenes can be very chaotic during the initial response. Having full control of the scene to keep people safe from explosive hazards is important.”
For more photos from the training, visit Fort Leonard Wood’s Flickr page.
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