Special Forces

Aboard Flight Reach-5107 Heavy -- Boring through darkness at 30,000 feet toward Iraq, Air Force Staff Sgt. Eric Erbaugh, a loadmaster on this C-17 flying combat supplies, did a quick calculation and grinned. In a few hours, he would avoid paying Uncle Sam the taxes on $41,161.50. Erbaugh is based at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina and flies regularly on cargo missions to the Middle East. After eight years in the Air Force, he was re-enlisting for another five. That earned him a $41,161.

Previously undisclosed conversations and letters by Timothy J. McVeigh to his younger sister before the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City portray him as so deeply frustrated and angry that when the bomb exploded on April 19, 1995, his family suspected him almost immediately.His sister, Jennifer McVeigh, told FBI investigators she had an "eerie feeling" he was involved. His father, William McVeigh, said he had worried that his son would do something to get himself in serious trouble and added that his ex-wife, McVeigh's mother, ,, thought her son "did the bombing."

NEW YORK -- Federal prosecutors have filed secret charges against a former sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces who is suspected of switching sides in the war against terrorism and joining the global campaign to attack Americans mounted by the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.The charges are part of federal authorities' efforts to prove that bin Laden was behind the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in August and a series of other attacks against U.S. soldiers in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

An excerpt of a Monday New York Times editorial: FOR DECADES, Congress has tried to ensure that U.S. military aid and training does not go to foreign soldiers who use it to kill and torture their own people. But a 1991 law allowed training by special forces units free of many congressional restrictions.As a result, such trainers have been in more than 100 countries and have worked with some of the world's most abusive and brutal militaries. In some cases, their training works at cross purposes with U.S. foreign policy.

Col. Francis J. Kelly, 78, who devised Army plans for unconventional warfare in the early 1960s, then commanded the Special Forces in Vietnam when the Green Berets were earning a formidable reputation for battlefield heroics, died Dec. 26 at Garden Terrace Nursing Home in Aurora, Colo.As commander of all Special Forces in Vietnam from June 1966 to June 1967, Colonel Kelly led an elite corps of a few thousand men who teamed up with South Vietnamese soldiers and ethnic-minority civilian irregulars such as Montagnard tribesmen to wage counterinsurgency warfare against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in some of the most remote areas of South Vietnam.

A Maryland subsidiary of the Texas defense contractor Tracor Inc. said yesterday that it has won a $38 million contract to provide communications systems for the Navy.Tracor Applied Sciences Inc. of California, Md., will design, develop, test and install exterior communications systems for various vessels for the next five years. The work was awarded by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Patuxent River.The contract covers a wide range of activities, according to Bob Wieland, general manager of the Electronic Systems Division of Tracor Applied Sciences, which employs about 850 in St. Mary's County.

KISELJAK, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- To all those in the Cardinal Gibbons High School class of 1970 who remember Frank Bohle as an under-whelming football player, has the Army got a surprise for you:Lieutenant Colonel Bohle is leading a Special Forces battalion in Bosnia, overseeing a highly sensitive job of smoothing communications among armies that speak different languages."

WASHINGTON -- The United States dispatched an aircraft carrier yesterday with part of a force that could launch an invasion of Haiti as early as next week, while the Clinton administration scrambled to reverse public and congressional opposition to an invasion.President Clinton, who met with his top advisers on final tactics yesterday, decided to deliver a televised address tomorrow at 9 p.m. from the Oval Office, outlining plans to restore Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power.

A & L Shatto Inc., a five-year-old Bel Air engineering firm, has been awarded a $40 million, five-year contract by the Department of Defense.Allen W. Shatto, the firm's president, said his company will be responsible for systems engineering and technical assistance to the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla. He said the company won the contract after a six-month competition among 27 bidders."

