When the Fort Benton Police Department said they needed a storage shed for their shooting range, a local high school shop class teamed up with members of the Montana Air National Guard to make it happen.

Fort Benton school shop teacher Ray Allen spearheaded the storage shed project, with help from Fort Benton Police Department and the 219th RED HORSE unit.

The RED HORSE unit is part of the Montana Air National Guard, and like their active-duty counterparts, they're known for building just about anything out of nothing. The acronym RED HORSE stands for Rapid Engineer Deployable, Heavy Operational Repair Squadron, Engineer.

Building the structure will pay off for the police; Officer Dan Holskey said, "This gives us the ability to keep all of our shooting supplies, tagets, steel, on location at the range so there's not a whole bunch of traveling back and forth."

And how did the team of students, military, and police work together? RED HORSE Staff Sergeant Mark Kassube explained, "We kind of showed 'em how to do things, and what we can do, and gave 'em an all around general knowledge on the 219th and what we're capable of doing."

Working together, students and the RED HORSE team put up the structure in a day, after the city-poured foundation was ready.

But RED HORSE is used to slightly bigger projects, as noted by SSgt Kassube: "The importance of the RED HORSE basically is to go into any place in the world and establish an airbase or help maintain and build it up, everything from the flight lines, tents for housing, feeding people - we do it all ourselves."

Tim Edler, Fort Benton High School senior, enjoyed the opportunity: "I thought it was pretty cool because some of them were telling me how they were all around the world, like in Guam and all that, it's actually pretty interesting to hear; I have a new perspective of what they do now."

And Jim Howard, the principal at the high school, said, "We've had quite a number of kids take a good look at the Guard and actually a number of kids from our community in recent years that are going that route."