Security forces ensure airmen return safely

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. A.J. Bosker
  • Air Force Print News
PRINCE SULTAN AIR BASE, Saudi Arabia --  In the upcoming weeks, the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing will inactivate, ending the American presence here.

By then, most of the deployed airmen here will have already rotated home or to other forward locations.

However, the airmen of the 363rd Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron will be on guard until the base is empty.

“So long as we have a single person working in the area, we’re going to provide (force protection) for them,” said Lt. Col. Tim Ferguson, 363rd ESFS commander. “Our job is to protect the wing and everyone in it.”

This has never been an easy job because of the size of the base and the many areas in which people lived and worked.

Besides the normal mission of providing perimeter security and guarding entry-control points, 363rd ESFS airmen conducted large search operations of both vehicles and people entering the base.

“We’ve also been responsible for meeting every truck, tractor-trailer and vehicle that is coming onto the installation to remove equipment during the wing inactivation,” Ferguson said. “Our people meet them at the gate, escort the vehicles to a remote-search facility and inspect both the vehicles and the drivers.”

This was an especially large and time-consuming job once the wing began inactivating, he said.

Besides the 200 vehicles and 500 to 600 people searched every day, the security-forces airmen had to search more than 750 tractor-trailers that were coming on base to move munitions to other locations.

“Prince Sultan was the largest combat wing in theater during operations in Iraq, so we had the largest munitions-storage area as well,” Ferguson explained. “Approximately $1 billion worth of munitions was packed into 750 Conex containers and shipped off base to other locations throughout the theater.”

The security-forces airmen also conduct daily patrols with their Saudi counterparts covering nearly 42 miles of fence around the installation.

“We’ve had an excellent working relationship with the Saudi security forces,” Ferguson said. “The only challenge has been the language barrier. Very few of our folks speak Arabic, and very few of their front-line security forces speak English. But we’ve worked hard to get through that and accomplish what needed to be done.”

The biggest challenge Ferguson had to overcome has not been a communications barrier or even the weather, which he said has been described as “standing in front of a blow dryer on full blast.”

Rather, it has been the rotation of people.

According to Ferguson, at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 363rd was the largest security-forces squadron in the Air Force, and probably the largest deployed squadron in the Air Force with 569 airmen.

There were only eight security-forces airmen assigned as permanent party, so the squadron had almost an entire turnover in people every 90 to 120 days, he said. It was a constant mission of training, retraining, getting people up to speed, and keeping them focused and motivated as their time drew down -- and then doing it all over again, Ferguson said.

“These airmen came from all over, and they were active duty, Guard and Reserve,” he said. “Each one was an incredible professional who came here to do a mission. And they all pulled together, regardless of their background, to make that mission happen.”

The mission and the conditions they endured were not always easy, he explained.

“They work in conditions that most people can’t imagine,” he said. “A standard day is 15 to 16 hours (with) three days on and one day off, and they do that their entire time here. It doesn’t matter if the wind is blowing and the temperature reaches 120 degrees, they don’t complain when they’re protecting all of the airmen here in the wing.”

Although Ferguson considers himself biased, he said he feels there is no other force in the world, or even the Air Force, that asks as much of its young troops as is asked of security forces airmen.

“They’re away from their families, but they get up every morning, go to work, check out a weapon and go stand out there and protect the men and women in the wing from the bad people who want to do us harm,” he said. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else other than leading great people like these airmen.”