Personnelists train to support emergency, disaster response Published April 10, 2007 By Chief Master Sgt. Dave Carlson ARPC Superintendent DENVER -- Officials at the Air Reserve Personnel Center emphasized the importance of military personnelists during an emergency when they conducted Personnel Support for Contingency Operations training Jan. 25. "Our primary goal is to facilitate these Airmen grasping the importance of their role to an overall war effort," said 1st Lt. Len Sobieski, ARPC PERSCO team chief. Personnelists assigned to PERSCO teams are responsible for accounting for every Airman assigned to a unit and providing personnel services during an emergency. Nearly 100 ARPC personnelists attended the fi rst of the monthly training sessions. Col. Ann Shippy, ARPC commander, asked Master Sgt. Anthony Hardin, DPP, and Lieutenant Sobieski, to lead the training sessions and prepare assigned personnelists for their wartime mission. "Everything we will teach and simulate is absolutely essential to ensuring the preparedness and more importantly, adaptability, of the Airmen that will inevitably be called upon to serve in a contingency operation," Lieutenant Sobieski said. Air Force PERSCO training was especially significant in 1996 when terrorists detonated a bomb that killed 19 Airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast destroyed one building and wounded hundreds of Airmen. "There was no way to have anticipated that we would need to relocate and bed-down thousands of Airmen after the terrorist attack on Khobar Towers," Lieutenant Sobieski said. "While there was no way to simulate the chaos that accompanied the death and injury that the PERSCO team encountered, the predeployment training and simulation that was received enabled them to adapt and overcome."