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Tuesday, August 8, 2000 |
BY PETER BACQUÉ
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
Yawing in the quartering tailwind,
dodging power lines and light poles, stirring dust and tipping trash cans, four
drab green helos settled, hopping, down on their struts.
Then in a whirr, a
whupp-whupp and rush, the giant leafblowers lifted up yesterday and flew away,
their crew chiefs leaning out of windows, waving at the folks who came to see
their tax dollars at work.
"Oh, this is so
cool," one woman said, eyes on the four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters
rumbling over The Diamond in the afternoon's hot haze.
"We hit the ground and
we're gone," said Lt. Col. Bob Hess of Fairfax County, commander of the
101st Aviation Regiment's 1st Battalion. "It's a bad place for us to be when
people are shooting at us."
Last night, only cameras
took shots at the airborne soldiers.
Hundreds of kids, parents,
dogs, TV reporters, cops, Diamond workers and local Army recruiters came out to
watch 13 Black Hawks skirt 22 light towers and a power line and set down in
"Landing Zone Robin," The Diamond's 12-acre parking lot.
The Army's famed 101st
Airborne Division flew into Richmond to train for what it calls military
operations in urban terrain, said Maj. Andy Cornett, the regiment's executive officer.
"We're preparing for
the ever-increasing peacekeeping missions, such as Kosovo and Bosnia," he
said.
Chief Warrant Officer James
Plzak, the lead Black Hawk's pilot, explained: "Coming here we learn the
ins-and-outs of navigating through a large urban center. Navigating over a city
is a little different than we're used to."
Walter and Stacy Alexander
brought their three children from Glen Allen to watch the mock air assault.
"My kids love
it," Walter Alexander said. So did he: Alexander flies radio-controlled
model airplanes as a stress-reliever. When one of the Army bird's rotors
stopped turning, he jumped into the pilot's seat, hoisting his young children
in after him.
Last night's mission
simulated putting a security force on the ground to protect a local government
distribution center as part of a peacekeeping mission, Hess said.
The exercise was a likely
scenario for an Army that has soldiers keeping the peace in Kosovo and Bosnia
right now.
Though the division has
fought from Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge to Vietnam, from Panama to
Iraq, yesterday's mission was the first time the 1st Battalion of the 101st
Aviation Regiment had trained in a city.
Even when the aviators
aren't in combat, Hess pointed out, "our business is inherently dangerous
anyway."
As a result, the Army
aviators flew in during daylight hours yesterday, and with that experience
under their helicopters' chin bubbles, they came back again after dark.
Landing in confined
metropolitan areas presents Army aviators with challenges they don't normally
confront.
"Lights, wire hazards,
towers," Cornett said. "We don't have that at Fort Campbell. You
don't find that many buildings over two stories on a military post."
Bitter lessons learned from
the Army's experiences in the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980 and
in Somalia underlined the need to train in metropolitan areas.
Getting called is a present
possibility for the battalion: It is part of America's rapid-deployment force,
ready to move out at a moment's notice anywhere in the world.
The country has 10 Army
divisions, soldiers say, but the nation has 14 divisions' worth of demands for
the Army's skills.
Since 1990, U.S. armed
forces have been ordered overseas more than 60 times to fight or to keep the
peace. In contrast, in the 45 years from 1945 to 1990, American forces were
sent to foreign soil fewer than 50 times.
Military analysts see the
21st century as a looming time of borderless wars involving terrorists and
"nonstate" enemies, producing a blurring of historic standards for
military combat.
The aviation battalion has
deployed 13 helicopters and about 100 soldiers from Fort Campbell, Ky., to Fort
Pickett for the training around Richmond.
At 5:35 p.m. and again at
9:35 p.m. today, the sky troopers will take their helicopters into the
Interstate 64-295 cloverleaf west of Richmond, Cornett said.
Mayor Timothy M. Kaine
greeted the airborne soldiers at LZ Robin.
"It's important for us
to help the services train for the environments they're in," Kaine said.
"We're glad to do it. It's like voting: It's a civic obligation."
And the city didn't charge
the Army for the use of The Diamond's parking lot, according to Stuart Weems of
the Richmond Metropolitan Authority, which operates the baseball park.
The Army's appearance in
Richmond has stirred considerably less public controversy than last year's
similar but more extensive training by the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit here.
The Army went to some
lengths this year, as did the Marines last year, to make the public aware of
the maneuvers.
"We decided to be very
specific about what we're doing," Hess said, "so there would be no
questions, no suspicions.
"I'm proud of what I
do and I'm proud of what my guys do."
That pride has a long
heritage among the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne.
Howard Tess wore his master
parachutist wings on his cap yesterday. Tess, who lives in Mechanicsville,
joined the Army during World War II and retired as a sergeant major in the
101st Airborne Division in 1965.
"They're fine people," he said of the soldiers at The Diamond yesterday. "They've got guts enough to stay in an air assault unit. They've got to be good people."
Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or [email protected]
Copyright © 1998-2003 A/101 AVN. All rights reserved.
Revised: 12/12/02.