More than 3,200 soldiers from 27 countries are testing out NATO’s new counter artillery-fire doctrine, which it previously lacked, during Exercise Dynamic Front 19.

“Counter artillery is a critical doctrine for any military,” said Col. Joe Hilbert, the commander of Operations Group for Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels. “The ability to take out the artillery of the opposing force, removes a strategic capability that they need, and gives you an advantage.”

While the United States has had contingency plans for what to do if their own artillery gets shelled by the enemy, the NATO alliance has lacked a cohesive counter battery fire doctrine in its game plan until now, military officials said.

“The U.S. has its own counter battery fire doctrine, and individual NATO allies have their own doctrine, but NATO doesn’t have a specific doctrine in place,” said Maj. Andrew Champion, the higher command officer in charge of the exercise.

The Army took the U.S. counter artillery fire plan and applied it to the large-scale multinational artillery exercise this week, Champion said.

This year’s exercise is the first Dynamic Front to take place in multiple countries.

While U.S. troops and allies are conducting the artillery-based war games in Germany, artillery will be firing simultaneously in bases in Poland and Latvia.

Additionally, this year the exercise is making use of more than triple the amount of the long-range multiple launch rocket systems as last year, with 24 MLRS vehicles supporting 62 howitzers.

The extra rockets bring additional capabilities to the soldiers, like the ability to launch anti-tank mines as well as highly precise rocket fire up to 55 miles away, said Maj. Andreas Leischner, commander of the German artillery battery at the exercise.

“You can shoot behind a skyscraper (50 miles) away, exactly on a target, and have no collateral damage,” said Leischner. “It’s not like artillery in the former days, where whole areas are destroyed.”

The live fire portion of the exercise began March 2 and will continue until this weekend.

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“Everything went to pieces,” Brig. Gen. Abdul Raziq Safi said of the base, which the Americans dubbed Forward Operating Base Shank. “Everything fell apart.”

After more than 17 years and $80 billion to build them up, Afghan security forces still struggle to secure their country, while corruption and other challenges strain their ability to maintain equipment and facilities provided by foreign forces, largely the United States.

FOB Shank’s fate — left to rot in the hands of overwhelmed Afghans — illustrates those challenges, as the White House reportedly mulls withdrawing thousands more troops, and as diplomats hammer out a peace settlement with the Taliban that could involve pulling out all foreign forces in the coming years.

Shank, located in eastern Logar province, is one of several former coalition bases throughout the country that have fallen into a state of disrepair, officials and observers told Stars and Stripes.

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Left behind

Once a strategic hub, Shank was a bulwark against Taliban enclaves in the lawless Tangi Valley to its west. An American-built runway allowed huge cargo planes to bring in troops, weapons and equipment.

Among the largest coalition bases at one time, it once hosted a 50-shop bazaar, four beauty salons, three restaurants and an academy to train soldiers in the counterinsurgency doctrine officials had hoped would end the war. It’s now a much different sight.

“It’s hardly recognizable,” said Army veteran Adam Cote, after viewing recent photos.

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Cote led a company of engineers who demolished some of Shank as part of a large-scale “shooting withdrawal” in 2014, after the Obama administration ordered most U.S. troops out of the country by the end of that year. The “retrograde,” perhaps the largest in modern history, cost the Pentagon a reported $6 billion, though likely far more.

While still battling the Taliban, units like Cote’s rushed to tear apart over 500 bases, shuttering many and downsizing others to be given to the Afghan forces. Some $860 million in property was transferred by 2015, including four logistics hubs, 13 operating bases and hundreds of tactical outposts, the Defense Department has said. About $48 million more was destroyed or abandoned.

DOD kept tons of valuable material, hauled out in miles-long convoys that snaked at a glacial pace across eastern Afghanistan to Bagram Air Field to be redistributed elsewhere or sent home.

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On its way out of the country, gear and supplies from remote eastern bases ended up at Shank, where troops picked through some 8,000 shipping containers, destroying, scrapping or giving away anything not worth risking American lives over. They left behind generators, air conditioners, furniture, buildings and empty shipping containers, a 2014 Army statement said.

“The end result was well worth the effort,” it said. “The Afghans will assume a functional operating base to immediately continue the war against transnational terrorists.”

'Houses for demons'

Today, Shank’s perimeter walls still stand, tracing a long pill-shape with the Afghan Camp Maiwand on its northern end. About five miles away, the southern tip hosts a small U.S. Special Forces camp and an American outpost called Camp Dahlke West that’s been built up recently.

In between is a vast swath of deserted buildings and ruined tent villages that U.S. troops have dubbed “Zombieland.”

Afghan troops use a similar term: “Houses for demons.” It describes several former coalition facilities “because no one is using them,” said Atiqullah Amarkhail, a retired Afghan general.

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Roaming packs of feral dogs now bed down at what was once Shank’s busy helicopter landing pad. Crows pick over scrap heaps amid metal tent skeletons whose torn plastic skins whip in the wind. Snow blows through collapsed walls of wood huts that once housed military offices.

As more Americans have been pushed out to Dahlke to advise front line units in the past year, U.S. troops have forayed into the wasteland to reclaim abandoned equipment, such as heaters and generators.

“You drive through and it’s like the ‘Walking Dead,’” 1st Lt. Tom Kopec, 26, a soldier in the 1st Cavalry Regiment, said in December.

Shank’s dilapidation was the result of resource limitations, claimed Safi, who heads a brigade in the army’s 203rd Corps. He has been fighting in Logar province for about 10 years and was posted at Shank in its prime.

Back then, its population of U.S. and coalition troops, civilians and contractors topped 8,000. Today, Safi’s troops here number one-fifth that, he said.

“We do not have the people to maintain the base — we have almost no people here,” Safi said via translator. “The rest are out at checkpoints.”

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Even with a base full of troops, Safi couldn’t afford to maintain it, he said, claiming the facilities are too costly to run. Everything the Americans left requires power, he said, even bathroom door locks his troops have replaced with ordinary padlocks.

Despite $2 billion in U.S.-funded power projects, Afghanistan’s grid remains underdeveloped and unreliable, and bases often depend on electric generators to power lights, heaters and other equipment.

For just one of the big tents now rotting in Zombieland, the Americans would burn about 80 gallons of fuel a night, said Safi, who spent hours one January morning searching room to room in his headquarters for a working heater.

“Where are Afghans supposed to get that much fuel?” Safi asked. He said later: “The Americans, money has no value for them.”

In a tent on the nearby snow-covered U.S. camp that same weekend, the Americans cranked the heat so high that one soldier wore shorts and another offered guests cold drinks to cool off.

While DOD provides the Afghans more than a million gallons of fuel a year, Kabul often struggles with logistics challenges, as well as frequent theft of gas and other property.

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Nothing lasts

It’s doubtful U.S. troops consumed as much fuel as Safi claimed, said Richard P. Mills, a retired general who led the Marines in southern Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. But, he and others said, the coalition didn’t do enough to ensure it left behind rudimentary bases that the Afghans could maintain.

“We were being less than truthful with ourselves that the Afghans would be able to take care of these bases,” Mills said.

Shank’s condition bodes poorly for a time when foreign militaries and their financial backing are gone, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

U.S. Central Command knew the Kabul government was “becoming overburdened by infrastructure” during the 2014 withdrawal, and NATO officials had been developing plans to help the security forces divest excess property, a group of CENTCOM logistics officers wrote in a 2016 review of the withdrawal effort.

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The status of those plans is unclear. Officials with the U.S.-led NATO Resolute Support mission declined repeated requests to discuss Shank and other bases, saying only that “we’re always learning and adapting and changing our processes.”

Meanwhile, Safi’s troops had adapted Shank to their own needs, growing flowers in a former bus stop shelter and drying raisins on the roof of an old housing container.

For Drew Pham, a former cavalry officer who had passed through Shank while fighting in Wardak province about eight years ago, the base he saw in recent photos was a metaphor for the efforts of soldiers like him.

“Nothing we made over there seems to last,” he said.

Franz J. Marty and Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.

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This has become routine for Georgian soldiers being advised by U.S. troops in defensive tactics to protect the small, mountainous country that shares its northern border with Russia.

Last week, amid heightened tensions in the region, soldiers with the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division began training the Georgians' part of the Georgia Defense Readiness Program, which is meant to bolster the country’s ability to defend itself against attack and modernize its military’s tactics.

“We have problems with our neighbor, Russia, and this gives our soldiers practice to increase their soldiering skills, and learn how to fight here in Georgia,” said Lt. Col. Vova Natenadze, commander of a battalion going through the training.

Several of the country’s northern provinces are still occupied by Russia, after a five-day war over the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions in 2008. Russian troops, which had been there as peacekeepers, remain there to this day, occupying roughly one-fifth of Georgian territory.

The training comes as Russian ships have been shadowing the destroyer USS Donald Cook on two recent deployments to the Black Sea, including during a port call in Batumi, Georgia, and an exercise with its coast guard.

This month, in the hills above Tblisi, U.S. troops have been mentoring and coaching a battalion of light infantrymen conducting war games.

The Americans are working closely with their counterparts to develop the defense program, with the hopes of building lasting improvements to the country’s military, said Maj. Jon-Paul Navarro, the officer in charge of the several dozen U.S. troops here.

“We’ve giving them our best tactics, techniques and procedures to develop this combat training center,” Navarro said.

The local soldiers spend much of their time digging foxholes and camouflaging their positions in order to ambush a mock opposition force modeling Russian tactics and made up of other Georgian soldiers.

Many going through the training fought against Russia in the 2008 conflict, including the training center’s commander, Col. Roman Janjulia.

Janjulia, whose father died nearly three decades ago fighting in the South Ossetia province now occupied by Russia, believes the American-led readiness program would have been beneficial to the country in its more recent conflict.

“I think this training would have helped in 2008,” Janjulia said. “And I think this will definitely help them in the future. They will not be vulnerable to the same threats. They will know how to oppose aggression and fight their war with minimum loss of personnel or equipment. They will protect this piece of terrain.”

Over the next few years, the country plans to send each of its nine light infantry battalions though the program, which began last spring, as the military here began to shift focus from Afghanistan deployments to the rising threats at home amid signs of an emboldened Russia.

“We’re looking at threats around the world, like Ukraine, Syria and the aggression we had in 2008, and we can say that this threat could come to us,” Janjulia said. “And we, as the Georgian army, should be ready to defend our people and our nation ... and this program especially helps us train for that.”

Though the war with Russia ended more than 10 years ago, tensions remain. A group of armed, masked men crossed into Georgian territory in 2015 in an attempt to move border markers further south, to allow Russia to control a mile-long stretch of land that includes an oil pipeline.

In addition to building up infantry skills, the program allows the Georgian Defense Ministry to assess its planning by trying out tactics on a mock battlefield. The center tests the plans and provides feedback to the ministry to help create improvements, Janjulia said.

“It’s not just the individual soldiers getting better, but the actual plan of how to defend Georgia is getting better,” he said.

Georgia is not a member of NATO, and its application has been blocked by European alliance members concerned about growing tensions with Russia. Still, Georgia has contributed a large contingent of troops to the U.S.-led NATO mission in Afghanistan. Soldiers here are confident their U.S. and European allies would step in to help them if hostilities did escalate between their country and its northern neighbor.

“Georgia wouldn’t stand alone,” Janjulia said. “We were not alone in 2008. There was support of other partners, which stood in front of Russia and told them to stop.”

Support for the troops here through efforts such as the readiness program also bolster their confidence, he said.

“They see the US troops and NATO partners, who are coming and advising us,” Janjulia said. “This is something our soldiers value.”

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Despite rain, clouds and wind throngs of costumed denizens lined the streets of this western German town to celebrate the final day of the carnival season with the 68th Westricher Fastnachtumzug, as the parade is known locally, the largest in the Westpfalz region of Rheinland-Pfalz.

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There were cowboys and Indians, clowns and witches among the spectators and members of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe Band were among the more than 1,000 participants in the parade.

The weather did delay the start of the parade by an hour and the route was shortened by half.

Local carnival groups threw candy to thousands of spectators lining the streets, as children scrambled to fill their bags with the goodies.

The Carnival celebrations came to an end in Germany before Lent begins on Wednesday.

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The soldiers were all waiting on the commanding officer to give them the “go ahead,” costing valuable time for the would-be ambushers.

This, U.S. advisers said, is a typical problem Georgian troops face during the training in the Georgian Defense Readiness Program, currently underway in the hills above Tbilisi.

“The Georgians are a little old fashioned,” said 1st Lt. Richard Klocksieben, one of the U.S. Army advisers. Like many former Soviet militaries, the Georgian noncommissioned officers frequently have fewer leadership responsibilities than their Western counterparts. “They rely too much on their senior officers for things they should be delegating to their NCOs.”

U.S. soldiers here have been advising their counterparts on when and how to use NCOs, and how to delegate more authority to the lower level soldiers.

“They have some problems, but they’re working on them,” Klocksieben said.

During the training scenario, in which Georgian soldiers defended their home country from a foreign invader, many of the soldiers have been using newer weapons the army has acquired, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and M240B machine guns — weapons the U.S. soldiers are very familiar with.

While the U.S. soldiers are not there officially to train them on the use of these weapon systems, the Americans have been offering tips and advice when they can, Navarro said.

“We let them know when we would use a Javelin or what kinds of positions we might set up (an M240B) for defense,” Navarro said. “They’ve taken to them very well.”

All nine of Georgia’s nine light infantry battalions are expected to undergo the training, aimed at modernizing the force, and will learn to use these new weapons to increase their defensive capabilities.

The Georgian army is in the process of building up its NCO corps, said Georgian Col. Roman Janjulia, commander of the training center.

Its old style of top-down leadership is a relic of the country’s past and a common problem in many of the former Soviet republics.

Unlike the other some of those other militaries, however, Georgian soldiers have been on extensive deployments to the Middle East, becoming the largest per capita contributor of soldiers to the international coalition in Afghanistan by late 2012.

That experience has led to a very effective military force, said Maj. Jon-Paul Navarro, the officer in charge of the several dozen U.S. troops here.

“Warfare is no stranger to them,” Navarro said. “The soldiers here are extremely motivated, and very experienced.”

In addition to loads of experience on the battlefield, the Georgian soldiers have another advantage — their hardiness — Klocksieben said.

“The weather here has been absolutely terrible. The winds are so cold that our guys are shivering, but the Georgian soldiers are all having a great time, joking around with smiles on their faces, like it doesn’t affect them,” he said.

The U.S. advisers say the Georgians are also especially good at mountain warfare, which comes as no surprise, as the country is at the heart of the Caucasus Mountains.

“I’ve had to hike up a few of these hills and its hard work. But we see the Georgians zipping up and down them like they’re nothing,” Klocksieben said. “They’re tough guys. They just need to work on their junior leadership.”

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Flags from all three countries were strung along the streets and storekeepers hawked summit souvenirs that included T-shirts emblazoned with photos of the two leaders.

Trump has touted Vietnam as a model that North Korea could emulate as it’s a communist country that has achieved economic prosperity and normal ties with the United States after emerging from the devastation of two decades of war, which ended in 1975.

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“Every anniversary for D-Day is special, but this is the last that many veterans of that day may be able to attend, so we knew that this year was going to be very big,” wing commander Col. Will Marshall said Thursday. “We wanted to look at what we could do that was special for this year and both tie into the history of the 48th Fighter Wing in support for that day.”

The new paint job features a checkered pattern on the nose, black stripes down the wings and a Statue of Liberty on each tail. The fuselage also is decorated with unit insignia and, under one of the wings, the classic national star symbol, also known as an Air Force roundel.

The 48th Equipment Maintenance Squadron corrosion control section came up with 25 original paint designs and narrowed the final selection down to three for the wing commander’s approval.

Then 10 airmen from the section spent more than 640 man-hours and used $15,000 worth of paint and supplies for the first of the jets, fighter wing officials said.

Two other fighter squadrons at RAF Lakenheath also each will have one F-15 painted and returned to a normal flight schedule.

The heritage design closely matches the striking, red-and-white invasion stripes on P-47 Thunderbolts flown by the wing during World War II.

“It was the most historically accurate that we could put on the F-15,” Marshall said.

Designated then as the 48th Fighter-Bomber Group, the unit flew P-47s in Europe during WWII, including the invasion of Normandy, which began on June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day. Its crews flew about 2,000 sorties in support of the invasion, dropping more than 500 tons of bombs and firing 160,000 rounds of ammunition, the wing said.

“While we stand on the shoulders of giants of the kind of men and women who were part of that, there are great men and women projecting combat air power today,” Marshall said.

As home to the U.S. Air Forces in Europe’s only F-15 fighter wing, RAF Lakenheath provides combat airport to support operations in Europe, Africa and southeast Asia.

“This allows us to draw that straight line between the events of that day to what folks are doing here and be motivated when they see that airplane,” Marshall said.

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Africano’s ship hit a mine on Jan. 22, 1944 and sank in the rough, stormy sea, killing him and 482 other crew members.

Officials read his and two other American casualties’ stories aloud Tuesday at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery to punctuate the great human cost of freeing Italy from fascism in World War II.

It was part of a 75th anniversary commemoration of the Allied landings at Anzio and Nettuno. The amphibious assaults began a five-month campaign that would result in the liberation of Rome, but would also take the lives of 28,000 Allied troops, including 11,000 Americans.

“As often is the case with war, the cost of freedom was high,” said Rear Adm. Matthew Zirkle, Naval Forces Europe and Africa’s chief of staff. “The bill was paid with the blood and youth of our fighting forces. We must ensure their legacy lives on. We must never forget.”

The American Battle Monuments Commission hosted the event in Nettuno.

About 7,860 U.S. soldiers are buried at the 77-acre site, and 3,095 who were missing in action are memorialized there. Most died in Sicily, Anzio and Salerno during Allied invasions of Italy.

American cemeteries like this one use a simple white cross or a Star of David as a headstone, regardless of the servicemember’s rank.

Standing amid the headstones, officials not only paid tribute to the war dead and the Allies’ victory, but the solidarity that formed between the U.S. and Italy.

Since WWII, Italy and America have shared common values such as liberty, justice and rule of law, thanks to those who fought and died to drive out fascism, Italian Gen. Enzo Vecciarelli said.

“Commemorate events like today’s anniversary … which keep alive all who died to grant us a better future,” Vecciarelli said. “It means the horror of war, oppression, repression will not come back again.”

A larger ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion will be held at the Normandy American Cemetery in June, said Benjamin Cassidy, an American Battle Monuments commissioner.

The Italian landings are credited with weakening German forces enough to pave the way for the Normandy invasions, Cassidy said.

Those who died in the Italy campaign are honored with memorials, statues and ships such as the USS Anzio, Zirkle said.

“But most importantly, we honor them with a great debt of gratitude – a debt that can never truly be repaid,” he said.

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For now, the mission in the region hasn’t changed, carrier group commander Rear Adm. Mike Wettlaufer told Stars and Stripes on Tuesday aboard the Stennis.

“We are given missions to do and we fulfill those missions whether it’s delivering ordnance where the ground commander may need it or providing overwatch for folks on the ground,” Wettlaufer said. “Our presence is part of the overall joint coalition force presence here.”

The presence is a signal of the U.S. commitment to ongoing operations in the Middle East, sailors said, and even some deploying for the first time said they are ready for whatever may come.

The USS Stennis arrived in the Persian Gulf last month — the first carrier visit to the region since April — at a time of heightened tensions.

Iran has threatened to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, where much of the world’s oil transits. The Yemeni civil war is ongoing and key U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar remain at odds.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s decision last month to pull U.S. troops out of Syria has created confusion over what could come next in the battle against Islamic State fighters in Syria. But in recent days, the Trump administration has sent mixed messages about its withdrawal plans. National security adviser John Bolton indicated earlier this week that a pullout could take months.

For the sailors aboard Stennis, the direction of Syria policy in Washington has little bearing on the day-to-day mission in the Gulf. On Tuesday, about 70 fighter jets launched and returned from flights, many in support of ground forces in Syria and Iraq.

Any carrier mission in the Persian Gulf means a nearby Iranian presence. The Stennis transited the Strait of Hormuz last month shadowed by Iranian warships. Local Navy officials said that while they have recorded some interactions with Iran that they deemed unprofessional recently, none were considered unsafe.

Stennis skipper Capt. Randy Peck joked that Iran was “escorting us through the Strait” in response to the interaction.

“It doesn’t deter us from being able to do our job to gain access and entry into the Gulf,” he said. “It’s an international strait, we’re exercising our right to be there and despite the show of force, it didn’t deter us from our ability to do that.”

Combat flights are just one part of the job for the 4.5-acre, 1,092-feet-long, 24-story behemoth. The ship’s executive officer, Capt. Patrick Thompson, manages 5,100 sailors, many of whom are 18-23 years old.

Thompson said that all the roles on board – ranging from logistics to repair, food preparation to administration – are “behind that one possible pilot to get him or her airborne and to get their ordnance heading up toward Syria.”

Driving the ship, Seaman Jose Antiveros, a 26-year old helmsman on his first deployment, joked that while he does have a valid driver’s license, he is also trained to steer an aircraft carrier.

“It’s a pretty important job,” Antiveros said. “There’s 11 nuclear-powered carriers in the world and I am one of those people driving the ship right now, so I think that’s pretty good.”

The ship’s workups helped prepare first-time deployers like Petty Officer 3rd Class Javen Rogers, a navigation specialist, for the long mission at sea. She said she’s ready for any type of emergency.

“Everything we did on the underway (training) prepared me for the deployment, so nothing is unexpected.”

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Expansion at Camp Dahlke West, 60 miles south of Kabul, has been so fast that everyone on base has had to pitch in to keep up and keep fed.

The buildup is a visible result of the Trump administration’s strategy in Afghanistan, which called for a modest surge of troops into the country four years after the military spent billions closing bases there.

It also comes as the U.S. sends more newly created units that specialize in aiding Afghanistan’s security forces, which have sustained heavy casualties as the Taliban and other insurgents continue to launch offensives throughout the country.

