82nd Airborne

WASHINGTON -- Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of allied forces in the Persian Gulf, is working on plans for a quick return of victorious U.S. forces, Pentagon officials acknowledged yesterday.The acknowledgment came amid reports that President Bush would welcome home more than 4,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne Division tomorrow in a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base, just outside the nation's capital.The White House and the Pentagon denied yesterday that such plans had been made.

FALLUJAH, Iraq - One soldier of the 82nd Airborne Division was killed and seven others were injured in an explosion yesterday while escorting children to school, a spokesman for the division said. None of the children was hurt. The dead soldier was the third killed in action in the "Sunni Triangle" to the north and west of Baghdad in three days and the 104th to die in battle since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. Soldiers patrolling tribal towns in the area in recent weeks have increasingly come under attack from roadside bombs and guerrillas armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

WASHINGTON -- Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of allied forces in the Persian Gulf, is working on plans for a quick return of victorious U.S. forces, Pentagon officials acknowledged yesterday.The acknowledgment came amid reports that President Bush would welcome home more than 4,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne Division tomorrow in a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base, just outside the nation's capital.The White House and the Pentagon denied yesterday that such plans had been made.

For a man steeped in military tradition who endured the grueling training to be an Army Ranger and paratrooper, heading a company called "Sweetheart" seems incongruent.But for William F. McLaughlin, president and chief executive officer of a seemingly cutesy-named company, the chance to head the country's largest maker of disposable food service products is yet another challenge."I view it as a great challenge," he said. "And I'm very pleased to be here."Mr. McLaughlin, 46, took command of Sweetheart Cup Co. last May, intent on leading a turnaround at a company that been severely wounded by a decade of turmoil.

Robert D. Horsey, a retired Somerset County District Court judge and sailor, died at his Marion Station home Sunday of Lewy Body dementia, a progressive brain disease. He was 72. Judge Horsey was born at his family's Coulbourne Creek home in the lower Eastern Shore county and raised at a nearby farm. After graduating from Crisfield High School in 1951, he worked for two years for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, surveying the Eastern Seaboard from New England to Key West, Fla. He enlisted in the Army and served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division from 1954 to 1956.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- Outside the Smoke Bomb Hill Chapel on this deserted army post yesterday, military wives hugged one another and cheered themselves with this verse from "A GI Family's Prayer:""On land and sand and sea and air, I back my soldier with this prayer. No matter how far he's forced to roam, just bring, I pray, my GI home."Across the nation, it was a day of prayer and patriotism -- the first full day of the allied forces' ground assault.Everywhere, the talk was of the land war."

Thanks to eighth-graders at Johnnycake Middle School, a lonely GI in Saudi Arabia is getting mail from home.Last month Army Pvt. Gary Gustafson, serving with the 27th Engineers, attached to the 82nd Airborne Division, wrote to USA Today complaining that he had nobody to write.Joe Selby, a social studies teacher at the Baltimore County middle school, showed the letter to a colleague, Dan Shaner, who teaches English. Mr. Shaner turned the soldier's plight into a special project for extra credit.

CHICAGO -- There is a spring in my step and a song in my heart, because the election is over and my party won. Not the Democrats, and not the Republicans. No, the party that deeply distrusts both Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush: the Divided Government Party. For the last 12 years, Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives, and for most of that time they also ruled the Senate. During the Bush administration, this has been a bad thing, particularly for people who favored less government, and for people who liked Mr. Bush in 2000 because he opposed using the military for nation-building - or, as Condoleezza Rice once put it, having "the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - On Wednesday, Spc. Phil McIlroy came home from Iraq. Yesterday, the 22-year-old visited a stone marker here bearing the name of a friend in the 82nd Airborne Division who died in an ambush last year when both were in Afghanistan. McIlroy has heard news reports about the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He has been told that one of the accused Cumberland-based reservists, Pvt. Lynndie England, is at nearby Fort Bragg awaiting possible charges. To McIlroy, the abuse of prisoners is plain wrong and, based on his stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, rare.

WASHINGTON -- In darkness, Army Rangers, their faces blackened, parachute onto the airfield. Navy SEALs, in scuba gear, emerge from the waters around the port.The clandestine Delta Force slips through the streets of Port-au-Prince to the homes and offices of the military dictators.Marines leap from helicopters and landing craft to seize command and communication points in the capital. And the 82nd Airborne paratroopers descend from the night sky to join the attack.That is how an invasion of Haiti would start, according to experts inside and outside the Pentagon.