B Company, 2nd Platoon, 52nd Engineer, 84th Battalion
A construction crew in camouflage arrived in Bailey last week. The Park County Historical Society called Fort Carson to request the U.S. Army to provide the manpower to put up the 120-year-old Keystone Bridge at the McGraw Memorial Park. The Army - responded by sending the 52nd Engineering Battalion. The battalion arrived in a snowstorm Sunday, April 21, making their home for the duration of the project in the Farmers Union. The snow abated for some fine softball weather before they started work on the bridge on Wednesday, April 24. The battalion is a construction unit and has seen a lot of community service action, according to Second Lieutenant Jeffrey, Aceto, officer in charge. • "What we normally do is sidewalks. We do sidewalks. We put in miles of sidewalks in Fort Carson," he said.' So a trip to the mountains to build something other than a sidewalk has been a welcome project.
"We really liked coming up here," he said. The group is "regular Army," which was a switch from the reserves group the historical society originally thought it would be having, historical society President Doug Frost said. Most of the group is with Aceto's bat-talion from the base, although eight of the 24 were borrowed from other groups, including Pfc. Army Medic Robert Collier, originally from Bay. City, Mich. Collier watches the work and if anyone gets hurt he rushes to their aid. His job involves a lot of sitting in the sunshine, but Collier uses the time to study and brush up on medical knowledge. He volunteered for the project because of the experience he hoped to gain, he said. So far there have been no accidents, and Collier's work has been limited to taking care of scrapes and one pulled muscle. Safety has been one of Aceto's big worries, he said. The cranes have to operate under power lines, and the conditions of the work have often been cold mission to the store, trying to find something to eat while watching taped movies he had brought with him. Besides movies, battalion members mostly play softball, fish, go hiking and climb rocks for entertainment. Pfc. Tony Aukstikalnis, from Orange, Mass., said he enjoys being in Bailey because, "I love the environment. It's really quiet and peaceful." He said he usually ends up playing softball or Monopoly during spare time. The group brought its own cooks, head cook being Pfc. Francisco Cardoso, half, he said, of the M&Ms (medics and mess hail for those unfamiliar with Army slang). Cardoso's job is "really relatively easy this time," he said. "Fortunately we have a little aid here from Lyle (Hetterly of the Farmers Union) lending his kitchen." Usually Cordoso has to cook on a field cabinet oven, which is a "constant field hazard," he said. The units have a marked propensity for getting extremely hot, and one even blew up during maneuvers in Idaho, Cordoso said. The stereotyped Army meal is not in Cordoso's cookbook, and he has been baking desserts to top meals of pork chops and steaks. "When it's so obvious to everybody who (the cook is), I don't want to settle for second best," he said.
Though the Army battalion doesn't plan on a long tour of duty in Bailey, the community service the group is providing will be around for a long time.