Camp Dahlke West has been built almost from scratch during the past year. It’s just south of the former Forward Operating Base Shank, which was given to the Afghan military during the 2014 military drawdown.

An influx of troops in the spring brought soldiers from the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, a cavalry unit and dozens of contractors.

Since then, the base has quintupled in population.

The soldiers who first arrived found only a few buildings around an airstrip. Soldiers waited in line for shared work computers, slept 12 to a room and used gym equipment built from scrap lumber.

The base now is bustling, with new buildings, including offices, a chapel, a recreation room, a laundromat and a gym. Engineers are building enough housing for 800 soldiers, including for the 2nd Security Force Assistance Brigade, which will arrive next year.

“By the time the second SFAB arrives, they should be out of tents and into better housing,” said Lt. Col. Gerald Law, 50, an engineer with Area Support Group-Afghanistan, the command responsible for base support throughout the country. Law oversaw construction as garrison commander at Dahlke over the summer. The goal, he said, is to ensure soldiers are not working on construction and can focus on advising and assisting government troops.

Expanding the base was until recently a small part of each soldier’s duty each day.

“It just sucks when you’re trying to get a meal and you remember, ‘oh I have to fill a sandbag,’” recalled executive officer 1st Lt. Matthew Moher, 27, from Apache Troop, 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment.

“The alternative is to go hungry,” said 1st Lt. Tom Kopec, 26, executive officer of Eagle Troop, 2-1 Cavalry.

The base continues to be a target of insurgents, with 83 mortar and rocket attacks since April, and sandbags provide another layer of protection for the base’s bunkers, Kopec said.

The two officers spoke at a cafeteria they helped build and furnish, over a meal of beef kebab, baked salmon, asparagus spears and strawberry cheesecake.

Moher found tables and chairs for the cafeteria, and Kopec flew all over Afghanistan in search of supplies to build up the base’s defenses.

To provide a sense of the expansion’s scale, Kopec said almost $6 million has been spent just on miles of Hesco barriers — the wire frames that are filled with sand and serve as walls. Meanwhile, trucks hauled in more than 700 sections of blast wall.

Every few weeks, some soldiers would also go to the former FOB Shank on “zombie runs,” named because of the eeriness of walking through a mostly empty base.

The soldiers carried memos to Afghans operating on a small piece of the former Shank, requesting supplies owned by the Afghans that the Americans had previously turned over.

Many of the generators now at Dahlke West belonged to the Americans, then the Afghans and then the Americans again. The housing containers being shipped in, the two soldiers noted, are in ample supply across the wire.

“There’s a village like that a hundred yards north of the wall, and no one lives there, there’s stray dogs there,” Kopec said.

“There are villages of tents just rotting away,” Moher said. “You think about how hard it is to get stuff here, and you look over the fence, and everything is right there.”

The base should be “mature” in early 2019, which means major projects will be completed and the camp will look similar to other bases in Afghanistan.

Current projects include bringing in a post exchange for soldiers to shop and building tents so fire trucks on the flight line don’t sit in the open air, where their water may freeze, said Brian Wilhelm, 56, the base’s mayor with Area Support Group-Afghanistan.

“When the guys first got here, there was nothing,” Wilhelm said. “The buildup so far has been incredible.”

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During the training on Wednesday, Marines and Spanish soldiers used a variety of sniper rifles from both countries to conduct marksmanship drills at various ranges.

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The drills included shooting from the top of an armored vehicle, blasting targets using the M107 with .50-caliber rounds and firing Spanish G-36 assault rifles before attacking from a longer range with sniper rifles.

The training is part of an ongoing partnership between the U.S. Marines in Spain and the Spanish recon units.

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The two men peeked into various rooms, marveling at treadmills still wrapped in plastic, and banks of electric clothes washers and dryers. An array of dozens of air conditioning units are likely to become a chore to keep running in a province with 17 districts, hundreds of villages and nearly 2 million residents, but just two qualified air conditioning repairmen.

The police officers asked each other who was going to pay to keep the lights on. Whether or not they knew it, the expectation is that it will be foreign donors, particularly the U.S., who are building the facilities as well as the electrical grid to power many of them.

The challenges in sustaining the country’s police force, underscore some of Afghanistan’s deep dependencies on its foreign backers. Some analysts say it could take decades before the country’s defense and security forces can operate without substantial support from abroad.

While the U.S. hopes to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign cash, the Kabul government already struggles with tasks large and small, from keeping equipment humming to holding ground against a resurgent Taliban who control or contest half the country.

In Herat, which along with Kabul was named early this year as the first of two provinces where a four-year program of police reforms would be rolled out, that means equipment fails and training suffers.

“When the foreign mentors were involved, they had more resources and equipment for training,” Herat police chief Aminullah Amarkhi said. “They knew how to operate and use them.”

At Herat’s regional training center, local officials insisted the Afghans have maintained training quality in the years since they took over from foreign trainers six years ago. Still, some crowd control and pepper spray training has gone by the wayside, they said, and they struggle to maintain equipment provided by their Western backers.

On a recent Stars and Stripes visit to observe the center’s training, smiling police officers went through routines as a trainer directed photographers where to get the best shots of men clearing rooms or practicing arrests on each other. Groups of uniformed young men waited demonstrated a riot shield exercise. It seemed more like dress rehearsal than instruction.

Among the other training no longer possible are exercises using tear gas grenades and night vision goggles, said Col. Allah Noor Mohammadi, who oversees the center. That training is still available for specialized units elsewhere, he said.

As long as the enemy has rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, police in Afghanistan will have to fight like soldiers, instead of being like Western-style law and order investigators, Mohammadi said. “You cannot defend the districts with a baton,” he said.

While police often fight alongside the army on the front lines against the Taliban, they are “not sufficiently trained or equipped” for counterinsurgency operations, according to a Pentagon report on Afghan security. New efforts aim to remake the force into a professional law enforcement agency, but its policing capabilities have been held back by a focus on building combat skills.

Throughout the country, a lack of NATO advisors and indecision about how to use the police have stunted the force’s growth, compared to the army, a recent Pentagon report found.

The main military training center in Kabul, meanwhile, came under scrutiny after the facility delayed classes and after reports of unsatisfactory training, poor living conditions, and inadequate trainer support. A recent Pentagon report noted that trainees at the Kabul Military Training Center were becoming malnourished and arriving at their units in poor health and not trained to standard.

Coalition advisers have stepped in to assist, and efforts to build up the training institutions will also depend largely on coalition members committing trainers in the future, officials said in a Pentagon report this summer.

When the U.S.-led coalition peels away support and transfers greater responsibility to the Afghan government to help it mature, that means accepting a higher risk of failure. That’s what coalition officials told a government watchdog after it raised concerns earlier this year about the lack of contracts for maintenance on a $3 million female dorm in the Afghan capital, like the one newly built in Herat.

The U.S. is already set to pay the bulk of the country’s $6 billion annual defense budget through 2023, including around $766 million for conventional police forces. Kabul pays less than a tenth of the tab itself, mainly for the care and feeding of its troops.

Foreign funding, largely from the U.S., will be critical to prop up security forces until they can stand on their own for many more years, as “full self-sufficiency by 2024 does not appear realistic,” according to a December Pentagon report.

It could be decades before the country can foot the entire bill for its security forces, said Mark Sedra, a researcher who’s written extensively on efforts to reform the security sector, particularly in Afghanistan.

Recent reports of a possible U.S. pullout from Afghanistan have brought back memories of the days after the Soviets left among Afghan leaders.

Russian efforts to build up Afghanistan’s security forces couldn’t be sustained once Soviet forces withdrew and money stopped flowing from Moscow. In the decade that followed, Afghanistan descended into civil war, the Taliban rose to power and the country became a haven for al-Qaida to launch attacks on the United States.

The U.S. foray into the country has lasted twice as long, as a stubborn Taliban insurgency continues to launch deadly attacks throughout the country.

“The worsening security situation has only compounded this sustainability time bomb,” Sedra said.

Zubair Babakarkhail, Mohammad Aref Karimi and Ghulam Rasoul Murtazawie contributed to this report.

lawrence.jp@stripes.com
Twitter: @jplawrence3
 

More than 5,500 soldiers took part in the two-week-long mock combat portion of Combined Resolve XI, the Army’s culminating event for tank and aviation units on nine-month rotations in Europe. The soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Combat Aviation Brigade, based in Fort Carson, Colo., and 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Hood, Texas, will be wrapping up their rotations to Europe next year.

Alongside the Americans in the wet and cold were armored units from Ukraine. The exercise comes amid heightened tensions along the Ukrainian-Russian border, after Russia fired on and seized several Ukrainian ships last month in the Sea of Azov.

The U.S. began its nine-month armor deployments to Europe in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The rotational armored and aviation brigades are part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, the United States commitment to deter possible Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

“The rotational deployments of armored brigade combat teams are a tangible expression of U.S. commitment to strengthening the defensive and deterrent capabilities of the NATO alliance,” the Army said in a statement on the exercise.

The rotational units faced a notional enemy made up of U.S. and Albanian troops as near-constant rains turned swaths of land into fields of sticky sludge for them to maneuver through. A brief look down confirmed that not a single soldier made it without plunging his boots into the mire.

The vehicles didn’t fare much better.

Tanks generally moved through the muck more easily, but many Humvees and smaller vehicles got stuck, making easy targets for the opposition forces launching surprise attacks.

The soldiers used drones and helicopters to scout enemy positions and minimize the effects of any ambush, while attack helicopters and tanks took out exposed enemy targets.

The rotational units are meant to provide a strong foundation for U.S. security efforts in the region.

“The forward presence of U.S. soldiers is the bedrock of our country’s ability to assure allies, deter adversaries and react in a timely manner if deterrence fails,” the Army statement said.

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Twitter: @Marty_Stripes
 

As they worked, the sound of snapping flower heads filled the air — the only sound besides the occasional rumble of attack helicopters at a nearby range. Nadir Khan Alizai, 55, watched as his son, 3, mimicked his older brothers canvassing the rows of flowers. His daughter, 4, hopped a furrow and wandered off holding a blossom.

The greying village elder once grew opium poppies, but a decade ago switched to crocus, from which saffron is made.

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The most expensive spice in the world, it can sell for up to $4,000 a pound. His family operates one of 400 farms that sell part of their harvest to Rumi Spice, a million-dollar company founded by U.S. Army combat veterans. Still, this year, prices for his saffron have fallen due to factors outside his control.

“I’m just a farmer, I don’t know why the prices went down, I just know it depends on the government and the mafia,” Alizai said.

The Americans see their business as continuing a mission they started in the military, but its rise comes as trafficking from Iran, counterfeiting and other growing pains for Afghan farmers threaten to undo progress in the fledgling saffron trade here.

Made from hand-picked flower stigmas, saffron is coveted as a seasoning in teas and rice dishes, as a dye in textiles, a fragrance in perfume and in medical applications. The legal cash crop is credited with helping Herat kick its opium-growing habit and giving jobs to vulnerable women.

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But recent upheavals may force some to return to the poppies that have helped fuel the 17-year Taliban insurgency. And despite the backing of a billionaire and testimonials from award-winning chefs, Rumi Spice’s success remains tied to the conditions in a volatile country gripped by insurgency and corruption.

Still, the veterans hope commerce can win entrenched battles that combat couldn’t win on its own.

The rise of Rumi Spice

While saffron growing has a long history in Afghanistan, it fell out of favor during decades of war, until refugees returned home from Iran after the Taliban fell in 2001 and began cultivating it near Herat. The flower thrived in the dry soil and cultivation was spurred by ample government and international aid.

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Keith Alaniz got the idea to sell the aromatic red saffron threads to Americans while deployed to the country from 2011 and then again in 2013. He was inspired by a local farmer who struggled to find overseas buyers for the spice, which remains pricey because of the labor needed to harvest and process it.

While he keeps a wary eye on news of growing insecurity, Alaniz believes business investments are critical for Afghanistan’s future.

“It’s impossible to reconcile that the last 10 years of my life were dedicated to a fruitless cause,” he said. “I believe the mission will be completed through the private sector, and I believe veterans are well positioned to do that.”

A former Army engineer turned regional expert in the military’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands program, Alaniz teamed with two fellow Army veterans to start the business in 2014. Billed as a luxury brand, Rumi Spice saffron runs $9 per half gram jar or $170 for a one-ounce “bulk” order in a small tin.

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Last year, billionaire Mark Cuban backed the company on the show “Shark Tank.” This year, it netted more than $1 million in revenues and began selling products nationally in Whole Foods stores, said Alaniz, now its chief executive.

Some earnings get reinvested into social causes, such as creating jobs for women. Its three saffron processing centers in Herat employs some 250 women — war widows and others displaced by drought — to hand-pluck crocus stigmas.

The women earn about $2 a day, Alaniz said. That’s more than double what a study earlier this year found most Afghans live on.

Economic development remains crucial to long-term stability in Afghanistan, both to improve livelihoods and to help fill government tax coffers to fund defense and security costs, most of which U.S. taxpayers now foot.

Rumi Spice has poured some $120,000 into training and equipment here in the past two years, Alaniz said.

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It also holds suppliers to U.S. agricultural standards, such as labor laws that allow young children to work only on family farms and only outside school hours.

It’s now one of five companies with meaningful sales out of some 30 saffron companies in the province, agriculture officials in Herat said. They said the Chicago-based firm is the largest importer of the spice to the United States.

Alaniz now hopes to build a local packaging facility and expand the product line to include wild cumin growing on the country’s mountainsides, which he said could go for 10 times the domesticated variety.

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A rising underdog and a shadowy underworld

The company’s rise parallels Afghanistan’s emergence as an underdog to compete with neighboring Iran, the world’s largest supplier of the spice, which has struggled against U.S.-imposed banking and trade restrictions that barred legal exports of its vast supply of saffron to the West.

Those sanctions and a weakened currency have led Iran to flood Afghan markets with its crop to skirt the restrictions and suppress vulnerable competitors across the border, locals and experts said.

“The stagnation of Afghan saffron prices, that’s the perverse effect of blocking the saffron from Iran,” said Philippe De Vienne, a 30-year veteran spice hunter and CEO of Epices De Cru, a Montreal-based spice company that purchases from Rumi Spice. “That is a shame because good Afghan saffron is a great product.”

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Smuggled and counterfeit spice is glutting local markets and getting shipped abroad, officials in Herat said, citing data that showed saffron exports exceeded production last year, even with half the crop remaining in the country.

Industry experts blamed Iran’s interference for a sharp fall in wholesale prices, which hurts farmers who invested heavily in the crop a few years ago amid what looked to be a boom, with rising prices and talk of Chinese markets opening.

To fuel its growth, the industry has for years sought inroads into new foreign markets like the U.S., where Iranian imports have long been barred but still enter, labeled as Spanish saffron. The average consumer has no way to know the difference.

“It’s a very opaque industry,” said Alaniz, who believes Americans may have been turned off by low-quality and fake saffron, such as imitations made of horse hair, shredded paper or safflower — an unrelated red thistle flower.

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Alaniz and others have sought to compete by positioning Afghan saffron as a premium spice through ethical sourcing, rigorous quality standards and greater transparency. Rumi Spice doesn’t take secondhand saffron and processes its crocus buds in a carefully controlled environment to prevent contamination, for example.

The government has also stepped in to protect the industry by trying to ban all saffron imports, even small amounts previously allowed to be carried from Iran.

Meanwhile, Afghan saffron exports to the U.S. have jumped from one kilogram in 2008 to 845 kilograms last year, United Nations figures show.

Production has shot up in the same period, more than doubling since 2015, according to government data.

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But farmers have seen prices flatten and then fall off one-third from their peak three years ago.

Opportunities in China have not materialized, said Abdul Saboor Rahmany, Herat province’s agricultural chief, and lower prices may be the norm for a while. Growers still earn more than they would from wheat or onions, he said, but “when the price decreases, the benefits decrease.”

Some farmers say that for the trouble they face from armed saffron-runners and declining prices, they might as well be in the more lucrative illicit drug trade.

“If the situation doesn’t change, I’ll go back to cultivating poppies, even if I get killed,” said Abdul Reza, a saffron farmer. “When guns rule the land, only the farmers and the poor suffer.”

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Twitter: @jplawrence3

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After scrambling into their gun turrets and checking their gear, the policemen rumbled off as part of preparations to arrest a Taliban commander.

The men were part of Herat’s new National Mission Unit, a police force intended for combat missions and advised by NATO instructors. Afghanistan hopes to double the number of crack units such as this one in Herat, a city of about 400,000 and the country’s third-largest.

Some analysts warn, however, that emphasizing development of elite Afghan units to the detriment of common soldiers and police officers may repeat of mistakes made by Western forces throughout the war.

Afghanistan currently has three NMUs taking on high-risk missions, such as arresting terrorists and responding to attacks.

Paramilitary police organizations are characterized by military discipline and tasked with missions that conventional police aren’t trained to handle – and as a result suffer higher casualties, according to a recent Pentagon report.

The unit in Kabul, for example, stormed a compound this August from which nine Islamic State fighters had fired mortar rounds that landed near Afghan President Ashraf Ghani as he was making a speech.

Herat, the largest city in western Afghanistan, was one of three localities chosen to host the new National Mission Units, along with Balkh in the north and Jalalabad in the east.

“The mission of the unit is antiterrorism, counternarcotics and critical response,” said Col. Habibullah Nazari, commander of the Herat unit.

The national units are part of an organization with about 3,500 police officers. A reorganization folded another, larger Afghan police commando unit, the Afghan National Civil Order Police, into the army last year.

Nazari said his men are trained to conduct air assault missions, where they disembark from helicopters and storm an enemy position. They use night vision goggles, grenade launchers, sniper teams and logistical trucks, which conventional police normally lack. He added that a unit of Afghan Mi-17 helicopters will soon deploy in Herat to provide dedicated air support. They also have the benefit of a year of training, both in Herat and at newly furnished training sites in northern Afghanistan.

The Herat unit conducted its first mission last month, Nazari said. It involved an early morning raid to nab a militant, who managed to slip away.

The policemen have been trained by Italians at their base near Herat’s airport. But Nazari said no foreign advisers were involved in the planning of that mission, although a plane from Camp Arena provided surveillance.

Advisers from Italy and Croatia are heavily involved in the training, and U.S. defense contractors are advertising for trainers.

Throughout the 17-year war in Afghanistan, coalition forces have focused much of their training and resources on elite units. But some experts say more and better-trained regular policemen are what’s needed to secure rural areas where the Taliban have been gaining ground.

“High-end forces are easier to train, they’re more educated, they do the sexier offensive missions,” said Seth Jones, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “But they’re not that ‘hold’ force, which are in some ways more important. Because this is where the Afghan government is struggling, to hold territory.”

High-end forces will often clear an area held by insurgents, but once they withdraw the guerrillas will gradually infiltrate back, said Jones, who also served as a plans officer for U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan.

The conventional Afghan police force is supposed to hold these areas and ensure that insurgents don’t return. But many policemen do not have the training, the equipment or the will to do so.

In Herat, they are also undermanned. Many of the city’s 15 police districts are staffed by just 70 or 80 officers, said Jailani Farhad, the governor’s spokesman. Farhad said these stations do not have enough manpower to police a city of almost 2 million, and bigger than Phoenix, which has about 4,000 police officers and is not in a war zone.

Herat’s provincial government plans to consolidate competent regular police officers into a new 300-member unit. It will be stationed near the governor’s office in a new compound and will have better equipment at its disposal.

The move will drain the best officers from Herat’s other police stations, but if the pilot program increases security and police effectiveness, Herat may be a model for other cities in focusing on the elite few over the regular many.

Mohammad Aref Karimi and Ghulam Rasoul Murtazawie contributed to this report.

lawrence.jp@stripes.com
Twitter: @jplawrence3
 

The powwow Tuesday was a chance for deployed Native American soldiers to honor their heritage and share it with others, said Capt. Warren Queton, a member of the Kiowa nation and the commander of the 1245th Transportation Company out of Oklahoma.

In August, members of Oklahoma City University’s Native American Society donated their drum to allow National Guardsmen deploying from their state to have a powwow in Kuwait.

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“Tribal people are vanishing from this earth,” Queton, 37, said. “We have to maintain our identity to preserve who we are.”

About 9,000 Native Americans serve in the armed forces. They have the highest number of servicemembers per capita compared to other ethnic groups, according to military statistics.

The powwow was a chance to show the importance of the American Indian identity, said Pfc. Tayshaun Mingo, 21, from the 114th Field Artillery Regiment. Mingo, a member of the Choctaw tribe, said he grew up attending powwows but didn’t think he’d be the drummer at one so far away from his home in Kansas.

“I didn’t expect to be doing a powwow in Kuwait,” he said.

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One of the dancers, Army Pfc. Loretta Menchaca, 21, had her white dress with streaming rainbow fringe shipped to Kuwait from her hometown of Keshena, Wis. The day of the dance, she peeked out the door of the hangar at the soldiers walking in for the ceremony. She usually doesn’t talk to people about being Native American, said Menchaca, a cook with the 395th Ordnance Company out of Wisconsin.

The prospect of telling everyone — through dance — about her heritage as a member of the Menominee nation made her nervous. Then she whirled around the drum as Queton and others beat a steady rhythm for several dances.

“I started dancing when I could walk, I’ve been dancing for about 21 years,” Menchaca said.

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Near the end of the ceremony, Menchaca invited other soldiers to join a friendship round dance, in which men and women lock their arms and shuffle in a circle in time to the beat. She led them through the steps, with the soldiers mimicking her, with varying levels of success.

She hugged her friends after the final beat of the last dance. No longer nervous, Menchaca said she was glad, because she was able to educate others about her heritage.

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Twitter: @jplawrence3

Camp Red Cloud, which has been a hub for American troops deployed near the front lines since the 1950-53 Korean War, is finally shutting down as part of a frequently delayed relocation plan.

The 2nd Infantry Division officially closed its longtime headquarters building, known as Freeman Hall, at the base on Oct. 16, lowering the flags and firing a cannon for the last time as the sun set.

About three dozen soldiers and civilians also gathered Sunday in the Warrior Chapel for a ceremony to decommission the white stone building with arched, stained glass windows and a steeple.

