NY Army Guard Specialist William Neumeister, a Latham resident, earns the Expert Soldier Badge

New award allows non-infantrymen to earn a distinctive skills badge

Latham, NY (10/14/2021) — New York Army National Guard Specialist William Neumeister, who until recently was a Latham resident, was one of four New York Army National Guard Soldiers who earned a new Army skill badge on October 1, at Fort Drum.

Neumeister was awarded the Expert Soldier Badge, which was created in October, 2019, following a week of testing run by the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum.

Neumeister and the other three Soldiers are the first in the New York National Guard to be awarded the new badge. The four men joined 950 Soldiers across the Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve who have earned the new badge.

As of July, according to Army Training and Doctrine Command, only 19% of the 5,000 Soldiers who have sought the Expert Soldier Badge have passed the course.

The Expert Soldier Badge, or ESB, joins the Expert Infantry Badge and the Expert Field Medic Badge, as a special skills badges that Soldiers must earn through a demanding testing program.

The session run by the 10th Mountain Division allocated two weeks for the skill badge evaluation. The first week, from Sept. 20 to 26, gave Soldiers a chance to review the skills and then master them with hands on training. The second week, from Sept. 27 to Oct. 1, was the testing phase.

The New York Guard Soldiers arrived at Fort Drum early so they could get a jump on the training and then they resolved to work together throughout the program, said Sgt. 1st Class Ryan Blount, who acted as the team captain.

"Once we got there and we saw what it was all about and how challenging it was, it was pretty clear we were going to succeed or fail as a group," said Blount, a full time human resource specialist.

The Soldiers had to successfully complete 30 Soldier tasks, qualify expert on their individual weapon, complete a physical fitness assessment, day and night land navigation courses and complete a timed 12-mile foot march carrying a pack and weapon.

The tasks are broken down into three lanes: weapons tasks, medical tasks and patrol tasks which involve things like map reading, transmitting a spot report and emplacing a Claymore mine.

Neumeister, a signals intelligence analyst, said he signed up for the ESB competition when his chance to go to Air Assault School - the Army course which trains Soldiers to deploy from helicopters--fell through.

Going to the ESB competition at Fort Drum was Neumeister's last official act as a member of the New York Army Guard and his former unit the 10th Main Command Post Operational Detachment, or MCPOD for short.

The MCPOD is a unit which supplements the 10th Mountain Division headquarters when that unit deploys. The 10th MCPOD deployed to the Middle East with the 10th Mountain Division headquarters in 2018.

Neumeister has now transferred to the Colorado Army National Guard's 19th Special Forces Group, where he will serve as a full-time intelligence analyst.

Earning the ESB has been a real confidence booster as he moves into a full-time job with a highly specialized unit in Denver, Neumeister said.

The biggest challenge for him, Neumeister said, was learning a new skill, becoming an expert on it and then "completely brain dump" the information and master something else.

"I usually carry a notebook with me and in two years in the Army I have filled in ten pages," he said.

"I filled that up immediately. My hand is a lot stronger now from taking notes, with how much I had to write," he joked.

The medical lane was purely memorization: how to treat a casualty for a spinal injury and shock, how to control bleeding, how to treat an abdominal wound, he said.

The weapons testing involved building the muscle memory to disassemble and assemble the weapons with correct steps. The patrol lane involved thinking through the tasks, he said.

"It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun," he said. "I'd never touched a Mark-19 (grenade launcher). I never touched a fifty caliber machine gun. It was fun studying up, and recognizing, and getting used to the sequences," he said.

He credited his success in working together with the other three New York Army National Guard Soldiers who were competing for the badge.

"Having other people there to talk it through and correct me if I am wrong, or out of sequence was important," he said. "If I didn't have them with me it would be a different story."

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