By David Snow
Eagle Post
The 2nd Brigade Combat Team — also known as the 502nd Infantry Regiment — cased its colors Wednesday in a ceremony held at
Col. Brett G. Sylvia, the commander for the 2nd BCT, said that about 1,400 soldiers — about one-third of the brigade combat team — would deploy soon to Iraq and Kuwait in support of Operation Inherent
“The Secretary of Defense has been saying a lot about how Mosul is an essential fight, that being a center of gravity for Daesh (the Islamic State), or for ISIL over there,” Sylvia said. “This administration wants to push really hard to assist our Iraqi counterparts to retake Mosul and really
Sylvia added that his soldiers are very adept at their training and are able to turn around and train and assist Iraqi soldiers in their fight to retake ground from the rebellious Islamic State troops.
“It’s an easy transition, actually,” he said. “…The one thing we do know how to do is train. Whether it’s training our own soldiers or training other soldiers, that’s something that we do exceedingly well.”
Sylvia said it would be good to “step into a known environment,” speaking about working under the 101st Headquarters Company that
“When you go into a combat zone, there’s already so much uncertainty that exists,” he said, “but to go there, where you know the higher headquarters, where there’s already bonds of trust that are built between commanders, between staffs, it makes a lot of difference to be able to truly hit the ground running.”
Sylvia and Command Sgt. Maj. Jeremy A. Gebhardt cased one banner of the unit’s colors in
Purdom served as the commander of the 502nd Infantry Regiment during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. He retired from the military in 1994.
“They are fighting a tougher war than what we fought in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, obviously,” Purdom said. “What they face today is much more lethal, much more organized, much more sophisticated than what we fought in the Gulf War, so my hat’s off to them.
“But, they’ve trained hard; they’ve been training hard for the last 11 months, I guess it is, and they are really ready to go.”
A colors casing ceremony demonstrates that a unit is leaving for another destination, whether it is a combat area overseas or returning home. The unit will uncase its colors upon arrival, then go through the procedure again when it returns to Fort Campbell.
The colors that are cased include the unit’s banner and streamers representing the campaigns through history that the unit took part in. The 2nd Brigade’s colors are many, including streamers from World War II, Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm and more recent deployments to the Middle East.