“The Warrior Chapel served military members and their families for more than 66 years and will continue serving the 2nd Infantry Division/[South Korea-U.S.] Combined Division community from its new home on Camp Humphreys,” said Chaplain (Capt.) Steve Love.

The long-anticipated closure of Camp Red Cloud will mark a milestone for a 2004 agreement to sharply reduce the U.S. military footprint north of the Han River. Most of some 28,500 U.S. servicemembers stationed on the divided peninsula have been concentrated in Seoul and bases near the heavily fortified border with North Korea.

Camp Casey, which is farther north, will remain open as the home to the 210th Field Artillery Brigade and other residual forces.

The relocation was initially supposed to be done by 2008 but had to be postponed several times as the largely South Korean-funded expansion of Camp Humphreys was plagued by construction and quality control problems.

The garrison held an inactivation ceremony for Camp Red Cloud in June, but that was a largely administrative bid to consolidate resources.

The Indianhead Division officially moved its headquarters to Camp Humphreys, some 40 miles south of Seoul, last week, becoming the last major command to do so, after the Eighth Army and U.S. Forces Korea. The grand opening of its new headquarters building, which will also be called Freeman Hall, is scheduled for next month.

Camp Red Cloud is on the northwestern edge of Uijeongbu, which was home to the real-life unit that inspired the popular TV show “M.A.S.H.” The base was originally known as Camp Jackson but was renamed in 1957 in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Cpl. Mitchell Red Cloud Jr.

But the shuttering of facilities is only the start of a lengthy transition process, including the capping of utilities and fuel tanks, negotiations over environmental cleanup requirements and other issues related to the status of forces agreement between the two countries.

“It’s estimated that the earliest that CRC will be able to be returned to the [South Korean government] is sometime in January/February 2020 if all of that process goes through and there are no issues,” said Paul Hubbard, the garrison’s lead base-closure analyst.

Hubbard said it has taken between three and 15 years to hand over other bases that have been closed due to disagreements over obligations for environmental cleanup and other issues.

The land will be turned over to the Defense Ministry, but city officials say they’re hoping it will be developed as a security-themed park.

Meanwhile, remaining employees are feeling nostalgic as they preparing to vacate the rest of the facilities.

The only part of the base that was busy Sunday afternoon was the golf course, with several South Koreans taking advantage of a sunny day with fall foliage covering the hills in the distance.

The golf club, with annual fees ranging from $300 to $1,000, is open to active-duty servicemembers, retirees and South Koreans who work for the military or are part of outreach programs. It’s also due to close by the end of the year.

The commissary, which is now full of empty shelves, will close Monday, according to the two remaining employees. Checker Sunny Avery, who will transfer to Camp Humphreys, said business has slowed to a trickle over the past few months.

“But it’s so sad that it has to close,” she said. “It was really friendly and kind of like family; everybody knows each other.”

Lee Jong-sook, 69, has worked as a bagger earning tips at the grocery store since it opened in 2001.

“I’m looking forward to retiring, but I’m sad about leaving all these good people,” she said.

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The Fort Bliss, Texas-based 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division replaced the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division — which will return to Fort Stewart, Ga. — during a transfer of authority ceremony in front of 2nd ID’s new headquarters at Camp Humphreys, a sprawling base 40 miles south of Seoul.

The Bulldog brigade will begin a nine-month tour as the sixth rotational armored brigade since the Indianhead division inactivated its last organic brigade combat team in 2015.

Its arrival comes as tensions have ebbed amid a diplomatic push to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

“This is one of the most strategically significant deployments in our recent history,” Col. Marc Cloutier, 3ABCT commander, said during the ceremony. “We live in interesting times and it’s promising to see negotiations ongoing toward a better peace.”

“We all hope this year is a breakthrough year, but we stand ready nonetheless to deliver a lethal capability to our [South Korean] partners if circumstances warrant it,” he added.

The rotation to South Korea also marks a first for the unit that spent most of its history in Europe, fighting in North Africa and Italy during World War II, then spending most of its time in Germany before moving to Texas in 2008.

2nd ID commander Maj. Gen. Scott McKean welcomed the Bulldogs, saying their tanks and troops will bring “fire, maneuver, shock effect to dominate any battlefield it encounters,” and he expects them to live up to division’s mantra of being ready to “fight tonight.”

McKean also thanked their Raider brigade predecessors, who came to South Korea last February when “the clouds of war were dark and looming.” He credited them for helping ensure peace on the peninsula.

Cloutier later told Stars and Stripes that he and his brigade, which includes fresh M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles deployed from Fort Bliss to replace aging vehicles in South Korea, will conduct a series of training events to keep their “knives sharpened” during the deployment.

Cloutier, who is on his first assignment to the peninsula, said he’s excited to work with South Korean troops who will be integrated for the first time at the brigade and battalion level. 2nd ID already includes South Koreans in positions at the division level.

He added those posts, which include deputy commander and operations positions, will begin filling in December. 2nd ID already integrates some of its positions, including the division’s deputy commander.

Cloutier said he and his soldiers “follow the news very closely” and welcome their new role on peninsula.

“We understand that our political and elected leaders will dictate the terms of the negotiations [with North Korea],” he said. “Our job as an armored brigade combat team is to provide that lethal deterrent and, if deterrence fails, a lethal punch.”

Roughly 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed on the divided peninsula where the two Koreas are technically at war after the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with an armistice instead of peace treaty.

fichtl.marcus@stripes.com
Twitter: @MarcusFichtl

Nationwide, 401 polling centers were due to operate on Sunday after running into problems the day before. The Independent Election Commission said only 253 were able to, and that voters registered at the remaining 148 centers would not be able to cast their ballots in the election.

Delayed opening times, absent election officials, confusion over biometric voter registration and missing registration lists led to scenes of chaos at many of the roughly 5,000 polling centers that were supposed to be functioning on Election Day.

Militants also attempted to obstruct the vote, widely regarded as a test for the U.S.-led coalition’s 17-year effort to build a stable democracy. Nearly 200 security incidents were reported Saturday, resulting in at least 36 deaths and dozens of injuries, Deputy Interior Minister Akhtar Mohammed Ibrahimi said.

The setbacks, however, did not deter voters — many of whom see the elections as a way to improve the dire economic and security situations in the country — from returning to the polls Sunday.

“Yesterday, I was really disappointed that I couldn’t vote, but I’m very happy I was able to vote today and that they gave us the chance to exercise our right,” Kabul resident Ahmad Samir said at a polling center in the capital’s Taimani neighborhood.

The center, inside a mosque, was open Saturday. But frequent glitches with biometric machines — that arrived just a month before the elections and were aimed at stemming fraud — contributed to a backup, which meant voting had to resume Sunday.

Eight boxes filled with ballots from the first day of voting were kept in a corner overnight.

Samir said while he trusted no one tampered with the ballots, he could understand how the situation — repeated at hundreds of polling centers in all corners of Afghanistan — could raise doubts over the election’s legitimacy.

“Maybe some people will start thinking someone stuffed the ballots and that there was some fraud,” he said.

Ahmad Rasouli, an election observer, was one of a dozen men who spent the night inside the mosque and, “only slept for about one or two hours,” to ensure there was no wrongdoing.

“It’s been very good,” he said. “There’s been no fraud.”

More than three million Afghans risked militant attacks and voted Saturday, out of 8.8 million who were registered to vote, the election commission said. It said around 4 million cast their ballots over both days.

Voting was postponed in the southern provinces of Ghazni and Kandahar. Ghazni faced complications, including security concerns, according to the commission. Kandahar delayed its ballot after a deadly attack earlier in the week that killed the provincial police chief.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said it was encouraged by the number of Afghans who turned out to vote.

“Millions of Afghan citizens braved security threats and, due to technical electoral management issues, waited long hours to cast their votes today for a better future,” UNAMA said in a statement Saturday evening.

“Those eligible voters who were not able to cast their vote, due to technical issues, deserve the right to vote,” the statement added.

Jahed Qayoumi, a master’s student in the capital who voted Sunday, agreed with UNAMA, but was wary about the situation.

“I believe it is my responsibility to vote, so I came today,” Qayoumi said. “But I don’t believe the government will count the votes accurately. In the past we have had bad elections. We have reason to believe it will be the same.”

Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.

wellman.phillip@stripes.com

Twitter: @pwwellman

The controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery — on a former golf course in the melon-farming area of Seongju, 190 miles south of Seoul — is manned by a unit known as Combined Task Force Defender.

The Delta Battery, 2nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment, which oversees the operation from nearby Camp Carroll, cut the ribbon Friday for its newly refurbished headquarters building.

“This ceremony today is the final step to formalize the presence of Delta-2 on the Korean Peninsula,” said the battery’s commander, Capt. Kate Theilacker.

The 29-year-old from New Richmond, Wisc., later told Stars and Stripes she was “honored” to be part of the “historic moment.”

“We’re here for the long haul to support the Korean people; we’re here as a permanent fixture in the ballistic missile defense of the peninsula,” she said.

The United States and South Korea agreed to deploy THAAD to the peninsula in 2016 to counter a growing threat from North Korea.

The transition from temporary to permanent unit began about a year ago when the unit flagged to the 35th Air Defense Artillery Brigade and its soldiers became permanently assigned rather than rotated in from the United States.

The move occurred despite opposition from locals, activists and China, which claims THAAD’s radar system poses a threat to its national defense. President Donald Trump also questioned what he said was the $1 billion cost of THAAD.

Local South Korean protesters routinely come to a head with transport vehicles entering the base. Most recently, skirmishes erupted in April when the South Korean defense ministry said it was providing material to make the base livable for the South Korean and U.S. servicemembers there.

Theilacker said the new building was a massive upgrade from their old location, which consisted of two small rooms and three computers.

“Sometimes we’d cram 40 people in to the old place” she said while giving a tour of the new headquarters, which includes offices, an armory to store small arms for the unit and space for 20 computer work stations

Work to be done

The smell of new paint and celebratory cake was a warm welcome to their new home at Camp Carroll, but Theilacker said life at Seongju needs improvement.

“The buildings we have weren’t built to house soldiers,” she said. “It’s not unlivable, but it’s not nice.”

She says the protesters not only force her troops to fly in and out every week via helicopter, but also stop U.S. vehicles from shipping in goods and supplies.

“Currently, the only way on and off of the site is by helicopter,” she said. “A week at a time at least, every single one of my soldiers is away from their barracks room, their family.”

She said if the gates weren’t blocked they wouldn’t require the extended rotations and could keep more people at Carroll, which is only a 25-minute drive away.

Spc. Josiah Welch, a THAAD operator, said conditions have improved since he started at the site in November.

“There was pretty bad mold initially,” said the 25-year old from Winter Park, Fla. “There was a week where we didn’t have running water – we had baby wipe showers.”

Now they have air conditioning and showers, he said.

The military finally began shipping fresh food three times week last month, reducing some reliance on pre-prepared field rations, Theilacker said.

The site even got a popcorn maker two weeks ago, she said, adding that toward the end of her last rotation it began tasting like the best popcorn she ever had.

Theilacker hopes they will get a functioning dining facility by the end of the year, rather than relying on the South Korean unit’s kitchen.

Welch said he appreciates the “real world application” of his job despite the rough conditions at Seongju.

“We get to see our work come to life and actually make an impact in the world,” he said.

fichtl.marcus@stripes.com
Twitter: @MarcusFichtl
 

More than three quarters of a century later, the bay is still home to military forces — troops from Russia, which took possession of Etorofu and three other islands north of Hokkaido at the end of World War II.

The Russian presence and the expulsion of more than 17,000 Japanese from Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai islands — which Japan calls its Northern Territories and Russia calls the Southern Kurils — remains a source of tension and the reason the nations have yet to sign a peace treaty 73 years after the war.

Most Japanese have never even seen the islands, the closest of which is only about 4 miles from Hokkaido’s northeast coast. However, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made them a priority, meeting regularly with Russian President Vladimir Putin and offering economic incentives at a time when his American ally has sanctioned the country over aggression in Europe.

The mountains of Kunashiri, almost 6,000 feet tall, loom over Hokkaido’s Shiretoko Peninsula. It’s a rugged area teaming with wildlife, including bears, hundreds of bird species, whales and gamefish.

From a lookout above the town of Rausu, the island looks close enough to swim to — just 15 miles away. Visitors can walk past a photograph of Abe and Putin shaking hands and spy Kunashiri through binoculars.

Kimio Waki, 77, who born on Kunashiri but expelled to Hokkaido with his family at age 7, came to the lookout on Oct. 10 to talk to reporters about his former home.

Waki has fond memories of his days on Kunashiri, although he said it was a shock when Soviet soldiers arrived to search his family home.

“I’d never seen people other than Japanese,” he said. “We had no information on the island, so we didn’t know the war started and ended.”

Waki recalled fishing in local streams, riding a horse to school to avoid bears and playing with Russian kids who arrived with the occupiers.

“We felt like we were living in a peaceful time,” he said.

After his family was sent to Hokkaido they settled in Rausu, where they could work as fishermen and see their former home, he said.

Waki has returned to Kunashiri several times in recent years under a program that allows visa-free visits by former residents. He said the area has changed.

“These islands are becoming more Russian and there are many new structures,” he said.

It’s not certain that expelled islanders would go back, even if Russia returned what was taken, Waki said.

“Their average age is 83, and it’s more comfortable for them with better infrastructure on Hokkaido,” he said. “But I would like to visit the islands freely. I would like to visit my ancestors’ cemetery.”

The former islanders want the territory restored to Japan, Waki added.

“Our demand is that all the islands should be returned together,” he said, rejecting the suggestion that Russia might only give back the two smallest islands – Shikotan and Habomai — which the Soviet Union agreed to return when it restored diplomatic relations with Japan in 1956 — but which have remained in Russian control due to the dispute over the other islands.

Local issues

Rausu mayor Minoru Minatoya said the Russian presence to the north causes many issues for locals.

Fishermen who cross a line dividing the strait between Hokkaido and Kunashiri are detained and their boats impounded. There have even been shooting incidents on the border, he said. White Japan Coast Guard ships are a common sight offshore or in local ports along Hokkaido’s northeast coast.

The divided control over the waters offshore makes it difficult for authorities to manage fisheries, since they don’t know how much Russian vessels catch on their side of the strait. In recent years, the local fishery has declined dramatically, although it’s hard to say if that’s due to overfishing, Minatoya said.

The territorial dispute also impacts cetacean researchers who come to the area to observe large pods of killer whales but can’t follow them into Russian waters, he added.

Each year, 160,000 visitors come to see Japan’s northern territories from Hokkaido, Minatoya said.

“It should be mandatory for Japanese lawmakers to come here and see the islands,” he said, noting that Japan’s other territorial disputes with China and South Korea concern remote islands that people can’t easily visit.

The only resource that the Japanese can harvest from the islands to the north is kelp, which was negotiated with the Soviets, he said.

Russians don’t eat kelp. The only time they took it from the area was when they needed iodine to treat people affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, he said.

Street signs in Hokkaido’s largest fishing town, Nemuro, are in Japanese, English and Cyrillic script – a courtesy to visitors from the north who’ve been coming there on ships since the last days of the Soviet Union brought new freedoms to Russians.

The areas that Russia had agreed to return comprise just 7 percent of the disputed land but 38 percent of the disputed sea territory, Nemuro mayor Masatoshi Ishigaki said.

His town, established in 1869, is like a mother city for the northern territories and home to many of their expelled residents, he said.

One of them, Hirotoshi Kawata, 84, fled Habomai with his family at age 11 after the Russians arrived. He recalled Soviet troops barging into his home and asking for sake and looking for Americans.

“We left everything behind, including our fishing boats, so we had to start from scratch,” he said. “We slept in barns and it took us 10 years to get a house.”

Another former islander living in Nemuro, Yoi Hasegawa, 87, left Etorofu at age 14. She recalled a kind of paradise where food was plentiful and “nobody got sick.” She’s been back but doesn’t like the controlled visits and limits on where she can roam.

At nearby Cape Nosappu, the shoreline is cluttered with monuments related to the islands, including the Habomais, slightly more than 4 miles offshore.

There’s a massive but weather-beaten white lookout tower – impressive steel arch, stone and wood markers bearing Japanese inscriptions extoling the return of the lost territory.

Gift shops sell kelp harvested from the Habomais, Russian nesting dolls and local seafood. There’s a visitor center with old photos and maps of the islands and a tribute to the former mayor of Nemuro, who in December 1945 petitioned Gen. Douglas MacArthur at his Tokyo headquarters asking that measures “be taken for the residents to live peacefully on these islands.”

However, the Russians, who had considered pushing as far as Hokkaido at the end of the war, remained in control.

Military factor

The presence of U.S. Forces in northern Japan, including Navy EA-18 Growlers capable of jamming enemy radar and Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons from nearby Misawa Air Base capable of destroying radar and missile launchers, may be factors in the negotiations over the territory.

In January, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force deployed its first F-35A Lightning II stealth jets to Misawa, which has also hosted U.S. Global Hawk unmanned surveillance drones in recent years.

Last year, it was reported that Russia had deployed two types of antiship missiles to Etorofu and Kunashiri as a response to missile-defense efforts in the Western Pacific, which include plans to install Aegis Ashore batteries in Japan.

There have also been reports of Russian plans to boost ground forces on the islands, which already host machine-gun artillery units and helicopters.

In March, a pair of Su-35’s — Russia’s most advanced fighter jets — landed on Etorofu for the first time, prompting a Japanese protest.

Last summer, Putin said demilitarization of the islands should be considered in the context of reducing tension throughout the region, according to Kyodo News.

He also expressed concern that the islands could be armed by the U.S. military if they were returned, according to Japan’s Asahi newspaper.

“A U.S. missile defense system may be deployed,” Putin said, according to Asahi. “Russia cannot accept that.”

The disputed islands form a strategic barrier around the Sea of Okhotsk, considered a safe location for Russian military submarines to shelter from potential adversaries, according to James Brown, an international affairs expert at Temple University’s Japan campus.

So, the prospect of returning islands that guard entry points to the sea to a nation that hosts U.S. forces likely doesn’t sound like a smart move to Russian military planners, he said.

Locals say they don’t notice military exercises or activity associated with the area, but they’re aware of its strategic value.

Russia seemed to be taking a diplomatic approach when it excluded the disputed territory from last month’s massive Vostok 2018 military drills with China. But the Russians held live-fire training on the islands this month, prompting complaints from Japan, Brown said.

The Japanese and Russians have agreed to engage in joint economic development of the area in five areas — aquaculture, agriculture, tourism, green energy and waste management, he said.

Japan hopes this will lead to a resolution of the territorial dispute, although Brown is skeptical that Russia would ever consider returning all the territory.

At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Sept. 12, Putin appealed to Abe to sign a peace treaty without prerequisites, but the Japanese didn’t take up the offer due to the island dispute.

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Twitter: @SethRobson1

The new “Fresh Line” items — available at the 12th Marines Mess Hall at Camp Hansen since February — replace popular but fattening options like chili macaroni and cheese that are high in sodium and calories, said Gunnery Sgt. Maurice Clifford Toole, a food-services subsistence chief for Marine Corps Installations Pacific.

“Overall when you look at the new-age Marine, they do care more about a healthier lifestyle,” he said. “The newer Marine is more conscious about what they eat and what they put in their bodies.”

Turkey bacon is served instead of pork and brown rice is offered instead of white, which is lacking in nutrients. The menu also includes mango and fruit-punch smoothies.

“The Marine Corps actually hired a chef to create new menu items that were healthier but still had taste,” said mess hall manager Master Sgt. Jerwon Donta Stephens. “It’s easy to go healthy, but if it’s not tasty, no one is going to eat it.”

The ongoing trial period has been tracking the new line’s popularity, along with how much manpower and money will be required to keep it up and running. So far, the reviews appear to be positive.

“I prefer Fresh Line items instead of having any other processed foods,” Lance Cpl. Jacob Flores told Stars and Stripes while waiting for his food at the chow hall Friday. “I usually get wraps or chicken.”

The new line is part of the service’s “Fuel to Fight” initiative, which aims to make it easy for Marines to identify healthier food choices, the service said in a statement earlier this year. “Foods are color coded as either red, yellow or green based upon the food’s total fat and saturated fat percentage of total calories.”

Both Stephens and Toole said they hope the Fresh Line will encourage healthier choices at bases where an abundance of fast-food options can often be tempting.

“Our body is our temple,” Stephens said. “If our body is not functioning correctly, our body can’t get back to the mission.”

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Twitter: @StripesCarlos

The Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood in Kabul, home to many of the Shiite Hazara minority, has seen some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the city in recent months. But in the days preceding Saturday’s vote, signs of defiance filled the streets, which were lined with election posters and frequented by cars blasting candidates’ slogans out of loudspeakers.

“If I’m alive on election day, I will vote,” said Dil Mohammad, 60, who sells pigeons in a small shop along one of the neighborhood’s main roads. “Everyone in this area is afraid of attacks on election day, but they’re also committed to voting. We need to elect good people who can bring peace and stability here.”

The Kabul government and U.S. officials have stated hopes that relative optimism will boost voter turnout among ethnic groups like the Hazaras, lending legitimacy to the long-delayed parliamentary ballot.

Mohammad, like others in the community, accused the current parliament of corruption and nepotism, and said a failure to appoint qualified people to government posts has added to the deteriorating security situation in places like Dasht-e-Barchi.

Last month, twin suicide attacks at a wrestling club in the neighborhood left over two dozen people dead. An attack the month before targeting a building where students were preparing for university entrance exams killed about 50.

ISIS, which considers Shiite Muslims apostates deserving death, claimed responsibility for both bombings, which followed a string of attacks against the Hazara community by the terrorists.

In a report released earlier this month, the United Nations expressed concern over an increasing number of attacks using improvised explosive devices that appear to target Afghanistan’s Shiite Muslims, most of whom are Hazara.

“Aren’t we the sons of this country? Are we not Afghans? Why are we not protected?” asked Ghulam Abbas, 52, a business owner in Dasht-e-Barchi. He said almost everyone he knows plans to vote on Saturday in the hope it might bring change.

