“I was simply not prepared for this.”
November 13, 2006 on 8:13 am | In Articles | No Comments Words of war collected in ‘Operation Homecoming’
NEA project seeks to preserve soldiers’ stories
Stars and Stripes
Scene, Sunday, November 12, 2006
Following are excerpts from the book “Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families,” edited by Andrew Carroll.
The book was part of a two-year project developed by the National Endowment for the Arts called Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.
The goal of the project was to preserve the stories and reflections of the latest generation of Americans and their families to experience war, according to NEA officials.
This is not a game
Army Capt. Ryan Kelly, 1st Battalion, 150th General Support Aviation Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division (Mechanized), New Jersey National Guard. From a letter to his mother dated Jan. 21, 2005, written from Camp Speicher, Iraq:
If it weren’t for the Army uniforms and the constant noise of helicopters taking off and landing, and the Russian 747-like jets screaming overhead every hour of the day, and the F-16s screeching around looking for something to kill, and the rockets exploding and the controlled blasts shaking the windows and the “thump, thump, thump” sound of the Apache gun ships shooting their 30mm guns in the middle of the night, and the heat and the cold, and the hero missions [moving KIA remains] and the body bags and the stress, and the soldiers fraught with personal problems — child custody battles fought from 3,000 miles away, surgeries on ovaries, hearts, breasts, brains, cancers, transplants, divorces, Dear John Letters, births, deaths, miscarriages and miss-marriages — and the scorpions and the spiders who hide under the toilet seats, and the freakish bee-sized flies humming around like miniature blimps, and the worst: the constant pangs of home, the longing for family, the knowledge that life is rolling past you like an unstoppable freight train, an inevitable force, reinforcing the desire for something familiar, the longing for something beautiful, for something safe, to be somewhere safe, with love and laughter and poetry and cold lemonade and clean sheets, if it weren’t for all that Iraq would be just like home. Almost.
What’s going on over here?
Army Sgt. Timothy J. Gaestel, 1st Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. Gaestel’s vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device on Highway 8 south of Baghdad on Sept. 21, 2003. He wrote his father an e-mail account of the event from the Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad.
I reached around and felt my back and pulled my hand back and it was cover with blood, before that I honestly thought it just hit my IBA [body armor] and gone right through it.
I laid down on the back of the truck but this didn’t seem like a good idea and I didn’t have my weapon and had to yell for the S-2 to give me my weapon, I didn’t want an ambush to happen and for me not to have my weapon. So I stood up on my knees and yelled again to him to man the 240B [mounted gun], he was scared but that’s what happened when you don’t ever get any kind of training and you sit in an office all day. This guy didn’t react very well, when I showed him my back he started flipping out and yelling “oh, G you got him man, oh he’s hit bad man.” This is the last thing that you tell someone who has just been hit in the back and is bleeding. As you can imagine I was pretty pissed off at this point and I showed my anger toward the people in the town that we were driving through, I had my M-4 rifle at the ready and my trigger finger on the trigger and just waiting for someone to give me a reason to put it from safe to semi. I maintained my military bearing as well as one could in that situation. I sure wanted to shoot the bastard that had set the IED off. The people in the town must have thought I was crazy because I was cursing and yelling and wanting someone to give me one reason why they shouldn’t have me kill them.
Manning the home front
Peter Madsen. Madsen, a former soldier who was medically retired in 1999, is married to an Army Reserve medic, Spec. Julie Madsen. When Julie was deployed to Iraq in March 2004, Peter remained in North Carolina and cared for the couple’s three children: daughter Tyler, age 11; son Joshua, age 10; and daughter Erin, age 7.
When Julie first left for Iraq, I didn’t do as well as I thought I might. I sat in bed telling myself over and over that I could do this. Then the panic set in, and I cried. I had no idea how to get the kids to school on time, let alone how to feed them on a daily basis. I was simply not prepared for this. Apparently, our wives do more than sit around eating bonbons and watching the Home Shopping Network. The list of things that keep a house in running order doesn’t get done by itself, and that was pretty apparent in our home within days of Julie’s departure.
The house was a mess, the laundry pile grew daily, and the kids were rather unimpressed with the menu selection. I was lying on the couch watching Oprah on TiVo one evening after work when they gathered around. The eldest cleared her throat. “Dad,” she said, then paused to gather her thoughts. “Dad, we really don’t like pizza that much anymore.”
I looked at the younger two, and they were nodding rather emphatically. Being a good father, I realized we needed to make a change.
Two weeks later, they came back. This time Joshua, my middle child, spoke. “Dad, we don’t like Chinese, either.”
Road work
Army Staff Sgt. Jack Lewis, Tactical Operations Detachment 1290, 1-25 Stryker Brigade Combat Team. During his Iraq deployment, in February 2005, Lewis witnessed a collision between a 19-ton Stryker wheeled combat vehicle and a small car. No U.S. personnel were injured, but the young Iraqi driver, an honors engineering student driving his elderly father home from a shopping trip to a nearby town, was killed instantly. His father was nearly insane with grief. Lewis, a combat lifesaver, tries to calm the man and dress his wounds:
I wrapped a head bandage onto him and tied it gently in back. It looked like a traditional headdress with a missing top. Every few seconds he would get animated, and I would put my hand firmly on his shoulder. He would not hold still long enough for me to splint his arm.
“Why can’t he shut up?”
