Patterson NJ Police Officer trains for Iraq as National Guardsman

Just one more case of a police officer also being a member of the National Guard.

Soldiers train hard for duty as prison guards
Mike Kelly

August 13, 2008 6:19 AM
The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)

(MCT)

CAMP OUTLAW, N.M. - Felipe Diaz, Paterson police officer and New Jersey National Guard sergeant bound for Iraq, put down his gun the other day at this remote desert training base and picked up an unlikely tool of war - a shield.

Except for its clear-plastic design, Diaz's protective shell seemed more suited to a Roman centurion 2,000 years ago, not a 21st-century American soldier in camouflage.

''This is a whole new ballgame,'' said Diaz, a member of the Teaneck, N.J.-based Foxtrot Company.

That's an understatement.



The Pentagon has given Diaz and most of the 2,800 other soldiers of New Jersey's 50th Infantry Brigade Combat Team the unfamiliar, politically sensitive mission of guarding captured Iraqis.

With their summer of training coming to a close, Foxtrot Company and other New Jersey units are swinging into an intense immersion regimen on how to handle prisoners. Besides plastic shields and other non-lethal gadgets, the soldiers take computer classes in Arabic culture and language and are encouraged to empathize with the plight of some detainees.

But behind almost every lecture and training exercise are two words - Abu Ghraib - and the indelible set of 2004 photographs showing a small group of U.S. Army reservists forcing captured Iraqis to strip naked and pose in sexually suggestive positions.

As the Army points out, Camp Outlaw was built on the sands of New Mexico's rugged chaparral to head off another Abu Ghraib scandal in the sands of Iraq.

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