Stars & Stripes - 03.23.18

Volume 10, No. 15 ©SS 2018

FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2018

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COVER STORY

BY NANCY MONTGOMERY Stars and Stripes

Lt.

Tony Nadal survived three days and three nights of vicious fighting at Landing Zone XRay, the first major battle of the Vietnam War. When it was over, 79 American soldiers, including some of Nadal’s closest friends, were dead.

While clearing a village on another mission, Nadal and his soldiers tossed a grenade into a tunnel that they suspected concealed enemy fighters.

After the explosion they found the bodies of only a mother and her two small children, too frightened to come out when called.

“I’ve never gotten over that.

I have tears in my eyes just telling you about it,” Nadal said in an interview a halfcentury later. “But that was an act of war. In my view, it was a legitimate assumption that they were a threat.”

No casualties of war prepared Nadal for what he saw when he opened the Dec. 5, 1969, issue of Life magazine.

The glossy pages contained the first view for most Americans of an atrocity committed

by U.S. soldiers 18 months before: photographs of scores of dead women, children and babies sprawled in a ditch at My Lai. Photos of terrified, huddled women holding babies, and grandmothers crying just before their murders.

Nadal was by then an

On the cover: A photo taken

by U.S. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle in the aftermath of the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, shows mostly women and children dead on a road.

Courtesy of the U.S. Army

instructor at the U.S. Military Academy. “I told the cadets how ashamed I was,” he said.

“I was ashamed for the Army. I was ashamed soldiers had done this and I was ashamed that nobody had stopped it.

“My Lai is a stain on the Army,” said Nadal, 82, a retired colonel. “It’s a stain on the judicial system of the U.S. military.”

The My Lai massacre — pronounced “mee leye” — is considered the nadir in modern Army history. More than 500 Vietnamese civilians were raped, tortured, stabbed and shot to death March 16, 1968, by three platoons of the boys next door.

A cover-up started that day would be dismantled bit by bit, leading to courts-martial and reprimands for a handful of officers.

But why it happened and who should be held responsible remained in dispute.

Should soldiers who said they were following orders be blamed or the superior officers in command? Was how America waged war in Vietnam responsible? Or was it something, however horrifying, that happens in all wars?

Fifty years and three U.S. wars later, there’s still no clear consensus. Rather than serving as a lasting warning for servicemembers, My Lai has been all but forgotten in the ranks of today’s armed forces.

Nadal blames the chain of command. Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade (Light) of the 23rd (Americal) Division, like other Army units in 1968, had officers unequipped for command, men not among the best and the brightest, he said.

“Harvard wouldn’t fight,” Nadal said.

Badly trained, “shake-and-

RONALD H AEBERLE /Courtesy of the U.S. Army

Vietnamese women and children in My Lai are shown before being killed in the massacre.

According to court testimony, they were killed seconds after the photo was taken. The woman on the right is adjusting her blouse buttons following a sexual assault. bake” noncommissioned officers added to the problem.

“Any NCO in that unit could have said, ‘This is bullshit,’ and stopped it,” Nadal said. “Not one of them had the intellect, courage, character or discipline to say, ‘Stop.’ ” Atrocities have occurred in all wars, he said, but not in units commanded by competent leaders who troops respect and know will come down hard on abuse.

“It’s easy to stop atrocities from happening,” Nadal said. “If it happens in a unit, it happens because the chain of command blew it.”

Retired Brig. Gen. John Johns, who served on a Pentagon task force created after My Lai that found 320 other atrocities substantiated by military investigators, disagreed.

“I don’t believe it is preventable in these kinds of counterinsurgency wars,” Johns

said. “There will be atrocities regardless of how well the troops are trained and led. The frustration from seeing one’s comrades led into ambushes ... can eat at discipline. And it goes back to the human instinct to demonize those outside our tribe,” Johns said.

“I blame the national leaders who put troops in situations that they have no business being in.”

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COVER STORY FROM PAGE 2

Contributing factors The first comprehensive review of how and why My Lai and its cover-up occurred was done by Lt. Gen. William Peers. He had been assigned the task in November 1969 by then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland, just as news of the atrocity was breaking nationwide. At first, officials wondered whether the company had “an unusual number of men of inferior quality,” Peers wrote. They pulled the soldiers’ personnel files and test scores and found that the men of Charlie Company “were about average as compared with the other units of the Army.”

The Peers Inquiry listed 13 contributing factors.

Among them were lack of proper training, lack of discipline, racist attitudes toward Vietnamese people, the ambiguity between combatants and civilians and a poor command climate from the company to the division levels.

Leadership lapses continued long after the massacre, the report said.

“Within the Americal Division, at every command level from company to division, actions were taken or omitted which together effectively concealed the ... incident. Efforts ... deliberately to withhold information continue to this day,” the report said.

Historian Howard Jones, whose book “My Lai, Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness” was published in June, said it was more than bad leadership in one division.

“Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient,” Westmoreland had said, and Jones said the U.S. military seemed to take that to heart in prosecuting a brutal war of attrition.

Massive bombing indiscriminately killed Vietnamese civilians.

“Body counts, free-fire zones, searchand-destroy missions,” said Jones, a professor at the University of Alabama.

“This is just a recipe for disaster.”

As Johns’ task force found, first reported by Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse in the Los Angeles Times in 2006, war crimes occurred throughout Vietnam.

Nelson and Turse, who gained access to the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group files gathering dust in the National Archives, reported that among the substantiated cases in the archive were: ! Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died. ! 78 other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted. ! 141 instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.

