Isle Stryker force trains at Bellows without Strykers

Stryker Brigade soldiers who used to show up to the fight in their eponymous eight-wheeled vehicles came in faster and lighter — by helicopter and then on foot — for a portion of Lightning Forge, the biggest 25th Infantry Division training exercise of the year.

Nearly 100 of the Schofield Barracks soldiers landed Friday in five Black Hawks and a big twin-rotor Chinook at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows with a mission to capture several “high-value individuals” in the fictional island nation of Ari. The soldiers also assessed a refugee camp.

Altogether, about 5,000 soldiers are participating in the three-week exercise held across Oahu and the Big Island, which ends Tuesday.

Adding a twist to the refugee camp were nearly 30 Roosevelt High performing arts students who studied for roles as “internally displaced persons” and populated a makeshift village — learning a bit about real-world strife in the process.

For the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, the switch from Strykers to light infantry is a paradigm shift that will continue to manifest itself for years to come and reshape how more than 3,500 Hawaii soldiers are used in the Asia-Pacific region.

Some 320 Stryker vehicles now in storage will be shipped to a National Guard unit in Washington state, probably starting in March or April as the conversion continues, the 25th Division said.

The Army announced in July that as part of a servicewide downsizing, the Hawaii Stryker Brigade would lose a maneuver battalion and its armored vehicles in the transition to light infantry.

Command Sgt. Maj. T.J. Holland with the 2nd Brigade said it’s “fiscally responsible” to make the shift to light infantry because it’s “expensive to train as a brigade with Strykers on this island.”

Hawaii’s mountainous terrain and lack of wide-open space have always been challenges for Stryker training, but with the switch, “we’re able to go ahead and get out in the locations as a light organization more effectively to meet the Army’s intent,” Holland said.

“In the long term we’re saving the Army’s money but we’re still maintaining that readiness,” he said.

Lightning Forge this year is aimed primarily at developing the capabilities of the 2nd Brigade, but multiple units are taking part in support roles. Last year the inaugural such exercise was focused on sharpening the skills of the 3rd Brigade, another light infantry unit at Schofield.

On Friday, B Company of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, helicoptered into Bellows and pushed its way through the overgrowth to the main village at the Marine Corps’ $42 million “immersion” trainer, which was built to look like an Afghan village and still retains many of those features.

As part of the exercise, the Buddhist island nation of Ari called upon the U.S. military to help defeat rogue elements from the Muslim nation of Poema, who are also aligned with the Islamic Liberation Front insurgency, the Army said.

Conducting a raid on the main village to capture several “high-value individuals,” B Company and other Schofield soldiers encountered a fierce firefight with the mock enemy and sustained about eight casualties in a hail of blank fire.

“Residents, get out of the street!” shouted a Schofield soldier from the second floor of the village mosque. “If you are in the street, you will be arrested!”

“It’s a challenge to work through” with shooters and noncombatants in the village, said the B Company commander, Capt. Ben Pinner, who is 28. Pinner said the loss of the Stryker vehicles has its advantages.

“Actually, honestly, I think it’s kind of better. It’s made us focus on the fundamentals (of infantry),” he said.

Down the road, the performing arts students from Roosevelt waited for the soldiers’ arrival. Micah Benavitz, the school’s performing arts teacher, suggested the role-playing to the Army to give students some outside experience and as an aid to Army training.

The sophomore-to-senior participants created characters and auditioned, Benavitz said. Julianna Oliphant, a 17-year-old senior, was excited to take part.

“We as students have never been able to do anything like this before, and to have an all-day improv activity with the military — it’s such real-world experience that we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else,” Oliphant said.

She was role-playing as a 16-year-old who went to the refugee camp with her brother after their parents died and the siblings had nowhere to go. Oliphant said she researched the Syrian refugee crisis and others.

“It’s been a lot of trying to figure out for ourselves what it’s like to be a refugee — which is hard because none of us have ever been refugees before, and realizing how privileged we are to live in America,” she said.

Col. Scott Mitchell, commander of the 196th Infantry Brigade, which ran the exercise, said he had about 1,000 people involved, including opposing and host-nation forces and observer controllers.

“It’s hard to find an exercise with this level of complexity,” Mitchell said. “We talked about it last year that really, you are training from the division all the way down to the squad and team levels.”