“We are very afraid,” he said of the possibility that crowded polling stations might be targeted by militants. “But we need to choose people who can help us, who can get us out of this chaos.”

In addition to the government, Abbas criticized Afghan and U.S. forces for their inability to prevent ISIS from operating in Afghanistan.

Apart from NATO’s train, advise and assist mission, U.S. forces carry out a smaller counterterrorism mission in the country that targets groups like ISIS.

In 2017, U.S. military officials said one of their main objectives was eliminating the local ISIS affiliate by the year’s end.

Since then, the number of U.S. munitions dropped over Afghanistan has reached record levels, but terrorist attacks have continued. The U.S. military now appears ready for an indefinitely long fight with the militants.

“We are sometimes suspicious that they are helping Daesh,” said Rajab Ali, 50, a mechanic in Dasht-e-Barchi, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS. “America is the world’s superpower, they should be able to defeat Daesh if they honestly wanted to,” he added, echoing a view held by some segments of Afghan society.

Government officials in Nangarhar province, ISIS’s eastern stronghold, said that Saturday’s election — which is already three years overdue — is unlikely to be held in at least five provincial districts mostly because of security threats posed by ISIS.

While American and other coalition troops are advising on security and logistics, Afghan forces are responsible for protecting the polling stations.

The Independent Election Commission recently announced that the roughly 7,350 polling centers across the country had been reduced to 5,100 due to security concerns. There have also been reports of fraudulent voter registration and interference by regional and local strongmen.

The Taliban, who wield much greater political influence in Afghanistan than ISIS and consider the election a tool to advance foreign interests, also have vowed to disrupt the vote.

On Wednesday, the group claimed responsibility for the death of an Afghan lawmaker participating in the elections in southern Helmand province, who died when a bomb was detonated under his office chair. He was the 10th candidate killed in the past two months.

Three other people died in the attack, which followed a blast at an election rally last week in northeastern Takhar province that killed 22 people.

Security fears have led to speculation from analysts that voter turnout could be low in parts of the country, and many Afghans have already said they won’t be casting ballots because the risks are too high.

But in Dasht-e-Barchi, Ahmad Shoib Taban, a campaigner for a Hazara parliamentary candidate, said many see the elections as a chance to reduce future risks.

“The only option to bring peace and security in Afghanistan from the Afghan side is to elect honest and trustworthy people to the parliament,” he said.

wellman.phillip@stripes.com
Twitter: @pwwellman
 

The two III Marine Expeditionary Force Marines drew the ire of their commanders recently for minor alcohol-related infractions while stationed on the tiny southern Japanese island prefecture of Okinawa. But leadership determined they were valuable to their units and should be given another chance rather than punished with separation from the Marines.

They were placed in the Correctional Custody Unit, a new rehabilitation program aimed at setting Marines on the straight and narrow and reintegrating them into their units. Dubbed CCU 2.0, the program began May 2 at Camp Hansen and could soon be launched at stateside Marine bases.

Cornelius and Daniels thought the program was going to be mostly manual labor and grueling punishment.

“I was watching old videos and all I saw was the hammering rocks, so I’m like, ‘We’re going to be busting rocks in jail?’ and I’m like, 'man,'” said Daniels, 28, a motor vehicle operator from Miami. “But when I first came in, it was totally different.”

The program includes mindfulness training, goal-setting and classes on a variety of topics, such as financial literacy and learning the jobs of other Marines, such as machine-gun operation.

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Cornelius said it didn’t take long for him to realize that CCU 2.0 was helping him.

“I had really bad problems with patience. I was always frustrated,” said the rifleman, 24, of Huntsville, Ala. “This program has actually allowed me to kind of like calm down, assess situations and just kind of go with the flow of things.”

Marine officials are optimistic about the program.

“The mission is to get that wayward Marine to serve their initial contract obligations,” said Gunnery Sgt. Loren Ortiz, staff noncommissioned officer in charge. “Anything after that is icing on the cake — re-enlistment, meritorious promotion … We’ve received support from the highest levels of leadership.”

Participants are called “awardees” and spend seven or 30 days under the constant watch and critique of a senior watch stander and assigned watch standers. Each awardee has an individual dorm room with a bed, sink, water fountain and toilet. The program can accommodate 32 servicemembers at a time.

When it was launched in May at the Camp Hansen brig, planners decided to scrap a controversial part of the program that saw flak jacket-clad Marines pulverizing rocks with sledge hammers in the Okinawan heat.

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Day 1

On Aug. 15, the seven-man Class 4-TAC-18 arrived in the rain outside the Hansen brig. Only the fourth class to go through the fledgling program, they stood outside with sea bags slung over their shoulders and were told to enter one at a time for in-processing.

The first Marine through the thick steel brig door didn’t make it one step before a watch stander was in his face shouting about neglecting to give the proper greeting.

“Get out,” he barked.

The Marine exited and re-entered.

“Good morning gentlemen,” he said sheepishly.

The awardee was instructed to dump his sea bag’s contents onto the deck and segregate it. His cellphone, wallet and other personal items were confiscated as contraband. He was given a foot locker and told which items should go inside. They were checked as each item was entered.

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This process was repeated for each Marine while a commanding officer met with Ortiz to go over any health concerns the awardees might have, appointments and rules for visitation.

Next, awardees stood on footprints, just like in boot camp. But these were not the kind welcoming them to the Marine Corps; these welcomed them to the portion of the brig where incarcerated inmates are housed.

They toured the in-processing center and learned about body-cavity searches and prison uniforms, the cells and the cafeteria. Everything was cold and stark.

“It is vitally important that you give everything you have to this program,” Ortiz said. “There is hope, regardless of what it feels like right now. I am telling you; there is hope.”

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Day 16

The CCU program is broken up into three weeklong periods called “conducts,” Ortiz said. Conduct 1, the first week, is the most strict. Rules are established, and battlefield communication — shouting, essentially — is used to enforce them. A board approves passage to the next phase.

“First thing I thought was everything was like boot camp all over again,” Daniels said. “Everything was stern, discipline, everything had to be done to the exact ‘T.’”

Reveille is typically at 4:30 a.m., the awardees said. They shave, brush their teeth and make their racks before physical training, which can be a hike or a run.

After, they shower and eat. Then they work on book reports and other tasks while waiting for classes to start. These run until evening, breaking only for lunch and dinner. Then they meet with senior watch standers who act as mentors.

They head for their racks for taps.

In Conduct 2, watch standers ease off and let appointed awardee squad leaders delegate and lead. Watch standers interject when necessary.

During Conduct 3 — the release phase — watch standers generally don’t need to step in.

On Aug. 31, the awardees completed a 3-mile run with cadence at 6 a.m. with the law enforcement battalion. They showered and got into their dress uniforms for inspection.

The process was rigorous.

The awardees changed out of their dress uniforms and filed into a classroom. They went over essays they had written and watched a video about goals, happiness, health and inner well-being by motivational philosopher Jay Shetty.

Some of the classes awardees take include “Thinking for Change” and “Prime for Life,” as well as a core-values refresher.

Correctional treatment specialist Michael Long asked the class about some of the things that bring short-term happiness as opposed to long-term or total happiness. They discussed goals.

They also participated in mindfulness training. Long said that’s one of the most beneficial aspects of the CCU program.

“We try to get them to be more reflective of what they’re doing; I think it’s getting them to slow down a little bit,” he said. “Making a good decision, making a bad decision, is just that brief moment; anger is a secondary emotion. So, if somebody is out drinking and they get mad, having the ability to just take a breath, think, can help you make the right decision.”

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Day 28

By Sept. 12, the Conduct 3 awardees were ready to return to their units. They donned dress uniforms and made their way by van to the Camp Hansen theater. A torii gate had been set up on the stage along with the U.S. and Marine Corps flags.

Friends and members of their units sat in the audience as a show of support.

After several speeches extolling their accomplishments, the awardees were called to the stage one by one. They received a certificate and shook hands with Ortiz and CCU 2.0 commander Chief Warrant Officer Rachel Jacobs. They walked with pride and there were no signs of shame or dishonor.

“It feels great to graduate,” Cornelius said. “I still plan on improving.”

With the right attitude, Daniels said, one can easily become a better Marine through the CCU. He said he is nervous heading back to his unit, but he has seen the improvement in himself.

“It’s like being given a second chance,” he said.

Cornelius said he didn’t have any goals when he entered the program. He was leaving with a plan to use tuition assistance to take college courses until he separates from the service. Then he plans to use his G.I. Bill to go to welding school.

“I didn’t have that planned out until I came here, so I would definitely say it’s been beneficial for me in that aspect,” he said.

burke.matt@stripes.com

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History of CCU

The first CCU program was started in 1979 to give commanders an alternative to discharging undeveloped or immature servicemembers who get into trouble for minor violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It became widespread in the mid-1990s, around the time one was founded at Camp Hansen, Marine officials have said. Marine Corps hubs of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and Camp Pendleton in California also had versions of the penal institution and program.

The units were known for strenuous physical training that resembled boot camp and were last operated in the United States and on Okinawa in 2004, when they were ended due to staffing shortages while the U.S. military was preoccupied in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In recent years, Marine leaders on Okinawa began looking to revive the program to cut down on administrative separations and help Marines finish their enlistments honorably. Headquarters Marine Corps approved the relaunch in February.

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Shouts of “oorah,” the Marine Corps' legendary battle cry, rang through the East Room and the standing-room-only crowd of Canley’s fellow Vietnam veterans and top military brass cheered the 80-year-old as President Donald Trump presented him the Medal of Honor. The Marines who fought alongside Canley in Vietnam’s brutal Battle of Hue had worked for years to see him receive the award – an upgrade of the Navy Cross that he was awarded in 1970.

Canley is the 300th Marine to receive the medal.

Trump, echoing the comments of Canley’s fellow troops, said Canley had showed throughout his entire life that he was a Marine’s Marine.

He is “a Marine warrior, who is bigger than life and beyond the reach of death. He is truly larger than life,” Trump said before turning to Canley. “There are very few people — brave, brave people — like you, John.”

On Jan. 31, 1968, Canley was suddenly called upon for a job that he never expected to have. With his company commander severely wounded as his unit made its way toward the besieged city of Hue in northern South Vietnam, then-Gunnery Sgt. Canley took control of Alpha Company, a job typically reserved for a commissioned officer.

For the next six days, Canley would lead the 1st Marines unit as it charged into the city to pry it from the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces who had captured it during the unanticipated Tet Offensive.

In the midst of one of the most ferocious fights of the Vietnam War, Canley would organize assaults on enemy positions, killing countless enemy fighters as his team retook buildings in the city, according to award citations. Twice, the noncommissioned officer braved fire to scale a wall in “full view of the enemy to pick up wounded Marines and carry them to safety.”

Trump said Wednesday that Canley had saved at least 20 Marines’ lives during that “house-to-house, very vicious, very hard combat.”

“In one instance after another, John risked his own life to save his Marines,” the president said. “He just continued to face the enemy with no regard for his own life.”

Canley of Oxnard, Calif., has credited the Marines that he served with for his receiving the award and his numerous acts of valor during that fight.

The Medal of Honor “means a lot to me,” Canley said in an interview earlier this year with USA Today. “Mostly for my Marines, because we’ve had to wait 50-plus years to get any kind of recognition. It’s not about me. It’s about the Marines who didn’t [receive] the appropriate recognition when we got home.”

Canley did not make a public statement at the White House on Wednesday.

In addition to the Medal of Honor, Canley received the Bronze Star with “V” device for valor, the Purple Heart and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with “V” device for valor for his service in Vietnam between 1964 and 1970, according to his Marine biography. He retired from the service in 1981 as a sergeant major after serving 28 years in the Marine Corps.

In a brief video produced by the Marine Corps, Canley said it was the men who fought alongside him who kept him going during the Battle of Hue from Jan. 31 to Feb. 6.

“My Marines because they believed in me, they would follow me to death,” he said in the video published Tuesday. “And I have no doubt about that.”

Canley is the seventh person to receive the Medal of Honor from Trump and the third to receive the award from him for actions during the Vietnam War.

All seven Medals of Honor that Trump has presented have been upgrades of previously awarded lower valor honors. While some of them are the result of a Pentagon-ordered review of Post-9/11 valor awards, others such as Canley have been the result of years of effort by friends and family of the recipients.

For Canley, the Medal of Honor upgrade required an act of Congress because of the amount of time that had passed since the war. Rep. Julia Brownley, D-Calif., sponsored the bill approving the upgraded award, which was passed in January.

“Sgt. Maj. Canley is a shining example of why our armed forces are the best military in the world, and his heroism and bravery showcases what being an American hero truly means,” Brownley said last month following the White House’s announcement of the award upgrade. “I look forward to Sgt. Maj. Canley finally receiving this much-deserved honor, and thank him for his unwavering dedication to our nation and his fellow servicemembers.”

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Twitter: @CDicksteinDC

Army driver Herbert Hunn, 24, and navy telegraphist Peter Mollison, 19, were brought aboard a New Zealand Air Force jet after a repatriation ceremony at Osan Air Base’s passenger terminal. The pair were to be returned to family members Sunday at Royal New Zealand Air Base Auckland.

“These two men beside me were not killed in combat and in fact died after the armistice agreement,” New Zealand Ambassador to South Korea Philip Turner said during the ceremony. “They were part of New Zealand and the international community’s commitment to security here.”

Both Hunn, who died in a vehicle accident in 1955, and Mollison who succumbed to meningitis in 1957, had been interred at a United Nations cemetery in Busan.

“Between 1955 and 1971, a New Zealander who died while serving abroad was buried overseas unless their families paid the repatriation cost,” Turner said.

Legislation passed last year brought about a program aimed at bringing those servicemembers home. It’s called Te Auraki — Maori for “the return.”

“When it’s finished, Te Auraki will see 35 people returning to New Zealand from six countries and nine locations, Turner said. “South Korea is the final country in what has been a significant national project for New Zealand.”

Friday’s ceremony, which began with a Maori prayer, brought traditional New Zealand song and dance from the island nation to Osan, including the Haka — a traditional Maori war cry. A dozen New Zealand army and navy personnel then carried their respective servicemember’s caskets through heavy rain and onto the jet.

“We at United Nations Command salute them for their service here and we pray for their families and their countrymen to find closure in their returning home,” said Gen. Vincent Brooks, head of U.S. Forces Korea and United Nations Command.

New Zealand was one of 16 countries to serve under the U.N. flag during the 1950-53 Korean War, which ending with an armistice instead of a peace treaty. Turner said more than 6,000 of his country’s servicemembers deployed to South Korea in the 1950s.

Six New Zealand servicemembers now serve in South Korea under the UNC, according to the New Zealand Defense Force website.

This was the first major repatriation ceremony at Osan since 55 remains presumed to be U.S. servicemembers were returned from North Korea in August.

fichtl.marcus@stripes.com
Twitter: @MarcusFichtl
 

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in August he’d seek to return the “Balangiga bells” held by the United States — two in Cheyenne, Wyo., and one at Camp Red Cloud, South Korea — to the Philippines. A Philippine government official said recently they would be handed back before Christmas.

In Balangiga, where the bells last rang in 1902, people will be happy when the bells come home, retired teacher and local historian Alicia Valdenor said late last month as she sat at the base of the tower where the bells will hang.

“It will serve as a reminder of how the first inhabitants of the place were faithful and dedicated Catholics,” she said.

U.S. troops took the bells during the Philippine-American war after a rebel ambush that killed 48 U.S. troops from the 9th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed “Manchus,” for their role quelling the Boxer Rebellion in China.

Philippine nationalists viewed the war, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, as one of independence, while the United States, which took the islands after the Spanish-American War, regarded it as an insurrection.

The bells were used “to signal the insurrectos, or rebels, who were under the command of Emilio Aguinaldo, to commence their surprise attack on the village of Balangiga and its garrison, Company C, Ninth Infantry Regiment,” according to a caption on a photograph at the 2nd Infantry Division Museum in South Korea.

The night before the attack, 300 insurrectos dressed as women entered the church with smuggled weapons, the caption says.

“They remained in the church until the following morning, when by arrangement between certain village officials and the insurrectos, the bell was rung as a signal to start the attack. In the ensuing savage fight, more than one-half of the seventy-four men of Company C, under the command of Cpt. Thomas Connell, were killed, and only four of the remaining Manchus escaped without wounds. Those Manchus fought fiercely and killed approximately 250 insurrectos by the time the battle was over and they were relieved by Company E, Ninth Infantry Regiment.”

Villagers presented the bell to the regiment when it left Balangiga on April 9, 1902, according to the caption.

The present-day people of Balangiga tell their own version of the story through a large monument beside the recently rebuilt church. The building and town were badly damaged by a super typhoon in 2013, sparking a large-scale relief effort by U.S. forces on Samar and the nearby island of Leyte supported by the USS George Washington aircraft carrier.

The monument, which lists the names of the insurrectos involved in the battle, includes a replica of the church tower and life-sized sculptures of the U.S. troops being gunned down at a breakfast table in a surprise attack.

Philippines researcher and author Bob Couttie has suggested the insurrectos were angry about a U.S. commander forcing local men to clean up the town after a typhoon.

But Valdenor tells a different version of the story based on a collection of notes on the incident compiled by her late father, who knew some of the insurrectos and spoke with them about the attack.

The fight broke out because they were angry and jealous about U.S. troops mingling with local women, she said.

“Communication was also a problem,” she added.

Road to Balangiga

Getting to Balangiga from the nearest large city of Tacloban on the neighboring island of Leyte involves crossing the 1.3-mile-long San Juanico Bridge, passing through several armed checkpoints and along an idyllic coastline bordered by lush jungle and fields grazed by water buffalo.

Out here you won’t find the American fast-food restaurants or air-conditioned malls popular in Manila and other large cities. People live in simple homes with corrugated iron or grass roofs and work on farms, fishing boats or for the local government.

One thing the towns have in common with the cities are signs letting people know they’re in a “DRUG CLEARED BARANGAY” – an area supposedly purged of amphetamine pushers as part of President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war that has resulted in thousands of extra-judicial killings.

Duterte, who has sought closer ties with China and Russia despite opposition from his pro-America military, demanded the return of the bells in a speech last year reported by the Philippine Star newspaper.

“Those bells are reminders of the gallantry and heroism of our forebears who resisted the American colonizers and sacrificed their lives in the process,” he said.

“Give us back those Balangiga bells,” he added. “They are ours. They belong to the Philippines. They are part of our national heritage. Give them back. It’s painful for us.”

The church is the first thing people see as they arrive in Balangiga. It has an impressive bell tower, stained-glass windows, a collection of broken bells, more than its share of gaudily painted icons and an outdoor ossuary with recently unearthed bones that locals think might belong to U.S. soldiers.

Valdenor’s notes show the town was officially recognized as a Catholic parish on April 1, 1854.

“In 1863 the first church bell was made from people’s donations of pieces of gold and coins,” she said.

That bell, inscribed with the name of local priest R. San Francisco, is in Wyoming with another made in 1889 that honors Father Augustine Del Gado.

The bell in South Korea was made in 1875 and bears the emblem of the Franciscan order, according to Valdenor’s notes.

Mixed feelings

The idea of giving back the bells has an uneven reception by U.S. military veterans. In July, the Veterans of Foreign Wars approved a national resolution in favor of returning them but others have suggested that handing back battle trophies would set a precedent for countries to make similar demands for relics from other wars.

If and when the bells come back there will likely be a visit from American officials. It’s unclear whether U.S. veterans would participate, but back in Angeles City – near the former Clark Air Base on the island of Luzon – old soldiers have mixed feelings about the endeavor.

Jim Collins served with 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment in South Korea at Camp Greaves from 1976 to 1977 and at Camp Liberty Bell from 1981 to 1983 and was proudly wearing a belt buckle featuring the unit’s “Manchu” emblem on a recent Saturday.

“If the U.S. government wants to return the bells and it makes peace with the Filipino people I’m all for it,” he said. “I hope it will resolve differences between us and we would become better friends.”

But it would be disappointing if the bells became part of an “anti-American shrine,” he added.

“The Filipinos have a ceremony down there every year where they are proud of the insurrectos. It might be perceived as an apology for past colonialism, and it could be a point of contention between us and them. It could be a tourist attraction for anti-American types,” he said.

However, Sanny Elacion, a local government administrator working on a renovation of the memorial to the insurrectos, said locals would be friendly to any Americans who came there to return the bells.

“They are helping Filipinos,” he said.

Valdenor said people in Balangiga are pro-American nowadays.

“After all, America protects the Philippines,” she said. “We will be very thankful to the American people if they return the bells.”

robson.seth@stripes.com
Twitter: @SethRobson1
 

Maj. Sandra Lee Altamirano of the Army Reserve said she took military leave to help place the 5,520 U.S. flags. She recently lost three friends to suicide, two of whom were veterans.

A couple of years ago, after serving three deployments in Iraq, she contemplated suicide herself.

“Each of these flags is a name, a person. Three of them are my friends, and one could’ve been me,” said Altamirano, now a suicide prevention liaison in the Reserve. “I hope this helps people see how vast of an issue this is. It’s overwhelming. It’s a crisis.”

The flags were placed on the Mall by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America, an advocacy group trying to draw awareness to the issue of veteran suicide.

On Wednesday, the scene grabbed the attention of tourists, who took photos of the small flags with the Washington Monument in the background.

A new report released last week by the Department of Veterans Affairs shows suicide among veterans and servicemembers continues to be higher than the rest of the U.S. population. Veterans accounted for 14 percent of all suicides in the United States in 2016, yet they make up 8 percent of the population.

The rate of suicide among young veterans substantially increased from 2015 to 2016. For every 100,000 veterans age 18 to 34, 45 committed suicide in 2016 – up from 40.4 for every 100,000 in 2015.

Rates have also increased among women veterans and some members of the National Guard and Reserve.

The release of the report last week coincided with a hearing of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. Several lawmakers questioned why there hasn’t been significant improvement, given Congress has increased the amount of money that it allots for VA mental health programs.

