FORT LEWIS -5/3/06- For two days this week, Stryker armored infantry carriers were abandoned for strollers, diaper bags replaced combat rucksacks, and military intelligence homed in on housing and schools.
An entire population of 6,000 to 7,000 people, roughly the size of Duvall or Gig Harbor, is packing up and moving permanently -- jobs, equipment, spouses, kids, cars, even pets -- to Germany this summer. Fort Lewis' 4,000-member 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division Stryker Brigade Combat, nicknamed the Lancers, will become the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in June and will be transferred to Vilseck, Germany. The unit was in Mosul in northern Iraq from 2004 to 2005.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, an advance guard of 300 soldiers in camouflage and their families took the first steps to leave the United States. They will depart for Germany soon. The rest of the Stryker brigade will go through the same process that took place this week -- which soldiers call the "Lancer family rodeo" -- next month and will leave in June.
This week, soldiers reconnoitered their way with spouses and children through the post's big Battle Command Training Center, bivouacking occasionally to fill out paperwork.
"You must be very patient -- very patient," said Mitchelle Garrett, 29, an Army wife, artfully bracing her 18-month old son, Ayden, on her hip while stressing the words.
Her husband, Pfc. Spencer Garrett, 30, helped convoy the couple's other three kids among specialized desks dealing with paperwork and information for medical, schooling, travel, veterinary, housing and other issues. Mitchelle Garrett, who is Jamaican, was immediately concerned about answers to passport and immigration questions.
"It's tough. I never imagined that I would be able to take care of all our kids by myself when he left" last year for training, she said. "But I still have hair, and it's not all white.
"What you learn is that 'Army family' doesn't just include us -- there is an extended Army 'family' of support to help."
For the couple, the move is the third transfer in the Army since last year, when Garrett left a good job with a microchip firm in Boise, Idaho to join the Army. It means yet another school for their oldest son, Dade, 6, who is in kindergarten, but it also means they're apt to finally settle down for a three-year tour of duty.
"When we learned we were moving to Germany it felt like a wall we had to climb again," she said. The rodeo, however, takes the mystery out of the unknown that haunts military families and makes the transfer as seamless as possible, she said. They already faced one reality of the lives of traveling soldiers.
"We got rid of our fish tank today," she said, finding a home for it with a relative.
The family rodeo is a far cry from the old Army, in which some veterans recall surly sergeants saying, "If the Army had wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one."
The Army, especially one that now relies entirely upon voluntary enlistments, realizes it must re-enlist families as well as soldiers, said Lt. Col. Tim Gauthier, the Stryker brigade's deputy commander.
Army statistics show that 53 percent of all soldiers are married, with an average 2.5 kids per family. So "picking up and moving an entire neighborhood of 4,000 people in six months and all their families and places of work" requires some deft coordination and timing for departures and arrivals, he said.
The 42 moving companies able to serve Fort Lewis, for example, will be hard pressed to meet the demand, Gauthier said, while timelines for airplane flights must be coordinated to meet up with household goods or shipped vehicles -- each soldier can ship one car to Germany.
The training center was set up to be a bridge between Fort Lewis and Vilseck, with one half dealing with the business of leaving the United States and the other, staffed by Lt. Col. Gail Murphy and 12 others, including 10 from Vilseck, dealing with the business of moving to Germany.
"Over there on the American side (the families) are clearing their quarters; over here we are processing them into housing," Murphy said.
Housing, along with medical care and naturalization information, seemed especially important in part because the brigade, which returned from Iraq late last summer, is about to experience a baby boom, she said.
By the time soldiers and families complete their rodeo, they have an address or post office box set up for their new home. And when a family lands in Germany, it doesn't have to go to a hotel or temporary quarters, as military families used to. The family heads straight to its home, furnished with loaned furniture until belongings arrive, she said.
Murphy said this week's processing for the vanguard of 300 soldiers and their dependents is a dress rehearsal for the bulk of the Stryker unit next month, and indicates the housing area will have to be enlarged, she said.
Roaming the U.S. and German sectors of the building, a legal desk behind a screen for obvious privacy might address the disposition of open court cases -- a drunken-driving citation, for example -- or update custody agreements and help with wills. Experts at another desk help with passports and immigration documents, while those at still another deal with airplane tickets. The personal property desk says what can and can't be moved.
A medical desk gets the ball rolling to transfer records and update immunizations, while another handles driver's licenses to get around in Germany. Student records from Fort Lewis' public schools are studied and mailed to mesh with the Defense Department schools in Germany.
Soldiers whose families have medical or special-needs challenges are screened to ensure that support exists in Vilseck, Gauthier said. "Otherwise, we can't let them go there. They would stay at Fort Lewis" and be allowed to pursue other duties he said.
Eyeing the veterinary table, Gauthier said, "pets are kicking our butt."
Northern Bavaria has severe restrictions on the types of pets that can be brought in. American pit bulls are a no-no, for example, while Rottweilers must pass a temperament test. Arriving with either means they could be put to sleep in Germany or sent back to the United States at considerable cost to the soldier. A temperament test alone can run $500 to $700, Gauthier said, and "there's no negotiation."
This week's rodeo didn't seem much of a bother to Kali Vickery, at 19 a battle-tested Army spouse after serving at home while her husband, Spc. Cameron Vickery, was deployed as a medic in Iraq last year. While her husband negotiated the lines this week, she attended to their infant daughter, Katelynn.
"It's still kind of a mystery to me -- I wonder how our daughter will adapt" to spending her early years traveling overseas, Vickery said.
"As an Army spouse, you have to be really strong and willing to go with it because tomorrow you could move again. You and your kids have to be really strong and flexible," she said.
"But I like it. I like the life," said Vickery, a Kansan who never traveled much before. "We're going places and meeting people and finding opportunities that we never could have if it wasn't for the Army."
P-I reporter Mike Barber can be reached at 206-448-8018 or
mikebarber@seattlepi.com 
