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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDeployed Inside the United States: The Military Waits for the Migrant Caravan
With little electricity, no combat pay and holidays away from home, the 5,600 American troops on the southwest border are on a mission ordered by a politically determined commander in chief and a Pentagon unable to convince him of its perils.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Helene CooperPhotographs by Tamir Kalifa
Nov. 10, 2018
BASE CAMP DONNA, Tex. Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Micek, a platoon sergeant with the 89th Military Police Brigade, tore open the brown packaging of his M.R.E. on Thursday. It was a chicken and noodle dish, one of the more sought-after rations because it came with Skittles. But from the cot outside his platoons tent at the Armys latest forward operating base, Sergeant Micek could almost see the bright orange and white roof of Whataburger, a fast-food utopia eight miles away but off limits under current Army rules. The desert tan flatbed trucks at the base are for hauling concertina wire, not food runs.
Such is life on the latest front where American soldiers are deployed. The midterm elections are over, along with President Trumps rafter-shaking rallies warning that an approaching migrant caravan of Central Americans amounts to a foreign invasion that warrants deploying up to 15,000 active-duty military troops to the border states of Texas, Arizona and California. But the 5,600 American troops who rushed to the brown, dry scrub along the southwest border are still going through the motions of an elaborate mission that appeared to be set into action by a commander in chief determined to get his supporters to the polls, and a Pentagon leadership unable to convince him of its perils.
Instead of football with their families on this Veterans Day weekend, soldiers with the 19th Engineer Battalion, fresh from Fort Knox, Ky., were painstakingly webbing concertina wire on the banks of the Rio Grande, just beneath the McAllen-Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge.
Nearby, troops from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State were making sure a sick call tent was properly set up next to their aid station. And a few miles away, Staff Sgt. Juan Mendoza was directing traffic as his engineer support company from Fort Bragg, N.C., unloaded military vehicles.
Come Thanksgiving, they most likely will still be here.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/us/deployed-inside-the-united-states-the-military-waits-for-the-migrant-caravan.html
Jersey Devil
(9,862 posts)At the rate the "caravan" is proceeding they may need Easter baskets too.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)lunch handed to them this past week. Wait till the Pictures come out of this area with the Concertina Wire strung along the River Banks and along the Hyways.
Some of use Oldsters remember those ugly Pictures coming out of Hungary ,Poland,and East Germany as people fled in the Sixties and Seventies.
spanone
(135,627 posts)OAITW r.2.0
(23,810 posts)Instead of deploying troops for political kabuki theater, we should be defending our nation from climate change that's causing as trillions of dollars in damages and thousands of lives. The damage that climate change begets in the form of fires, flooding, hurricanes, and tornado's is the real and present danger to our country, not what a relatively small number of migrants represent. These same migrants could actually be helping our country fight against Climate Change and earning their right to citizenship..
Marcuse
(7,391 posts)mahatmakanejeeves
(56,884 posts)he'll fly to Mar-a-Lago for some badly needed golf.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,021 posts)He didn't think of them as people, just tools, when he sent them there to gin up his 'base'. He has completely forgotten about them since the election, because they're not tools for whatever he wants to do now.