“I’m beyond frustrated about the numbers and data,” said Keita Franklin, executive director of the VA’s suicide prevention program. “Having worked in this field as long as I have, it’s frustrating. When I try to think about what we’re missing … we tend to do a lot of one thing at a time and do it very well, full throttle. Preventing suicide takes a bundle of 10 to 12 things done at full throttle, all the time.”

Of the approximately 20 veterans who commit suicide every day, 14 are not receiving health care from the VA. Part of the VA’s effort is getting veterans to seek help.

Stephanie Keegan traveled from New York to help plant flags Wednesday morning. Her son Daniel was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who died of a drug overdose in 2016 while struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. He had waited 16 months to get into a VA mental health program, Keegan said. He was supposed to be admitted Jan. 23. He died Jan. 8.

Daniel Keegan had wanted to become involved in veterans advocacy. So now, Stephanie Keegan is dedicating her life to it. She has left her son’s photo in every House lawmaker’s office, met with VA secretaries and is involved with IAVA, in addition to other advocacy efforts.

“I get to do the work that he wanted to do, and I feel like he’s sitting on my shoulder all the time,” Keegan said. “It’s been an opportunity to educate people on what a really struggling veteran looks like because he didn’t look like anything you would expect. He was healthy as could be, but he was catastrophically ill for the last two years of his life.”

To reach the Veterans Crisis Line, text 838255 or dial 1-800-273-8255 and press 1.

wentling.nikki@stripes.com
Twitter: @nikkiwentling

Many are military personnel and members of the Kaiserslautern Rod & Gun Club, where they often spend their weekends in the woods near Pulaski Barracks, honing rifle and shotgun skills.

When not shooting, they’re fixing equipment, running programs and doing hundreds of hours of volunteer work in support of a club that has been in a state of disrepair and neglect in recent years.

The 86th Force Support Squadron at Ramstein, which oversees the club through its Outdoor Recreation department, has been ambivalent about its future. About two years ago, the club stopped accepting new contracts for privately owned firearm storage, sparking rumors of closure. Officials with the 86th Airlift said at the time no decisions had been made but they’ve done little since then to promote or invest in the club.

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Base officials said this summer they were still assessing the facility’s fate, expressing concerns about costly fixes to old infrastructure and club access that depended on a German forest service road lease set to expire in 2020.

But since then, wing leadership has turned over and the new commander, Brig. Gen. Mark August, has asked for a new analysis of the issue, Ramstein officials said.

At stake is a place, volunteers say, where servicemembers can safely sport shoot while out of uniform, without the hurdle of language or cultural differences. The club also provides access to training courses required for a German hunting license and gun ownership in Germany, and a place authorized by U.S. military regulation to store personal weapons.

“We have the facilities for it. We need the support,” said Brandon Cowell, an Air Force reservist and contractor at Ramstein who serves as the hunting coordinator of KMC Outdoorsmen, an organization that’s part of the Hunting, Fishing, and Sport Shooting program in Germany and open to anyone interested in outdoor sports and conservation.

“We have paintball, archery, shotguns, rifles,” he said. “I mean, you can’t ask for a greater weekend for somebody who loves the outdoors or just enjoys sports shooting.”

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A steady decline

During the height of the Cold War, when about 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed across Europe, military rod and gun clubs were widespread.

At one point, there were at least 30 operating on U.S. bases, many of which have since closed as forces have drawn down.

In Germany, the Hunting, Fishing, and Sport Shooting program was integrated into and funded by base recreation departments, officials said. The Army in Europe oversees and regulates the program. At bases that don’t have their own recreational ranges, the Army maintains local agreements for use of military and host-nation ranges on a limited basis.

At Wiesbaden, for example, Outdoor Recreation arranges shooting about once a month at the U.S. military’s nearby Wackernheim training range, with the caveat that “military requests take priority.”

Baumholder has its own trap and skeet range and a pro shop. But Kaiserslautern is the only rod and gun club with its own building and ranges, separate from other Outdoor Recreation facilities.

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Better days

The Kaiserslautern gun club and its ranges are in the woods behind the Air Force’s Vogelweh area and the Army’s Pulaski Barracks.

The 1966 building looks like a hunting lodge. On the main floor, chandeliers hang from a vaulted ceiling with exposed wooden beams. Mounted antlers and animal skulls hang above the brick fireplace. Sport-shooting trophies and plaques on display hark back to busier days.

Calvin Churchill, an Air Force retiree who’s worked at the club since 1990, said that in the ‘90s, “this place was up and running like you wouldn’t believe it.”

There were just as many Germans as Americans for customers. Families turned out for events, such as Easter egg hunts, and commanders with stars on their shoulders often took turns at target practice, Churchill said this summer, while paging through club scrapbooks full of yellowing newspaper clippings and old photos.

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“Back then, you could just drive up here,” Churchill said. “There were no fences on Vogelweh. Then 9/11 hit and that just curtailed everything.”

After 9/11, the Germans couldn’t bring weapons on base. Access at the time was on a paved road through the forest via a gate on Vogelweh, near the shoppette traffic circle. Club usage also declined as military personnel deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he said.

From that point on, the story of the club’s decline gets fuzzy. Two people associated with the club for years say things went downhill after the Air Force took operations over from the Army’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation program.

But Air Force officials at Ramstein said they have no record that the Army owned or managed the club.

Under Air Force management, the club in the early ‘90s lost some of its range space to the service’s Combat Arms mission, the mandatory marksmanship training for airmen.

Fernando Rondon, a retired soldier and Vietnam veteran who’s worked as a volunteer instructor and range officer at the club since 1984, said volunteers have kept the club afloat.

“If it wasn’t for volunteers, this place would have gone to hell,” Rondon said. “The volunteers, we’re fighting to keep it for our military, because they can come on weekends to practice their fighting skills, shooting and all that stuff.”

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Volunteer labor

When winter began to thaw earlier this year in Germany, volunteers sprang into action at the Kaiserslautern Rod & Gun Club.

The five-stand range was in disrepair, and the trap and skeet ranges were only partially working because of malfunctioning equipment, said Air Force Maj. Nathan Waters, president of the KMC Outdoorsmen.

Volunteers fixed the machines and restored the ranges. They painted, pulled weeds and mowed grass. Local Boy Scouts helped repair the trail through the woods at the archery range.

“We did straight-up manual labor that a lot of us haven’t done since we left the farm,” Cowell said. The transformation was “like ‘Walking Dead’ prior and then now it’s not so ‘Walking Dead,’” he said, referring to the television drama about life in a zombie apocalypse.

To celebrate the reopening of the trap and skeet ranges, the club hosted more than 250 people at a Father’s Day event with the help of volunteers. KMC Outdoorsmen held a pig roast; the shotgun, rifle and archery ranges, as well as both paintball fields, were in use all day.

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KMC Outdoorsmen volunteers kept up the work, officially logging 1,815 hours in 2018, Waters said last month. But that number does not include most of the hours volunteers have spent on club operations since June, helping to run ranges, run the shop, do repairs and maintenance during a staffing shortage.

Waters said their efforts saved the Air Force tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and labor costs.

As one example, volunteers repaired the rifle range for the second time since 2013. The $1,000 it cost to fill the backstop with sand was well below Air Force estimates, Waters said. Volunteers shopped around for the best price, arranged delivery and spent a Saturday filling sand bags and shoveling sand into the backstop by hand.

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Making inroads

At the recent pig roast, many attendees said they didn’t know the club existed, had trouble finding it or thought it had closed in 2016.

Club access changed in 2015, when security forces stopped manning Gate 14 on Vogelweh. That decision cut off access to the club via a paved road from base.

An alternate access road was leased from the forestry department in Kaiserslautern, base officials said. The entrance to the road is now off base, on a slope near a commercial strip in Einsiedlerhof.

The Air Force says the road lease has been a sticking point in its determination of whether to continue operating the club. The lease costs 2,000 euros — more than $2,300 U.S. — a year and will expire Sept. 30, 2020.

Base officials say there’s no guarantee it will be renewed, noting that the lease road owner has expressed dissatisfaction with the way it is being used and wants customer access to go through the Vogelweh gate instead.

But Bodo Mahl from the forestry office in Kaiserslautern told Stars and Stripes that he is not aware of any problems with club members’ usage of the road.

Waters said volunteers have tried to be good stewards of the road “because it’s the way we get to the club.”

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Fresh eyes

Base officials with the 86th Airlift Wing said no final decisions have been made about the club’s future. Some solutions suggested by the previous wing leadership included moving the club’s functions elsewhere by partnering with a local German range or another nearby military range, such as Baumholder.

But under August, the issue has been getting a renewed look, base officials said this month.

“Ultimately the new wing commander has this on his radar,” said Lt. Col. Joel Harper, a wing spokesman. “Our leadership appreciates the passion of the hunting and sports shooting community and has asked for a renewed analysis of the issue in order to chart a clear course forward.”

Volunteers said the club has not accepted new contracts for privately owned firearms storage since late 2016, even though joint Army and Air Force regulations authorize rod and gun clubs to do so. That’s caused a huge problem for airmen and soldiers who live in the dorms, since they aren’t allowed to store personal firearms in their quarters, volunteers said.

Outdoorsmen like Waters and Cowell say they want a chance to help solve some of the challenges and time to turn the club around.

“We have a grassroots momentum happening here that has everybody excited about this becoming better than what it is,” Cowell said.

So far, those efforts seem to be paying off.

The club in 2017 lost about $30,000, base officials said. As of August, the club was reporting a loss of $4,976, officials said.

The Air Force considers rod and gun clubs to be revenue-generating activities, expected to be self-sustaining and “capable of funding most expenses,” according to service guidance.

The Air Force says club usage is up. Interest is also up in the hunting and fishing classes. A record 21 new anglers graduated from the fishing course in May, followed by 22 more in July, Waters said. The current hunting class of 27 students puts the program on track to graduate 59 hunters in 2018, also a record.

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Volunteers maintain it’s hard for the club to lose money, as long as it’s resourced properly. A recent hunting class netted nearly $8,000 for the club: Students paid $200 to take the volunteer-taught course, not including fees for ammunition and gun rental.

“It’s a great opportunity for any outdoorsman,” said one student, Staff Sgt. David Williams, of the chance to hunt in Germany and shoot at the club. “I’ve come over here, done a lot of traveling; been pretty bored missing the outdoors. Hunting, that’s a big part of my life.”

Cowell said the club can help servicemembers that grew up hunting or fishing feel at home.

“Maybe it’s something to do on the weekends,” he said. “They say, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.’ Well, put them out here. We’re supposed to be proficient marksmen both in the Army and Air Force.

“If you’re only requiring someone to shoot a weapon one time a year, they’re not going to be proficient,” he said. “But if you allow them a place to go without any kind of language barrier … they feel comfortable, the safety is in place, you know the rules.”

Marcus Kloeckner contributed to this story.

svan.jennifer@stripes.com
Twitter: @stripesktown

The entire 12-man force from Operational Detachment-Alpha 3336 had fought valiantly April 6, 2008, on that Nuristan province mountain where they’d been sent to kill or capture a high-value leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin insurgent group, Behr said Sunday. But Shurer not only single-handedly kept Behr alive after he was shot through the hip early in the fight known now as the Battle of Shok Valley, but he also ultimately was responsible for ensuring all of the American troops on that mountain made it out alive.

“Without Ron Shurer at my side, I would have died that day. No question,” Behr said. “His presence gave me the confidence to know I could make it. There’s a good chance if he would have been critically injured or killed on the battlefield … we all might have died out there.”

Months after the battle, 10 soldiers who fought that day were awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest honor for valor, representing the most such battlefield awards earned in a single engagement since the Vietnam War. On Monday, Shurer’s Silver Star was upgraded to the Medal of Honor when President Donald Trump presented the nation’s highest military honor to the former Green Beret during a ceremony at the White House.

Trump smiled widely as he presented the award to Shurer, tapping the former Green Beret on the shoulder of his dress blue Army Service Uniform.

Behr and eight other members of Shurer’s unit who fought in the battle with him attended the ceremony, as well as two Afghans who fought by their side. The upgraded award felt right, Behr said.

“Knowing that he was awarded the Silver Star, the same award that I got, it didn’t really seem fair,” Behr said the day before the ceremony. “So, to see him elevated and given the nation’s highest honor — there’s nobody else that could deserve it any more, and I’m extremely proud to know him.”

For Shurer, 37, who has worked as a Secret Service agent since he left the Army in 2011, the upgraded award was unexpected and the result of a Pentagon review that began in 2016 of high-level, post-9/11 combat awards.

On Sept. 4, Shurer was summoned to the West Wing. There, the president told the soldier that he would receive the Medal of Honor, Trump said during the ceremony.

“It was a moment I will never forget,” he said in the East Room of the White House before a standing-room-only audience of senior military leaders, Secret Service agents and Shurer’s family and friends. “It’s a great story … for Ron, a good man.”

Before his meeting with Trump, Shurer said he was not aware his Silver Star was under consideration for an upgrade.

“Since we got the word, I’ve felt every emotion — pride, humbled, a little embarrassed,” he said. There’s “so much to try and process and take in. It’s definitely something you grow up hearing about, but never would have considered myself in that conversation.”

Ultimately, Shurer said, the award is about recognizing the other men who fought alongside him on that mountain a decade ago.

“I want to dedicate this to the other men in ODA 3336,” he said Monday just after he was presented the award. “Without them, this Medal of Honor really never would have been possible. It was truly a team effort.”

‘Utter chaos’

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The Green Berets and some 100 Afghan commandos sent on that mission could sense something was amiss not long after their arrival. The unit was forced to drop about 10 feet from the hovering helicopters, which could not find a place to land, and needed to scale a nearly vertical, 100-foot cliff to reach the compound where their target was expected to be, according to soldiers who served on that mission.

Behr said he felt a sense of “eeriness” immediately.

Then the battle erupted — heavy fire from rifles and machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades rained down onto them from some 200 to 300 enemy fighters from positions overhead.

“It was just an onslaught of fire and explosions for a very long time,” said Behr, who was then a sergeant first class and the unit’s communications specialist. “Utter chaos.”

The operation’s ground commander Lt. Col. Kyle Walton, then a captain, split the team into several assault elements, leading the way up the cliff with Behr and several others. Below the cliff, some of the Afghan commandos were wounded. Shurer, the only medic on the operation, began tending to them.

“Blood all over the place,” Trump said, describing the details of the battle. “It was a tough, tough situation to be in.”

Before long, Walton recalled, the situation for him and the others atop the cliff became untenable.

With his team outmanned, outgunned and taking casualties, Walton was forced to call Shurer to his position.

“When I called for Ron, there was a silence over the radio for a few seconds, because everyone realized what that meant — that it was bad,” Walton said. “He had to climb a mountain under fire with a couple other guys on the team. When he showed up, nearly everybody was wounded. We were under direct fire. We were pinned down with nearly nowhere to go except down that 100-foot cliff.

The unit’s Afghan interpreter, who they knew by the nickname C.K., was mortally wounded. Behr was down and even after Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolt IIs arrived to help, soldiers kept getting hit with the mix of enemy fire and shrapnel from the “danger close” strikes, bombs that were called in close to their own position.

Shurer went to work on Behr, calmly reassuring his friend he would make it.

He checked the others' injuries. C.K. was not going to make it; the others had a chance to live if they could be evacuated. But Behr was in the worst shape, with the gnarled hip injury and another wound to his arm, Shurer recalled.

“Constantly bleeding,” the former medic said. “I got to the point where … I just resorted to using my fingers to kind of shove [a clotting agent] in and then bandaged him up as tight as I could.”

Shurer was hit twice — once in his helmet, leaving him momentarily stunned, and then again in his arm. He kept working.

Behr, in a morphine stupor, believed he would die. He said a prayer.

Then “Ron slapped me across the face and said, ‘Wake up. You’re not going to die today,’” he recounted. “I knew at that point I was going to make it.”

‘Calm, collected and cool’

After hours of fighting, the unit was still not in the clear.

Walton feared his force was on the verge of being overrun.

With the insurgents nearing his position, Walton reached for a grenade and called in a massive “danger close” strike, expecting it could take his entire team out.

They were “all prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice,” he said.

The bomb dropped. And then he saw the image he would forever remember from that fight – Shurer’s body draped over the injured men he’d been working on through the fight.

“In that moment, the strike that we had called in on our own position detonated just above us and blocked out the sun. As the dust settled, Ron Shurer was the first thing that I saw on top of his wounded teammates, protecting them even to the end when we had all fully accepted the fact that we were going to go down fighting,” the officer said. “Ron Shurer was still thinking of others.”

The bomb blast gave the team enough cover to remove the wounded.

Shurer strung together nylon tubular webbing to form a makeshift sling to lower Behr and the others off the cliff to get them to the incoming helicopters. They would survive.

Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Williams, another Green Beret who served on that mission, credited Shurer’s sure-handedness with allowing the unit to survive the battle — one of the worst Green Berets have faced in recent years, he said.

“His ability to manage an unmanageable situation and remain calm, collected and cool — always was that guy, hanging out or training or whatever,” said Williams, who is still with 3rd Special Forces Group. “It really came to light during the worst possible time and that is the reason we were all able to make it away from that position alive and as a team.”

The mission might not have been a success, but Shurer managed to ensure his fellow soldiers survived.

“We’d been in engagements before, even on that deployment,” he said. “Nothing like that before. Luckily, we’re all incredibly well trained, we trusted each other, and it all just kind of worked for us that day. On our worst day.”

Shurer said Sunday that his fellow soldiers' appreciation of his actions that day means more to him than receiving the Medal of Honor.

“That means so much more,” he said. “I know these guys’ wives, their kids. Just knowing that — it’s very humbling for them to say [he saved their lives]. Luckily, it all kind of worked for me to help those guys.”

Shurer, who last year was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, hopes his award can draw some attention to the sacrifice Green Berets have made through the years and continue to make today in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and in countries across Africa.

“Hopefully, [it will] remind the American public about all the servicemembers we still have out there, still doing the missions today, just quietly going about their jobs, you know, not asking for recognition,” he said. “Whatever little voice I get, I hope to just be able to direct attention that way.”

dickstein.corey@stripes.com
Twitter: @CDicksteinDC

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More than a hundred soldiers turned out to remember and honor Pfc. Adrienne Barillas during a service at Camp Humphreys’ Warrior Chapel. The 22-year-old from The Woodlands, Texas, was found unresponsive Sept. 23 on the sprawling base south of Seoul and later pronounced dead by emergency personnel. The cause has not been released.

“The investigation remains open and ongoing and the cause and manner of death are part of that continuing investigation,” said Christopher Grey, a spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command.

Barillas was a water purification specialist when she arrived at the 11th Engineer Battalion, 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade late last year. She worked in the unit’s training room and served as the commander’s driver. South Korea was her first assignment in the Army.

Her commander, Capt. Ciara Cooper-Thomas, recalled troops bragging about Barillas’ cooking. The young soldier’s skills lived up to the hype during the unit’s organizational day, she said.

“She brought a crock pot of the best queso dip I’ve ever had,” Cooper-Thomas said.

She said the two bonded during a trip to training areas north of Humphreys.

“During our long drive on the road … she spoke with love and passion for her family back home, about preparing her native Belizean rice dishes and finally about attending the board and receiving her promotable status,” Cooper-Thomas said.

Barillas’ supervisor, Staff Sgt. Thomas Yannotti, said she told him she hated the cold when she arrived in South Korea.

“Welcome to Korea,” Yannotti said he jokingly replied.

He said Barillas’ dedication to her job and ability to bring out the best in her fellow soldiers impressed him. He also watched her fall in love with her husband, Pfc. Emmanuel Gardner, who served in the unit until this summer.

“I can still see her and Gardner running down the hill — her with big sunglasses on and a huge smile on her face,” Yannotti said. “That was a couple I loved seeing together.”

After Barillas’ name was read during a final roll call, a procession of soldiers lined up to salute her soldier’s cross — a rifle adorned with her boots, helmet and dog tag.

Her husband waited until the room cleared, then embraced Barillas’ uncle, John Lopez, before leaving a single white rose on her cross.

fichtl.marcus@stripes.com
Twitter: @MarcusFichtl

“I am honored and humbled by the reason we are gathered here this morning for this repatriation ceremony: to pay our respect to the 64 fallen South Korean soldiers who today begin their journey back home,” said Rear Adm. Jon Kreitz, deputy director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, during the ceremony in a Hickam Airfield hangar.

The remains have been at the agency’s labs since being returned following joint recovery operations conducted in North Korea from 1996 to 2005.

The remains of roughly 7,700 Americans are still unaccounted for from the Korean War, with about 5,000 of those believed to be in North Korea.

In July, North Korea returned 55 boxes containing an unknown number of American remains. DPAA identified two U.S. soldiers from those remains earlier this month.

“It is our fondest hope that [South Korea] will be successful in giving these heroes back their names and in reuniting them with their families in their country,” Kreitz said.

Sixty-three of the microwave-sized boxes of remains – each shrouded with a South Korean flag – had been loaded into the hold of a C-130 cargo plane. One box, wrapped in a United Nations flag, was used in the formal transfer from DPAA to United Nations Command to South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense.

Taking part in the ceremony were Choo Suk Suh, South Korea’s vice minister of national defense; United Nations Command Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Mark Gillette; and Col. Hak Ki Lee, commander of the South Korea KIA Recovery and Identification agency, known as MAKRI.

MAKRI will now continue the work of identifying the remains.

Plans originally called for 65 boxes to be transferred to South Korea, but this summer forensic scientists from MAKRI were able to identify one soldier from DNA samples taken in December 2017, said Jennie Jin, the Korean War project lead for DPAA in Hawaii.

Pvt. Yoon Gyeong-hyuk, who was killed in North Korea’s South Pyongan Province, was repatriated in July, she said.

DPAA is nearing the end of the identification process for the estimated 200 individuals retrieved from North Korea from 1996-05, Jin said.

The task of separating the commingled remains of American and South Korean dead presented a forensic challenge particular to both countries, she said.

