REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
Base's old bakery is home sweet home for 'Rats' of platoon
By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer
The "Rats" of Charlie Company's 2nd Platoon out of Schofield Barracks recently found a new home at Kirkuk Air Base. The unit of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, moved out of "conex" shipping containers and into the old base bakery.
Whatever the Iraqis were baking, they were making lots of it. A 50-foot-long German-made Werner & Pfleiderer oven has a metal conveyer 4 feet wide.
A stainless mixing bowl of similar width and several feet deep still sits on rollers. What used to be a holding room for fresh-baked goods is now the repository for dusty Army duffel bags.
The building, like most others on base, has fallen into disrepair, but the Schofield unit inherited a fort-like maze of plywood-paneled rooms built within by its predecessor — the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Parachute Infantry, a 173rd Airborne Brigade unit that recently returned to Italy at the end of its deployment.
Legend has it that baked goods were still rolling off the conveyer when the 173rd arrived last spring.
Building codes were not a consideration here: 19- and 20-year-old soldiers were the chief architects.
"When I first saw it, from the outside it was more space, but a little dumpy," said Spc. Jonathan Counts, 23, from Sullivan, Mo.
For Counts, a forward observer who's with the 2nd Battalion, 11th Field Artillery, but is attached to 1-21, it's become a better home. "I like it. It's within walking distance, the gym's across the street, the post office is right there," he said.
The 2nd Platoon Rats have a workout room and their own bathrooms and showers — a luxury. With their own washers and a dryer, that's a double luxury because, otherwise, it takes the Iraqi-run base laundry 10 days or more to return their desert camouflage uniforms.
Kenneth Bargamento, a defense contractor from Hilo who works with the 25th Infantry Division (Light) at Kirkuk Air Base, has a unique perspective on the war in Iraq.
The 49-year-old flew into Bashur in the north by C-17 transport on March 27 last year, the day after the 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted in.
"I was in the second bird on the ground," said Bargamento, who works in communications for Mantech International out of Germany. "We landed, cut the safety straps on the Humvees, and we were busting out (of the aircraft). It was exciting. It was dark, cold and raining."
The best part was seeing the reaction of the Kurds who greeted the American soldiers as heroes, running out of homes to wave and high-five them as they headed south to Kirkuk.
"That was the biggest thing for me, it was very emotional and put everything in perspective," said Bargamento, who still gets emotional recalling it. "We liberated them — the freedom part of Iraqi Freedom."
Bargamento did active duty in the Army and worked in military intelligence in Operation Desert Storm. He got out in 1993 and worked for Na Leo 'O Hawai'i public access television on the Big Island, then for Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Co. as an electronics technician, before going to work for Mantech in 1999.
Bargamento, who now lives with his family in Germany, decided to stay on in Iraq to assist the 25th Division.
He said: "I thought it was kind of ironic. I was telling my wife, 'I'm a local boy, I come to Iraq, and meet a local unit and I'm providing support.'"
