A dust cloud swirled as the supply convoy made its way down an isolated road Thursday.

When a Humvee carrying four soldiers from the Lancaster-based Headquarters Company of the Pennsylvania National Guard's 328th Brigade Support Battalion passed by a seemingly harmless mound of leaves, an explosion erupted from the earth.

White smoke billowed across the road, and the convoy screeched to a halt.

Two soldiers in the "destroyed" Humvee were declared "dead," two others "wounded."

The convoy's ambulance moved in to pick up the "wounded" soldiers. When "snipers" started firing on the ambulance from hiding places alongside the road, a U.S. military truck roared up and a gunner standing in the truck's turret returned fire with a .50-caliber machine gun.

The "snipers" were "killed" and the "attack" ended.

"That wasn't too bad," said Army Maj. Dale Barnett. "They've got a few things to work on, but overall I thought they did pretty well."

No one actually was injured or killed in the "attack."

The convoy was on a training exercise at the 17,000-acre Fort Indiantown Gap National Guard Training Center in Lebanon County as the 328th Brigade Support Battalion prepares for war.

The 140 soldiers in Headquarters Company and the medical unit Company C, both based at Lancaster's Stahr Armory, do not have orders for deployment overseas, according to Capt. Cory Angell of the Gap's public affairs office.

But based on the training exercises the brigade began at the Gap June 9 and will continue with until Friday, it seems inevitable the entire 328th will be deployed by 2009, Angell said.

"The brigade will hit its initial operating capability by the end of 2008, and once they hit that point, they can be tagged for missions," Angell said.

"I think if you're a soldier in a Stryker Brigade, you see all this new equipment and you're doing all this training, you're thinking you're going to be used."

The 328th is part of the Pennsylvania National Guard's 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

Stryker brigades are mobile combat units built around the Stryker Light Armored Vehicle. The eight-wheeled Stryker is faster, quieter and lighter than the Bradley fighting vehicle and the M1 Abrams tank.

Strykers rely on stealth and a high-tech communications matrix to outflank the enemy and target it with precision firepower, Angell said.

The heart of the Stryker's communications network is a sophisticated computer called the "force 21 battle command brigade below," or "FBCB2," as the soldiers call it.

That's one piece of equipment soldiers in the 328th are becoming familiar with this month at the Gap.

The computers are located in every vehicle and command post in the brigade.

Commanders use them to locate vehicles out on deployment, because the computers have built-in global positioning systems.

Soldiers use them to communicate with one another and their commanders via e-mail and touch-screen notations.

"They cut down on radio chatter," Angell said. "A commander can send out an order for a rendezvous, and every vehicle will know how to get to that point from wherever they are just by looking at a map on the computer."

And medical company commanders, such as Capt. Scott Harrington, commander of Lancaster's Company C, can use them to assess battlefield casualties.

Company C, or "Charlie Med" as the members of the 328th call the unit, is responsible for providing the brigade's medical support.

The 67 members of Harrington's company have been practicing with the FBCB2 at the Gap this month, as well as simulating battlefield triage and learning basic medical care for wounded soldiers.

Sgt. Pedro Guzman was busy Thursday teaching members of the 328th to hook up patients to intravenous lines.

Trauma care is nothing new to Guzman, who is an emergency room nurse at York Hospital. From 2003 to last year, he was an emergency room nurse at Lancaster Regional Medical Center.

"My teaching style is to have people who have been trained to do things, like start an IV, teach me how to do it," he said. "Then they are more alert and active than if I was just lecturing to them."

While Charlie Med practices saving lives, the members of Headquarters Company practice their duties.

Acting company commander Lt. Jeanne Falchek said her outfit is responsible for "providing the brigade's headquarters whatever they need to keep track of the brigade's missions."

But above all else, Falchek said, "We are riflemen first."

To hone their "rifleman" skills, the company has been practicing tactics for defending convoys — something the soldiers are likely to do often once they are sent to Iraq.

Barnett runs one of the convoy training "lanes" at the Gap.

A lane is a road on which convoys and infantry lines encounter various scenarios, such as roadside bombs, breakdowns in equipment, snipers and war protesters.

It's not easy using the dense forests of the Pennsylvania mountains to mimic the conditions soldiers are likely to encounter in the deserts and river valleys of Iraq, but Barnett said he must "work with what we've got."

Mock insurgents huddled behind trees along Barnett's lane waiting to touch off roadside "bombs." The small explosive charges spewed talcum powder out over the convoy.

"It's something to imitate the fog of war," Barnett said.

The Iraqis and Guardsmen exchanged fire using weapons loaded with blanks.

And casualties requiring immediate treatment were designated.

"Our goal here is to provide as much realism as we can," Barnett said. "We want the noise, we want the smoke and we want the confusion of having different people getting hit.

"They have to be able to react to anything."

E-mail: preilly@lnpnews.com