The files contained 500 other alleged atrocities that Army investigators could not prove or that they discounted, Nelson and Turse reported.

Peers stressed that before My Lai, “there had been instances of mistreatment, rape and some unnecessary killings in Task Force Barker.”

Some troops engaged in contests of raping women, Jones said, with “extra points for killing them.”

Very few were prosecuted and almost none served jail time. “It helped form a pattern of behavior,” Jones said.

A sort of slide into evil wasn’t difficult in Vietnam, Philip Caputo wrote in his 1977 book, “A Rumor of War.” “Everything rotted and corroded there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals. Scorched by the sun, wracked by the wind and rain of the monsoon, fighting in alien swamps and jungles, our humanity rubbed off of us as the protective bluing rubbed off the barrels of our rifles.”

‘Flawed intelligence’ When Tony Nadal went to Vietnam in 1965, as the war’s escalation and the anti-war movement were just getting started, more than 60 percent of Americans supported sending troops to the country.

Three years later, support had plummeted.

During a supposed truce in observation of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, on Jan. 30, North Vietnam troops launched a huge surprise assault that took 10 U.S. battalions nearly a month to beat back.

After that, only a third of Americans agreed that progress was being made.

Nearly half said the U.S. should never have intervened in Vietnam.

On Feb. 27, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, considered the nation’s most trusted newscaster, told his millions of viewers that the war could not be won.

Two weeks later, on March 16, Capt.

Ernest Medina led Charlie Company, part of Task Force Barker, into the hamlet of My Lai. The unit had lost 28 soldiers from snipers, landmines and booby traps, and hadn’t once seen the enemy, Jones said.

The area was considered rife with Viet Cong fighters and civilian sympathizers.

“You’ve got all this fear and frustration. And then they got flawed intelligence, that up to 300 or 400 Viet Cong would be implanted in My Lai,” Jones said.

That there were no Viet Cong fighters became clear early in the mission. No shots were fired at the troops, no weapons were found.

Platoon leader Lt. William Calley and his men nonetheless went to work, burning huts, raping women and girls, and killing with knives, grenades and machine guns.

Some soldiers testified later that they’d understood their orders were to lay waste to the village and kill everyone there because they were Viet Cong sympathizers. Officers denied it, and no such written orders were ever found, although it was acknowledged that the troops were ordered to kill the livestock, burn the huts and poison the wells, and that there was no order as there should have been addressing the safeguarding of civilians.

One soldier shot himself in the foot to avoid his orders, turning the quintessential action of a coward into something almost self-sacrificing. He, like the rest of the soldiers, kept quiet about what they’d seen and done.

“I just started killing any kind of way I could kill. It just came; I didn’t know I had it in me,” Varnardo Simpson said in a 1982 TV interview, 15 years before he killed himself. “From shooting them to cutting their throats to scalping them to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongue. I did that. And I wasn’t the only one that did it; a lot of other people did it.”

The exception was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his two-gunner helicopter crew. “Something ain’t right about this,” Thompson said over his radio as he flew overhead. “There’s bodies everywhere. There’s a ditch full of bodies that we saw.”

Thompson landed his helicopter repeatedly to confront and defy higherranking officers. He coaxed out a dozen

villagers hiding in a bunker Calley and his solders were about to kill with grenades, and called in a gunship to evacuate them. “Y’all cover me,” Thompson told his gunners, Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, as he faced off against the U.S. infantrymen.

“If those bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them.”

Thompson officially reported the slaughter up the chain of command, which called off the rest of the operation and buried the report.

Battalion commander Lt. Col. Frank Barker called the operation in My Lai “well planned, well executed and successful” in his after-action report. He reported 128 “enemy” killed in action.

Brigade commander Col. Oran Henderson, informed by Thompson of all he’d seen, reported 20 noncombatants inadvertently killed in a crossfire between U.S. and Viet Cong forces.

Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster, Americal Division commander, insisted later to investigators that he’d reviewed and believed Henderson’s report, which, unfortunately, had somehow gone missing.

But the truth would come out.

Undeniable evidence Ron Ridenhour, a former gunner in another unit, sent registered letters to some 30 lawmakers and officials in March 1969, telling them what other soldiers had told him.

“I asked ‘Butch’ several times if all the people were killed. He said that he thought they were — men, women and children,” Ridenhour’s letter said. “He recalled seeing a small boy, about 3 or 4 years old, standing by the trail with a gunshot wound in one arm. ... He just stood there with big eyes staring around like he didn’t understand. ... Then the captain’s RTO (radio operator) put a burst of 16 (M-16 rifle) fire into him.”

The public didn’t hear about it for another eight months until journalist Seymour Hersh, who’d gotten wind of Calley’s upcoming court-martial, broke the story. The Army photographer who’d been on the My Lai mission, Sgt. Ronald Haeberle, provided the photos to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was the first to publish them. Haeberle then sold his photographs to Life magazine.

About 30 more were charged with crimes connected to the massacre or the cover-up. About half of them were officers, most of them charged with dereliction of duty.

But charges were dropped or military juries acquitted. Only Calley, against whom there was overwhelming evidence, was convicted of a crime. In 1971 he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, although he served only three years under house arrest before being freed.

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EUROPE/COVER STORY

Members of MEU training in both Romania, Israel

BY SCOTT WYLAND Stars and Stripes

NAPLES, Italy — A Marine Corps unit has members training simultaneously in Israel and Romania, two strategically important nations experiencing tensions with their neighbors.