“My concern is not to send Asian-Americans back to Korea,” Jin said. “[MAKRI’s] concern is they cannot take North Koreans or Chinese into their laboratory. No enemy forces are allowed in their laboratory. So we had two different concerns. During the joint forensic review, they kept asking me, ‘How do you know this is not North Korean or Chinese?’”

They came to an agreement over the 64 sets of remains based on DNA evidence, historical records and the search-and-recovery reports, she said.

Initially, DPAA scientists examined the remains for a type of DNA specific to maternal ancestry called mitochondrial, which generally revealed Asian ancestry, Jin said.

But because about 100 Americans still missing from the Korean War were of Asian descent, further evidence was needed.

“We then looked at all our Asian-American guys to see if they have family reference samples, and, fortunately, almost all of them that are still missing in North Korea have their family DNA on file,” she said. “So we did the matching, and none of them matched the guys we’re sending back to Korea today.”

“Then we used historical information to find where these guys were lost, and then we looked at the actual recovery reports,” Jin said. So, for example, if both Asian and American remains were found in a mass grave during the recovery operations, it was a good indicator that those Asians were not North Koreans or the Chinese who fought with them.

“We never buried enemy forces with our guys,” she said. “So that was very strong evidence — circumstantial — but pretty strong evidence that these are not the North Koreans or Chinese.”

Most of the 64 remains were recovered from sites associated with the Battle of Unsan or the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, both fought in late 1950 in what is now North Korea.

As the repatriation ceremony ended, Korean War veteran Jimmy Shin offered a pithy judgment of the affair.

“About time,” he said.

olson.wyatt@stripes.com
Twitter: @WyattWOlson

With 1.2 million soldiers involved, the World War I Meuse-Argonne offensive was the largest involving U.S. forces. It began on Sept. 26, 1918, and lasted until the guns fell silent with the armistice on Nov. 11 of that year.

About 117,000 were killed or wounded in the battle, which pushed the Germans beyond the Meuse River. Many of the dead — 14,246 — are buried here at Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, the largest U.S. military cemetery in Europe.

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With the flags snapping in the wind and sheets of rain drenching participants and visitors, the ceremony was moved inside the cemetery’s small chapel, where people stood rows deep to watch the ceremony, although most only heard it.

Speakers, including Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Europe, spoke about the bravery, sacrifice and camaraderie of the American and French soldiers fighting the battle.

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“Let it remind us, we are stronger when we face a challenge together,” Scaparrotti said. “That when we act as one, we will conquer every challenge and we will deter every aggressor and we will ensure a Europe that is whole and at peace.”

Outside, members of French military organizations braved the rain, bearing the Stars and Stripes and other flags. The U.S. Naval Forces Europe Band performed under the colonnade that flanks the chapel.

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During the day, volunteers placed candles on each headstone that were to be lit for an evening luminary.

Unfortunately, the rain soaked the candles, and the American Battle Monuments Commission, the organization that runs the cemeteries, had to cancel the event. However, that didn’t stop some visitors from walking through the rows of crosses and Stars of David and lighting some of the candles anyway.

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Twitter: @stripes_photog

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“He was one of the fastest horses in detachment at that time, so when we’d do cavalry charges … I had to do my best to hold him back as far as I could. Once we were gone, that was it. If I wasn’t careful we’d end up way out in front of everybody,” said Naiman, 37, who left the Army in 2004 as a sergeant.

That time with the detachment changed her life. Naiman entered the Army as a medic, expecting it to lead to a career in that field. Instead, years of riding experience landed her in the horse detachment, where she quickly rose to the top riding group and worked as the military trainer alongside the civilian trainer. After leaving the Army, she went to the University of Findlay in Ohio and earned a bachelor’s in equine business management.

Since then, she always dreamed of adopting Big Ben and bringing him to her 23-acre farm in Oxford, Ohio, where she lives with her three children and Navy veteran husband. This month, that dream came true.

“I never thought he’d be in Ohio with me, and my kids would get to hang out with him and meet him and ride him,” she said. “It feels like everything is coming full circle. I’m beyond excited.”

A new adoption policy, part of Title 10, U.S. Code on military animals, will allow Big Ben, now 25 and five years into retirement, and other retired detachment horses to spend the remainder of their lives with second families outside the Army.

“We’re doing this because we really want them to enjoy being a horse in their golden years,” said Capt. Jenny Nocella, detachment commander. Before the policy, which was implemented in May, the detachment’s quarter horses lived out their retirement on pasture rotation just outside the main gate of Fort Hood in Texas.

“The best reward is knowing he is so well loved and taken care of,” Nocella said, emphasizing that the older retired horses were never a burden on the unit and that the soldiers aren’t looking to pass off responsibility. Just like soldiers who leave the Army to find a civilian life, the detachment wants the same for these horses. One retired horse, Jethro, is unavailable for the program because he has a heart condition that requires 23 pills a day. Nocella said they couldn’t ask a family to take on such responsibility.

Big Ben is the second horse the detachment adopted this summer. The first was Travler, a 30-year-old whose career highlights with the detachment include many Rose Parades and an inauguration parade in Washington for then-President George W. Bush. Naiman said she was away at training during the 2001 parade, so she and Big Ben missed out.

On Aug. 3, Travler moved to his new home with Wanda and Tony Noakes at the 47-acre Wyldwynd Ranch in Cameron, Texas, about 60 miles east of Fort Hood. Tony Noakes, 58, is a retired sergeant major, who, as a cavalry scout, spent a portion of his 28-year career in 1st Cavalry Division units at Fort Hood. His 2008 retirement ceremony took place at Hood and included a cavalry charge from the horse detachment. He continues to work on post for a contractor.

The horse has his own enclosure neighboring gypsy van horses, Tennessee Walking Horses and Brangus cows. Wanda Noakes, 65, said Travler will occasionally reach his head over the fence to groom Shawnee, a gypsy van yearling who is quite taken with her new neighbor.

Other than being too old for an adult to ride, Travler doesn’t act like a 30-year-old horse, Wanda Noakes said. The average horse lives to be 30 to 35.

“He’s very feisty,” she said. “He has my heart. He’s so easy and he loves people.”

Because of Travler’s military training, Noakes said the horse is easy to keep. He stands still for grooming, is polite when she feeds him and loves carrots.

While Big Ben hasn’t been ridden in a couple years, he is younger than Travler and physically fit enough for it. Naiman said she looks forward to getting this opportunity again and sharing it with her children, ages 12, 8 and 2.

The idea to adopt out retired horses from the detachment began about four years ago as a way to “make sure those horses got to spend their time outside the Army with families who love and adore the organization,” Nocella said.

“For us, it’s more for the personal aspect,” she said. “We want to see these horses go and see something else. Here in this pasture, they can still hear a cannon go off every day.”

They aren’t startled. When they hear it, they are ready to go to work, she added.

Government organizations take priority when adopting horses that might have some years of work left in them, followed by anyone who meets the requirements, which include having the right acreage for a horse – two acres for the first horse and an acre more for each additional horse – and the ability to provide proper care, feeding, facilities and any special requirements the elderly horse might have.

“Anything he would have received here, we make sure he’ll receive at his next home,” Nocella said, adding they’ve had no trouble finding adoptive families to take on the horses.

Anybody can apply and there is no fee to adopt – just supporting the horse financially, which Wanda Noakes estimated at $300 a month.

The Noakeses happen to live near Fort Hood, but there are no restrictions on distance as long as the horse is physically able to make the trip. Naiman was responsible for providing transportation for Big Ben’s weeklong journey from Texas to Ohio.

Nocella said she hopes to see some equine therapy groups apply for adoptions as well.

The detachment, created in 1972, is home to 31 quarter horses, three mules and a dog. The animals are cared for by the detachment’s 32 soldiers and civilian stable master. Soldiers also learn skills such as leatherworking and saddlery, farrier skills to shoe the horses and maintainance of the unit arms’ room, which includes Colt revolvers, the weapon used by 1880s cavalrymen. This teaches soldiers special skills and allows the detachment to be self-sustaining.

There’s one more retired horse at the detachment, and its adoption availability will be announced in the coming weeks, Nocella said. Following the trend of similar adoption programs at Fort Riley, Kansas; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Fort Irwin, California; and the Old Guard in Washington, adoptions are announced on the unit’s Facebook page. The first two horses each drew four interested parties.

When Wanda Noakes saw the announcement about Travler, she was on pins and needles with excitement. During her husband’s time at Fort Hood she said she often would park at the visitor’s center and watch the detachment’s horses in the nearby pasture.

Having Travler “is something I can do for the Army. It’s something that pays back. That’s huge for me,” she said.

Tony Noakes was completely on board with the adoption.

“She already takes care of one cavalryman. She can take care of another,” he said.

thayer.rose@stripes.com
Twitter: @Rose_Lori

They climbed up scaffolding to reach the spot where their father’s name, Charles McDaniel, Sr., is inscribed in stone and placed a bronze rosette next to his name, indicating he is missing no more.

During an earlier ceremony at the cemetery observing the annual National POW/MIA Recognition Day, Charles McDaniel, Jr., told an audience of 300 how the remains of his father were suddenly and dramatically found.

When North Korea turned over 55 boxes possibly holding the remains of Americans who died in the Korean War in July, McDaniel greeted the news with caution.

He was three and a half when he last saw his father, who was declared missing in action on Nov. 2, 1950, during the Korean War.

The elder McDaniel, who was a medic, was one of more than 5,000 American servicemembers whose remains are believed to be in North Korea.

“So I figured, 55 sets of remains: 1 percent chance or less” his father’s remains would be among them, McDaniel said. “You kind of push it back, like you have to with grief.”

Yes, the pain of a lost father always lingers, he said, “but you have to push it back, and you go on with your life.”

But then, a representative from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency called with a stunning update: the sole dog tag found in the boxes of remains belonged to his father.

“Last week I got another call,” McDaniel explained. “Didn’t expect it so soon. Waited 68 years for this.

“They said, ‘We’ve identified your father,’” McDaniel said, gasping as he swallowed a sob, as he did numerous times while speaking to the crowd.

“Excuse me for grieving in front of you,” he said. “I’m really not apologizing. I’m just telling you it’s a reality.”

On Thursday, the brothers were shown their father’s remains at the DPAA headquarters at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

“My emotions are jumbled by recent events,” he said.

He recalled as a little boy thinking from time to time: “Maybe my dad’s still alive.”

Then, as he grew up, dark thoughts about his father possibly being in a prison camp somewhere, mistreated and tortured, encroached upon him.

“But I knew logically — as my brother Larry and I discussed from time to time — we knew that he wasn’t coming back as a living person,” he said.

McDaniel held onto a precious few things that made his father real.

He had a handwritten letter sent by his father to his mother, mailed from Ogden, Utah, as he headed to war in Korea.

“Give my love to the boys,” the letter closes, words that took on almost the relevance of scripture to McDaniel, who went on to a career as an Army chaplain.

He has only one memory of his father, a moment when he ran toward him to greet him coming home, his dad sweeping him up in his arms.

Now there is the dog tag.

After the ceremony, he held it in the palm of his hand and showed a group of reporters.

“This was around my father’s neck,” he said with a tone of wonder that he could ever be this close to him.

While at the podium, McDaniel recited the concise information on the dog tag — full name, service number, blood type A, Protestant.

“I value all of those things because I have type A blood, because I have faith, like my father had faith,” he said. “That’s something that’s gotten me through for many years, and I commend it to you.

“I leave him in the hands of God, but I encourage all of you to participate as you can in supporting looking for those who have gone missing, that you take it personally and enthusiastically, steadfastly.”

olson.wyatt@stripes.com
Twitter: @WyattWOlson

Against a backdrop of orange and pink skies, with a bright moon peeking over the hills, about 1,000 paratroopers from the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team and allied forces jumped out of U.S. and Italian C-130 aircraft behind a fictitious enemy’s lines.

This year’s edition of the Saber Junction exercise is designed to assess the readiness of the brigade’s “sky soldiers” to conduct large-scale, complex airborne operations.

“We can put a brigade combat team of 3,000-4,000 soldiers in the air, behind enemy lines, in 18 hours,” said Maj. Christopher Giorgi, the lead exercise planner. “That’s a pretty significant capability that not everyone else can do.”

The jump marks the first day of the war games portion of the exercise, which includes more than 5,500 soldiers from 20 nations fighting a simulated invading army. They will continue the ground fight until the exercise ends at the end of the month.

“It’s going to be tough,” Giorgi said before the jump. “Right away, they are going to be jumping into the forward elements of the (opposition forces).”

The paratroopers launched a nighttime attack from both sides of the opposing forces after landing Wednesday.

The enemy is played by the resident 1st Battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment. They are heavily armed, with light armor vehicles and tanks alongside infantry, and will keep getting reinforcements to launch larger and more aggressive counterattacks.

“The (opposition forces) are very good at what they do,” Giorgi said. “They know the terrain, they know how to fight. Their tactics would present a challenge for any unit. They’re trying to win.”

Throughout the war games, the paratroopers will be tested against the rural training area environment and the challenge of working side-by-side with soldiers from other nations.

“Just the terrain alone is a challenge. It’s very hilly and forested,” Giorgi said. “They will have challenges just talking to each other. Then you have challenges with interoperability, talking to allies with different radio sets. It’s not going to be easy.”

Despite everything the Army is throwing at them — or maybe because of it — the paratroopers were excited to start the fight as soon as they hit the ground.

“The jump was outstanding,” said Warrant Officer Cole Brown, with the 173rd. “It’s always a great day when we get out and jump. I’m glad to be a part of it.”

egnash.martin@stripes.com
Twitter: @Marty_Stripes
 

A group of veterans, spouses and civilians based at U.S. Army Garrison Ansbach opened three beehives at Soldier Lake, near Army Airfield Ansbach, on Friday. The Ansbach beekeeping club is taking care of what they call the Bee Haus, which is home to as many as 30,000 bees.

“We are a group of American and German volunteers who care for the bees,” said Daniel Woernlein, an environmental protection specialist on base.

The club decided to build the beehives primarily for the ecological benefits of having honey bees in the area.

“Having more bees in the environment gives more pollinators to the plants and flowers,” Woernlein said.

The group also planted this summer drought-resistance wildflowers throughout the Army recreational area to give the bees more pollen.

“We wanted plants that could go a long time without rain and bring more life into the area,” Woernlein said.

The bees are already making honey, and the group expects to harvest it next year. It will give the club additional income for projects around base, like school field trips.

The hives are open to the public, and the club expects the base schools to make quick field trips to them, to learn about bees and the environment.

Beekeeping, especially urban beekeeping, has gained popularity as a recreational activity in recent years, with beehives popping up on top apartment buildings, offices and landmarks around the world.

This past year, for example, beehives have been installed at the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Musee D’Orsay in Paris.

The Ansbach beekeeping group says is looking for more active-duty soldiers to join up and help take care of their new 30,000 friends. For more information or to learn about how to set up hives at other bases, please contact the group at the base Facebook page.

egnash.martin@stripes.com
Twitter: @Marty_Stripes
 

Aumick, a 20-year-old forward observer with 1st Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, said his unit’s task in a crisis would be to slow down a larger Russian invasion force that would have the Americans outmanned and outgunned.

“I’d like to think we could hold them up,” Aumick said.

If Moscow were ever to test the alliance on its own turf — something Russian authorities have repeatedly rejected as Western paranoia — the Suwalki Gap along the Polish and Lithuanian borders could be the place. But some military analysts fear that U.S. and allied soldiers like Aumick are badly exposed as they operate near the 45-mile Suwalki corridor as part of NATO Battle Group Poland.

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Significant Russian forces are based in Kaliningrad, a military enclave that borders Poland and Lithuania and is just 50 miles from where U.S. forces operate.

If the Russians ever mobilized to seize control of Suwalki and cut the Baltics off from the rest of NATO, the U.S.-led battle group of 1,100 troops would be first responders.

After six months of training geared toward protecting the strategically vital corridor, U.S. soldiers with the Vilseck, Germany-based 1st Squadron described their jobs as human tripwires, deployed to hold the line in case of conflict.

“It wouldn’t just be us,” added Sgt. Wolrick Thurton, 25. “We’d be getting help from other allies and we would be getting reinforced.”

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But the questions of whether NATO has sufficient firepower in the region and whether reinforcements could arrive fast enough are fiercely debated in military circles.

Slowing a Russian offensive enough to buy time for reinforcements is one scenario, but one that would likely come at a high cost for the soldiers on the ground. Other military analysts argue U.S. and allied forces in Poland and the Baltics would be quickly overrun in any scenario.

A July report co-authored by former U.S. Army Europe leader Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges calls for more troops and firepower in the region, in hopes of deterring Russia from attempting to control the Suwalki corridor that separates Kaliningrad from Russian ally Belarus.

“If Russian forces ever established control over the Suwalki region, or even threatened the free movement of NATO personnel and equipment through it, they would effectively cut the Baltic States off from the rest of the Alliance,” the report stated. “Such an outcome could make reinforcing the Baltic States by land exceptionally difficult. Deterring any potential action — or even the threat of action — against Suwalki is therefore essential for NATO’s credibility and Western cohesion.”

Hodges’ report for the Center for European Policy Analysis calls for upgrades like developing a division-sized operational headquarters in Poland, as well as adding a mobile U.S. Army air defense battalion in the region.

There are signs of the U.S. moving in that direction. Last week, the Army announced it was setting up new air defense and rocket units in Germany. Like the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, those units could be candidates for rotations in Poland and the Baltics.

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‘The thick of the fight’

Since April 2017, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment has led NATO’s multinational battlegroup in Poland, which includes about 800 U.S. soldiers and a smaller contingent of troops from allied states. Next week, 2nd Cavalry turns the mission over to the 2nd Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment from the Tennessee National Guard.

During the 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s stint, cavalrymen have become a more lethal fighting force, commanders say.

“We are a more ready force hands down,” said Lt. Col. Tim Wright, commander of 1st Squadron and NATO Battle Group Poland.

Defending NATO territory hasn’t been a serious Army concern since the end of the Cold War, when allies were massed along the Fulda Gap, a fault line between eastern and western Germany that was considered the most likely place where war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact could start.

At the time, troops deployed around Fulda, much like those in Poland and the Baltics now, served as tripwires tasked with slowing an invasion if fighting erupted.

“It is something we haven’t done in a while,” Wright said of the mission along NATO’s eastern flank. “You’re not worried in Fort Bragg that South Carolina is going to invade. But we are on the terrain right now that (we would) have to fight in, and what that has done is force us to focus very hard on how we think we would respond to any aggression in the area.”

Second Cavalry squadrons have cycled through Poland in six-month rotations. The regiment’s 1st Squadron has Stryker vehicles armed with 30 mm cannons that every squadron crew is qualified on.

The Army upgraded the Strykers following concerns from 2nd Cavalry leadership, who said they needed more firepower to counter Russia.

“This is a first in the U.S. Army,” Wright said. “There is no other unit that has got these vehicles. Eighteen months ago that vehicle didn’t even exist.

“If something were to go down, that vehicle would be in the thick of the fight.”

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Training with Russia in mind also means contemplating an adversary who can disrupt communication networks and GPS systems that soldiers have used unchallenged in the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq. Working with maps, free of electronics, to navigate the terrain has been emphasized, Sgt. Austin Albery said.

“Joes (junior soldiers) are steadily getting better,” he said.

Training now also means working on more conventional battle drills and developing defensive tactics. In years past, gearing up for deployments to places like Afghanistan was all about taking the offensive, he said.

However, there are areas of concern.

Capt. Luke Henry, 1st Squadron physician assistant, said standards of treatment at the local Polish hospital are poor. When troops are injured, he tries to avoid sending them off base for treatment. In one case, a soldier had to be sent back to Germany.

“It’s been really frustrating trying to get American-level care and that is something I am taking up the chain,” Henry said.

Henry was blunt about the health care options: “It’s not all that different from being in Afghanistan.”

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Testing NATO unity

While U.S. military leaders have acknowledged that conventional conflict with nuclear-armed Russia is unlikely, the overarching concern is that Moscow could take limited action in the Suwalki corridor to test NATO’s political unity and willingness to uphold its Article 5 collective defense provision over a small sliver of territory.

To do so would risk a major escalation. But failure to act would render the collective defense provision meaningless.

“For NATO, Suwalki represents a challenge not only to its strategy and capabilities but also to its credibility as a guarantor of mutual Defense,” the CEPA report states. “Moscow’s strategic objective in Europe is to disrupt, divide, make irrelevant, or eliminate NATO as a security organization and defense guarantor for states along Russia’s western borders.”

Not all the threats in the region are conventional. U.S. troops in Poland have dealt with cyber intrusions and hacks into soldiers’ personal smartphones, and some Army leaders have blamed Russia.

There also are concerns about Russian disinformation. When NATO’s battle group in Lithuania formed last year, suspicious reports emerged that German soldiers were responsible for raping a Lithuanian teenager.

Allies suspected Russia of planting the story, which was quickly debunked as fake, to undermine NATO support.

Unit leaders in Poland say they take such threats into account.

“We are aware of the surroundings,” said 1st Lt. Jake Brehmer, who has been deployed with 1st Squadron in Poland for six months. “Everybody is looking at you. Be aware of what you are doing and how you are speaking. I think our servicemembers have been pretty good at understanding the environment they’re in.”

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Soldier life in Poland

In between training and rehearsing quick reaction missions, soldiers pass the time at their Polish military base on the outskirts of Orzysz, a rural town of 5,000 people.

The base is getting a makeover. Barracks have been renovated and there is a new chow hall. U.S. troops mingle with their Romanian, British, Croatian and Polish counterparts at sports fields and recreation areas.

For soldiers, the mission to deter Russian aggression has an upshot over deployments to combat zones where there is the mission and nothing else. In Poland, weekend passes are possible and soldiers routinely visit eateries off base for meals.

There’s also a chance to mingle with the locals and have a beer or two — the maximum allowed.

Aumick, who is on his first overseas assignment, said the living conditions have been decent and mixing with a different culture has been fun, yet frustrating.

“I tried to pick up on the Polish women — that didn’t go well,” Aumick said.

The first order of business back in Vilseck: “I can’t wait to have more than two beers,” he said.

