Q&A: 82nd Airborne general on deployments, training at Fort Liberty and All American Week
It’s been nearly six months since Maj. Gen. J. Patrick Work took command of the 82nd Airborne Division.
The division’s headquarters deployed to Europe less than a month later, while the 82nd Airborne Division Combat Brigade headed to the Middle East.
Meanwhile, units back at Fort Liberty have trained locally, combined with annual training at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, and the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. And the division's Immediate Response Force maintains constant readiness to deploy if needed worldwide.
The historic division is also gearing up this month for its annual All American Week which honors current and past paratroopers.
The Fayetteville Observer spoke with Work via a video call on Monday, while he is deployed to Europe, to catch up on what’s been going on in the division for the past six months.
Work's responses are below and edited for clarity, style and length.
How have the past six months been?
Work: To take command in mid-November, when you’ve got the holidays in November followed by the holidays in December and... a slice of us deployed to Europe ... I really had to account for every hour of every day for those 17 days or so that I was in North Carolina. It was really critical that we made the most of my time. No. 2, we already had the aviation brigade in the Middle East … And then obviously, we’ve got ... the Immediate Response Force. So, there’s a lot going on. Fortunately, I was familiar with the division, and there’s a lot of familiar faces. By the time January rolled around, we were faced with ... attempting to leap priority change back in North Carolina while still doing what V Corps in Europe needed us to do … There’s a couple of things that a division commander is responsible for … Obviously, the priority is combat readiness. The second priority is taking care of our people … By January, we had to implement a disciplined rhythm, a cadence for how we can work East Coast, Middle East and East Europe. And how do we keep the organization moving on some sort of disciplined rhythm so we can make the decisions we had to make to affect change on this end and change back in North Carolina. All the while, I’m responsible for 17,800 people’s lives and thousands of families. So, I felt well prepared for it … I got a lot of help. We’ve got a tremendous amount of talent in the division.
What is the 82nd's role in Europe right now?
Work: Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, with the initial invasion being in 2014 and then obviously again in 2022, the combat is vicious, and Romania shares a border with Ukraine. So the Black Sea region is really volatile, and there’s a whole lot at stake ... The world is watching everything that’s playing out in Ukraine, and there’s no guarantees on how this thing’s going to end. So, when you think about the Alliance and you consider the investment that the United States and (Europe Command) made in the Baltic states of Poland in the beginning of 2014, we’re a little bit behind down here at the southeastern border.
What Gen. Cavoli is trying to do with us is energize the Alliance, backstop the Alliance and encourage the Alliance in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, because this really is a rough neighborhood. The major commitment to Poland and the Baltic states occurred a decade prior to the reinvasion ... Romania’s got a lot of potential. It’s got two national divisions. It’s got a NATO division that it hosts and a NATO Corps that it hosts. Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia, they’re principally focused on their national defenses, so what we’re trying to do through our Security Force Assistance is help connect their national efforts to the NATO efforts. So if you’re facing starting in the east along the Russian border and southeast flank of Europe, how do we help those three states connect deeply, more meaningfully to the alliance? That’s what we’re working on ... Gen. Cavoli is clear ... prioritize alliance efforts and energy toward the alliance.
The 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade has had a lot of training in the Middle East during the past few months. How is their deployment?
Work: That’s obviously a very dangerous environment — since the very first week of October, even more so. It wrestles with counter-terrorism challenges within the region ... Among many of those countries, some are really struggling with their own civil internal problems. Obviously, Syria deals with a civil war, but it’s based on what’s happened between Israel, Hamas and most recently Iran. It’s a really dangerous environment, and our aviation brigade is deployed right in the middle of that. And so, what happens between state actors doesn’t necessarily stay between those two states. We’re operating out of several countries throughout the Middle East right now. The Combat Aviation Brigade really defies physics. We can take for granted the skill it takes to fly helicopters. Every time it takes off, it’s defying gravity, and the pilots are extraordinarily skilled, and they do it day and night. That’s a really rough environment over there, just the heat and amount of sand, dirt, etc. They’re doing it to a very high standard, so we’re really proud of them, and we should never take for granted what those really skilled pilots do with those machines every day, and what those maintenance crews do behind the scenes to keep those aircraft flying. Not only are we proud of what they’re doing, but those paratroopers that are deployed to the Middle East right now are delivering every single day in a really difficult environment, and they’ve been doing so now for over six months.
A paratrooper was injured early during the deployment. Can you talk about the resiliency of the family’s here in North Carolina?
Work: For those families dealing with separation right now, particularly the aviation brigade’s families where they know that their loved ones are operating in a dangerous environment — we’re really grateful. We tend to enlist soldiers but reenlist families, and the miracle of the all-volunteer force is that these families continue to stay with us, and we need them to do so. We’re extraordinarily grateful, and with great admiration, I say thank you on behalf of the nation and on behalf of the division. Additionally, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Garret Illerbrunn had a very close call on Christmas Eve. At the better part of six months, he and his family have been coping with his recovery, and we’re all pulling for them and praying for them. For all the families affected by what’s happening in these wars, we keep you in our prayers and we keep you in our thoughts. They’re always in the front (of my) mind as commander.