The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit is participating in two exercises that began more than a week ago — Juniper Cobra in Israel and Spring Storm in Romania. Both exercises are intended to sharpen tactical skills by training with foreign allies.

Juniper Cobra, the larger of the two, is focused on boosting missile defenses through computer simulations and on military drills on land and sea. About 2,500 U.S. military FROM PAGE 3

Many of those who were at My Lai had left the service by the time the story broke. At the time, federal law provided no widely accepted way to prosecute former enlisted soldiers for crimes committed overseas while in uniform, although the Army’s general counsel, Robert E. Jordan III, recommended in 1969 that the My Lai participants be tried before

A look at some of the key players in the My Lai massacre and its aftermath. stripes.com/vietnam50

personnel from all services are taking part.

“The U.S. is deeply committed to the defense of Israel,” said Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, head of U.S. European Command, in a statement. “We will continue to work alongside them to promote stability throughout the region, not only for the purposes of this exercise but in the event of any real-world contingency.”

Marines trained with the Israeli military and practiced ship-to-shore movements from their amphibious assault vessel, the USS Iwo Jima.

The 26th MEU, based in North Carolina, was deployed to the 6th Fleet theater in January after assisting with hurricane disaster relief in Key West, Fla., Puerto Rico

and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

One of seven Marine expeditionary units, it conducts training exercises and activities that support 6th Fleet, as well as emergency and combat missions when needed.

For Spring Storm, Marines went to the Black Sea region, which has been tense since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Relations between the U.S. and Moscow have grown more strained since the Navy installed a missile-defense station in Romania and began building another in Poland.

Moscow has called it a provocative move against Russia’s missile program. U.S. officials insist the purpose is to thwart missile attacks from all adversaries.

Marines trained with the Romanian army, shooting on a

a special war crimes tribunal.

Eighty percent of Americans objected to Calley’s prosecution, according to a contemporary Gallup poll.

Twenty percent said Calley was executing his superiors’ lawful orders on the battlefield.

Jimmy Carter, then Georgia governor, urged constituents to “honor the flag” as Calley had done, and to leave their headlights on to show their support.

A song lauding him played on the radio.

Others considered Calley a scapegoat.

“We only want this country to realize that it cannot try a Calley for something which generals and presidents and our way of life encouraged him to do,” Vietnam vet and future Secretary of State John Kerry said at an anti-war protest.

“And if you try him, then at the same time you must try all those generals and presidents and soldiers who have part of the responsibility. You must in fact try this country.”

“If you were against the war, Calley was a war criminal writ large — but a dupe,” said

Ted Thomas, who served in Vietnam and teaches a class on the war at the Army Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “If you were on the right, he was just a soldier doing the best he could.”

Setting standards The Hague Conventions in the early 1900s set out the laws of war that required safeguarding the fundamental human rights of prisoners of war, wounded troops and civilians.

Later, the Nuremberg Principles stated that a soldier “just following orders,’’ as numerous Nazi war criminals had claimed, was not an excuse: Illegal orders must not be obeyed.

Likewise “command responsibility” — the idea that higher ranking officers are responsible for atrocities committed by their troops — has been codified since the American Civil War. After the execution of Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita for war crimes committed by troops in the Philippines

Photos courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps

A team from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit carries equipment and weapons to the barracks at the Capu Midia training area in Romania on March 9 during Spring Storm, a Romanian-led exercise in the Black Sea region. live-fire range, maneuvering in urban terrain and conducting a simulated amphibious assault, said Capt. Natalie Poggemeyer, a 26th MEU spokeswoman.

They also trained with a Romanian women’s unit, which included using live fire and nonlethal weapons, patrolling

and handling detainees, she said.

“Exercises like this allow us to build our capability to work together to respond to threats in the region,” Poggemeyer said.

in 1944 — despite there being no evidence that he approved or even knew of them — the doctrine was refined and given his name: the “Yamashita standard.”

It said that officers who knew about — or should have known about — atrocities and failed either to prevent or stop them could be criminally prosecuted.

My Lai resulted in another standard: the “Medina standard,” named for Capt.

Ernest Medina, which clarified U.S. law to make command responsibility applicable not only to foreign officers but U.S. officers.

Calley testified he’d been following Medina’s orders, and other witnesses testified to seeing Medina kill a woman lying injured. The Peers Inquiry found he’d possibly killed three people and that although aware of the massacre had done nothing to stop it.

Medina was acquitted of all charges.

Since then, the Army has failed to even attempt to hold officers accountable for war

crimes, he said, instead, scapegoating low-ranking troops.

wyland.scott@stripes.com Twitter: @wylandstripes

Lessons forgotten?

Historians say My Lai damaged military morale and increased revulsion to the war at home.

The “lessons of My Lai” also provided a model for future soldiers of what not to do.

Yet most enlisted troops have never heard of it, Nadal said.

Even West Point graduates, considered among the Army’s best and brightest, struggle to recall it.

“It was an atrocity. … It was a unit that was taking casualties, and they took it out on the village and committed atrocities,” answered a lieutenant colonel recently asked what he knew about My Lai. My Lai had been discussed in his philosophy class at West Point about just and unjust war, he said. But that was a couple of decades ago. His memory was hazy.

“I can’t remember the name of the platoon leader,” he said. montgomery. nancy@stripes.com

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MILITARY

Study: Unit cohesion unaffected by adding women

BY NANCY MONTGOMERY Stars and Stripes

Men in boot camp units that include women are just as likely to be satisfied with their training and esprit de corps as those serving in all-male contingents, says a new Norwegian study.