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Vandiver.john@stripes.com
Twitter: @john_vandiver

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It’s rare to have so many naval exercises going on in the area simultaneously, but “this isn’t in response to any one threat or any potential threat,” said Lt. Christina Gibson, spokeswoman for U.S. Navy Central Command. “It is to demonstrate that we are operating and capable to respond to threats, should they arise,” she said.

The two-week Theater Amphibious Combat Rehearsal, which began Saturday, focuses on the Bab el Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint known as one of the most dangerous narrow waterways in the world.

In 2016, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fired rockets in a failed attack on two U.S. Navy warships just north of the strait. The area has been under threat from the Houthis since then, with attacks on several oil tankers and other commercial vessels.

The amphibious combat rehearsal normally takes place when a new amphibious ready group enters the 5th Fleet area of responsibility, which includes the Middle East and parts of the Indian Ocean. The USS Essex ARG entered the area earlier this month.

“The U.S. and our partners stand ready to ensure the freedom of navigation and free flow of commerce wherever international law allows,” Vice Adm. Scott Stearney, 5th Fleet commander, said Sunday.

Iran has been known to practice anti-access naval tactics as part of its military strategy. In June, Tehran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, where much of the world’s oil and natural gas transits.

“We are the ... guarantor of security of the waterway of the region throughout history,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a June 22 speech. “Don’t play with the lion’s tail; you will regret it.”

Rouhani’s threat came about a month after President Donald Trump reinstated sanctions against Iran and pulled the U.S. out of an international agreement monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities. Trump replied in an all-caps Twitter message that Iran should never threaten the U.S. again or it would suffer consequences “the likes of which few throughout history have ever seen before.”

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 miles northwest of the amphibious rehearsal, the two-week Bright Star 18 exercise has been active since Saturday, with the U.S. and Egypt focusing on conventional and unconventional warfare in the Suez Canal.

Mine Countermeasures Exercise 18-3 is also underway, with the U.S. and U.K. operating in the Persian Gulf. This exercise takes place four times a year with the U.S. and U.K. navies, both of which have mine countermeasure ships and aircraft in the region.

“These quarterly exercises really enforce those relationships and the proficiency of operating together,” said Lt. Cmdr. Robert J Toohig Jr., commanding officer of USS Dextrous.

Later this month, the Navy will drill in the Persian Gulf during an MK-60 Griffin missile exercise, which aims to combat surface threats, and protect minesweepers and other coastal patrol ships in the region.

behnke.jason@stripes.com

“Impossibly large shoes to fill, General Clark,” Wood said at his change-of-command ceremony, praising his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark.

Clark stepped into the job nearly two years ago as a three-star general. But the position has been re-designated as a two-star position, while the U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa deputy commander slot is now a three-star position, service officials said.

Clark, a B-1 bomber pilot, will become the deputy chief of staff of strategic deterrence and nuclear integration at U.S. Air Force headquarters. Before landing at the Pentagon, however, he’ll temporarily serve as a special assistant to USAFE–AFAFRICA commander Gen. Tod D. Wolters.

Clark said he was grateful for the opportunity to serve as 3rd Air Force commander, noting he was only the second bomber pilot to be in the job.

Of his wing commanders and command chiefs, Clark said: “I got to witness and watch you do things that I never imagined that our Air Force did.”

Wolters said Clark improved the U.S. Air Force’s relationship with the Israeli air force, to where it’s now “the best our nation has ever witnessed.”

Clark’s most daunting task was building readiness and trust between the U.S. and its allies and partners in the region, Wolters said.

“I will miss you my friend; I will love you for a lifetime,” Wolters said, “and I think every single one of the warriors that served under your command will say the same.”

Wood comes to Ramstein from Scott Air Force Base, Ill., where he was the director of strategic plans, requirements and programs at Headquarters Air Mobility Command.

Although it’s Wood’s first geographic assignment in Europe, he did work with Europe, NATO and Russia in a political and military affairs role at the Pentagon from 2015 to 2017.

Wood has accrued more than 4,000 flying hours, primarily in the T-38, C-130, KC-10 and C-17.

Wolters said he’s witnessed firsthand Wood’s composure under pressure.

“In situations where tempers flare and tensions heighten, John Wood is one of those cool cookies that just gets calmer,” he said.

svan.jennifer@stripes.com
Twitter: @stripesktown
 

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Undercurrent of enthusiasm ran through an otherwise serious event. The expansion will keep the cemetery – long viewed as a shrine to America’s fallen heroes – viable for about 10 years longer than expected. Plans for the new space, titled the Millennium Project, have been in the works since Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s.

“It’s a hugely important project for Arlington National Cemetery,” said David Fedroff, the cemetery’s deputy chief of engineering. “Any time we get to increase our burial capacity and have the opportunity to continue to serve veterans for the future is an extremely proud moment.”

A historic moment

About 100 people huddled in the shade of two large tents in the cemetery’s new Section 81 on Thursday.

The event started with cemetery officials unveiling signs for two new roads – one named for lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis and the other for Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Jonathan W. Gifford.

Ida Lewis is the first woman to be honored with a street name at Arlington. In the mid-1800s, Lewis rescued people near Lime Rock Island in Rhode Island, where her family tended the Lime Rock Lighthouse. The U.S. Lighthouse Service later was absorbed into the U.S. Coast Guard.

“In 1854, her first rescue saved the lives of four men. At the time, she was 12 years old,” said Karen Durham-Aguilera, executive director of Army National Military Cemeteries. “She conducted many rescues, becoming a living legend, known even in her lifetime as the bravest woman in America.”

Gifford, now the first Marine to have a street named after him at Arlington, is buried in Section 60 of the cemetery. He was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2012, when he led a counterattack against a Taliban ambush. Gifford, who died at 34, was awarded the Navy Cross posthumously.

On Thursday, his wife, Lesa, and five sons, Jonathan, Joseph, Patrick, Thomas and William, along with his parents, Diana and Thomas, and brother, Matthew, watched as a cemetery official pulled a black cover from the new street name, Gifford Drive.

The dedication ceremony ended with the first funeral in the new space. Two Union soldiers from the Civil War, discovered by archaeologists in June, were buried in a corner of Section 81, near the intersection of Gifford Drive and Lewis Drive.

The soldiers, whose identities are not known, were found alongside amputated limbs in a shallow grave at Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia. Experts with the Smithsonian Institution determined the soldiers fought for the North.

Workers with the National Park Service used part of a 90-year-old oak tree from the battlefield, which fell during a windstorm, to create historically accurate coffins for the remains.

Soldiers, eight to a coffin, set them into place Thursday, as a 20-piece military band played “America the Beautiful.”

Some of the employees of Manassas National Battlefield Park attended the funeral.

“In addition to protecting the ground on which soldiers fought, we share their stories to ensure the enduring memory of their service and sacrifice,” said P. David Smith, deputy director of the National Park Service. “These two men, these two American soldiers, are forever part of that history.”

Capacity problems continue

The Millennium expansion, which came at a cost of $81.7 million, provides room for 27,828 interments, including under- and above-ground graves and space for cremated remains. It includes more than 6,000 pre-dug gravesites – a method used to save space and improve efficiency.

But the new sections are not a final solution for the 154-year-old cemetery, which is running out of burial space quickly.

During the next year, the cemetery’s advisory committee plans to determine how to keep Arlington a working cemetery.

One option that the committee is considering is to change eligibility standards for burial there. Under current rules, most veterans and military retirees are eligible for either above- or below-ground burial in Arlington.

Cemetery officials are also looking at the possibility of another expansion.

The cemetery is in the process of negotiating construction costs for a 37-acre project, titled the Southern Expansion. Most recent estimates peg the project at a cost of approximately $274 million with a completion date sometime between 2025 and 2027. At an advisory committee meeting earlier this year, Army Maj. Shannon Way, the strategic planner for Arlington, said the demand for burials at Arlington is “simply too high to handle and stay open for future generations.”

wentling.nikki@stripes.com
Twitter: @nikkiwentling

Plus, unlike Domino’s, it’s got a three-year shelf life.

In anticipation of the long-awaited rollout of the Meal, Ready to Eat pepperoni pizza that’s been called “the holy grail of MREs,”  Stars and Stripes flew several of the military ration’s main pizza entrees into Afghanistan for taste tests with the troops.

“It’s not delivery, it’s MRE,” Air Force Capt. Robert Erskine said, before digging in to a slice.

The feedback was generally positive — some said it was a contender for a new favorite menu item. It’s designed to be eaten cold or hot, but those who tried it cold said it would be better heated. Some said it was a bit too bready or needed the added flavor of cheese spread, which will come with the full MRE.

Erskine, from Yakima, Wash., said he wouldn’t order it if it was on the room service menu. Partial to thin crust, Erskine said he liked it better once he sliced off the bottom two-thirds of bread.

Since the 1980s, soldiers have been asking for a pizza MRE, according to the Army. In 2012, the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Natick, Mass., began the tricky task of developing a slice-in-a-pouch that would be shelf-stable for 36 months.

“It’s a very difficult food to create to be able to store for a long time at room temperature,” said Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, the author of “Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U. S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat.”

Marx de Salcedo keeps up with military food innovation and traces the ways the technology and foods eventually reach the public. McDonald’s McRib, for example, traces its lineage to military food developments.

Recent military advances in chemical-free food preservation may lead to healthier processed foods, she said, such as “a TV dinner that you can throw into a closet” instead of a freezer.

It’s too soon to say whether the MRE pizza will one day reach the public, but the techniques that make it possible may.

Part of the difficulty for the pizza developers was creating a barrier between the various pizza components — cheese, sauce, crust and toppings. Basil and tomato films were used to create “very, very thin layers between each ingredient,” Marx de Salcedo said.

The components can be made shelf-stable on their own, but “the real trick” is to get them “inside a pouch, happily together,” Jeremy Whitsitt, deputy director of the Defense Department’s Combat Feeding Directorate, said in a statement.

The pizzas were field-tested beginning in 2014. They were delayed in reaching the troops by production hiccups last year, but Whitsitt said they will hit the pipeline next year at the latest.

In addition to a square of pizza, the full MRE will contain cheese spread with jalapenos, Italian breadsticks, cherry/blueberry cobbler, cookies and chocolate protein powder.

The full MRE wasn’t available this summer for the taste test, but the Combat Feeding Directorate shipped a few of the pizzas by themselves.

“You can’t fully appreciate the value of an MRE unless you are cold, wet, tired and hungry — sitting in the dark and the rain on a mountain in Afghanistan,” said David A. Accetta, spokesman for the Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “That’s when the MRE, and the ability to have a hot meal anywhere, provides that touch of home and comfort.”

To test this theory, Stars and Stripes hand-delivered the pizzas to Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Akin at Ramstein, who put them on a flight to Bagram. From there, they made it to our reporter in Kabul.

Meanwhile, Stars and Stripes cobbled together some cheese spread — with and without jalapeno — MRE heaters and other condiments from near-expired MREs that were being sold on Kabul’s black market.

Seven U.S. servicemembers and two Italian soldiers tried them at the NATO mission’s headquarters in Kabul. Not exactly cold, wet and starving on a mountain, but still in harm’s way.

The consensus among the volunteers was that it tasted somewhat like day-old pizza, which many said was not a bad feat.

Hailing from Racine, Wis., the “land of cheese,” Chaplain (Col.) Kenneth Sorenson said he even liked the cheese.

The Italians seemed to like it — at least as a field ration.

“Taking into consideration where I’m going to eat that kind of pizza, yes, it’s good, in the middle of the s---,” said Maj. Gianluca Cinque, a member of Italy’s Alpini mountain warfare troops. “We just need a beer inside.”

garland.chad@stripes.com
Twitter: @chadgarland

Andy Cox, a British farmer and metal-detecting enthusiast, discovered the ring about a decade ago in a dump on a friend’s property, near a disused WWII-era airfield in Ridgewell, England. The 1941 class ring was from a high school in Birdsboro, Pa.

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It was among many other items, he said, “everything from U.S. Army toothbrushes to bits of aircraft and dog tags.”

Cox said he was unable to find the owner of the ring until he met Todd Peterson, a Pennsylvania police officer, two years ago on Facebook.

“I explained to him about this ring and I would like to try and get the records for the school for that year,” Cox said. “He gave me the list of names, and there was one guy in there, Ken Spatz, and I traced him back on the unit’s roster.”

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Kenneth L. Spatz, it turned out, had been assigned to the 381st Bomb Group, a unit that flew B-17 Flying Fortresses from the former Royal Air Force station known as RAF Ridgewell, between June 1943 and April 1945. He and seven other crew members on board a B-17 named Smashing Thru were killed when their plane crashed after two engines failed.

Peterson managed to locate Spatz’s son in Pennsylvania and asked him if he’d be willing to talk to a man from England.

Cox said he called Spatz that night and emailed him photos of the ring.

“I told him the ring is yours and it belongs with you,” Cox said. “He said, ‘Don’t post it because that’ll be the one thing that gets lost. We’ll come and collect it.’”

Last week, Spatz and his wife began a pilgrimage through Europe, visiting various WWII historical sites. They ended their journey in England.

Cox and his friends planned a whole day of events for Spatz and his wife after picking them up from the Ridgewell train station. They went to see the reconstruction of a B-17 cockpit and the Ridgewell Airfield Commemorative Museum. Their last stop was the crash site, now a farmer’s field, where Cox gave the 1941 class ring to Spatz.

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The field belongs to Cox’s friend, who also has a dump of items left from the former air station. Some hand-sized pieces of melted metal from the B-17 remain at the crash site.

“I’m incredibly in debt to these fellows and what they’ve arranged,” Spatz said, fighting back tears. “Just imagining that B-17 coming in here and flipping over is too big for me to talk about.”

howard.william@stripes.com
Twitter: @Howard_Stripes

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They lined up in the dark starting about 5:30 a.m., stood in lines that snaked around the Capitol, faced downpours and subsequent sun and heat, and climbed staircases to get a glimpse of the casket draped in an American flag that held the 31-year senator, former Vietnam prisoner of war and naval aviator.

Finally, at 1 p.m., doors to the Capitol opened to the mourners to pay their respects to the Arizona Republican lying in state in the Senate Rotunda as the Capitol Police Guard of Honor kept watch.

“He spent five years in a POW camp, so we can stand five hours in line,” said mourner Paula Malone, 57, of Huntsville, Ala.

McCain died Saturday after a 13-month battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. His final year was a political tour de force, railing against President Donald Trump’s nationalistic policies, defense budget cuts, wasteful Pentagon spending, a murky shift in war strategy and the non-combat deaths of military servicemembers.

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“I, from time to time, found myself on the receiving end of John’s distinct brand of candor. Happily so,” outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., told a crowd of family, friends and other dignitaries attending a ceremony for McCain’s lying in state. “I remember thinking more than once, ‘yeah, he really does talk like a sailor.’”

As McCain’s condition worsened, he was restricted to crutches, then a wheelchair by late fall 2017. In December, he left the Capitol to continue his cancer fight from his home in Cornville, Ariz.

His family revealed the day before he died that he had discontinued treatment for the cancer.

On Wednesday, his adopted state of Arizona gave him a sendoff that included several ceremonies from the state Capitol and his family’s North Phoenix Baptist Church.

McCain’s casket arrived to Joint Base Andrews on Thursday evening, which was followed by Friday’s lying in state.

In remembering McCain, Ryan quoted author Ernest Hemingway’s writings on how “the world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” He said McCain is one of the bravest souls the nation has ever produced.

“No one was stronger at the broken places than John McCain. The brokenness was his ballast,” Ryan said. “He never lost the joy that time can dull, or the edge that political life so often sands away.”

On a train from New York

Mark Schivley, 61, an Army veteran from Westchester County, N.Y., lined up Friday morning at 5:30 a.m. to make certain that he could say goodbye to McCain.

Schivley said he began telling family in the wake of McCain’s death of his plans to buy an Amtrak ticket and take the train down to Washington D.C. for the lying in state.

Schivley, wearing an Army veteran’s cap, stood in the dark, was soaked by rain, and then stood in soaring heat, before he finally made it inside to the Senate Rotunda.

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“I wanted to pay respects to the senator,” the retired Army captain said. “He was always trying to do the right thing… This is about anybody who has dedicated their lives and served our country.”

About six hours after he began waiting in line, Schivley, who made friends along the way as he waited, signed a guest book thanking McCain for his service.

McCain died on the same day that Schivley’s father, a Navy World War II veteran, who passed years earlier.

“It’s a sad time. Not just with McCain, but with what’s going on with the country,” Schivley said. McCain’s death “shouldn’t be politicized and it was politicized.”

A daughter and her father

Daughter Kristina Hoti, 38, of Orange County, N.Y., knew McCain’s death was especially painful for her father, a Vietnam War veteran.

So Hoti drove from their New York home to Washington, D.C., with her 71-year-old father, Carmine Garritano, 71, who was drafted into the Army in 1966 during the Vietnam War.

“Dad was hit hard,” Hoti said from outside the Capitol building after they viewed McCain’s casket. “I’m happy to be here.”

As they walked out into the hot sun, Hoti and Garritano were amazed to see thousands more had lined up to see McCain, and how the new lines extended even further than the lines that they stood in earlier Friday.

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Garritano said it was important to travel down to the Capitol for the late senator and war hero.

“He was a great American. We owe him a lot,” Garritano said. “I wanted to pay tribute to John McCain. He was a great American.”

Garritano worn his Veterans of Foreign Wars member cap to Washington since it was the closest thing he had to a military uniform. The viewing in the Senate Rotunda was touching, he said.

“It was solemn,” Garritano said of the lying in state. And “very respectful.”

'I would have crawled here'

Victor Guido, 76, a former plumber who worked at the Capitol Hill complex, told his wife that they had to come to McCain’s lying in state.

Guido, who comes from a military family, said he grew up knowing about McCain and his influence at the Capitol and beyond.

Guido and his wife Barbara McLean-Guido, 53, who are from the Washington D.C. area, promptly got in line at 10 a.m.

By the end, the couple was exhausted after making their way through lines for more than two hours. Guido is restricted to a wheelchair.

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Still, he was all smiles after the couple was able to make it to the Senate Rotunda to pay their respects.

“I would have crawled here if I had to,” Guido said. “I had to be here.”

McLean-Guido, a former federal employee, who like her husband has lived in the D.C. area all of her life, said she’s never come to any service or ceremony at the Capitol.

But McCain was different, especially for her husband.

“We had to come,” McLean-Guido said.

A trip from Alabama

Timothy Malone, 70, a Marine Corps veteran, and Paula Malone, 57, of Huntsville, Ala., have been planning to come to Washington D.C. since McCain revealed his brain cancer diagnosis in July 2017.

Timothy Malone, who wore his veteran’s cap to Friday’s lying in state, said McCain’s death was a shock, and even with the deadly diagnosis, he didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

But soon after the news broke of McCain’s death Saturday, Paula Malone quickly booked the couple’s flight to D.C.

“I’m good at the Internet,” Paula Malone said smiling.

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She remarked McCain spent five years in a POW camp, so they could handle five hours in a line.

Timothy Malone was emotional after his visit to the Senate Rotunda. He said he had to pay his respects to McCain.

“Last night, I was close to tears,” Timothy Malone said in thinking of coming to the Capitol on Friday. The lying in state was “very moving.”

He said he voted for McCain when he ran for president, though he disagreed with some of his policies.

“He represents the virtues of America,” Timothy Malone said. “The civility, the honor, the courage.”

An Army man said goodbye to a Navy man

Archie Elam, 63, an Army veteran of Stamford, Conn., once saw McCain give a pep talk to players before the Army-Navy game in 2016.

Elam said McCain’s talk with players was memorable, and he continues to hold him in high esteem.

“There were no phones, no cameras,” said Elam, who retired as a major from the Army.

The Army-Navy game was a favorite of McCain’s, and he attended the annual face-off regularly, extending to his earliest days as a Naval aviator.

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Elam, who is director of the West Point Association of Graduates, an alumni group, wore his VFW member’s cap, and brought a Navy cap, with hand writing dedicated to McCain.

McCain had worn a similar cap, and Elam wanted to bring one along in turn. The handwritten message thanked McCain for his service.

“It hurts to lose him,” said Elam, who drove to D.C. from Connecticut. “We are going to spend years realizing what he did.”

Elam said McCain brought courage and influence badly needed around the world, to places where there is conflict and places that have yet to see prosperity like the United States.

“Once in a great while, we get to live in the company of someone who lived the best of what Americans are supposed to be,” said Elam, who visited the “Hanoi Hilton” where McCain was a POW in Vietnam. “He was a hero.”

grisales.claudia@stripes.com
Twitter: @cgrisales

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The battle for the strategic, jungle-covered South Pacific island was raging, as Folsom and the bulk of his inexperienced fighter squadron VMF-121 joined the operation. They were tasked with finding and destroying Japanese G4M medium bombers – known as “Betty Bombers” – that had been wreaking havoc on American troops on their first major offensive in the Pacific theater during World War II.

“We were in combat immediately with no experience,” Folsom, 98, recently told Stars and Stripes. “Green as can be – very few of us had any real flight experience. I guess I had 12 or 14 hours in the F4F when I got into combat.”

It showed from the outset, he recalled.

Just days after reaching Guadalcanal, Folsom found himself piloting his Wildcat upward of 25,000 feet when a formation of Japanese A6M Zero fighters and Betty Bombers approached. For the first time, Folsom maneuvered his fighter into position, moving onto the tail of an enemy plane to line up the sights for the six M2 .50-caliber machine guns mounted on his Wildcat’s wings. He pulled the trigger.

“Nothing happened,” Folsom recalled.

Folsom’s squadron had covered its guns in lubricant before he took off, but at altitude the coating froze, rendering the machine guns useless.

“I don’t remember anything except thinking, ‘Jesus, are these damn guns going to fire?’ ” Folsom said. “Very frustrating. Causes bad words to come from your mouth.”

It would happen twice more to Folsom – and dozens of additional times to his squadron mates – before the unit realized the cause. Folsom would leave Guadalcanal with three air-to-air kills – after downing a pair of Betty Bombers and a D3A Type 99 “Val,” a carrier-based Japanese dive bomber.

