GUIDON staff

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Command Sgt. Maj. Ted Lopez, the 11th Regimental Command Sergeant Major for the U.S. Army Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School, is saying farewell to Fort Leonard Wood. His change of responsibility and retirement ceremony will be held at the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence plaza, at 5 p.m. April 26.

After 33 years of service to the Army, and serving as the USACBRNS RCSM since 2008, Lopez is looking forward to retirement and has a lot of people to thank for his successes.

“I have been blessed to have great Soldiers and great leaders that I have worked with. All the commanders that I happened to be teamed with — I like to say they were very successful because we worked as a team,” Lopez added.

Lopez said he was thankful for Col. Phil Visser, USACBRNS commandant, because not only did Visser enable him to be successful at his job, he has strived to do the best thing for the Chemical Corps.

“The commandant has established some lines of effort, a campaign plan, that really has everybody tracking in a direction of success — we never had that before,” Lopez said.

Visser said that Lopez is a tremendous senior NCO leader with a wealth of operational experience.

“I will miss his passion for our regiment and his genuine concern for our Soldiers and their Families. He is the consummate professional and an incredible battle buddy,” Visser said of Lopez. “What I will miss the most are the early morning meetings we have enjoyed for PT and our discussions during long distance runs together.”

Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Wells, Maneuver Support Center of Excellence and Fort Leonard Wood, said Lopez was a great CBRN Soldier – a decisive NCO that based his decisions on a solid foundation of basic Soldiering skills.

“Command Sgt. Maj. Lopez brought a set of credentials that made him the ideal professional NCO to represent the Soldiers of the CBRN Regiment. I’ve always valued his expertise on telling me what skills a CBRN Soldier and their equipment brings to a Brigade Combat Team in combat, stability ops or peacetime,” Wells said. “Command Sgt. Maj. Lopez was able to hit all the wave tops required of a senior NCO and be able to drill down into issues that took care of Soldiers. It’s hard to replace someone in your formation with those kinds of attributes.”

While Lopez is looking forward to handing the reins over to the next generation, he said he will miss Fort Leonard Wood’s close-knit community.

“I brag about Fort Leonard Wood all the time. It’s probably the best community I have ever seen when it comes to supporting Soldiers and Families,” Lopez said. “I find that one of the biggest assets of Fort Leonard Wood is that it is a close community and they take care of Soldiers and Families very well. A lot of installations don’t have that. Between the military and civilians and our retirees and the outside community, it is by far the best I have ever seen in my 33 years.”

While serving as the RCSM for the USACBRNS, Lopez was able to visit Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and see their accomplishments, which he said has made a big impact on the Chemical Corps.

 “I got to see our warriors out there doing some state-of-the-art, highly technical stuff,” Lopez said. “I was also excited to see us doing a lot of the toxins and HAZMAT type of stuff in Iraq, which is where we are going and another mission for the Chemical Corps.”

The most challenging issue Lopez had while performing his duties was building both international and joint relationships.

“In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time with international relationships — with Korea, and we built some pretty good partnerships,” Lopez said. “We also spent a lot of time with the civilian populace when it comes to first responders and the kind of things that support homeland defense.”

Lopez said he spent a lot of time establishing formal relationships with different institutions, so Soldiers and civilians could train at places other than Fort Leonard Wood.

“Building these enterprises is really important because we can expand out everywhere — it’s not about ownership, it’s what is best for our nation, the Army and essentially the Chemical Corps,” he said.

Over the last several years, the Chemical Corps has changed the way they train and Lopez was able to have a hand in helping to make those changes.

“We just finally got our Advanced Individual Training revamped and looking good for 2020. It had Cold War era stuff before and that took some time … and the same way with our Basic Officer Leader Course,” Lopez said.

Lopez said when he first took over as the RCSM, he established the phrase “CBRN Warrior” because he wanted Soldiers within the Chemical Corps to be well-rounded service members.

“When I came in the first thing I said was ‘taking care of our most precious resource is our CBRN warriors’ and I really think that set the tone for us to move forward and have highly technical warriors that can first, kick in a door and do a combat patrol. But the thing they are trained to do is on their technical skills whether it be a sensitive site exploitation or extraction,” Lopez said.

Lopez’s focus on CBRN Soldier’s technical training led to the complete revision of the program of instructions for all Chemical professional development courses, Visser said.

“He has directly impacted the NCO professional development in our NCO Academy and for the first time ever, the commandant of the MSCoE NCO Academy is a CBRN CSM,” Visser added. “CSM Lopez’s efforts have shaped the technical training of our Soldiers for years to come and will prepare our Warriors to serve in the Army of 2020.”

Lopez and his wife, Tanya, will move to San Antonio, Texas where he will continue to serve the military as a civilian.

“I will be working with U.S. Army North, Civil Support Training Activity, and Advance Technical and Educational Consultants — contractors — in consequence management and homeland defense,” Lopez said. “I’m not going away from Soldiers too far — I will still be training them.”