The researchers said that they found “no evidence that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits’ satisfaction with boot camp or their plans to continue in the military.”

The Norwegian study, titled “Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes?” comes as the U.S. Army has recently begun training women for the infantry, armor and other combat positions. The move remains controversial even though women, who comprise less than 15 percent of the Army, have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The study, posted as a working paper with the National Bureau of Economic Research, claims to be the first to assign men and women to live and work together and study how attitudes change over time.

The Norwegian male recruits became less sexist, the study concluded, just as previous racial “contact theory” studies have shown that racism decreases with familiarity among those assigned equal status.

“These findings demonstrate that men’s gendered attitudes are not fixed, but can change through interaction with women,” the study stated.

In contrast, a 2015 U.S. Army study on gender integration found that combat arms soldiers anticipating women joining their units felt certain that the women’s inclusion would degrade unit cohesion and readiness.

The Army study found that combat arms soldiers’ most urgent concern about having women in their units was the maintenance of physical performance standards, which they thought would inevitably decline. Nearly 60 percent of combat arms soldiers surveyed thought standards would not be maintained.

The next year, a Rand Corp. report found “strong, deep-seated and intensely felt opposition” from special operations personnel in all services to opening up their career field to women.

The Norway study did not measure the performance of squads during boot camp. There is also less gender inequality in Norway to begin with than in the United States, according to the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum.

“This paper does not answer all the questions,” said Gordon Dahl, the lead author of the study and an economics professor at the University of California at San Diego.

STACY PEARSALL /Courtesy of the U.S. Air Force

Army trainees practice hand-to-hand combat using pugil sticks during basic combat training at Fort Jackson, S.C. A Norwegian study found that unit cohesion was unaffected by adding women.

But it did assess unit cohesion and morale, finding no evidence that having a woman in the squad affected men’s enthusiasm for the military.

“What we’re saying is ‘How do they operate as a unit?’ ” Dahl said. “What we’re learning, at least in Norway, is that a lot of preconceived notions people had turned out not to be true. With common goals and equal status — that’s when barriers break down.”

The Norwegian study randomly assigned women to some units at boot camp to live and train on six-person teams with male trainees. Other units remained all male. The study included 781 men and 119 women, who were unaware that they were part of a study.

At the beginning of training, 55 percent of men agreed that mixed teams were as or more effective than same-sex

teams and 67 percent said housework should be equally shared.

After eight weeks, men with women in their squads were 14 percentage points more likely to think mixed teams perform as well or better than unisex teams, and 8 percentage points more likely to believe that men and women should share household work equally.

Dahl said that the study may be more applicable to the wider services than to combat jobs in which physical strength and endurance are the top requirements.

“Our study may not apply to the Marines,” Dahl said, “but it certainly applies to radar technicians. Both Norway and the U.S. have less than 15 percent women (in the military). These attitudes are part of the reason why we don’t have more women in noncombat roles.”

The Army has for years trained

women and men together at boot camp.

The sexes live in separate barracks, however.

In contrast, the Marine Corps maintains a separate course of basic training for women, who comprise 9 percent of the corps.

In June, Brig. Gen. Austin Renforth, the commander of Marine Recruit Depot Parris Island, said that women must train separately from men at the beginning of training.

“There’s a lot of tears, there’s a lot of struggling,” Renforth told Military.com. “... I don’t necessarily want the men to see those women; it can have a reverse effect if you see them too early. You get one chance to make a first impression.”

Montgomery.nancy@stripes.com Twitter: @montgomerynance

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Cyber School has new command sergeant major

by Laura Levering | Fort Gordon Public Affairs Office

Fort Gordon and the U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence welcomed a new command sergeant major to the U.S. Army Cyber School during an assumption of responsibility ceremony held March 9 at Signal Theater.

Command Sgt. Maj. Julie A. Guerra assumed responsibility of the Cyber School. Prior to Guerra’s arrival, Sgt. Maj. Karl Pendergrass served as the school’s interim command sergeant major.

Brig. Gen. Neil S. Hersey, U.S. Army Cyber School commandant, welcomed Guerra to the team and commended Pendergrass for filling in during a crucial time, setting the stage for Guerra to excel.

Command Sgt. Maj. Julie A. Guerra, Cyber Corps and Cyber School, visits with Command Sgt. Maj. Eric M. Schmitz, Intelligence and Security Command. Bill Bengtson / Fort Gordon Public Affairs Office Command Sgt. Maj. Julie A. Guerra, Cyber Corps and Cyber School, visits with Command Sgt. Maj. Eric M. Schmitz, Intelligence and Security Command. Bill Bengtson / Fort Gordon Public Affairs Office “When Command Sgt. Maj. (William) Rinehart was called up to (U.S.) Army South, Sgt. Maj. Pendergrass beautifully and professionally stepped up to serve as my battle buddy, and in doing so, actually accelerated the school’s initiatives,” Hersey said.

Guerra’s long, distinguished career in military intelligence at the operational and institutional levels is one of several qualities that make her a perfect fit to lead the Cyber branch NCO’s, according to Hersey.

“A professional, trained, and prepared NCO Corps is essential to the Army’s capability to remain ready … she has the skills, the aptitudes, and the experience to lead the way for a Cyber Noncommissioned Officer Corps and for the Army,” Hersey said. “She is uniquely qualified to serve as a Cyber Corps command sergeant major with her key insight into how cyber aligns within the total Army force.”