“You ever lose a kid?” This is a pointless question to ask a soldier who’s practically a kid himself.
… Forty minutes later, a medic arrived.
“What’s his status, sergeant?”
“He has a cut left earlobe. I think his hand is broken.” (I think his heart is broken).
“Roger. Okay, I got this.”
“Thanks.” (Bless you for what you do every day, doc.)
I get out of the way, letting the old guy go for the first time in almost an hour. He starts wailing again almost immediately.
An interpreter arrives on the scene.
Finally, I had to ask, “What does he keep saying?”
The terp looked at me, disgusted, resigned, or maybe just plain tired. “He says to kill him now.”
A little later, while the remains of the young Iraqi are being carried to an ambulance, Lewis goes to sit next to the Iraqi father on the back gate of the Stryker.
I felt the cold creep into me. The old man sat next to me, perhaps too tired to continue his tirade against cruel Fate, careless Americans, war, and its accidents.
I haven’t lost a full-grown son, just a little daughter. A baby. And she wasn’t torn from me in a terror of rending steel, stamped out by a sudden monster roaring out of the night. She went so quietly that her passing never woke her mother. I like to think that she kissed me on the way out, on her way home.
But still, sitting on the steel tail of the monster that killed his son, I think I knew exactly how one Iraqi man felt.
“Just kill me now.”
We sat and looked straight into the lights.
Here among these ruins
Army Spc. Helen Gerhardt, 122st Transportation Company, Missouri National Guard. In her e-mail home, Gerhardt shared her first impressions of the Iraqi people and their country, which seemed to be a curious mix of the ancient and the modern:
The first face I saw closely was a girl maybe ten years old, thin, but beating time on a half-full water bottle as she danced up and down on the shoulder of the road with confident grace. She looked straight into my eyes with no trace of humility, her brilliant smile seemed to command acknowledgment of a beauty impossible to deny anything to, her cinnamon and curry-colored gown waved like a flag of bold pleasure in past triumphs. I wished I could throw roses and roast beef, confetti and corndogs, wanted to celebrate her gutsy contrast to my worst fears and get a good square meal into her belly. Behind her, an older woman stood still and straight, wrapped in black, staring through her daughter and me to the desert beyond.
After Gerhardt arrives at the unit’s destination, a former Iraqi army base in Mosul:
In the regular soldier’s barracks, I found a detail that irrationally moved me … A black-bottomed coffee pot sat in the sill of a window, its spout pointing out the heavy bars on the windows toward the foothills in the distance. Here, the poorly fed draftees of years past must have shared coffee and cigarettes, read letters from home, told each other news of the families we knew they had not volunteered to leave. I sat there a long time, the door open behind me, finally moved to take myself back to the army barracks I had freely chosen. Just outside the door I found a boy waiting for me. “Thank you,” he said, his light brown eyes looking straight into mine, and then he smiled with what seemed years’ worth of relief. Despite all my reservations about this war, I could not help but wonder if he was thanking me for freeing father, uncle or brother from a cell like that I’d walked so easily out of.
Lunch with pirates
Army Staff Sgt. Clint Douglas, 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard. In his personal narrative, Douglas says that he and his men worked well with most of the provincial officials appointed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But they did have one nemesis: Zia Audin, the local warlord in Gardez, who lived with his band of cutthroats and outcasts at “Bala Hissar”:
… or Castle Greyskull, as we called it, a massive fortification built by the British in the nineteenth century in the middle of Gardez. It dwarfed all the other structures in town and dominated the entire mountain plain that surrounded the city.
Zia Audin — sorry, General Audin — was responsible for many of the rocket attacks on our firebase and at least some of the IEDs that exploded around our patrols. All of the American and Afghan agencies around the region knew this, and most interestingly Zia Audin knew that we knew. But he didn’t try to kill us out of a sense of either hatred or malice in his heart; he did it out of jealousy and pride, for Zia Audin was heartbroken. He suffered from an unrequited love of America, and this was awkward for all parties. So Zia Audin, in a fit of adolescent pique, did what came naturally — he tried to kill us.
But the 20th SFG had their revenge:
“We’d whittled away at Zia Audin’s power and his honor to the point where his men sat dispersed at their various barracks despised, bored and hungry. Because of their previous turns at bad behavior, the locals were enthusiastic about informing on them. Shame is a powerful force in Afghanistan, and we disgraced these sad, pitiful [expletives] without mercy. The consistency with which the Americans had dealt with Zia Audin had also generated no small amount of goodwill among much of the local population.
Night flight to Baghdad
Air Force Master Sgt. Thomas Young, 167th Airlift Wing, West Virginia Air National Guard. Here is his personal narrative:
We park on a cargo ramp and off-load again, with engines running. I wipe my face with a handkerchief, double-check the takeoff speed and distance, then take a swig of water and a whiff of oxygen, just to clear the cobwebs. The loadmasters are almost too good. Before I can unbuckle my harness and stretch my legs, the guys have the cargo off the airplane.
“We’re all closed up back here,” calls Shambaugh. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
Works for me. As we taxi out, I briefly imagine Saddam himself boarding an aircraft ramp in his better days. No time to ponder that now, though. Throttle up, brakes released, and we’re off again, lifting into the angry night over Baghdad.
Langley’s flying now, and he wants what the Air Force pilots call “smash.” Smash is kinetic energy. Up high, it’s altitude we can convert into speed by diving. Down low where we are it’s velocity we can trade for altitude or a good, hard turn.
