Wheeler Army unit
heading to KuwaitThe soldiers will help manage
military cargo for the war zones
A Wheeler Army Air Field unit that manages port and ocean terminals will be sent on its first wartime mission next month to Kuwait in support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Guy Cabral, spokesman for the 599th Transportation Group, said seven civilians and five soldiers from the unit will be part of the first group that will be stationed in the Port of Ahuibab in Kuwait.
He estimated that eventually almost all of the 47 members of the unit -- two out of three of them civilians -- will serve in Kuwait over the next six months.
"They will be rotated periodically," Cabral said.
The Wheeler unit, to be augmented with Army and Navy Reservists from the mainland, is commanded by Col. Thomas Harvey.
It will replace the 598th Transportation Group, which has been in Kuwait for the past six months and will be returning to its duty station in the Netherlands.
The 599th has been in Hawaii since 1991, Cabral said, and until four years ago it was known as the Military Traffic Management Command. In 2000, it was designated as the Surface Deployment Distribution Command, Southwest Asia, whose parent organization is in Falls Church, Va.
In Kuwait, the 599th will be responsible for managing the port operations, including scheduling work hours for unloading commercial container ships used by the military for the Iraqi and Afghan wars, Cabral said.
In the past, it has helped plan the movement of military cargo using commercial vessels for training exercises in Asia, he said.
In December, the 599th helped coordinate the movement of the 25th Infantry Division to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The shipping began in December, when nearly 2,000 pieces of vehicles and containers were placed on the cargo vessel USNS Pililaau at Pearl Harbor to support the 4,500 Tropic Lightning soldiers deployed to Iraq.
When the Pililaau left on Dec. 18, its seven decks, with a capacity of more than 380,000 square feet -- equal to eight football fields -- were fully loaded.
In February, the 599th moved the equipment of an additional 3,500 soldiers headed for Afghanistan. The 599th was augmented with soldiers from the Army Reserve's 1394th Deployment Support Brigade in Camp Pendleton, Calif.