Guerra enlisted in the Army as a counterintelligence agent in 1994.

She is a graduate of the U.S. Army Airborne Course, Drill Sergeant School, and Equal Opportunity Leaders Course.

Command Sgt. Maj. Julie A. Guerra, left, Cyber Corps and Cyber School, holds her unit’s colors in a March 9 ceremony taking charge of her duties. With her on stage are Brig. Gen. Neil S. Hersey, commandant, U.S. Army Cyber School and Chief of Cyber and Sgt. 1st Class Nolan R. Tobler, Cyber School.

Bill Bengtson / Fort Gordon Public Affairs Office

Command Sgt. Maj. Julie A. Guerra, Cyber Corps and Cyber School, visits with Command Sgt. Maj. Eric M. Schmitz, Intelligence and Security Command.

Bill Bengtson / Fort Gordon Public Affairs Office

Expressing appreciation for Pendergrass, Guerra thanked him for a “seamless handover.” Looking to the future, she told Hersey she felt honored and humbled by the opportunity to lead alongside him.

“To staff, cadre, Soldiers, officers of the Cyber School – I look forward to serving and to representing you across the Army,” Guerra said.

Guerra holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College. Her overseas tours include Korea, with deployments as part of the Implementation Force, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. She is joined by her husband, Mathew, and 12-year-old daughter, Catalina.

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ARCYBE Welcomes new Senior Enlisted Advisor

by William Roche | U.S. Army Cyber Command Public Affairs

U.S. Army Cyber Command welcomed a new command sergeant major during an assumption of responsibility ceremony at Fort Belvoir, Va., March 12.

Lt. Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, commanding general, ARCYBER, passed the command’s colors to incoming Command Sgt. Maj. Sheryl D. Lyon, signifying her acceptance of the senior enlisted position in the organization.

Lyon, who will serve as ARCYBER’s senior enlisted advisor, joined the Army in 1991 and completed training as an Arabic linguist and Signals Intelligence Analyst. She has since served tours of duty in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including service in Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation New Dawn and with the Kosovo Force.

She has served in every enlisted leadership position, from team sergeant to first sergeant, to command sergeant major at the brigade level and senior enlisted leader at the nominative level.

She comes to Fort Belvoir following duty as the U.S. Army Europe command sergeant major.

During her brief remarks at the assumption of responsibility ceremony, Lyon said she is already impressed by the professionalism of the Army Cyber team.

“I’m ready to face the challenges that are going to come about,” Lyon said. “One of the things that never ceases to amaze me everywhere I go is the level of professionalism across our force and it has been no different here with Army Cyber.

“You have built this Army Service Component Command up from the ground.

All you can do is go higher and higher.

“To our civilians, Soldiers - it means a great deal, the work that you do, the accomplishments that you have achieved. You should never ever take that for granted.”

Nakasone called Lyon a leader of character whose wealth of experience as a command sergeant major makes her “singularly prepared for the challenges and the opportunities [at ARCYBER]... I am confident she will continue leading, mentoring and developing Command Sgt. Maj. Sheryl D. Lyon accepts the colors of U.S. Army Cyber Command from Lt. Gen. Paul M. Soldiers and officers.”

Lyon’s professional biography is available at Nakasone, commanding general, Army Cyber Command, in an assumption of responsibility ceremony held Monday, www.arcyber.army.mil/Leaders/Command- signifying her acceptance of her new duties as ARCYBER’s command sergeant major, at Fort Belvoir, Va. JOY BRATHWAITE / ARMY NEWS SERVICE Sergeant Major.

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EUROPE

Exercise preps USAF for worst-case scenarios

BY JENNIFER H. SVAN Stars and Stripes

SPANGDAHLEM AIR BASE, Germany — Against a backdrop of rolling hills and farmer’s fields in this bucolic corner of southwest Germany, the U.S. Air Force is practicing for worst-case scenarios.

The base on March 15 wrapped up a two-week exercise during which flying ramped up day and night.

Loud sirens signaled for airmen to take cover under desks, among other training drills.

It was the largest exercise staged at Spangdahlem in more than 18 months, but base officials said it wasn’t in response to any emerging or specific threat.

Rather, it’s one of many ways the Air Force trains to be ready for a gambit of possible scenarios, from defending the base from attack to quickly launching aircraft to help a NATO ally in distress, officials said.

“Whether we’re here in Korea or in Florida, we’re always making sure we can defend the base from any adversary, any sort of aggression, and also support our allies,” said Tech. Sgt. Kyle Beck, a member of the 52nd Fighter Wing inspector general’s office exercise inspection team.

The exercise featured a lot of air power, combining F-16 fighter jets from two squadrons — Spangdahlem’s 480th Fighter Squadron and those of the visiting 112th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron. The 112th is an Ohio Air National Guard unit deployed to Europe from Toledo.

The unit brought with it more than 300 airmen and 12 F-16 Fighting Falcons, wrapping up a two-month deployment to Estonia with a few additional weeks of training at Spangdahlem, said Lt. Col. Greg Barasch, the unit’s commander.

“This kind of brings it all together for us. We get to work with a lot of regional partners, NATO allies” in Estonia, Barasch said. “And then we

PHOTOS

BY

JENNIFER H. SVAN /Stars and Stripes

Ohio National Guard F-16 fighter jets from the 112th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, deployed to Europe from Toledo, prepare for training March 13 at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany.

Left: F-16 pilots with the 480th Fighter Squadron suit up before flying during the exercise. Right: Pilots from both units listen to a preflight briefing. get to come here and work with a U.S. unit and actually tie together some of our mission sets to maintain that readiness.”

