Army reservists from the 317th Engineer Construction Company and Navy Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 14 wake up early to build a road in a place far from home. It's 8 a.m., and it is already uncomfortably warm as the soldiers and sailors start up their construction equipment. As the diesel engines on their vehicles roar to life and the machines push through the sand, dust billows up and makes the landscape look unearthly.
The land the service members are in is far from foreign; they are in the northwest corner of Montana. Here, within the borders of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, is a small but growing town called Browning.
"The purpose of the project here is to build roads to create more housing," said Craig Falcon, a community leader. "We're in a housing crisis. We're definitely outgrowing our reservation."
The Blackfeet population in Browning requested the government's help to build a road desperately needed for a new housing development.
Innovative Readiness Training
They did this through the Innovative Readiness Training program, a project that fulfills the needs of civil society and the military. Local communities contact the IRT to ask for help with projects ranging from infrastructure and transportation to health care and cybersecurity. The program then finds military units that can meet the needs of that community while also providing valuable training for the service members in a real-world environment.
"It was a great training opportunity for the soldiers that wanted to learn how to run the equipment," said Army Sgt. 1st Class Keith Albrecht. "A project like this is great for training. You get to use every piece of equipment that the engineers would normally use."
The engineers arrived in the first week of June and were welcomed by the town with open arms. The community taught classes to inform the soldiers and sailors about the Blackfeet culture, asked them to march in a parade, and even invited service members to participate in a traditional sweat lodge ceremony.
Falcon said the local Blackfeet population hopes the troops can return in future years to build more roads to ceremonial grounds and to become more involved in the Blackfeet way of life.
This training doesn't just improve local infrastructure; it also improves unit readiness. The soldiers came in rotations of one platoon at a time and stayed for two to three weeks, with the overall mission ending the last week of July. In that time they constructed dirt roads on two different job sites, laying the groundwork for developers to begin construction on new neighborhoods.
"The roads they came and built and repaired are greatly appreciated," Falcon said. "It's saving our tribe hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to go into those areas and build new housing for our families and even create businesses to expand the town itself."
By the end of July, the transformation of the landscape was stunning. What were once fields of dead grass and rocky soil are now roads that lead to new home sites and better futures for the people living on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.