Sgt. Patrick Daniels doesn’t routinely pull rank on Pfc. Justin Daniels.

He doesn’t have to.

Patrick is Justin’s father.

The two are serving and will deploy to Iraq together in B Troop, a unit of the 1st Squadron, 303rd Cavalry Regiment. Patrick joined the Washington National Guard in 2003, and his son followed two years later.

“It’s pretty cool because I’ve seen a lot of change in him so far,” said Patrick, a 43-year-old Boeing inspector from Arlington.

Justin, a 21-year-old structural mechanic from Boeing who lives in Everett, said the unusual arrangement isn’t always easy – like when Justin calls his father “Dad.”

“Yeah, he does that a lot,” Patrick said, smiling. “We’ve already got out butts chewed out a few times for that.”

“Well,” Justin replied, “I can’t exactly call you Sgt. Dad, either.”

YAKIMA – The tape in the sand represented the walls. Four soldiers lined up outside, silently signaled they were ready and kicked down a nonexistent door.

The men rushed in, rifles panning the imaginary room. They secured the location as seasoned veterans looked on and critiqued their actions.

It’s called a glass-house drill, and soldiers of the National Guard’s 81st Brigade Combat Team repeated it dozens of times Friday at the Yakima Training Center.

The soldiers are trained to be anything from tank mechanics to police officers. But other skills are needed in Iraq, so the members of 1st Squadron, 303rd Cavalry Regiment based in Kent, were practicing urban warfare skills less than three weeks before their mobilization begins.

The 3,400-soldier unit, which is expected to arrive in Kuwait in late October and will enter Iraq soon after, will mainly be tasked with protecting convoys, defending bases and working with reconstruction teams but can be called to engage in close-quarter combat.

When the 81st arrives in Iraq, it will function as a heavy brigade in name only.

“We have tanks, Bradleys, Paladins; we are a conventional force if the United States went to war against a conventional enemy,” said the brigade commander, Col. Ronald Kapral. “But because we aren’t going against a conventional enemy and we’re doing a counterinsurgency mission, we had to refocus our training.”

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The State Secretary of State’s office is at Yakima during drills to encourage service members to either register or to change their status to active military on their registration forms.

Nick Handy, the state’s elections director, said that 90 percent of the 2,400 soldiers set to deploy with the 81st Brigade are already registered or will register before drills are finished. Handy didn’t have a firm number Friday morning on the amount of new registrations.

About 30 people – including state workers, county auditors’ offices and volunteers – have been helping guide soldiers through the registration process. One advantage of changing voter status to military, Handy said, is that it allows the state to send a mail-in ballot sooner.

With more training looming next month in Wisconsin and then the deployment to Iraq, that makes that extra week even more crucial, he said.

“We want to make sure that the 81st Brigade members are able to exercise one of our country’s most sacred rights,” Secretary of State Sam Reed said in a release. “As they go to Iraq to help give Iraqis the freedom to vote, we need to make sure our soldiers have the opportunity to vote in our elections.”

That's basically the question I put to the spokesman for the Army Surface Deployment and Distribution Command at Scott Air Force Base, where they make the decisions about how to move Army gear to and from the United States from Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else.

The short answer: Not really.

Actually, what I asked was: In light of the increased security issues at recent operations at the ports of Tacoma and Olympia, did the SDDC consider sending this latest shipment home via some other port – Beaumont, Texas, or Port Hueneme, Calif., for example? And how much more would it cost to move all that stuff – 900+ vehicles and 300+ cargo containers -- to Fort Lewis by rail?

Via e-mail, response from spokesman Ken Holder:

"First and foremost, we do what's best for the Warfighter to get their equipment to the point of need quickly and safely. We conduct analysis of the following criteria when we're selecting an off-load port -- port congestion on the day the ship is scheduled to discharge; geographic location of the port as it relates to the Warfighter; intermodal solutions (truck and rail); and port operating capability -- meaning the seaport infrastructure is able to upload or discharge the Warfighter's equipment. Cost is always a concern, but not the deciding factor. We continually strive to be good stewards of the taxpayers' dollars, however operational requirements are sometimes the priority.

... While cost is always a concern, it is not the deciding factor when we're selecting where a ship would offload cargo -- we look at port congestion, port operating capability, intermodal solutions, geographic location of the port in relation to the Warfighter and what's best for the Warfighter.

The sooner the Warfighters have their equipment, the sooner they can get about the task of getting it ready for any future contingency."

Meantime, see Lights & Sirens for coverage of what's going on down at the Port of Tacoma.

About 50 soldiers in headquarters troop of the 1st Squadron, 303rd Cavalry filled a large white tent early this morning. They sat at long tables and took notes while a civilian instructor presented a slideshow on a projection screen.

The training might not be as sexy as kicking in doors or firing M-4s at the range, but the Guardsmen were learning skills that will be crucial during convoy security missions.

“We’re teaching CREW training right now,” said Chief Warrant Officer Gordon Jay, a Shelton resident and electronic warfare officer. “Basically, we’re teaching guys how to jam radio-controlled IEDs.”

Here’s a milspeak-to-English translation: IED is an improvised explosive device, more commonly known as a roadside bomb. An IED detonated by radio frequency is known as an RCID. And CREW training stands for Counter RCID Electronic Warfare.

The soldiers were learning how to use the tools that interfere with the electronic signals that set off the bombs. It’s a rapidly changing field, Jay explained, because as the different tools to detonate the bombs change become more sophisticated – cell phones and passive-infrared sensors have largely replaced RC car remotes and garage-door openers – the jamming technology has evolved.

“Once (the military) got a system on the ground and it countered a threat, a new threat would arise and that system couldn’t counter that threat,” he said. “So they had to look at a new system. It made a steep learning curve the first few years.”

The jammers the Guardsmen are learning to use prevent detonation because they overwhelm multiple radio frequencies at once. But because the detonators come from an array of technologies, the range of frequencies to jam is wide.

Employees from Virginia-based defense contractor General Dynamics taught the course to the Guardsmen. Instructor Randy Caswell, a Lewis County native and retired electronics maintenance technician with the Army, said several agencies from various countries are now working together to share information about developments in IED technology, and that swapping has helped the military make strides in preventing attacks.

But roadside bombs still remain the largest security threat on convoys, Jay said.

“(The insurgents) aren’t dummies,” he said. “A lot of people want to label them as dummies. The guys actually laying them in the road might not be the smartest guys in the world, but the guys designing them are insidiously clever.”

Photographer Russ Carmack and I are about to head to the Yakima Training Center to start our three-day visit with the 81st Brigade Combat Team. Things are always subject to change, but it sounds like we’ll be spending our first day with the 1st Squadron, 303rd Cavalry based in Kent.

Check back for updates throughout the day, pending scheduling.