The Army Reserve’s top NCO praised the annual Global Medic Exercise when he visited the Army Reserve Medical Command on Tuesday for morning PT and professional development with noncommissioned officers assigned to AR-MEDCOM and the AR-Medical Management Center.

“We had a great PT session. It was oh-dark-30, we’re in Pinellas Park, Florida, and it's dark. We had some lights out,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Gregory Betty, the principal enlisted advisor to the commanding general of the U.S. Army Reserve.

“We got some muscle failure; we got in some running,” Betty said. “The exercise that we did this morning, and it was done perfectly.”

Betty said he appreciated the opportunity to meet with Army Reserve Soldiers assigned to the AR-MEDCOM headquarters and the Army Reserve Medical Management Center both here.

“I love interacting with the medical professions,” said the married father of three, who came to New York City in 1982 and enlisted in the Army in 1988.

“It's a great opportunity to come down because when I was deployed in Afghanistan with the engineers, we actually had to send 68s with the engineers to go on patrol because the war is so kinetic where they went out,” he said. Army medical professions belong to the 68 military occupational specialty series. The largest MOS specialty in the Army is the combat medic, 68 Whiskey.

“We have IEDs and all that other stuff, and we had several 68 Whiskeys who got either cabs or Purple Hearts,” The Desert Storm veteran said. CAB is Army shorthand for the Combat Action Badge, awarded to non-infantry personnel.

The medics always have a place in his heart, Betty said.

“It’s near and dear to me because Soldiers need to know that they're going to fight, and if they do get injured, that someone is there, right there, to help them either get patched up and get back into the fight or get patched up and get sent home for further care,” he said.

“The medical community is a big deal and a big asset that we have in the Reserve and that the entire military needs when we go out and fight,” he said.

The command sergeant major said he enjoyed his visit to the Global Medic Exercise, sponsored by the AR-MEDCOM and its subordinate Medical Readiness and Training Command, where he got to see how Citizen Warriors bring expertise from their civilian professions to their military duties.

“I was extremely impressed with the Global Medic exercise,” Betty said.

“I went to see the Soldiers there; a lot of them are EMTs on the civilian side so that knowledge and that skillset is constant,” he said.

“They're seeing some of the things that we'll see at war in the civilian capacity so that when we do go to war, they're ready and able and willing to get after anything that our Soldiers might face,” he said.

“When we're doing notional exercises, they're notionally saying: “What could go wrong? What would go wrong? What are the steps they would take to make sure that they can get to the need, address the needs as the Soldiers, and get after the care of the Soldiers?” he said.

During his visit to the Global Medic exercise, which MRTC hosts annually in iterations at Fort Hunter Liggett, California, and Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, as a companion to the Combat Support Training Exercise.

“I was out there and had the CSMs out there,” he said. “We had the generals out there watching and seeing what their Soldiers are doing and seeing where they're lacking and what needs to be maintained, sustained, and worked on to get them to where we need.”

The Kingston, Jamaica, native said he also saw that the medical training at the exercise is tuned to the Army’s posture transformation.

“Now, we’re posturing—getting out of Global War on Terrorism,” the command sergeant major said. “We're posturing now to what's called LSMO or LSCO, large-scale mobilization operation or large-scale combat operations.”

Betty said the next conflict is going to be a serious war, which is one of the reasons the new chief of Army Reserve and commanding general of U.S. Army Reserve Command, Lt. Gen. Robert D. Harter, added “combat ready” to the Army Reserve motto, which now is “Twice the Citizen. Combat Ready,” so that Army Reserve Soldiers understand what could be coming.

“We got to realize that the fight is not just going to be a small fight; it's going to be a big fight against one of our near-peer adversaries, and we got to make sure that we're prepared,” the command sergeant major said.

“Our boss, Lt. Gen. Harter, has stressed that we must be combat ready,” he said.

“That means got to get to the point where the reps and sets are in so that when we do get to an LSCO, we're ready to go,” Betty said.

“When we do go to a large-scale combat operations, our medics must be ready—ready to support and defend, ready to support and make sure they take care of our Soldiers in the battlefield,” he said.

“I'm asking Soldiers, get ready, stay ready, because a fight is coming. We don't know when. We don't know where, but we need to be ready.”