The 1st BN 61st INF is currently training basic skills and producing young soldiers ready to learn their trade and speciality in future assignments. None of the modern high tech, electronic wizard stuff. Just rifles, bayonets and soldiers learning to do soldiers work. A copy of the individual training record is one of the appendices and it seems the training required is quite comprehensive. More than I ever had, that is for sure. I searched for crossbow qualification and shield repair but could not find them. Nothing on horses or mules either. If you would like more information visit the TRADOC Web Site and view REG 350-6. Weapons change but the basic need for well trained and courageous men remains. As always the 1st BN 61st INFANTRY has such men and today, women too.

Training goes on night and day. With the new night vision equipment someone is watching all the time. The night does belong to the well trained and the well equipped.

These newly trained soldiers will join a force that truely needs them. The old veterans are no longer able to carry the load. But even their age dimmed eyes are able to see that the future, like the past, will need young blood to do the work that no one else will do.

The battalion is currently commanded by LTC James Allen and the Command Sergeant Major is CSM Carl B. Stevens. They are rightly proud of their unit, its lineage and the training it now conducts.

Late in 2002 the 1st BN 61st INF was alerted for an overseas mission. Together with troops from Ft. Benning and Ft Polk, TF 1/61 was ordered to move to Taszar, Hungary. There it would establish a training program for Iraqi volunteers in the fight to overthrow Sadam Hussain.
In early spring of 2003 the TF returned to Ft Jackson and resumed its mission of basic training for US Army recruits. What else can you do if you throw a party and nobody comes?

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself..."