About 150 Georgia National Guardsmen from the Toccoa-based 876th Engineer Company are heading to Afghanistan this summer for a nine-month deployment.
Consisting of carpenters, electricians, masons and plumbers, the unit will be based in the Kabul area and will train Afghanistan’s security forces on engineering skills. The troops will also help improve and maintain existing infrastructure in the war-torn country as the U.S. military draws down its forces there.
“For the state of Georgia, we are the only vertical construction company,” said Capt. Tyler Cook, of Woodstock, the company’s commander. “We are kind of a specialized unit in that sense. So we are just going purely to do construction and whatever tasks where they put us that are engineering-related.”
The guardsmen will first head to Fort Stewart for about a month and then Fort Bliss in Texas for additional training before deploying overseas. They are preparing to attend a send-off ceremony on May 29 at 10 a.m. at the Georgia Baptist Conference Center in Toccoa.
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