“I’m lowering the nose to get more speed,” Langley says, thinking out loud. I’ll remember that sentence for the rest of my life.
A tremendous flash lights up the cockpit like daylight. Magnified by night vision goggles, it blinds me.
For a tenth of a second I think: there’s a fireball. It’s all over.
The missile warning tone screeches like a demon. Langley whips the airplane into a steep bank, and my arm grows heavy with the pull of g-forces.
I expect heat, pain, fire, eternity.
Instead comes speed, and speed brings life. I realize I felt no impact, my vision is restored, and this airplane is still flying.
Moving beyond the slogans.
November 10, 2006 on 4:48 pm | In Articles | No Comments
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CSAR Replacement Vehicle
November 10, 2006 on 4:41 pm | In Articles | No Comments
Officials select developer for combat search and rescue replacement vehicle
11/9/2006 - WASHINGTON (AFPN) –
Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne announced the selection of Boeing Helicopter of Ridley Park, Pa., to provide the new combat search and rescue replacement vehicle, known as CSAR-X.
The Nov. 9 announcement comes at the end of a fair and open competition, and thorough evaluation of multiple proposals allowing the Air Force to fulfill its number two acquisition priority.
“The Air Force is the only service with forces dedicated to the critical mission of combat search and rescue,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley. “We take that mission seriously, and this new CSAR platform will greatly benefit all service members who perform vital work deep in hostile, uncertain or enemy territory.”
The CSAR-X is a medium-lift helicopter that will replace the Air Force’s fleet of HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters, which are quickly approaching their useful service life limit.
The primary mission of the CSAR-X will be to recover downed aircrew members and isolated troops in a combat environment. Rescue forces also may conduct missions such as non-conventional assisted recovery, non-combatant evacuation, civil search and rescue, international aid distribution, emergency medical evacuation, disaster/humanitarian relief, and combat forces insertion/extraction.
“The increased capabilities that CSAR-X will provide our joint force commanders and future civil disaster needs is tremendous,” said General Moseley. “From Operations in Iraq, to Afghanistan, to civil support during Hurricane Katrina, Air Force rescue forces do amazing things to ensure that others may live.”
The CSAR-X will be designed to deploy quickly and to operate out of austere locations worldwide. Additionally, the combat search and rescue mission requires the helicopter to operate in the day or night during adverse weather conditions and in a variety of spectrums of warfare to include nuclear, biological and chemical environments. On-board defensive capabilities with armor will permit the CSAR-X to operate and survive in a higher threat environment than current systems.
The CSAR-X program office plans to procure 141 of the new helicopters with associated training and logistics support. The Air Force plans to achieve Initial Operational Capability with its first ten new CSAR aircraft by the end of 2012
Stories from the frontlines and from home….
November 10, 2006 on 2:57 pm | In Articles | No CommentsNew book features writings of 90 servicemembers
about war
By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Friday, November 10, 2006
ARLINGTON, Va. — When it comes to writing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one can tell it like the troops who’ve been there.
In fact, “they are the ultimate embedded reporters,” said Andrew Carroll, founder of an effort to preserve wartime correspondence of veterans and active-duty troops called the Legacy Project.
“Troops have greater potential to be first-rate writers than almost any community,” Carroll told Stripes. “First, they’re taught to communicate efficiently. The second thing is, they’ve experienced things in a very short time that most of us will not experience in our lifetime.
“They have a lot of wisdom to impart, not just about war, but about human nature, because they see the extremes of it,” he said.
The collected wisdom of some 90 servicemembers are found in a book called “Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families,” which is part of a two-year project developed by the National Endowment for the Arts, called Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.
The goal of the project was to preserve the stories and reflections of the latest generation of Americans and their families to experience war, according to Carroll, who was chosen by the NEA to edit the book.
But at first, “I almost passed” on the offer, Carroll told Stripes, even though he thought it was “a brilliant idea. To be honest, I thought, what was there left to say?”
With embedded reporters, 24-hour cable news and the Internet, Carroll felt that the experience of servicemembers had been documented as thoroughly as any war in history.
“What do we not know about these wars (that) we haven’t heard?”
But the historian in him ultimately could not resist.
To help get the effort off the ground, the NEA sent Carroll and a stable of famous authors such as military thriller writer Tom Clancy and Mark Bowden, who wrote “Black Hawk Down,” to conduct 50 writing workshops at 25 military bases across the country and overseas from April 2004 through July 2005.
More than 6,000 people participated, Carroll said.
Project leaders also issued an open call for writing submissions from troops who have served since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, along with spouses and family members.
More than 1,200 individuals responded, NEA officials said.
Two different panels of NEA officials then read through all the submissions, and winnowed the selections down to 1,200 pages, Carroll said.
Those, in turn, were turned over to a jury of distinguished authors who “spent two intense days,” further culling the selections into big binders with “hundreds” of selections, he said.
“It was a real good mix” of short stories, poems, e-mails, diary entries, and other writings, Carroll said, with personal narratives the most popular genre.
As he edited the selections down into the final book, Carroll said he had to limit the length to 500 pages, because the NEA didn’t want to produce a book that would be too expensive for most people to purchase.
There was also a concern that making the book too long would overwhelm readers, he said.