While in Estonia, the Ohio Air National Guard trained at Amari Air Base, flying sorties with partners in the region.

The deployment was part of a theater security package under Operation Atlantic Re-

solve to act as a deterrent and reassure NATO allies nervous about Russian intentions.

The Ohio pilots, about 60 percent of whom are part-time airmen, were back in the air almost immediately when they arrived in Germany, figuring out quickly how to train with the Spangdahlem fliers, Barasch said.

Maintainers from both squadrons supported the busy flying schedule, gaining important lessons in the process, they said.

During the second week of the exercise, Capt. Jessica Watts, 480th Aircraft Maintenance Unit officer in-charge, said, “We are generating more than half the normal sorties

that we would produce in a month.

“By putting so much stress on the organization to see how well we perform, as leaders it allows us to see, ‘Hey, I have an issue here,’ ” she said. “You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.” svan.jennifer@stripes.com Twitter: @stripesktown

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MILITARY

Seeking justice War dog handlers left behind by adoption process

BY DIANNA CAHN Stars and Stripes

S

WASHINGTON taff Sgt. Shawn Martinez stepped off the airplane onto the Kansas tarmac, hunching his shoulders against the gloom of a cold, gray winter’s day and the starkness of coming home. He gave his buddy, Bono, a tactical explosive detection dog, a playful wrestle.

He’d barely taken a few steps when Army contractors approached him to take the dog. After all, Bono was the property of the U.S. Army.

It was wrenching. Martinez and Bono had traversed hell together in Afghanistan in 2012. They’d lost a fellow battle buddy — watching as his life drained away under flying bullets — and bore witness to each other’s pain. Bono had developed shakes and nightmares; he would urinate on himself in moments of stress. Martinez had his own anxiety after three deployments that included a Purple Heart after taking shrapnel in his upper legs from a grenade.

Being abruptly separated as they came home in February 2013 was brutal. “They just didn’t care,” said Martinez. “They threw him in a kennel, and that was that.”

It took Martinez months of pounding the phones before he found Bono at a kennel run by Army subcontractor K2 Solutions in North Carolina and ultimately adopted him. When he went to collect Bono, the dog was skinny and agitated, Martinez said. He had “hot spots” where he would chew into his own flesh in moments of distress — something he continues to do today when he is confined in small spaces.

It seemed to Martinez that this alpha dog that had been trained to run through battlefields and sniff out bombs had been all but imprisoned in kennel cages, rarely getting to stretch his legs.

“He didn’t get walked a lot,” Martinez said. “He didn’t get shown a lot of attention.”

Bono was one of 232 military war dogs who served honorably in the Army’s four-year tactical explosive device detection program, or TEDD, and according to a just-released Defense Department inspector general report, he was one of the lucky ones. Struggling with anxiety, Bono left the TEDD program while it was still operational and was able to land in the care of one of his handlers. Most of the dogs and handlers never found each other again.

Steps skipped The report found that the Army had no plans in place on how to dispose of the dogs, so after the program closed abruptly in early 2014, the Army had just weeks to adopt out or reassign 150 remaining dogs. The Army’s office of the Provost Marshal General did not extend the contract care for the dogs, so it was forced to skip steps and quickly dispose of them, the report said.

Because of that, dogs were adopted out without giving their handlers first option, and many were given away without the required vetting of the dog or its new owner to ensure they were suitable, the report found. The IG found cases where a dog that was trained to bite or was aggressive was given to a family with small children. Many of the dogs weren’t neutered or tracked properly.

Army data show that of 232 dogs, 40 were adopted by handlers, 47 were adopted out to civilians, 70 went to other Army units, at least nine died and the rest went to federal or law enforcement agencies. Three were identified on a spreadsheet but not included in the Army’s final tally, so their fates were not clear, the report found.

The IG made recommendations for the Army to put safeguards in place for future programs, since the TEDD program shut down long ago, but it did not hold any individuals accountable.

The report also did not address the way some dogs, like Bono, languished in kennels before the program ended.

For former handlers and advocates, the report comes as no surprise. But they say it didn’t delve deep enough or try to right past wrongs.

“We hoped there would be more resolution for the handlers,” said Betsy Hampton, who has been running the Facebook page and website Justice for TEDD Handlers since 2015, the year after the program shut down. “I was surprised they admitted fault,” she said.

“But mostly, I was upset that they are not rectifying wrongdoing.”

Justice for TEDD Handlers During the “surge” in Afghanistan in 2010, U.S. forces and their allies encountered a spike in buried enemy bombs. The Army initiated the TEDD program as a way to help troops detect and remove the explosives before they did harm.

The program was considered a suc-

Courtesy of Andrew Spaulding

Army Spc. Andrew Spaulding and tactical explosives detection dog Bono during Bono’s first deployment to Afghanistan in 2010. cess, lasting from 2011 to 2014. But it was stood up quickly, procuring and training dogs through a contractor rather than the established Air Force training program used for most of the military’s war dogs.

Soldiers from brigade combat teams volunteered to be TEDD handlers and, after going through a few months of training, would deploy with the dogs.

Once they came home, the dogs would go back into the system to be picked up by another handler for deployment.

Handlers were told they would be given first right to adopt the dogs when the time came, according to the report.

But that promise mostly fell through the cracks. When the TEDD program was shutting down in late 2013 and early 2014, the subcontractor that trained and kenneled the dogs — the second over the course of four years — held two adoption events. Many handlers weren’t notified and, as the report indicated, many of the dogs and their prospective adopters were not properly vetted.