Can you talk about the brigades back at Fort Liberty that have also been part of training cycles?
Work: One of the things that we provide are ready and responsive forces on very short notice, and that’s no secret to anybody who watches ... We’ve got the Immediate Response Force ... and their job is to be ready to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours to take on any enemy in any environment. … We’ve also got a brigade combat team that’s on a slower alert and they’re in an intensive training cycle ... Their job is to do mission-essential task training and everything from the individual up to the collective brigade combat team — all of those tasks from offense to defense to stability, and they’re really the division’s bread and butter, which is joint forcible entry — forcing our way into an adversary’s backyard, taking a piece of land from them so that we can help the nation build combat power as part of the joint force. We have a whole bunch of people right now that are out there trying to master their craft, whether it’s artillery fires, whether it’s engineers, whether they’re logisticians, or whether they’re infantry and they get paid to shoot, move, communicate and dominate in close combat. We have an entire brigade combat team focused on that right now, and then our division artillery and our sustainment brigade never get a day off. Every single time there’s a paratrooper in the field, someone put them there. Someone packed their parachute. Someone moved that ammunition. Someone’s firing those Howitzers to support them. So we got a lot going on in the division all the time. That's only because of this top-tier talent, this teamwork, that we’re able to put all the staff together. In many ways, this division makes it look easy.
What does it mean to continue the All American Week tradition this month?
I very much look forward to it because I’ll be returning home to spend some time with our division ... The division’s lineage to World War II, from Sicily to Salerno to Normandy to Holland and then further on into the Battle of Bulge and into Germany, that really cemented the division’s reputation for combat excellence and for extraordinary courage .... Since then, whether it’s doing humanitarian assistance for places like the Dominican Republic to Hurricane Katrina, combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria ... the division has had a central role in so many of these critical security moments of the Cold War and post 9/11 era. Getting together to honor our ancestors is really critical because this thing we had was paid for by blood ... It’s about our responsibility to be good ancestors to inspire the next generation, to show them how to fight the way we did. So really look forward to bringing everybody together, from the families of our paratroopers, to our Gold Star families, to all of our former paratroopers and our paratroopers that are still going ... Command Sgt. Maj. (Randolph) Delapena and I really look forward to doing this together and having a little fun together ... It’s an opportunity to honor our fallen, honor our ancestors, honor our families, and then really remind ourselves that we’re really blessed to be doing this together.
Will the division have representatives at the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion?
We very much look forward to participating in this 80th celebration of the Allies’ invasion to pierce the Atlantic wall and liberate Normandy. A number of us are going to be there, and I’m very much looking forward to it. The 160,000 Allied troops that assaulted on D-Day, about 23,000 of them were paratroopers. They were paratroopers from the 82nd, from the 101st Airborne Division and from the British 6th Airborne Division. And from our division in particular, several of our regimental combat teams at the time conducted parachute assaults — the 505th, the 507th, the 508th and a handful of pathfinders from the 504th and then the 325th, which was a glider infantry regiment. All of those organizations participated in the assault landings on D-Day, and they fought doggedly in places like La Fiere, Rhines … So really remarkable to be part of that and to get together with the other divisions. Something that’s interesting is that I’m deployed to Europe right now and I have a battalion from the 1st Infantry Division and a brigade from the 101st that are supporting over here. All those organizations made massive contributions during the Normandy campaign. And so for our division, over 33 days of sustained combat, 1,142 paratroopers paid the ultimate sacrifice. For units like the 508th that had over 2,000 jumpers on D-Day, when the boats came back a month later to England they only had about a thousand of them left... We owe them an exceptional kind of debt for the price they paid with their blood. I look forward to doing everything from getting over there honoring them at the various ceremonies such as St. Mere Eglise, the first city liberated within Normandy, which the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment jumped on. We will head over to La Fiere bridge — the 505th fought doggedly; the 325th fought there; the 508th converged on there. We look forward to the opportunity, if the weather cooperates, to get out of an airplane and put on a show. It’s kind of a surreal moment for me to be the first jumper out of the door at the Normandy 80 celebration. That’s an incredible privilege and honor, which I look forward to if we can line it all up.
Is there anything else to add?
I hope everybody comes out to All American Week and catches the paratrooper bug. It’s an incredible privilege to paratroop with our people. These are the top-of-the-food chain soldiers in our Army — best led, best trained, best equipped paratroopers the planet has ever seen. It’s a real privilege to serve them and serve with them. I look forward to seeing everybody here in a couple of weeks … We enlist paratroopers. We reenlist families. In many ways, this service, this calling, this cause we’re in, it really is a family business, and no one can do this alone. These families have given their lives for our country as well.
Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at [email protected] or 910-486-3528.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Maj. Gen. Patrick Work on the latest 82nd Airborne Division news