But in addition to archiving all of the writings gathered for the project, the NEA was to post many submissions that didn’t make it into the book online on the Operation Homecoming site, www.operationhomecoming.gov, beginning Friday.
“Cease Fire, Friendlies….”
November 9, 2006 on 12:23 pm | In Articles | No CommentsTillman investigations spur questions
In a remote and dangerous corner of Afghanistan, under the protective roar of Apache attack helicopters and B-52 bombers, special agents and investigators did their work.
They walked the landscape with surviving witnesses. They found a rock stained with the blood of the victim. They re-enacted the killings — here the U.S. Army Rangers swept through the canyon in their Humvee, blasting away; here the doomed man waved his arms, pleading for recognition as a friend, not an enemy.
“Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” he shouted, again and again.
The latest inquiry into Tillman’s death by friendly fire should end next month; authorities have said they intend to release to the public only a synopsis of their report. But The Associated Press has combed through the results of 2¼ years of investigations and uncovered some startling findings.
One of the four shooters, Staff Sgt. Trevor Alders, had recently had PRK laser eye surgery. Although he could see two sets of hands “straight up,” his vision was “hazy,” he said. In the absence of “friendly identifying signals,” he assumed Tillman and an allied Afghan who also was killed were enemy.
Another, Spc. Steve Elliott, said he was “excited” by the sight of rifles, muzzle flashes and “shapes.” A third, Spc. Stephen Ashpole, said he saw two figures, and just aimed where everyone else was shooting.
Squad leader Sgt. Greg Baker had 20-20 eyesight, but claimed he had “tunnel vision.” Amid the chaos and pumping adrenaline, Baker said he hammered what he thought was the enemy but was actually the allied Afghan fighter next to Tillman who was trying to give the Americans cover: “I zoned in on him because I could see the AK-47. I focused only on him.”
All four failed to identify their targets before firing, a direct violation of the fire discipline techniques drilled into every soldier.
Shortage of supplies
There’s more:
Taken together, these findings raise more questions than they answer, in a case that already had veered from suggestions that it all was a result of the “fog of war” to insinuations that criminal acts were to blame.
The Pentagon’s failure to reveal for more than a month that Tillman was killed by friendly fire have raised suspicions of a coverup. To Tillman’s family, there is little doubt that his death was more than an innocent mistake.
One investigator told the Tillmans that it hadn’t been ruled out that Tillman was shot by an American sniper or deliberately murdered by his own men — though he also gave no indication the evidence pointed that way.
“I will not assume his death was accidental or ’fog of war,”’ said his father, Pat Tillman Sr. “I want to know what happened, and they’ve clouded that so badly we may never know.”
Almost two years after three bullets through the forehead killed the star defensive back — a man who President Bush would call “an inspiration on and off the football field” — the fourth investigation began.
This time, the investigators are supposed to think like prosecutors:
Who fired the shots that killed Pat Tillman, and why?
Who insisted Tillman’s platoon split and travel through dangerous territory in daylight, against its own policy? Who let the command slip away and chaos engulf the unit?
And perhaps most of all: Was a crime committed?
From football to Rangers
The long and complicated story of Pat Tillman’s death and the investigations it spawned began five years ago, in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center.
“It is a proud and patriotic thing you are doing,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote to Tillman in 2002, after Tillman — shocked and outraged by the Sept. 11 attacks — turned down a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the elite Army Rangers.
The San Jose, Calif. native enlisted with his brother Kevin, who gave up his own chance to play professional baseball. The Tillmans were deployed to Iraq in 2003, then sent to Afghanistan.
The mission of their “Black Sheep” platoon in April 2004 sounded straightforward: Divide a region along the Pakistan border into zones, then check each grid for insurgents and weapons. They were to clear two zones and then move deeper into Afghanistan.
A broken-down Humvee known as a Ground Mobility Vehicle, or GMV, stalled the unit on an isolated road. A mechanic couldn’t fix it, and a fuel pump flown in on a helicopter didn’t help.
Hours passed. Enemy fighters watched invisibly, plotting their ambush.
Tillman’s platoon must have presented an inviting target. There were 39 men and about a dozen vehicles.
Impatience was rising at the tactical operations center at Forward Operating Base Salerno, near Khowst, Afghanistan, where officers coordinated the movements of several platoons. Led by then-Maj. David Hodne, the so-called Cross-Functional Team worked at a U-shaped table inside a 20-by-30-foot tent with a projection screen and a satellite radio.
(Hodne, now a lieutenant colonel and executive officer for the 75th Ranger Regiment, declined to be interviewed on the record by the AP — as did nearly every person involved in the incident.)
When the Humvee broke down, the Black Sheep were nearing the end of their assignment; all that was left was to “turn one last stone and then get out,” Hodne would testify. The unit was then to head for Manah, a small village where it would spend the night.
The commanders had already given the Black Sheep an extra day to get into its grid zones. High-ranking commanders were “pushing us pretty hard to keep moving,” said Hodne.
“We had better not have any more delays due to this vehicle,” he told his subordinates.
‘I felt like the village idiot’
At the operations center, the Black Sheep’s company commander, then-Capt. William C. “Satch” Saunders, was feeling the heat to get the platoon moving.
“We wanted to make sure we had a force staged to confirm or deny any enemy presence in Manah the next day, so we would not get ourselves too far behind setting ourselves up for our next series of operations,” he recalled later to an investigator.
The order came down to split the platoon in two to speed its progress.