“Essentially, anyone with a pulse was given a dog,” Hampton wrote in a description on the Justice for TEDD Handlers Facebook page.

Hampton and a small group of people started the social media campaign to reunite TEDDs with their handlers in December 2015. Her involvement with the TEDDs began after the shelter where she adopted her own dog posted a notice about a TEDD handler who was looking for his dog, Howard.

She joined thousands of supporters on social media to help him locate Howard and ultimately win a custody fight to get

him back.

She and a few others soon discovered that Howard’s case wasn’t isolated. He was one of six dogs adopted by a small town in North Carolina on the premise that the dogs would be used by law enforcement. But instead, they had been adopted by individual police officers, Hampton said.

Since then, they’ve connected with more than 100 TEDD handlers who have been unable to find or reconnect with their dogs. Hampton said some of the handlers had tracked down their dogs within weeks of the adoptions, but many families were not willing to give the dogs up.

“The people running this (adoption event) did not know what they were doing,” Hampton said in an interview.

“I was told whoever showed up got a dog.”

Hampton and her group found some dogs went to friends of contractors in the program or friends of Army officers, she said. Others went to a group that said they were planning to retrain them as service dogs for veterans.

Instead, the dogs were left at a kennel while the group tried to sell them to the Panamanian government, Hampton said.

Some people acted like the dogs were trophies, she said.

“People were posting stuff on Facebook. They were proud of the dogs they found,” Hampton said. “We have so many files of screenshots of people bragging about getting these dogs. It’s disgusting.”

SEE JUSTICE ON PAGE 14

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Friday, March23, 23,2018 2018 Friday, March

MILITARY ment. But after just a few days of open farmland and a little discipline — they would put him in a room when he would act out — Ben stopped that behavior and hasn’t exhibited it since, she said.

“At the adoption place, it was obvious things were not handled properly,” she said.

The woman running the adoption was clearly stressed. “It was chaotic.”

One thing was clear, Ben was a dog used to being a leader.

To this day, every time she walks outside to pick up the newspaper, Ben startles her when he crouches and jumps up and grabs the paper. It’s like a game.

“After all these years, you’d think we’d be used to it,” she said, laughing.

“He is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest dog,” she said. “We think we hit the jackpot with him — and with Julio and Sully and their children. I really think it doesn’t get better than that.”

FROM PAGE 12

Ben

One of Hampton’s key complaints is when adoptive families, fearing they will lose their dog, won’t share information with the handlers. It’s heartbreaking for them, she said.

Others have done right by handlers — seeking to reunite them with the dog. When Kim Scarborough adopted her dog, Ben, during one of the Army’s adoption days at K2 Solutions in 2014, she set out right away to locate Ben’s handler.

Scarborough found Hampton online, and two years later, Hampton connected her to Julio Munoz, Ben’s handler, now living in New York City.

Scarborough, who lives in Kinston, N.C., said she and Munoz corresponded for a while through Facebook until they finally met a few months later when she visited her mother in Pennsylvania.

They met at a park in spring 2016. Munoz came with his wife, Sully, and their two children. Scarborough came with Ben. She watched the emotional reunion of dog and handler, and Scarborough said she knew, no matter how painful, that she had to give Ben back to his rightful owner.

Munoz wondered whether Ben might be better off with Scarborough and her husband, Paul, on the farm, she said. But Scarborough was adamant. “I told him he needed to take the dog,” she said.

The Munoz family took Ben, and they all stayed in touch. After several months, Scarborough missed Ben and Munoz realized the animal would benefit from being able to run around, so they agreed to share custody. Ben would become a snowbird dog. He would be in New York in the summers

Bono revisited Courtesy of Kim Scarborough

Kim Scarborough, Ben and Ben’s former handler, Julio Munoz, catch up at Scarborough’s Kinston, N.C., home in August 2017. and head down to the farm for the winters.

In late 2016, though, when Munoz deployed again, he asked Scarborough if she could take Ben on the farm full time.

“Even though we went through a lot of stuff, I still wanted Ben to have the better life,” Munoz said. “I wanted him to go back to the original family that adopted him. He already fell in love with them, and I didn’t want to break that apart.”

Max D. Lederer Jr., Publisher Terry Leonard, Editor Robert H. Reid, Senior Managing Editor Tina Croley, Managing Editor for Content Doreen Wright, U.S. Edition Editor Michael Davidson, Revenue Director CONTACT US 529 14th Street NW, Suite 350, Washington, D.C. 20045-1301 Email: stripesweekly@stripes.com Editorial: (202) 761-0900 Advertising: (202) 761-0910 Michael Davidson, Weekly Partnership Director: davidson.michael@stripes.com Additional contact information: stripes.com

Now the dog lives with the Scarboroughs, and the Munozes stop in for visits. The two families have become friends, Scarborough said.

“We have a unique relationship, one for which I am especially proud,” she said.

Scarborough said Ben is thriving. When she first took him home, the 45-pound dog was 10 pounds underweight and extremely stressed. He was humping everything in sight, she said with embarrass-

This publication is a compilation of stories from Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper authorized by the Department of Defense for members of the military community. The contents of Stars and Stripes are unofficial, and are not to be considered as the official views of, or endorsed by, the U.S. government, including the Defense Department or the military services. The U.S. Edition of Stars and Stripes is published jointly by Stars and Stripes and this newspaper.

