As cavalry scouts, their job is to perform reconnaissance and report intelligence regarding enemy tactics and locations to the task force commander. Here in Iraq, they perform their scout mission and whole lot more.

“We always go find stuff. That’s our job. To…go find the bad guy,” U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Jerry Helton, the scout platoon sergeant, said. “Since we first got here, if [the task force] had a source, we’d go find it, take pictures of it and try to find who lives there and get pictures of them and their cars.”

1st Lt. Justin Harper, the scout platoon leader, explained how the scout platoon’s reconnaissance missions in Iraq often involved working closely with military intelligence analysts and Arabic interpreters. He said having the scouts along as escorts on intelligence gathering missions adds versatility to the task force’s overall objective.

“We know the area. We know how to fight if something goes wrong. If we see a known terrorist in the area, we have the capability to grab them, or shoot it out with them, or whatever we need to do,” Harper said.

After the intelligence is gathered, and the objective identified, then the scouts are on hand to guide the rest of the task force into position. They are there to see the mission through from beginning to conclusion.

When they’re not scouting, the scouts fill in as a force multiplier. They’ve been on the ground with the infantry conducting raids, searches and patrols with a steady reliability over the past year.

Recently they were found sweeping farmland for weapons caches during a Jan. 21 task force operation along the Euphrates River near Latifiyah. The scout platoon swept an area adjacent to an infantry platoon and discovered a cache of over 70 hand grenades and several mortars.

“[Searching fields] is not typically a scout mission, but we do it because we have wheels,” Harper said. “We can get a lot of places where it’s hard for people to get, and basically we’re all over the place doing different stuff.”

One thing that makes the scouts so dynamic is their ability to operate independently and with minimal guidance, Harper explained.

“If its time to do dismount, we dismount. If its time to do a cordon and search, we do that. [As a scout] you’re doing a lot more stuff, and you’re doing it independently,” Harper said. “We are the eyes and ears of the Task Force and we operate away from a lot of higher level supervision. I get my guidance from the battalion commander and we go. We’re gone.

“[It’s the] same thing with my sections. I’m going to tell them, this is what you need to accomplish, but I’m not going to tell you where to sit. It’s very decentralized, and it requires a lot of independent thought, he continued.”

Bockting, a native of Louisville, Ky., added that as a small platoon, the scouts know each other well, and have a high level of camaraderie, allowing them to work well together.

“The scout platoon knows each other real well,” Bockting said. “We know each other’s tone. We know attitudes. We can tell who’s in a bad mood, who’s not in a bad mood, who can handle what today, who’s going to be the energetic one, and who’s going to be the one to take charge on this particular event.”

The value of this tight-knit, relatively small task force element was proven in theater over the past year, according to Helton. Whatever the scouts were tasked to do, whether a scout mission, or a common task mission, the scouts came through and accomplished the assignment, he said.