Saunders initially told investigators that Hodne had issued the order, but later, after he was given immunity from prosecution, he acknowledged it was his decision alone.
Hodne later said he was in the dark — “I felt like the village idiot because I had no idea what they were doing,” he recalled. The decision was foolhardy, he said. Divided in two, “they didn’t have enough combat power to do that mission” of clearing Manah, he testified. (Other commanders have insisted that splitting the platoon was perfectly safe and a common practice.)
One thing is clear: The order sparked a flurry of activity by the Black Sheep.
One of the gunners who shot Tillman said his unit didn’t even have time to look at a map before getting back on the road.
“We were rushed to conduct an operation that had such flaws,” said Alders. “Which in the end would prove to be fatal.”
“If anything, this sense of urgency was as deadly to Tillman as the bullet that cut his life short,” Alders wrote in a lengthy statement protesting his expulsion from the Rangers. “We could have conducted the search at night like we did on the follow-up operations or the next morning like we ended up doing anyway. Why, I ask, why?”
An investigator, Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones, would later agree that an “artificial sense of urgency” to keep Tillman’s platoon moving was a crucial factor in his death: “There was no specific intelligence that made the movement to Manah before nightfall imperative.”
An officer involved in the incident told AP there was, however, general intelligence of insurgent activity in this region, historically a Taliban hotbed.
That suspicion would be confirmed when the Black Sheep drove through a narrow canyon, its walls towering about 500 feet, and came under fire from enemy Afghans. Chaos broke out and communications broke down.
After the platoon split, the second section of the convoy roared out of the canyon, into an open valley and straight at their comrades a few minutes ahead. A Humvee packed with pumped-up Rangers opened fire, killing the friendly Afghan and Tillman, though he desperately sought to be recognized.
Later, at least one of the same Rangers turned his guns on a village where witnesses say civilian women and children had gathered. The shooters raked it with fire, the American witnesses said; they wounded two additional fellow Rangers, including their own platoon leader.
‘Holding the military accountable’
Had it happened in the United States, police would have quickly cordoned off the area with “crime scene” tape and determined whether a law had been broken.
Instead, the investigations into Tillman’s death have cascaded, one after another, for the past 30 months.
For Mary Tillman, getting to the bottom of her son’s death is more than a personal quest.
“This isn’t just about our son,” she said. “It’s about holding the military accountable. Finding out what happened to Pat is ultimately going to be important in finding out what happened to other soldiers.”
In the days after the shootings, the first officer appointed to investigate, then-Capt. Richard Scott, interviewed all four shooters, their driver, and many others who were there. He concluded within a week that the gunmen demonstrated “gross negligence” and recommended further investigation.
“It could involve some Rangers that could be charged” with a crime, Scott told a superior later.
Then-Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey later assured Tillman’s family that those responsible would be punished as harshly as possible.
But no one was ever court martialed; staff lawyers advised senior Army commanders reviewing the incident that there was no legal basis for it.
Instead, the Army punished seven people; four soldiers received relatively minor punishments known as Article 15s under military law, with no court proceedings. These four ranged from written reprimands to expulsion from the Rangers. One, Baker, had his pay reduced and was effectively forced out of the Army. The other three soldiers received administrative reprimands.
Scott’s report circulated briefly among a small corps of high-ranking officers.
Then, it disappeared.
Some of Tillman’s relatives think the Army buried the report because its findings were too explosive. Army officials refused to provide a copy to the AP, saying no materials related to the investigation could be released.
Lingering questions
The commander of Tillman’s 75th Ranger Regiment, then-Col. James C. Nixon, wasn’t satisfied with Scott’s investigation, which he said focused too heavily on pre-combat inspections and procedures rather than on what had happened.
Scott “made some conclusions in the document that weren’t validated by facts” as described by the participants, Nixon would tell later investigators.
Nixon assigned his top aide, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, to lead what became the second investigation. Kauzlarich harshly criticized Baker and the men on his truck.
Among other things, Baker should have known that at least two of his subordinates had never been in a firefight, and should have closely supervised where they shot.
“His failure to do so resulted in deaths of Cpl. Tillman and the AMF soldier, and the serious wounding of two other (Rangers),” Kauzlarich concluded. “While a great deal of discretion should be granted to a leader who is making difficult judgments in the heat of combat, the command also has a responsibility to hold its leaders accountable when that judgment is so wanton or poor that it places the lives of other men at risk.”
The Tillman family complained that questions remained: Who killed Tillman? Why did they fire? Were the punishments stiff enough?
“I don’t think that punishment fit their actions out there in the field,” said Kevin Tillman, who was with his brother the day Pat was killed but was several minutes behind him in the trailing element of a convoy and saw nothing.
“They were not inquiring, identifying, engaging (targets). They weren’t doing their job as a soldier,” he told an investigator. “You have an obligation as a soldier to, you know, do certain things, and just shooting isn’t one of your responsibilities. You know, it has to be a known, likely suspect.”
And so, in November 2004, acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee ordered up yet another investigation, by Jones.
The result was 2,100 pages of transcripts and detailed descriptions of the incident, but no new charges or punishments. The report, completed Jan. 10, 2005, was provided to the Tillman family. It has not been released to the public; the family found it wanting.
Pressed anew by the Tillmans, the Pentagon inspector general announced a review of the investigations in August 2005. And in March 2006, they launched a new criminal probe into the actions of the men who shot at Tillman.