The appearance of advertising in this publication, including inserts or supplements, does not constitute endorsement by the DOD or Stars and Stripes of the products or services advertised.

Products or services advertised in this publication shall be made available for purchase, use, or patronage without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, physical handicap, political affiliation, or any other nonmerit factor of the purchaser, user, or patron.

© Stars and Stripes, 2018

In May 2015, Andrew Spaulding put a post on Facebook with pictures of Bono, the bomb detection dog he handled during his deployment to Afghanistan five years earlier.

“I was supposed to have first choice when it came to adopting him, and come to find out, his last handler was able to adopt him instead,” wrote Spaulding, who served six years in the Army and now lives in Bartow, Fla. He wanted to locate Bono and find out how he was doing.

Bono and Spaulding had deployed to southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in 2010. It was the Taliban heartland, and improvised explosive devices were everywhere. For 10 months, the dog and his handler were inseparable — going on patrols, working checkpoints or hanging back at the base.

“He slept with me, ate with me,” Spaulding said. “He went everywhere with me.”

Bono found caches of bomb-making equipment and weapons. He sniffed out buried bombs. He even detected the scent of explosives on an empty trailer bed that was being pulled behind a motorcycle. A swipe proved him right — the motorcycle had been carrying explosives.

When they landed back home in 2011, the contractor that

trained and housed the dogs — at that point Vohne Liche, in Indiana — was waiting on the tarmac to take Bono back.

It wasn’t until 2015, not long after the TEDD program shut down, that Spaulding set out to look for Bono. A colleague from the program informed him Bono had been adopted.

In May, he put up the Facebook post.

Within days, the post had been shared more than 100,000 times, Spaulding said, and it ultimately led to Bono’s second handler, Martinez, who deployed with Bono in 2012 and 2013.

Spaulding contacted Martinez and learned what those two had been through together.

Martinez and Bono were attached to a Special Forces unit. They went on countless air and overnight assaults, landing in the dark of night in remote areas and seeking out the enemy.

One night, during a particularly heavy fight, Martinez heard on the radio that Staff Sgt. Jon Schmidt had been wounded while running to help a fallen Green Beret. Bono and Martinez had drilled with Schmidt to be the backup handler should something happen to Martinez. The three were extremely close. Martinez and Bono were by Schmidt’s side when he died.

Martinez told Spaulding that Bono was living a good life with him. Though it hurt Spaulding to know he would never live with Bono again, that was all he needed to hear.

“Bono is with his last handler and living a very happy life,” Spaulding wrote in a post May 18. “He was certified last year as a service dog to help his current owner with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. He is loved by him very much and that is all I care to see.”

Spaulding said he was told from day one of the TEDD program that as Bono’s first handler, he would have first adoption rights. But no one ever contacted him. “I guess it was just a bunch of empty promises,” he said.

Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of his dog. But he knows Bono is in good hands and he does not want to destroy what Martinez has with the dog.

He hopes that one day he will get to see him again. cahn.dianna@stripes.com Twitter: @DiannaCahn

Friday, March 23, 2018

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7:30pm Liverpool Legends Jabez S. Hardin Performing Arts Center Repeats at 7:30 p.m. March 24. This Beatles tribute band’s members were picked by Louise Harrison, sister of actual Beatle George Harrison. $45.

Visit AugustaAmusements.com or call 706-726-0366.

Sat Mar 24

8am 2K Fun Run/Walk Diamond Lakes Regional Park Registration starts at 7 a.m. Event includes prizes and a raffle. $10 per entry; proceeds benefit the Friends of the Augusta Library. Register in advance at any Richmond County library location or online at bit.ly/ easteregg2k.

9am - 11am Run Into Recovery River Levee Trail Benefits Young People in Recovery and Focus on Recovery. $20, Augusta Striders registration; $25, early registration (by March 17 to save $5 and guarantee a shirt); $15, walkers, students and kids fun run (the Kids 1-Mile Fun Run will start at 9 a.m.).

Visit give.classy.org/rir2018 or email augustaga@youngpeopleinrecovery.org.

10am - noon Trillium Trek Greystone Preserve, North Augusta This guided hike has a goal of searching for the endangered flowering plant Relict Trillium. Free, Central Savannah River Land Trust members; $10,

Friday, March 23, 2018

suggested donation for nonmembers.

Call 706-312-5263, ext. 2, or email bethany@csrlt.org.

Noon - 2pm Hike Into Spring Mistletoe State Park Hike along the Cliatt-Creek and Beach Trail, with a ranger leading the way. $5 parking. Pre-registration required. Call 706-541-0321 or visit gastateparks.org/ mistletoe.

Noon - 11pm Benefit Concert with Kellie Pickler Evans Towne Center Park The All in for Miller Concert is in honor of Miller Grover. All profits will go to the Lachlan McIntosh Tannery Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises awareness for childhood cancer. Fun and games available during the day, then Kellie Pickler takes the stage at 7 p.m. $5, daytime activities; $10, concert (gates open at 5 p.m.). Visit goo.gl/i8A5hM or evanstownecenterpark.com/events.

7:30pm Latin Masterpieces Miller Theater A Symphony Orchestra Augusta performance. $23-$66. Visit soaugusta. org or call 706-826-4705.

Sun Mar 25

1pm Disney Live! Mickey & Minnie’s Doorway to Magic Bell Auditorium Repeats at 4 p.m. March 25. $25-$45.

Call 877-4AUGTIX or visit georgialinatix. com.

Friday, 23,23, 2018 Friday,March March 2018

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