To the best of his knowledge, Folsom said, he is the only living member of his fighter squadron.

In honor of his 98th birthday, Folsom took the field Aug. 14 at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, where the Major League Baseball team celebrated him as its Hero of the Game.

It was a moment, like so many others in his life, he said he would treasure.

‘I didn’t dream it’

Seventy-six years after Guadalcanal, Folsom admits he does not remember his days swooping through the clouds over the South Pacific as well as he once did. Those memories, he said, sometimes feel like dreams.

“It’s like I’m sitting here telling you an awful big lie,” Folsom said during an interview in the living room of his apartment in a Santa Monica, Calif., high-rise that looks north toward Beverly Hills. “You no longer have any touch with really something that went on 70, 80 years ago. It’s gone. I must have dreamed that. But I didn’t. I didn’t dream it.”

He regularly shares his experiences, sitting for hours recently for interviews by a neighbor, Los Angeles-area filmmaker Steven C. Barber, who plans to turn the footage into a documentary.

Barber describes his meeting Folsom as “pure chance,” meeting Folsom and his wife of 68 years, Barbara Cole Folsom, 90, in their neighborhood.

“I saw he was wearing a Marine hat and asked him about it,” Barber said. “Talking to him, I thought, ‘I’ve got to share this man’s story.’ ”

With a hint of an accent from his native Massachusetts, Folsom rattles off dates, locations and the numbers identifying the units he flew with in World War II, during the American occupation of Japan, in the Korean War and as an instructor and test pilot in the United States. He retired from the service in 1960 as a lieutenant colonel to take an executive position at Pan American World Airways and eventually settled into a long real estate career in New York City.

Marine Corps “through and through,” as a neighbor described him, Folsom eschews accepting more help than he deems necessary. He declines to use a cane or walker and often refuses the aid of a friend or family member’s arm.

When he took the field at Dodger Stadium, he shrugged off offerings of support as he raised his arms high over his Marine Corps ball cap-covered head, waving to the crowd of nearly 47,000, which roared its approval.

The veteran of two wars -- just two years shy of reaching a century on earth -- accepted handshakes and “thank yous” from fans and from Dodger third baseman Justin Turner and outfielder Matt Kemp as he made his way up the legendary stadium’s concrete steps.

“I enjoyed every moment of it,” he said, smiling broadly as he looked down at the field where the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants were battling.

Flying at Guadalcanal

Folsom is among the last surviving men to have piloted a Marine aircraft in the Battle of Guadalcanal, a decisive victory for the Allied forces in the Pacific and widely considered a turning point in the campaign against the Japanese. To the best of his knowledge, Folsom said, he is the only living member of his fighter squadron, a team of 40 pilots that lost 17 in the three months it spent on the island. Overall, Allied forces lost 7,100 men; Japan casualties were 31,000.

The fight was difficult. His squadron lived in tents near Henderson Field, the key airstrip that was built by the Japanese and completed by U.S. Navy Seabees after Marines stormed the island in the offensive that caught the enemy by surprise. Though Folsom insists the conditions could have been much worse, he acknowledged that aviators often went without hot food and basic supplies were in heavy demand. Uniforms and clothing, he said, were so scarce that Marines would raid the quarters of their comrades who were shot down or went missing.

“We had a shortage,” he said. “It wasn’t heartless. Don’t misunderstand me – it’s just that it happened. People didn’t make it. A lot of people didn’t make it. It was war.”

Despite the losses, Folsom’s squadron gained recognition, earning the moniker “Foss’s Flying Circus.” The unit’s executive officer, then-Maj. Joe Foss, became renowned for his exceptional flying skills, earning 26 enemy air-to-air kills, making him the Marine Corps’ top ace at the time. For his actions at Guadalcanal, Foss was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1943. He reached the rank of brigadier general in the South Dakota Air National Guard and served as that state’s 20th governor.

“Very straightforward,” Folsom said of Foss, who died in 2003 at 87. “He acted the part. He knew what he was doing. He was a great flyer; he was a great shot.”

Folsom does not hold another renowned Marine Corps flyer and Medal of Honor recipient in such regard. Folsom recalls being underwhelmed after meeting Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, the commander of VMA-214 and an ace with a penchant for drinking and fighting his own men.

“They called his squadron the Black Sheep Squadron, but it was he who was the black sheep,” Folsom said. “He was in trouble all the time. He drank a lot. His squadron was highly regarded, and he was highly regarded as a pilot, but he was not the image of a Marine.”

For Folsom, more than the heroic moments – the air-to-air kills, the action that earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross – it was the close calls at Guadalcanal that largely stick out in his mind.

He recalled at least three incidents in which his Wildcat was shot up badly by Japanese Zeros, enemy fighters that were faster and more agile than his F4F.

In one such incident, Folsom was chased by three or four of the enemy fighters. He maneuvered in and out of cloud cover hoping unsuccessfully to lose his Japanese pursuers.

Then the bullets started to fly.

Dozens of them pierced the metal shell of his Wildcat. One struck him in the leg, another hit the plane’s throttle level, separating it from the panel connecting it to the flight deck.

“They shot the hell out of me,” Folsom said. Somehow he managed to land his fighter, leaving him shaken. “I was lucky. Don’t misunderstand me – it’s not a question of bravery, of anything like that. You just automatically say, ‘I’ve got to land the damn airplane. I’m going to do it.’ And then you do it. That’s all.”

He recalls the successes just as matter-of-factly. Of his first air-to-air kills, in which he dove from some 20,000 feet to near the ocean’s surface and shot down two Betty Bombers within minutes of each other, he does not recall any fanfare.

“It’s nothing, you just do it,” he said. “All this baloney in movies about people torturing themselves, and wondering should I shoot this guy and all that — you automatically, at that point in life, shoot because you know that guy is going to shoot at you.

“I don’t really remember any emotion. Truthfully, I don’t. I was there, fired the guns. It happened.”

The formative years

Folsom never intended to join the Marines.

He was commissioned a Navy ensign upon graduation from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 1940, but was denied a request to enter flight training – the entire reason he had wanted to join the military.

“I always wanted to fly,” he said. “I don’t know why. It was just something I always wanted to do since I was a kid. Maybe it was movies or maybe it was [Charles] Lindbergh.”

He elected to vacate his commission, choosing to join the Marines, who agreed to send him into aviation training. He would spend the next 17 years on active duty.

“You don’t give it too much thought at the time, but in retrospect the Marine Corps meant a lot to me,” he said. “It gave me experiences I never could have gotten anyplace else.”

At 98, Folsom said he would not trade his experiences for anyone else’s life – including those close calls over Guadalcanal. His military experience, he added, shaped the rest of his life.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the Marine Corps, and I loved flying,” he said. “It’s been a really good life, and I have the Marine Corps, in part, to thank for much of that.”

dickstein.corey@stripes.com
Twitter: @CDicksteinDC

For military children, the first day of class is often the first day at a new school altogether. Such was the case for 17-year-old Marissa Fowler, who said she was nervous to begin her senior year at Nile C. Kinnick High School on Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan.

“I have bad anxiety. But because I move so often, I’m better at socializing – even though inside I want to puke,” she said.
Kinnick is Fowler’s sixth school, and her family has moved 14 times for her father’s Navy career. She and her parents, Senior Chief Petty Officer Chris Fowler and Jennifer Fowler, came to Japan in June.

With college around the corner, Marissa Fowler was happy to find out about a new online program DODEA is rolling out this year to help parents and students navigate the college and scholarship application process.

Choices360 – available to grades 7 through 12 – offers lessons and activities to help students “learn how to transform their interest and goals in plans for life after high school,” a DODEA statement said.

DODEA Director Thomas Brady told Stars and Stripes in a phone interview Friday that the tool is a “wonderful sweep of programs that help parents and students prepare for life after K-12.”

“It’s a great enhancement to our career counselors in our high schools,” he said.

In line with that vision is the department’s College and Career Readiness curriculum – similar to Common Core – that DODEA has been rolling out since 2014, Brady said. He added that CCR teaches collaboration and other skills sought by modern employers.

“National research indicates that they’re looking for employees who can work collaboratively and find solutions, work as a team …” Brady said. “In this 21st century learning [environment] where you have student-focused training and learning, kids are doing the problem solving.”

Brady said the national CCR standards offer new ways for students to approach school subjects to promote such skills.
“In mathematics for example, we don’t memorize multiplication tables anymore. We don’t just do the formulas,” he said. “We teach the children the theories behind it, so they can explain it and they understand it.”

A standard approach

With CCR comes new standardized assessments to be given to certain grades at the end of the school year to review whether standards are being met. DODEA was not required to comply with national annual assessments under No Child Left Behind, Brady said, so the concept is relatively new to the schools.

The first tests were given in the spring, and Brady said this year’s results will offer a “baseline” to determine where each school’s strengths and weaknesses lay. He said the results will help teachers understand their effectiveness.

Unlike some education departments, DODEA assessments won’t be tied to student graduation requirements and “the teacher’s value and worth” will not be based solely on the results.

“It’s not punitive, it’s informative, and I think it will serve us very, very well,” Brady said.

‘Ready to rock’

Two of retired Petty Officer 1st Class Katherine Jacobs’ children, 9-year-old Kyra and 7-year-old Richard IV, started their first DODEA school Monday at Ikego Elementary School near Yokosuka. They’d previously attended an off-base public school in Bremerton, Wash., where the family lived when their father, Chief Petty Officer Richard Jacobs III, was attached to the USS Stennis.

“I’m excited for making new friends,” Kyra said of starting fourth grade. “I’m excited for multiplication because that’s what I can do.”
She worried, though, that her class would be too large.

“It’s very exciting, but since I don’t like being crowded by people, I get shy,” she said. “It would be OK if it was a small class.”

From 2013 to 2018, the number of DODEA schools dropped from 191 to 163, impacting overall enrollment by about 12,000. This year, there are 68,315 students enrolled in the schools, with 21,293 in the Pacific and 25,557 in Europe. The remaining students are enrolled in the 51 DODEA stateside schools.

When the Jacobs family reached school later that morning, the siblings were greeted by their teachers, swarms of students and a Navy band playing patriotic tunes. Their little brother, 5-year-old Moises, will begin next week when kindergarten starts.

At Yokota Air Base – home of U.S. Forces Japan in western Tokyo – Air Force Master Sgt. Steffan Fritz said farewell to his son, Gavin, who was starting fifth grade at Joan K. Mendel Elementary School.

“He’ll be one of the big kids this year,” he said. “It’s a little scary.”

At Kadena High School on Okinawa, students stomped their feet through a morning assembly to the sounds of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” The school’s panther mascot played air guitar.

Teachers entered like a football team at a pep rally and were greeted by raucous applause. Principal Kristopher Kwiatek wished the them success in the new school year.

“We have 820 students this year,” he said later. “We’re ready to rock.”

In South Korea, rain canceled recess at Humphreys West Elementary School, but that gave students more time to make new friends, meet their teachers and get over first-day jitters.

“I was scared that I was going to have a mean teacher, but she’s nice,” said fourth-grader Isaac Alexander,9.

The school opened last year alongside Eighth Army headquarters, which moved 40 miles south from Seoul to sprawling Camp Humphreys, along with thousands of troops and their families.

Third-grader Lillian Song, 8, who was part of that move, was impressed by the size of the building, which serves nearly 600 students. “The school is so big,” she said.

In Vicenza, Italy, home of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and U.S. Army Africa, it was the first day in a new school for Sofia Mertz, 7. She spent the first two years of her schooling in an Italian school and can speak English, Italian, and, she said, "a little bit of French."

Her dad, Spc. Jarred Mertz, said that he and his wife Eleonora had decided move Sofia to the base school to prepare her for an eventual move to the United States.

At Landstuhl Elementary/Middle School in Germany, Mary Kate Feldt, 7, said she loved going back to school.

"Wow, is it possible to be scared in first day of school?" Feldt asked.

Her classmate and friend Rylan Gonzalez, 7, said it was — he had a little case of the first day jitters. "I don't know much about the 2nd grade," Gonzalez said.

Delayed start

Not all overseas DODEA schools started classes on Monday. A few exceptions were made in other grades because of new changes in the 2018-19 school year, including the addition of six new schools across Europe and Asia.

In South Korea, students at the newly named Seoul American Middle High School and Seoul American Elementary School go back on Wednesday.

DODEA schools in Seoul will have a late start to allow them to adjust to downsizing after U.S. Forces Korea moved its headquarters from Yongsan Garrison to Camp Humphreys as part of a long-delayed plan to relocate the bulk of American forces south of the capital.

Stars and Stripes correspondents Matthew M. Burke, Leon Cook, Marcus Fichtl, Kim Gamel, Nancy Montgomery and Will Morris contributed to this report.

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The state-of-the art, $74 million facility is one of two “21st-century” Department of Defense Education Activity schools set to open Monday in Europe. The other is Wiesbaden Middle School in Germany.

Rain forced festivities indoors at the new high school, built on the former Vogelweh base exchange complex, but there was still plenty to see. Upperclassmen led wide-eyed students and parents on tours of instructional areas known as “neighborhoods,” with open classrooms and movable glass walls. They peeked into science labs teeming with boxes in various stages of unpacking and gazed at the tall ceiling in a music room with sound-absorbing walls.

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“This is a great atmosphere for the kids to learn,” said Army Sgt. Maj. Michael Mitchell, the parent of an incoming junior. “Just seeing how much the school has changed, what they put into it; our tax dollars at work.”

Using technology and flexible instructional spaces, 21st-century schools are designed to support various learning environments, from small-group to project-based activities.

“As we have learned more as educators what’s good for students and the brain and how kids learn and make connections ... we’ve wanted this kind of flexibility,” whereby teachers can team up and design more interactive activities, said Sandra Whitaker, principal of Wiesbaden High School, which opened its 21st-century school last year.

“To have the facility now to support that model is really exciting.”

At Kaiserslautern, returning students said they were excited for change while still learning their way around the bright, open school that felt like a movie set.

“It reminds me of ‘High School Musical,’” said senior Raisha Hernandez, who led tours Friday with classmate Jeff Millburg.

Millburg said he liked the commons area centered around the stage.

“At our old school our cafeteria was kind of crammed, so now we have a lot of space to spread out,” he said.

Hernandez said she was excited to go to the new school “but kind of scared, because I feel like the freshmen are going to ask us where to go.”

“And we don’t know,” Millburg said.

“I know that ‘neighborhood,’ but I don’t know where the teacher is,” Hernandez said.

The neighborhoods are shared by a group of teachers, with open classrooms clustered around a small commons area, or central hub.

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The classrooms are more like lecture spaces, where history might be taught one period followed by science, educators said. Teachers move around and don’t occupy the same desk at the front of the room or display their posters or other educational material, as they would in a traditional classroom.

“Everybody’s a traveler,” said Brian Manson, who teaches biology and Advanced Placement biology at Kaiserslautern.

While teachers adjust to having less personal space, the biggest challenge for students might be the open floor plan, which facilitates collaboration and flexible learning spaces but offers more distraction, educators said.

The adjustable glass walls keep out sound but not what’s going on across the neighborhood.

“It will be challenge for students ... to be in an open area to where they can see people come by,” said Kaiserslautern principal Barriett Smith. “They’re going to have to refocus on the lesson” while teachers will need “to make sure they are engaged with their students.”

Whitaker said her students adjusted quickly to the open floor plan.

“By the end of the second day of school, the glass walls are out of their minds and they are just energized by the environment,” she said. “They truly love the space.”

For teachers that were already engaged in team teaching or project-based learning, “the leap into the new facility was really exciting,” Whitaker said, “because the space now allowed for them to really extend what they were already trying to do in a more traditional structure.”

At Wiesbaden Middle School, which is DODEA’s first 21st-century middle school in Europe, principal Jackie Ferguson said that “the sky’s the limit” in a school where instruction isn’t limited by the environment. “If you wanted to do an integrative project between language arts and social studies, you no longer have to be in this room or that room; you just open the wall in between ... you have two experts working with the students in groups rather than simply one.”

Among the new features at Wiesbaden Middle School that stand out, Ferguson said, are a performance hall, a stage with state-of-the art sound and lighting, a band room with adequate practice space, a green room for video production, and high-school quality science labs.

At Kaiserslautern, everything is an improvement, as the old school operated from a converted World War II-era hospital.

A year ago, just as classes began, “the roof was caving in and we had to evacuate 28 rooms,” Smith said. “We’re going into this brand new building, which will only enhance teaching and student learning.”

Classroom areas have interactive Smart Boards and dry-erase walls. “You’re able to write on the walls … and the windows,” Smith said.

Outside the classroom, Kaiserlautern now has its own softball field, tennis courts and seats on both sides of the gym, Smith said.

Smith, who graduated from Kaiserslautern in 1976, as did two of his children a generation later, the old school holds lots of memories. Their handprints are among hundreds in the old school corridors, he said, part of a tradition where graduates left their handprints in paint on the wall. But he’s not nostalgic.

“I want the best for our kids, and this building is outstanding, and so our kids deserve the best,” Smith said.

Millburg, one of the student tour guides, said graduates of the new school will carry on the tradition of leaving their handprints behind, just not on the new white walls.

“We’re doing it on canvas,” he said.

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The mission brought about 300 airmen and 14 F-15C/D fighter jets from the 493rd Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based in RAF Lakenheath in the U.K., to the small island nation, where they provided 24/7 coverage over NATO’s northern border.

Iceland was a strategically vital during the Cold War, when pilots watched for incursions into NATO airspace from the Soviet Union. It was at the center of the so-called GIUK Gap, a naval chokepoint between Greenland and Britain through which Soviet submarines had to pass to reach America’s Eastern Seaboard.

“In recent years, the strategic importance of the North Atlantic has increased again,” said Sveinn Gudmarsson, spokesman for Iceland’s Foreign Ministry.

Tensions with Russia, following its 2014 Annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, have brought increased NATO attention to the North Atlantic island nation.

“However, the (surveillance) mission is conducted regardless of Iceland’s strategic importance at any given time. It is a peacetime collective defense mission, safeguarding the integrity of the NATO airspace,” he said.

Military activity in Iceland dropped off significantly after the U.S. closed its permanent bases in 2006.

Iceland is the only member of NATO that does not have its own armed forces, save for a coast guard concerned more with the safety of fishermen.

“We joke about being the largest military presence in Iceland, but their coast guard has a big presence here,” said Lt. Col. Cody Blake, the squadron’s commander. “They make it feel like we’re not the biggest military here.”

This air policing mission gives the small NATO ally a level of aerial security that it would otherwise not have on its own.

“Iceland’s membership to NATO as well as the bilateral defense agreement with the U.S. are the cornerstones of Iceland’s defense strategy,” Gudmarsson said, citing the U.S. squadron’s ability to intercept potential enemy aircraft.

U.S. pilots practiced hopping in their jets on short notice and checking out simulated threats above Iceland’s skies throughout the exercise.

As the last stop before North America, the U.S. could intervene over Iceland if a non-NATO military aircraft flew into the area. They could also take on civilian air policing duties—for example, in a scenario such as when a mechanic took off with a stolen plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and crashed in Puget Sound earlier this month.

“Hypothetically, if what happened in Seattle happened here, we would most likely be the ones called to scramble our jets and intercept the aircraft,” Blake said. “When that happens, that usually means we fly close to the aircraft to make visual confirmation of it, to relay vital information back to the ground.”

In addition to their primary surveillance duty, the airmen conducted mock aerial battles around the island’s airspace, giving priority to junior pilots in need of experience commanding groups of fighters.

“Being a younger guy here, I basically fly every day,” said a pilot identified only by the call sign “Vice” because the Air Force did want him to be named. “It’s amazing to be flying, and looking down to see these huge glaciers, or bright blue lakes next to mountains.”

When the airmen weren’t working, they explored Iceland, visiting black-sand beaches and the capital, Reykjavik.

Some of the Americans tried Iceland’s specialty dishes. Vice said he tried both whale and puffin, a cute black-and-white bird with a colorful nose.

“They were on the menu so, I got them,” Vice said. “Whale was great. More like a steak than fish. Very mammaly. The puffin didn’t have a lot of flavor itself; it just took on the sauces it was served with.”

At the time of the interview, Vice had not yet tried the most infamous dish on the island, putrefied shark, but planned on having it soon.

Putrefied shark, known as hakarl, he explained, is Greenland shark fermented for up to six months.

The airmen who did try hakarl described it as tasting exactly like it sounds. Like rotten fish, in your mouth.

Thankfully, the rest of the deployment left a better taste in their mouths.

“It’s been a great experience for us here in Iceland,” he said. “The Icelandic people seem to really appreciate what we’re doing here.”

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Spc. Jacob Root, an infantryman with the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) won the soldier category, for junior enlisted. Staff Sgt. Cesar Gonzalez, an infantryman with the 7th Army Training Command, won the noncommissioned officer category, and 1st Lt. Robert Martin, an infantry officer also with 7ATC, won the officer category.

“It was a really tough competition, and there are a lot of great soldiers out here,” Root said. “I still can’t believe I made it.”

During the competition, soldiers put their endurance to the test with several hikes and marches, proved their marksmanship skills with various firearms, and fought each other in a combative tournament to determine the winners.

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And there were plenty of cameras to catch the action.

The main event was the F-22 Raptors from Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla, forward deployed to Europe for training.

Following a short ceremony and media event that featured USAFE-AFAFRICA commander Gen. Tod Wolters, a group of international photographers were taken to a knoll along the flight line to capture the F-22s taking off.

While the Raptors of the 95th Fighter Squadron were the stars of the show, Spangdahlem’s own F-16 Fighting Falcons of the 480th Fighter Squadron didn’t come up short either.

Any plane rolling down the taxiways or roaring off the base’s runway was in the photographers’ viewfinders, even the C-21 Lear Jet flying Wolters from Spangdahlem.

Also on the runway were Dutch F-16s that were training with their American counterparts.

Besides the photographers on base, numerous other aviation enthusiasts waited off base to catch the fifth-generation fighters.

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