In-depth investigation
The veteran Pentagon official who is overseeing these latest inquiries, acting Defense Department Inspector General Thomas Gimble, has called the Tillman probe the toughest case he has ever seen, according to people he recently briefed.
Investigators are looking at who pulled the triggers and fired at Tillman; they are also looking at the officers who pressured the platoon to move through a region with a history of ambushes; the soldiers who burned Tillman’s uniform and body armor afterward; and at everyone in the chain of command who deliberately kept the circumstances of Tillman’s death from the family for more than a month.
Military investigators under Gimble’s direction this year visited the rugged valley in eastern Afghanistan where Tillman was killed. It was a risky trip; the region is even more dangerous today than it was in 2004.
According to one person briefed by investigators, the contingent included at least two soldiers who were there the day of the incident — Staff Sgt. Matthew Weeks, a squad leader who was up the hill from Tillman when he was shot, and the driver of the GMV that carried the Rangers who shot Tillman, Staff Sgt. Kellett Sayre.
When the current inquiry began, the Pentagon projected it would be completed by September 2006. Now Gimble and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, known as CID, are aiming to finish their work by December, say lawmakers and other officials briefed by Gimble.
CID is probing everything up to and including Tillman’s shooting. The inspector general’s office itself has a half-dozen investigators researching everything that happened afterward, including allegations of a coverup.
The investigators have taken sworn testimony from about 70 people, some of whom said they were questioned for more than six hours. But Gimble said investigators have been hindered by a failure to locate key witnesses, even some who are still in the active military.
Moreover, those who are now out of the Army, including three of the four shooters, can’t be court martialed. They could be charged in the civilian justice system by a U.S. attorney, but such a step would be highly unusual.
The law that allows it, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, has been invoked fewer than a half-dozen times since its enactment in 2000, said Scott Silliman, executive director of Duke Law School’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security and a high-ranking Air Force lawyer until his retirement in 1993.
The investigation, Gimble has said, is also complicated because of “numerous missteps” by the three previous investigators, particularly their failure to follow standards for handling evidence.
Gimble promised lawmakers in a series of briefings this fall that his investigation “will bring all to light.” He has committed to releasing his detailed findings to key legislators, Pentagon officials and the Tillman family, as well as a synopsis to the general public, congressional aides said.
Gimble declined an AP request for an interview.
Punishments handed out
To date, a total of seven soldiers have been disciplined in Tillman’s death.
Bailey, the 2nd Ranger Battalion commander who was camped out about two miles down the road with another unit the night Tillman died, surveyed the shooting scene hours after it occurred.
“I don’t think there was any criminal act,” he said. “It was a fratricide based upon a lot of contributing factors, confusion,” he testified to an investigator in late 2004.
Some high-ranking officers, including Bailey, believe a lack of control in the field was to blame — starting with the platoon leader and including the soldiers who didn’t identify their targets.
Bailey, who approved punishments for several of the soldiers, said he disagreed with the platoon’s protests that they were “doing what we asked them to do under some very difficult circumstances, and that there were mistakes made but they weren’t negligent mistakes.”
He also testified that “three gunners were, to varying degrees, culpable in what had happened out there.” And he said he wanted a fourth soldier involved — the squad leader, Baker — “out of the military.”
Baker soon left the Army.
As for others involved:
“They didn’t do communications checks. They didn’t check out their equipment. So they’d been there 24 hours,” Bailey testified. “For example, some of the weapons systems weren’t even loaded with ammunition. Many of the soldiers didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t have contingency plans.”
A non-commissioned officer on the ground that day, however, testified that the unit carried out required communications checks.
Uthlaut was also wounded by fellow Rangers in the incident. He was awarded the Purple Heart and later promoted to captain.
Saunders, the company commander, was given the authority to punish three soldiers. Both Saunders and Hodne received formal written reprimands for failing to “provide adequate command and control” of subordinate units — administrative punishments lighter than the Article 15s handed down to the soldiers who shot at Tillman. This obviously hasn’t hurt Hodne’s career; he has since been promoted.
“I thought it was (the commanders’) fault, or part of their fault that we were even in this situation, when they’re telling us to split up,” said Ashpole.
Congressional hearings?
Some lawmakers have warned that if this probe does not clear up all questions on Tillman’s death, they may press for congressional hearings. Others have said Congress could call for an independent panel of retired military officers and other experts to conduct an outside probe.
Rep. Mike Honda, a Democrat who represents the San Jose district where Tillman’s family lives, has pressed the Pentagon for answers on the status of its investigations.
“I’m very impatient and at times cynical,” Honda said. But, he said, the honor of the military — and the confidence of the public in the military and the government — are at stake.
“So if we pursue the truth and wait for it,” he said, “it may be worthwhile.”
Tired of having movers break your things and not getting paid?
November 9, 2006 on 9:36 am | In Articles, Resources | No CommentsMilitary Update:
Families First set to help make moving easier
Tom Philpott, Special to Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Thursday, November 9, 2006
Servicemembers who have household goods damaged or lost during government-directed moves will be reimbursed under a more robust “full replacement value” standard starting by March 2008 at the latest.
Congress set the deadline in the 2007 defense authorization act signed into law Oct. 17. The National Military Family Association and other service advocacy groups had urged the action after the Department of Defense fell behind in implementing “Families First,” a personal-property program initiative that includes a goal of full replacement value (FRV) reimbursement.