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration is considering sending a small contingent of U.S. Special Forces to Somalia to help track down and seize Mohammed Farah Aidid, the fugitive warlord, a senior State Department official involved in U.S. policy on Somalia said yesterday.The official, Ambassador David H. Shinn, who has just completed an inspection of United Nations operations in Somalia, said the move is being considered as part of an accelerated review of U.S. policy in Somalia ordered by the White House on Monday.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - In a sandy clearing in the pine woods, Special Forces soldiers and civilians are struggling with the riddle of Afghanistan. Why is the United States, seven years after it invaded and threw out the Taliban, still falling short in the war? From their varied backgrounds - infantryman, farming expert, foreign aid officer - they work under U.S. Army doctrine: You can't beat insurgents with military force. For years, everyone from politicians to generals have advocated "more troops," and the Pentagon is deploying about 4,000 additional soldiers and Marines during the next two months.

BAGHDAD - Predawn raids by elite Iraqi forces yesterday resulted in the fatal shooting of a government employee and the arrest of two prominent Sunni Arabs, according to witnesses and officials. The troops were from the central government's counter-terrorism units, said Gov. Raad Rashid al-Tamimi of Diyala province, where the raid took place. They had stormed the governorate building in the city of Baqouba and arrested Sunni provincial council member Hussein al-Zubaidi, who belongs to the Iraqi Islamic Party.

Aboard Flight Reach-5107 Heavy -- Boring through darkness at 30,000 feet toward Iraq, Air Force Staff Sgt. Eric Erbaugh, a loadmaster on this C-17 flying combat supplies, did a quick calculation and grinned. In a few hours, he would avoid paying Uncle Sam the taxes on $41,161.50. Erbaugh is based at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina and flies regularly on cargo missions to the Middle East. After eight years in the Air Force, he was re-enlisting for another five. That earned him a $41,161.

James L. Pryor Jr., a retired travel agency owner and golfer, died of complications from orthopedic surgery Jan. 12 at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. He was 72. Born and raised in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Pryor earned a bachelor's degree in 1955 from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. From 1955 to 1957, he served with the Army's Special Forces. After leaving the Army, he went to work at the former Washington National Airport as a ticket agent and later was promoted to sales.

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. -- So many of America's special operations commandos have been thrown into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan that only a handful of the elite troops are available for the quiet but critical work of training local security forces and stabilizing governments elsewhere -- raising worries about al-Qaida and related terrorist groups expanding in other parts of the world. The demand for Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other highly trained units in battle, which senior military commanders expect will last for the foreseeable future, is a tough problem for the military and for its relatively small and overstretched special operations forces centered here in a bustling wartime headquarters.

A longtime Green Beret who attended high school in Maryland died in an ambush Saturday in Afghanistan, the Defense Department said yesterday. Chief Warrant Officer Bruce E. Price was fatally wounded when his vehicle was attacked by insurgents using small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, officials at the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg in North Carolina announced. He was 37 and had lived in Fayetteville, N.C. The often-decorated soldier leaves a wife, Renate, and an 8-year-old son, Aidan.

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.

MOSCOW - Special forces swooped in on Russia's richest man yesterday when his plane stopped for refueling in Siberia, then handed him over to prosecutors who charged him with seven criminal counts, including tax evasion and fraud. The action against Yukos Oil Co. chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky - which a company spokesman complained resembled the capture of a terrorist - stunningly raised the stakes in a months-long confrontation between prosecutors and the influential billionaire, a battle many people see as a struggle over political power and oil riches rather than real issues of law. At its broadest level, the struggle pits pro-business bureaucrats led by Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov against officials who want to rein in the country's wealthiest men - so-called "oligarchs" who acquired much of the nation's wealth in questionable 1990s privatization deals.

With the White House and Pentagon facing mounting criticism over their handling of the war in Iraq, what's one more television report attacking their credibility? Perhaps not all that much when measured against the sheer mass of media questions as to whether there really were stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to obtain uranium. But War Spin: Jessica Lynch, a British report airing tonight on BBC America, does take allegations that the U.S. government purposefully misled the public to a new level that warrants consideration.

MOSUL, Iraq -- Lt. Col. Robert Waltemeyer quickly discovered that seizing the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was a lot easier than running it. "We have to protect families and kids, stop bad guys from shooting at us, set up a city council and convince people I don't want to rule the city," said the beleaguered officer and Baltimore native, who led the ragtag forces that captured Iraq's second-largest city this month. But rule it he must, at least for now, because the city's old government vanished in the Mesopotamian mists when the Americans arrived.