Fort Bragg

WASHINGTON -- After a third white soldier was charged in the killing of a black couple in Fayetteville, N.C., Army officials said that they were examining whether there were any patterns of extremist activity at Fort Bragg because the three harbored Nazi flags and white supremacist literature.Maj. Rivers Johnson, a spokesman for the Army's 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, said in a statement Friday that the shootings were an "isolated incident," but he acknowledged that the division was "reviewing the units" for any evidence of "patterns of activity that are incompatible with Army policy."

Nelson Leighton "Pete" Bond Jr., a former Alex. Brown & Sons investment executive and business owner, died Monday of complications from diabetes at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 75. Mr. Bond, whose father was executive vice president of McGraw Hill Publishing Co. and president of McGraw Hill International and whose mother was a homemaker, was born in Montclair, N.J., and raised in Essex Fells, N.J. After graduating from Montclair High School in 1953, he earned a bachelor's degree in history in 1957 from Lehigh University.

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."

When Ty Ruff, a 22-year-old Baltimorean, heard that he'd be a castmate in "The Real World: D.C.," he was disappointed. The previous season had been filmed in Cancun, Mexico, and the one before that took place in Brooklyn, N.Y. Once he settled in, though, being in Dupont Circle "was like ... the other side of the world." Ruff moved into the house at 2100 S St. on July 2 with seven strangers, but the castmates, some of whom were just 5 years old when the original "The Real World" was broadcast in 1992, can't say much about the 23rd season of the show, which is scheduled to premiere at 10 p.m. Dec. 30 on MTV. Their tight-lipped spiels sound rehearsed, as each castmate chants the "live hard, play hard" mantra they say defines D.C. culture.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- Like a mantra, you hear it over and JTC over again in this military town: "It's what he's trained for."With 30,000 troops from neighboring Fort Bragg on duty in the Persian Gulf, spouses seem to offer up the explanation as a kind of emotional salve."

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.

An Army commander at Fort Bragg, N.C., has ordered Pfc. Lynndie R. England to face a military court-martial on 19 charges connected to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, overriding an earlier recommendation that some counts against the young Army reservist be dropped. The Army announced yesterday that Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, referred England to trial by a general court-martial. Her trial, scheduled to begin Jan. 17, is for now the only one arising from the scandal to play out inside the United States.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - To hear Brig. Gen. Bill Fox tell it, it was "just another day" at this sprawling Army post on the Carolina coastal plane where paratroopers train. The huge Air Force C-17 transport made three passes over the "drop zone," disgorging its load of medical supplies and units of the 44th Medical Brigade, the only airborne medical brigade in the Army. The soldiers - X-ray technicians, doctors and nurses among them - floated gracefully to earth and quickly began setting up a field hospital, just as they practice doing almost monthly.

Fires throughout the region during the weekend destroyed a church in Prince George's County, residences in Carroll and Anne Arundel counties and a rowhouse in Baltimore, and caused the death of a Baltimore servicewoman stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. City firefighters fought a blaze yesterday in West Baltimore that destroyed a vacant three-story rowhouse and damaged an adjacent rowhouse in the 100 block of S. Monroe St. No one was injured in the fire, which...

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - Sgt. Steven Snyder is getting his affairs in order. He has updated his will, directed his paycheck to go to his family and given his wife, Jamie, power of attorney. For the first time in his six years in the military, the 27-year-old soldier is facing the grim reality that he likely will go to war. An infantryman in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, Snyder has spent the last year and a half preparing for dangerous missions. His division is capable of deploying soldiers and conducting airborne operations anywhere in the world within 18 hours.

Ethel Bohle was in the attic of her Severn home Friday morning, retrieving photos of her grandson, Brad, from more than five dozen albums and recalling memories of the 29-year-old soldier who was killed this week in Afghanistan. One of her favorite memories involved her husband, Edward, who died three years ago. "They would do woodworking together, and Brad even had a lathe in his house," she said. "After they were done working, Pop would make him a milkshake and shave the ice for it. When Brad's father came to tell me the bad news, he said, 'I guess Brad and Pop are having a milkshake.

At the Air Force Student Detachment barracks at Fort Meade, almost every room contains mold. Water drips from leaky pipes into buckets on the floor. Shower water seeps down a hallway wall. Forty-seven airmen live in these half-century-old barracks, among the worst on the Army installation in western Anne Arundel County. "I think we've gone beyond the point of saying these barracks are unsuitable," said Maj. Danny S. Chung, commander of a Marine Corps detachment at Fort Meade.

When Ari D. Brown-Weeks learned that his wife planned to visit Washington, he asked that she go to Arlington National Cemetery, take photos and e-mail them to him in Iraq. "He especially wanted a video of the changing of the guards," said Ashley Weeks, 21, a Harford County native. "I took the pictures on a beautiful, peaceful day, and I know he saw them." Specialist Brown-Weeks, 23, an Army paratrooper who had lived in Abingdon for two years, was killed in a truck accident in Baghdad with six other soldiers Monday, military officials said.

Their story began on her first day at the Johns Hopkins University, the day Jenna Parkinson, a freshman, met Jonathan Grassbaugh, an intimidating senior and the battalion commander in the ROTC program she joined. It ended nearly six years later on a spring day at Fort Bragg, N.C., when Parkinson - now Jenna Grassbaugh - learned that just 10 months after getting married, she is now a widow. "When I saw the two of them at my door, I just thought it had to [be] something else," said Jenna Grassbaugh, 22, a first-year law school student at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. "I just wanted them to tell me he was hurt and not gone.

A soldier from Gaithersburg was killed in combat in Iraq on Wednesday, the Department of Defense announced yesterday. Army Spc. Thomas J. Barbieri, 24, a gunner assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., died when he was hit by small-arms fire from enemy forces during combat operations south of Baghdad, the military said. The soldier's parents, Thomas and Carolann Barbieri, were grieving yesterday and not able to talk with the media, a family friend said. Specialist Barbieri, who joined the Army in October 2004, trained at Fort Benning, Ga., and became an infantryman in January 2005.

The U.S. Army has dropped its case against the only officer to face criminal charges in connection with the beating deaths of two prisoners held by the United States in Afghanistan, a military spokesman said yesterday. The officer, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, led a reservist military police company at the main U.S. detention center in Afghanistan when the two men were killed in December 2002. The prisoners died after guards kneed them repeatedly in the legs while each was shackled to the ceiling of his cell.

Aaron Bank, 101, known as "the father of the Green Berets" for his role as the first commander of the Army's elite Special Forces, died Thursday in Dana Point, Calif. In 1952, the Army approved 2,300 spaces for men in a Special Forces unit, the 10th Special Forces Group, at Fort Bragg, N.C. Colonel Bank was a key figure in pushing for its creation.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - The first public court hearing for Pfc. Lynndie R. England was postponed yesterday until mid-July, signaling possible plea negotiations that could allow the young woman who became one of the most visible faces in the Iraqi prison abuse scandal to avoid a military trial. Asked in a brief phone interview yesterday whether she was involved in plea talks, an attorney for England said: "Yes, I have been." But the Colorado-based lawyer, Rose Mary Zapor, quickly amended her remarks to say she would not comment.