Air Force Col. Steven Amato, director of passenger and personal property for the Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command, said the start of FRV might still take effect sooner, perhaps by this time next year, if Families First can get back on schedule for executing a broad re-engineering of the Defense Department $1.4 billion personnel property program.
But if Families First is not fully implemented by March 2008, the department still will shift to FRV reimbursements on household claims, Amato told Military Update.
DOD is the moving industry’s largest customer, with 500,000 moves contracted for every year. About 1,300 moving companies get a share. The department has worked for more than a decade on what became Families First, a comprehensive effort to improve quality of moves, reduce claims, quicken the claims process and run the entire personal property program more efficiently through technology. When Families First is fully implemented, a sophisticated information management system will link customers, carriers and transportation offices across the U.S. military.
But a long-standing complaint for military members, reflected in after-move surveys, is low reimbursements for damaged goods. Congress now feels that solution should not be delayed until bigger challenges for Families First are worked out.
Historically, about 35 percent of military moves result in damage claims. The figure has been nearer to 20 percent in recent years but it still tops the list of complaints tied to moves.
Currently, when household items are lost or destroyed, members receive only a depreciated value for the goods. On rare occasions when an entire shipment is lost, carrier liability to members is capped at $40,000.
A sofa that cost $1,000 five years ago, for example, would be valued using the depreciation formula 25 percent below replacement cost, a depreciation rate of 5 percent per year. Other items depreciate at 10 percent. The concept, used for decades, is that household items are “used” and so the government should pay replacement value of used items.
Under FRV reimbursement, however, if a carrier lost an item the member would get a new one. Exceptions involve cars, motorcycles and boats because replacements of equal value are easily found. But with items such as furniture, appliances, electronics, carriers would buy new items or settle claims for enough money so members could buy them new.
The shift in formula will affect repairs, too. Currently, if an older $300 television is damaged in a move, the depreciated value might be $150. If the repair estimate is $200, the carrier now will pay no more than that depreciated value, $150. The servicemember is stuck paying $50 in repair costs out of pocket. Under FRV, the mover would pay full repair costs.
Maximum FVR liability per shipment would be capped at $50,000.
FRV liability coverage already is common for private-sector-employee moves with companies choosing to buy the higher liability coverage.
Military members now can buy FRV coverage from carriers only on U.S. domestic moves. The cost is a few hundred dollars on an average military shipment of 6,000 pounds. For senior ranks with larger shipping weight allowances, buying FRV coverage costs $400 or more. Fewer than 10 percent of members buy the extra protection. An FRV option isn’t even offered by carriers on overseas moves, though private insurance is always an option. Not many servicemembers opt for it.
By spring 2008, however, the entire military will be better protected financially from transportation mishaps. The higher FRV reimbursements will be paid by the government. Movers simply will raise their rates, charging the government more for each move, to reflect companies’ increased liability.
The old depreciation formula for claims will continue to be used only for servicemembers who refuse to deal directly with their movers. Currently, they file claims with base claims offices. But under Families First, a direct customer-to-carrier relationship is seen as critical to lowering government costs, reducing breakage (and therefore claims), and awarding carrier contracts based on service and performance rather than lowest bid.
Terry Head, president of the Household Goods Forwarders Association of America, warns of a “huge culture shift” ahead for everyone involved with the military personal property program. Industry officials are worried that Families First will shift a lot of administrative costs to moving companies. Yet DOD also intends to cap spending for the military personnel property program at only a 13 percent increase, to include the shift to FRV reimbursements.
Amato emphasized the importance of members completing customer satisfaction surveys after every move to “rack and stack” the performance of moving companies, which in turn determines eligibility for future contracts.
Scott Michael, vice president for government traffic with the American Moving and Storage Association in Alexandria, Va., said only 15 percent of members are completing the surveys, which isn’t enough, statistically, to make judgments about carrier performance for awarding of future contracts.
The Heart Gallery
November 8, 2006 on 12:19 pm | In Articles, Resources | No Comments‘The Heart Gallery’ helps kids find homes
SANTA FE, N.M. - In a place where beautiful pictures are common, one woman had an uncommon idea. On her first day working for the New Mexico Children, Youth & Families Department, Diane Granito thought the very least she could do for children looking for adoptive homes was to take a decent photograph. Not a snapshot, a portrait by a professional.
Granito chose children considered difficult to place in adoptive families — difficult because they came along with siblings, or they had just grown older, like Arron, still hoping for parents at 16.
“When you’re hoping for something like that for a long time and it doesn’t happen, your heart gets a little more broken each time,” says Granito.
Soon all the photographs Granito had arranged began to fill her office.
“I was surrounded by these children, and the emotion that came up in me was so powerful that I knew we were onto something,” she says.
And this is where Diane Granito followed her very good idea with a great one. She had recently been walking along Santa Fe’s art gallery row and she thought to herself, photographs this beautiful deserve an equally beautiful home. So she went to one of Santa Fe’s finest art galleries.
“What a great idea!” recalls Lisa Bronowicz, the former special events director at Gerald Peters Gallery. “You have the kids, we have the gallery.”
She called it, “The Heart Gallery.” Three sisters featured in the exhibit found a family in less than an hour. Soon, other states were calling.
“It was almost as if the country was waiting to be told these children are here, because nobody really talked about them before,” says Granito.
