Camp is renamed to honor victim of hotel rocket attack
The Army’s permanent aviation base camp in Kuwait has been renamed in memory of an officer who died in a rocket attack last fall on the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad.
In a brief ceremony attended by about 50 people on May 8, Camp Udairi was renamed Camp Buehring in honor of Lt. Col. Charles H. “Chad” Buehring, who had been the senior psychological operations officer in Iraq at the time of his death.
Buehring, 40, of Winter Springs, Fla., was a 1985 graduate of The Citadel and served 18 years in the Army, according to a biography posted on the Web site www.arlingtoncemetery.net.
He served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and had been working with Iraqi media in Baghdad to publicize the work of coalition troops.
Buehring was killed Oct. 26, 2003, when a guerrilla’s rocket struck his 11th-floor room at the Al Rasheed Hotel, home to many officers and soldiers who work at CPA headquarters.
He was buried three weeks later at Arlington National Cemetery in a funeral attended by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been staying one floor above Buehring at the hotel when the attack occurred.
Camp Udairi, 15 miles from the Iraq border, has served as the staging and training base for tens of thousands of Iraq-bound troops.
Since opening in January, 2003, it has been a busy hub for Army Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.
A monument and plaque memorializing Buehring were dedicated as part of the event, said Sgt. Vanessa Bagley, an Army journalist from the 13th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment who attended the brief ceremony.
