Newcomer's Sponsorship Program. Policy Letters. Crisis Phone Numbers. Visitor and Gate Information. Looking for something to do outside that allows you to get some exercise and fresh air and learn some Fort Polk history you may not be aware of?
Fort Polk has museum pieces and monuments to heroes who went above and beyond the call of duty during their service to the nation. After the war, emphasis began to shift away from readiness training to maintaining armored divisions.
Fort Polk is situated in an area rich with culture and history. There are many sites, on and off-post, with high historical and archaeological value. Other outdoor adventures can be had at Kisatchie National Forest, which features more than , acres across seven parishes east of the fort.
Kisatchie Bayou Recreation Area is known for its beaches, camping and bayou canoeing. There are a number of small towns nearby with populations averaging between eight and ten thousand people. They include, but are certainly not limited to:. Inprocessing at Fort Polk is centralized. Call ; DSN for assistance. For inprocessing, the following appointments at the center apply:. According to official sources, services may vary depending on staffing issues.
Active duty military members have treatment priority, and dependents are seen after priority cases have been dealt with. Services at the hospital include:. Fort Polk is served by four Child Development Centers on-post.
These centers provide care for children ages six weeks to six years old, Monday through Friday. Army vehicles as they fought the greatest sham battle in U.
The attack had come before dawn. With two fast-moving, hard-hitting armored divisions leading the way, Lieutenant General Ben Lear, commander of the Second Red Army, had pushed his troops across the muddy Red River, and was already sending long tentacles down the highways to the south, where Lieutenant General Walter Krueger's Third Blue Army lay in wait.
The mock battles of what became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers had one purpose: To prepare America's Soldiers for the war that had already begun in Europe and was threatening to spread around the world. Likewise, the rudimentary barracks and facilities that sprang up as a result of the massive exercises were a prelude to the importance of Central Louisiana to the U. And so Camp Polk was born….. And in , the great General George C. At the end of World War II, the American public, grown weary of tragic carnage, began focusing on peace and prosperity and the speedy return of the service men and women from overseas.
The victorious U. Army, the most powerful on earth, rapidly began disarming. By , Camp Polk was designated a medical training center and only a skeleton force remained. Finally, in December, military officials declared Fort Polk inactive, and the now-empty barracks stood quiet. When the nation called again, Camp Polk answered. In the early morning hours of June 25, , more than , North Korean soldiers surged across the 38th Parallel to invade South Korea.
Camp Polk shook off the dust accumulated from disuse and once again teemed with Soldiers training for war. Seventy percent of the troops who first reported to Camp Polk that year had served in World War II, but thousands of other draftees or volunteers soon arrived.
With no previous combat experience, these new Soldiers had to quickly learn enough at Camp Polk to wage war and survive. And learn they did. Once again, the words spoken by Gen. George C. Only the combat theater had changed. A scant year later, tensions between the U. Once again, as they had done before World War II, civic and local government leaders fanned out in Vernon Parish, asking landowners to sign documents allowing the Army to use their land.
The Sagebrush exercises, which lasted 15 days, covered a substantial portion of Louisiana, stretching east-west from Alexandria to the Sabine River, and north-south from near Shreveport to between DeRidder and Lake Charles. When the Sagebrush exercises ended after 15 days, the 1st Armored Division began establishing new headquarters at Fort Polk — and the installation again reverberated with the sounds of cannons, machine guns, and soldiers marching in cadence.
But in June of , Fort Polk shut down completely. Many local businesses closed, and citizens left, seeking better opportunities…. With the growing Berlin crisis in , the 49th Armored Division began rolling into Fort Polk, and in June of , the installation became the Army's largest Infantry Training Center.
Its new mission: To provide basic training for individual Soldiers, many of them draftees. Fort Polk offered them their introduction to the military, and most would never forget the experience. And so Tiger Land was born…. More than one million soldiers trained at Fort Polk during the Vietnam War. They trained in two simulated Vietnamese hamlets at Tiger Land which featured earthen berms, sharpened bamboo stake defenses, and booby-trap simulations. The realism of Tiger Land, was a foreshadowing to the mock Iraqi and Afghan villages that would pepper our training area more than 40 years later.
By , Fort Polk had dispatched more soldiers to Vietnam than any other military post in the nation.
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