And after five years, almost 100 Heart Galleries have opened in 48 states. Different locations, but the same magic. More than 1,000 children have found homes.
Twelve-year-old Jalinda saw her portrait for the first time at the St. Louis Heart Gallery.
“I think it looks good!” said Jalinda. “I like it, it is cute!”
For the photographers, who all donate their time, something often clicks. The very first frame Santa Fe photographer Jackie Mathey took of Faye captured them both.
“I could see her strength and her character in the mirror,” remembers Mathey.
She and her husband adopted Faye. She says it is even better than she hoped it would be.
“They’re very special children,” says Granito. “They deserve to be seen in this type of environment — a beautiful place.”
And it helps us see the need of thousands, through the eyes of a child.
Enjoy the fresh air this weekend by….
November 8, 2006 on 9:35 am | In Articles | No CommentsNovember 07, 2006
National parks, forests free on Veterans Day
By Kelly Kennedy
Staff writer
Soldiers, veterans and their families may visit any national park or forest on Veterans Day for free this year — and every year after that.
“All they have to do is say they’re a veteran or in the service,” said Department of the Interior spokesman Gerry Gaumer. “No questions asked.”
It makes sense to open the parks to veterans every Nov. 11 to honor them for their service, Gaumer said.
“We’ve got all these parks specifically because of what veterans have accomplished,” he said, citing Valley Forge National Historical Park from the American battle for independence and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
People looking for ideas about which park to visit may go online to find a list of park grounds by battlefield, war or memorial.
The departments of the interior and agriculture have waived fees for the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Forest Service.
Have any home improvements go to….
November 8, 2006 on 9:33 am | In Articles | No CommentsNovember 06, 2006
Home Depot, Lowe’s giving Vets Day military discounts
By Karen Jowers
Staff writer
The world’s two largest home-improvement retailers are offering 10 percent discounts to active-duty personnel, reservists, retired military, veterans and their families in honor of Veterans Day.
• Lowe’s Companies Inc. the second largest chain, will offer the discount Nov. 10-12, on in-stock purchases up to $5,000. To qualify, customers must present a valid military identification or other proof of service such as veteran’s ID or discharge papers, or Veterans of Foreign Wars card. The company also offered discounts during the 2006 Memorial Day and July 4th holiday weekends. Excluded from the discount are online sales, previous sales, special order items, installation fees, gift cards, Fisher & Paykel appliances, Dyson vacuums, John Deere products and Krups small appliances.
Lowe’s has more than 1,325 home improvement stores in 49 states.
• The Home Depot will offer the discount from Nov. 9-12, on purchases up to $2,000, at The Home Depot stores, The Home Depot Floor Store locations, The Home Depot Landscape Supply stores and EXPO Design Center locations. Customers must go to the Special Services desk in the store, and show proof of military service, such as an ID card. They will receive a coupon that can be redeemed at any cashier’s checkout register, on a single receipt, in-store purchase only.
As the nation’s largest home improvement The Home Depot has 2,109 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The company also has offered discount sale weekends to the military community earlier this year and in previous years.
Airpower Summary
November 8, 2006 on 9:25 am | In Articles | No Comments| CENTAF releases airpower summary for Nov. 8
11/8/2006 - SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) – U.S. Central Command Air Forces officials have released the airpower summary for Nov. 8 In Afghanistan Nov. 7, Navy F/A-18 Hornets and Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt IIs provided close-air support for International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, troops in contact with Taliban extremists near Mangretay. The F/A-18s and A-10s expended guided bomb unit -12s; an A-10 expended a general-purpose 500-pound bomb on an enemy position. Navy F/A-18s provided close-air support to ISAF troops in contact with enemy forces near Armarah. They expended GBU-12s on enemy positions. In total, 46 close-air-support missions were flown in support of ISAF and Afghan troops, reconstruction activities and route patrols. Additionally, 11 Air Force and Royal Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, aircraft flew missions in support of operations in Afghanistan. U.S. Navy fighter aircraft performed in non-traditional ISR roles with their electro-optical and infrared sensors. In Iraq, Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons conducted a strike against anti-Iraqi forces near Ramadi. The F-16s expended a GBU-12 on an enemy target. Royal Air Force GR-4 Tornados and Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles provided close-air support to troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Kirkuk. The F-15Es expended cannon rounds and GBU-12s on enemy positions. Air Force F-15Es provided close-air support to troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Al Muhammad. In total, coalition aircraft flew 34 close-air-support missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities. Additionally, 14 Air Force, Navy, RAF and Royal Australian Air Force ISR aircraft flew missions in support of operations in Iraq. Air Force fighter aircraft performed in non-traditional ISR roles with their electro-optical and infrared sensors. On Nov. 6, Air Force rescue and medical crews on HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters flew three medical evacuation missions in support of OEF. Three U.S. military, one Afghan national police and one Afghan local national with injuries requiring urgent care were evacuated as a result of these missions. Air Force C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster IIIs provided intra-theater heavy airlift support, helping sustain operations throughout Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa. More than 150 airlift sorties were flown; more than 490 tons of cargo was delivered, and more than 3,680 passengers were transported. Coalition C-130 crews from Australia, Canada, Japan and South Korea flew in support of OIF or OEF. On Nov. 6, Air Force and RAF tankers flew 36 sorties and off-loaded almost 2.2 million pounds of fuel. |
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